I was fucking up with these other women. I wasn’t spending any time with my kids. My wife and I never spoke to each other hardly unless we were arguing. I couldn’t stand to stay home, and I hated myself every time I went out. Now I’d met another one, and she seemed wonderful except for the car pulling up and catching us, which hadn’t been her fault. I wasn’t catching any fish, and since it was only ten o’clock in the morning, I knew that if I kept drinking beer I was headed for a bad drunk sometime later that day. Possibly even a DUI conviction. For the moment I was safe. I wasn’t driving anything but my boat, and they couldn’t get me out there, unless it was some gung ho officer of the Mississippi game wardens, and I knew all of them. I knew I’d probably be facing another bad scene when I got home, whenever I got home. I knew I could probably make everything right by going home with a big load of fish and dressing them and cooking a good supper for my whole family, but the problem was I’d only caught one and it didn’t look like I was going to catch any more now that I’d started drinking beer. There comes a time some days when you say fuck it, and I didn’t know whether to say that that early in the morning or not. I hated to. I’d said it so much in the past and it hadn’t ever helped anything. It looked like the whole problem was with me, looked like my wife could just keep rocking on the way she was until she was old and gray and sixty and I couldn’t. It seemed like we were raising our children simply for their own benefit and not for ours. But our own lovemaking had brought that. Now it seemed we’d locked into a position that was far beyond our imaginings when we’d married, and there didn’t seem to be any recourse. Be born, live, bear children in turn, get old, die. There didn’t seem like there ever was anything else. And there didn’t seem like there ever was anything else since man had been man, since the first primitive ape-person—was that Adam?—crawled down from the tree and found a female under another tree and hauled her away to a cave, where he ravished her. I was uneasy about a lot of things, my own mortality among them. I didn’t know if when I died I was going to die forever, or maybe just for twenty years, and come back as a house cat or something. The whole universe was a secret to me, including what happened over there in Siberia in the 1920s when something hit the ground and knocked all that timber down and set all those woods on fire. I was uneasy about the Bermuda Triangle, and how long I could keep getting up and getting it up, and afraid I’d never find the best woman in the whole world for me to love. I decided I’d better just keep drinking beer and keep my hook in the water and hope for the best.