P. Ivan Young

The entrance at the back of the complex led onto a road, where an upended couch tilted into a ditch and a washing machine gleamed avocado beneath pine needles. From the end, you turned left and left again, then cut a trail to find the cul-de-sac of bright brick houses. We'd walk as far as we dared before a man pushing a mower might stop to ask, "whadda you boys need?" That was a question we could never answer. I loved the name of the place, White Hall, imagined that each interior was a stretch of marble perfect wall adorned by smiling photos of the family. Our own halls were brailled with nail holes of former tenants, the spackled rounds of fists. But doesn't longing clarify the body? The boys I left behind: Tommy, wearing the World War II trenching tool; Danny, whose father, so much older than the other parents, died in his recliner one sunny afternoon while watching baseball; Duke, who stole his mother's car and crashed into a wall. Boys who knew when you were posing, waiting for someone to say, "smile." Boys who, on those latch-key days, held themselves in narrow passages when no one was there to show them what to do.

We sit on the spillway, the red and white bobbers lilted by the wind, while some force beneath the water brings everything to attention, the tight line, the echoed rings conjuring tension inside us. And when I touch the rod, a living strangeness, a quivering unseen tugs at my imagination, not receiving but sending some impulse down the line, into the muddy water, and when the sunfish erupts I've made the spangles of water the verdant scales, the shudder of tail fin and light. We build fish all afternoon, threading hooks, looping line into a tight noose, running gills down the stringer into an opalescent chain of glimmering emerald bodies. Soon our mothers will call with their icy vodka voices and we will carry them home like the weight of guilt, but for now night closes around us.