Whitlow paused, sucked in a breath, then said, “We never had a man at the fishing that makes his living at it. Hope you’ll stay around for it. It’ll stir up some interest.”

“I’ll try to do that,” Noah said.

“Guess we better let Littleberry know he’s got some competi-tion,” an older man wearing an eye patch said with a drawl, making the syllables in competition sound like separate words. The man was squat and fat-heavy, and when he laughed at his saying his face turned red from the effort. A young boy—maybe fourteen, Noah judged—sat beside him. The boy had a narrow, pale face, wore thick eyeglasses, leaned forward to make himself part of the group. A lopsided grin rested on his face.

“That’d be Littleberry Davis,” Whitlow said to Noah. “He’s the best we got around here, if you go by how many times he’s won our little contest. Last five or six years by my count.”

“Six,” said the eye-patch man. “And if I know Littleberry, he’s spent this year’s money before he’s wet his hook.”

Another laugh—easy, natural—spilled from Whitlow. He removed his hat and began to fan with it. His hair was thinning and sweat-stamped to his head. “You out looking for customers this morning?” he asked.

“Guess I always am,” Noah answered, “but right now, I’m mostly looking to pick up a couple of things in the store.”

“Well, around here this is the getting place,” Whitlow advised. He gestured to the door of the store with his head. “You’ll find a cousin of mine in there by the name of Taylor Bowers, more’n likely counting all that money he’s got hid around in shoe boxes and tobacco cans, and if he’s not got what you want, he’ll try to sell you something else to take its place. Some folks are bornagain Christians. Taylor’s a born-again talker. Even worse than I am and these boys will tell you that’s going some.” He smiled broadly. “But, don’t you go buying no sardines in a can. That’d put some holes in your story about fishing.” He laughed again and the men around him also laughed.

Noah grinned, said, “I guess it would at that.”

The eye-patch man leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers across his bulging stomach. “You go fishing around here, stick to the river, or go over to the Chatuge. They’s a little lake up the road a piece, but you won’t find no fish in it.”

The men nodded nods of agreement.

“Used to be full of fish a long time ago, but they all gone now,” the eye-patch man added. “Just up and disappeared.”

Noah thought of his dream of the fish rising from the lake, following the ghost of the see-through bass.

“I’ll make you a deal,” the eye-patch man said. “You go over there to the river and catch me a mess of river cats and bring them back here before sundown, and I’ll give you a dime a fish, if they big enough to fit in the fry pan. All this talking has made me catfish hungry. You can throw back the trout and bream and crappie. Just catfish, and a lot of them. I got a tableful of people to feed, like my grandboy here.” He nudged the boy sitting beside him, and the boy nodded vigorously, his lopsided grin quivering.