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as he began to haul up the line.
    An electric spear shattered the dark, swirling sky, and the flashing blade of a rocket-fish broke the surface downstream. A hooked shad played tug-o-war with Sid’s one hand while the other hand felt the distant rattle of line peeling from his fly reel, deep in the weedy bay below.
    Turbid river water began to top the gunnels; Sid realized the river had him by the balls. That’s when the anchor rope snapped, and the jolt shoved Sid backward. He staggered as the boat swung suddenly around. Man overboard.
    The sky splintered with light, but Sid couldn’t hear the storm’s explosions. Fly line was tangled around his legs, and whitecaps kicked his head against the twirling aluminum hull. He clung to a gunnel by elbow and armpit—to let go would be to join guys that got popped. Boulders nudged him from below. And all the while, he could still feel a well-hooked rocket-fish tugging at one end of the line, like it was sewing him up in a body bag.

    It was almost nine that evening by the time the rain stalled, but Russ had the barbecue pit stoked even as the clouds were running out of gas. Fillets steeped in garlic and beer, topped with strips of bacon, hissed and browned over the coals. Russ sat in a sagging Adirondack chair, one foot on the edge of the brick oven, one hand around a cold Yuengling beer. The other hand held a blue plastic water pistol ready to put out any bacon fires. Eyes alight with the fire, his thoughts turned to Sandra.
    Perhaps the most debilitating aspect of his past tragedy was the emotional baggage he’d packed for himself. At the bottom of this steamer trunk of pain was self-loathing over his inability to prevent Sandra’s death.
    On top of that was his frustration over trying to prove or convince the police that his wife’s “accident” had been murder. Russ had truly hit rock bottom when his friends and family began scolding him for his assertions. They felt he was dragging Sandra’s name through the mud, that he was indirectly suggesting she must have been involved with criminals to be the target of murder. They took to psychoanalyzing him, telling him he was flipped-out from despair, or suffering effects from the bump on his head, or concocting a cover-up for some misdeed on his part.
    Near the top of the trunk rested the conundrum of why someone had killed her in the first place, a question with which police, friends, and family pelted him and for which he had no answer.
    It had been ten years since her death, and the sickly sweet taste of regret had become familiar enough that it was not altogether overwhelming. Over the last couple of years he’d been able to set that aside and remember Sandra herself, the woman he loved, and the time they’d had together, however brief.
    He smiled at the thought of their first meeting, when they’d scraped fenders at Bradley Airport parking lot and subsequently found themselves seated on the same flight, side by side. Their relationship warmed over dinner and the next few months. Eventually, she took him to small claims court over the traffic accident, and when she won, she used the money to take him to Montego Bay for a week, where they got married to the accompaniment of a steel drum calypso band. Russ burned the photos from that trip after Sandra died. The evidence of his loss was too damn painful to have around. Of course, destroying all those photos was just one more thing to regret, one more garment in the trunk. But he’d managed to rescue one photo of their honeymoon, which she’d kept at her office. It hung over Russ’s fly-tying desk, and sometimes when he saw it, he felt a little like smiling. Those were the good days.
    Russ had decided against Postum with Phennel Rowe. Although she never tired of hearing of his pain, Russ did. After a while, it all seemed perverse, masochistic. He was sick of hearing his own voice, his own sighs, and his own doubts. Phennel’s languid creaky words of comfort and religion