Closure and Other Stories

By Bill Dantini

Married at nineteen, she was a war widow at twenty.

Now 85 years old, Meara Sullivan is determined to reconnect with her husband who died during World War II on D-Day. They knew each other as husband and wife for only five days when Private 1st Class Paul Hughes shipped off for Europe, never to return.

CLOSURE, the anchor story of this 7-story anthology, recounts Meara’s unlikely trail of discovery. Told in a series of flashbacks, CLOSURE captures life on the home front for Meara and Paul in 1940s Boston and offers a gripping account of the young soldier’s part in the greatest amphibious invasion in military history.

Dan Celeste is both narrator and participant in each of the anthology’s seven tales. His personal story interlaces historical events, intriguing characters, and coming-of-age lessons. CLOSURE and Other Stories spans seven decades, beginning in 1943 and ending in 2011 when Meara completes her quest for renewal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728364285

Bill Dantini

William R. (Bill) Dantini was born in Amsterdam, New York. He received his bachelor’s degree in English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, and did his postgraduate work at the University of Louisville. He served as a writer and manager for General Electric before operating a communications firm in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has been a contributing author for magazines and newspapers, and has written video scripts and television spots. Aviation History magazine featured his account of the first transatlantic stowaway in its July 2020 issue. “CLOSURE and Other Stories” is his fourth book. He lives in Raleigh.

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© 2020 Bill Dantini. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/18/2020

ISBN: 978-1-7283-6429-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-6427-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-6428-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020910568

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover Design and Illustration: Amy Benevento

This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places, incidents and dialogue in this

book are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

For Quinn, Will, Natalie and Nolan.

Dream big and don’t take no for an answer.

CONTENTS

The Catch

Button Downs

Canal Man

The Speech

Lucky Day

Irish China

Closure

THE CATCH

Daniel Celeste, you’re in big trouble, young man.

The boy tried to outrun his mother’s voice as he soared over the grass in great impala strides, traversing the slope to the beach, his flip-flops jettisoned. His feet, now gravity-defying hooves, barely grazed the ground. The lioness, a wonderful beastly thing, roared from the top of the hill. She was gaining on him.

Danny, I know you can hear me!

The boy glanced back over his fur-striped shoulder, catching a glimpse of the predator’s magnificent mane and jowly jaws. A feint left to decoy the rampaging white rhinoceros, a dart right past the ferocious water buffalos sloshing in the river muck, a hopscotch across the backs of the giant Nile crocodiles while nimbly avoiding their gaping maws, a bound over the python-infested boulders onto the beach and… It was over. The jungle boy was safe. He’d thwarted the lioness again and left her panting on the Serengeti grasses. Her prey, breathing a sigh of relief, would live to see another day.

"We have got to do something about that boy!"

The voice echoed from the summer camp. Tinny sounds of pots banging together could be heard in the kitchen. A refrigerator door closed with a wumpf. The noise carried to the lake.

The sawing stopped, the air suddenly peaceful again. The gentle whine of cicadas and the chirping of crickets took up where the rasping saw left off.

What’s that, hon? Can’t hear what you said. The rusted bow saw knocked against her husband’s knee.

I said we’ve got to do something about Danny. There was no response from her husband. Irritated, she barked, Don’t pretend you can’t hear me. Isn’t it time you became his parent and not his best friend? You let him get away with everything and it’s not helping.

Hon, we’ve been over this a million times, he yelled from behind the camp, dropping the saw into a mound of pungent sawdust. What do you want me to do to him? Then louder, For heaven’s sake, hon, he’s only eight years old! That’s what eight-year-olds do.

For two weeks Danny’s mom had tried to corner her husband into a decision concerning their son. Their son, she reminded herself. But when it came to discipline, it was always her son. How many times had she heard her husband’s insinuating refrain, Can’t you handle your son? He listens to me.

The truth was that the boy didn’t listen to either of them. Not really. Rather, the child placated them. As far as his mom was concerned, Danny did just enough to avoid his father’s wrath. Yes, he cleaned his room when his mother insisted. He cleaned it just enough to satisfy his father, which wasn’t much. True, he ate the meatloaf and diced carrots on his plate. Just enough to escape the old man’s scrutiny.

Danny wasn’t a bad kid. He was neither disobedient nor disrespectful. He was simply unmotivated and uninspired to finish the things asked of him.

He’s eight, which means he’s an ingrate, his father said to his mother, winking.

His mother threw up her arms. All you can do is make bad rhymes.

Kids Danny’s age can’t be bothered with doing things to completion. They’re too busy learning who they are and where they’re going. They spend their time sampling things rather than finishing them. It’s hormonal. Part of the maturation process. You know, a rite of passage.

It wasn’t what he said; it was how he said it that annoyed Danny’s mother – that child psychologist tone of voice he pulled out of his hat. It got under her skin.

His mother’s retort always made Danny laugh. Thank you, Doctor. Just send me the bill. He covered his mouth so his parents wouldn’t see him smirk.

At first Danny’s mom accepted her husband’s explanation. Not having had brothers anywhere near her age when she was a girl, she deferred to his judgment when it came to what was normal behavior for an eight-year-old boy. But when Danny’s third grade teacher called to express her concern over their son’s disregard for finishing homework assignments, reading lessons, even the weekly quickie-quizzes, it became serious business. Danny’s teacher said that he exhibited symptoms of hyperactivity, and she cautiously mentioned that medication might be a recourse.

Medication! For her little boy? That sent shivers up her spine. Alarm bells went off. Air raids sounded. To a doting mother it might just as well have been bubonic plague. The last thing she wanted to do was put her child on a mood-altering drug with potential side effects.

After Danny had gone to bed that night she brought it up with her husband. He sipped the wine she’d offered, scratched his head, and sloughed it off as some crusading spinster’s attempt to undo the male ripening process.

How that man could gall her! Her husband’s flippant remarks weren’t what she needed to hear. Not now. Not when Danny’s attitude around the house confirmed what his teacher had observed in the classroom. Armed with conviction, she planned numerous strategies to divert her son’s ruination.

And then summer came. School let out with no serious side effects on Danny. He’d even managed to get B’s in a couple of courses. The family wasted no time in charging off to the camp on Sacandaga Lake, just north of Broadalbin. The foothills of the Adirondacks climbed the far shore of the lake on their trek north where they became full-fledged mountains.

But it was a short reprieve. Danny’s mom decided she couldn’t enjoy the idyllic beauty of the mountain-rimmed lake with Danny acting the way he was. Today was no exception. She winced when she remembered the morning’s skirmish.

Danny, honey, help me wipe the dishes.

He did, dispirited as ever, wiping three dishes, two cups, and a fork before he threw the dishtowel into the sink and trudged out the kitchen door. Slam! He was nearly to the lake before his mother discovered the desertion.

I’ll tell you what I want you to do, she called to her husband. You march right down there to that lake and tell him a thing or two about responsibility. About sticking a job out until he’s finished it.

She was heating up to fever pitch, her husband knew. He chuckled in spite of himself.

You tell him that nobody thinks highly of a quitter. Tell him there’s no room in this world for quitters. Winners never quit, and quitters never–

"Win. Yup, yup, I know how it goes. Look, if you know so much about it, why don’t you march down to the lake and tell him?"

He knew she was getting fighting mad, but he couldn’t resist the jab. Besides, he didn’t think Danny’s negligence was as bad as his wife made it out to be.

The screen door slammed. His usually demure wife whirled around the corner and eyed him like a hawk would a field mouse. He knew he’d gone too far this time.

Now you listen to me. Danny is not himself. He’s gloomy and unhappy, and he hardly even talks to us. He’s not acting like our little boy anymore. Tears were welling in her eyes. She fought them back and fixed her husband with a hard stare. Even his teacher was worried enough to call us about it. He doesn’t concentrate on anything. She braced herself and let go with the finale. Worst of all, you don’t seem to care one iota about your own son.

There. She’d said it. It was over and done. Husband and wife stood staring at each other, both ashamed at the outburst. Overhead, the insect orchestra was in full swing, making the parents painfully aware of their own silence.

Okay, I’ll talk to him. It was the best he could muster.

His wife studied him–his brown eyes, wavy hair, wide shoulders – trying to gauge his conviction. For the first time in her life she thought he looked– What was the right word? Small? Yes, that was it. Even in his six-foot frame, he looked small and oddly insignificant.

The family owned a beachfront camp, a hundred yards or so from the lake. Behind the camp, a weedy green lawn wound its way under trees and shrubs to the rocky beach. The sand swept out to the shoreline where it met a dilapidated wood dock extending twenty feet into the blue-green water of the Sacandaga.

Danny sat motionless on the dock, dangling his milky white feet into the cool water. Tiny silver minnows tugged at the peach fuzz on his legs. The tickling sensation thrilled him.

Danny!

The boy jumped at the sound. The school of minnows exploded in a thousand iridescent shimmers.

Hi, Dad.

The words came out chipper enough even though the boy was disappointed that he had scared off the fish. Danny knew what his father wanted and he dreaded where the conversation was sure to go.

Thought maybe you were sleeping sitting down, his father said with a forced laugh.

That’s pretty ridiculous, Danny was thinking, but he dared not say it. Just watching the minnies, he said instead.

Must be a good show to hold your attention like that.

Yeah, the boy answered.

Danny–

The boy flinched at the sudden firmness in his father’s voice. Or was it his father’s voice? The shadow on the sand was too long to be his father’s. It was immense. It stretched from the big gray rock all the way past the dock and disappeared into the stubble of scattered stones on the water’s edge. The voice was too deep to be his father’s. It was low and ominous; the words coming out in a slow-motion drone like a record player set to the wrong speed.

Danny ventured a glimpse toward the source of the voice but the blazing sun blinded him. He couldn’t make out the face towering nine feet over his hunched puny body. All he saw was a silhouette with a massive torso, ponderous head and tree trunk legs. And then it clicked. His older cousins had told him about the ogre that lived under the floorboards of the abandoned house just over the bluff. The ogre only ventured from its secret den when it was time to feed. Its preferred diet, according to his older cousins, consisted of small boys with disciplinary problems. Disguised as a parent or guardian the creature preyed on solitary boys who wandered off unmindful of their instructions to stay within earshot.

Danny knew that he fit the bill. Could this be happening? Was it the beast? He dared another peek.

The ogre was speaking through a thick gnarly beard that resembled the steel wool hanging in fibrous clumps on the wall behind his father’s workbench. Through the beard he saw the stumps of chipped teeth, a telltale sign that the ogre had gnawed the bones of countless truant children. The teeth were yellow and stubby, and two of them were cracked down the middle. Danny tried not to stare at the black tongue that lurked in the crevice behind the gaps in the teeth. The tongue appeared to be rotted. Danny could smell the rancid mire in which it floated.

The shadow moved closer. Danny saw the silhouettes of furry arms and jagged claws reaching out. He heard rumbles that sounded like thunder and feared they were hunger pangs emanating from the belly of the beast. He wondered if ogres ate their victims whole or if they tore them apart bit by bit and ate them in a specific sequence – head to toe, for example. Did they suck the flesh off the bones as his uncle did with barbequed chicken legs or did they grind them up and swallow the masticated mush like cream of wheat?

Danny had so many unanswered questions.

He thought about his friend Toby, whose parents rented a camp a few doors down the previous summer. They’d bonded over Wiffle ball and lightning bugs and slate skipping, and then one day Toby was gone. Danny had knocked on the door of the rental camp and learned from Toby’s parents that the boy was spending the rest of the summer with a relative in a distant land. Danny dismally accepted the news but then got to thinking. Toby was fascinated by the ogre that lived under the floorboards of the abandoned house. He’d dragged Danny to within inches of the sagging front porch on numerous occasions and begged his friend to go inside with him. Danny shook him off, aghast at how little Toby understood about the ways of ogres. You didn’t just walk into the lair of a full-grown ogre, Danny explained to his naïve friend. Ogres were unpredictable, especially if they hadn’t eaten in a while.

Danny squinted into the sun at the hulking shadow hovering over him. Now he knew what happened to his friend Toby last summer.

Then the ogre spoke.

Your mother tells me you haven’t been yourself lately. Kind of down and out, you know?

There was no response from his son, who was wondering what Toby’s bones might have tasted like.

Danny?

The voice sounded like his father’s. But how to be sure it wasn’t the ogre mimicking him? Danny glanced at the speaker’s legs and saw the badly healed gouges where tissue and veins used to be – moon craters splotched in reds and purples that his father said were caused by the awful war. Only one person had scars like that.

The boy looked up at his father, his big brown eyes begging leniency.

Hey, buddy, what’s the matter?

Danny brightened at the tone of his father’s voice. Nothing, Dad. I just don’t feel like doing much.

His father looked miffed. Son, we both know that that won’t do. Now what’s up? You can tell me.

The boy squirmed on the dock and left a puddle where his wet foot rested on the old planks. But that’s it, Dad. Honest. I just don’t feel like doing anything. He braved a glance at the figure towering above him. The stern look he saw there was all the proof he needed. His dad wasn’t having it. Danny inhaled deeply, sighed, and braced himself for the confession his father was sure to force out of him.

Come on, Danny, let’s hear it.

The boy lifted his other foot out of the water, watching the water droplets dribble back into the lake. The late morning sun hit him full in the face, and he had to squint to see the ripples.

Everything I do turns out wrong. He spoke to the water, not wanting to confront his father’s eyes. In school I raise my hand to answer a question, and it’s the wrong answer. Then I find out when I turn in my homework that I did the even questions when I was supposed to do the odd ones. At the park Jimmy Morris asked me to play kickball on his team, but when he saw me kick, he said I did it all wrong. Everybody laughed. And Mom’s always asking me to do a million things because she wants to see if I’ll quit one of them. I can’t win.

The boy flicked at a feather that landed near his fishing pole. It’s better to do nothing at all.

His father looked irked. Danny, he said, you’re not being fair. To your teacher, to your friends, or most importantly your mother. He paused for effect. And most of all to yourself. You know that, don’t you?

Danny nodded in slow motion. He knew his father expected a response. Instead, he gazed hypnotically at a water bug that had come ashore on his big toe.

Danny! The word sounded like a rifle shot.

Yeah, Dad, I know. He tried to sound contrite.

Is that all? A smaller rifle this time.

And I’ll try to be better and stick things out to the end. Even to the boy, his words sounded hollow.

Good boy, Danny. The man looked like Douglas MacArthur addressing the war weary. Just tell yourself you’re going to finish every job you set out to do. Don’t be a quitter. Nobody thinks highly of a quitter. There’s no room in this world for–

The words sounded strangely familiar to him, as if he were reciting from a script. Then he remembered his wife’s harangue and tried a different tack.

Know what the catch is, Danny? You can’t finish something unless you start it. Speaking of catch, you’ve got your fishing pole. Why don’t you catch that big old fish that’s been eating all our minnows?

Methodically, the boy picked up the pole and reached robot-like for the bait pail. Sure, Dad, I’ll catch him.

Way to go, Danny. He raised himself to leave. Oh, and Danny–

Yeah, Dad?

Your mom’s planning a nice lunch, so if you don’t catch a fish, I don’t want you getting bored and running off.

Don’t worry, Dad, he said listlessly. I’ll catch him.

The silver-green minnow squirmed on the hook. Its scales reflected an assortment of dazzling colors, like mirrors with a thousand tiny faces. Unsure fingers fumbled with the thin nylon fishing line, winding it in and out to form a knot around the sinker. Then came the bobber, a red and white float that Danny maneuvered onto the line. With one ferocious heave, he launched the rig thirty feet into the water, a good cast even by his father’s standards. The ripples from the splash came back to him in ever widening circles.

Now came the wait, the lonely, interminable affair the boy hated. It was like sitting in math class when he would give anything for something interesting to happen. In the past Danny had devised a number of games to pass the time as he watched the bobber crest the waves and dip into the troughs. In one, he pretended he was on a Navy destroyer, and his fishing pole was the anti-aircraft gun he used to shoot enemy fighters out of the sky. On other occasions he was a baseball star, and if he gripped the pole just right, it felt like the bat he would use to clout his game-winning homer. Sometimes he was a rifleman, sometimes a swordsman, and every now and then he became the intergalactic crusader who would slay the three-headed Martian with a single courageous blow.

Today, however, he was a fireman. Great gushes of water were shooting from his fire hose sixty feet into the air, extinguishing a raging blaze. The flames rose higher and higher as he valiantly fought them back. He glanced up. A puppy was yelping through an open window, the licking fire visible behind it. His fishing pole morphed into an axe, which he used to hack through the door. He pulled the mask tighter over his face and plunged inside. He could barely make out the staircase in the billowing smoke. In great leaps he ascended the stairs, two and three at a time. He ran through the hallway, guided by the puppy’s cries. He opened the first door, a bedroom, and found nothing. He kicked open the next door with his heavy black boot. Still nothing. He heard a whimper coming from the last room. The door was locked. He battered it down with his axe. The puppy was cowering in the corner, eyes bulging in fright. Danny bent on both knees and picked it up. The puppy licked his face. He ran down the stairs toward the front door clutching the dog, the smoke blinding him and the cinders singeing his exposed wrist where his fireman’s jacket had torn. Bursting from the inferno into the sunlight, he handed the scared, panting puppy to its owner, a little girl in dungarees about his own age. She’d been waiting breathlessly in the street. She smiled in gratitude at this young, unlikely hero.

Danny dropped the axe on the ground and took the hose which another fireman offered him. The other fireman, although much older, knew from experience that Danny was the only person who could quell a firestorm this big. He smiled.

You can do this, Danny. We’re all counting on you.

Danny pointed the thick, heavy hose at the conflagration and adjusted the nozzle. The whoosh of water propelled him backwards. The little girl trembled, aghast at the orange tongues knifing into the sky from the rooftop of her house. Gawkers in the street were calling his name and urging him on.

It’s up to you, Danny. We’re all counting on you.

Danny tucked the hose under his arm and gripped the nozzle as hard as he could. It felt as if he were tangling with an anaconda in the Amazonian rainforest. The nozzle hissed at him, coiling for a strike, its fangs glistening white. Twice it looped back on him, spitting venom and lashing out. He knew he couldn’t let the giant reptile wrap around him or it would constrict and crush and certainly suffocate him. The little girl would surely lose her house, and the gawkers in the street would whisper that he’d failed. No, the fireman couldn’t allow that to happen.

Undaunted, the valiant firefighter gripped the nozzle with all his might and, in a final burst of adrenalin, tamed the anaconda. Danny could smell the smoke, hear the sirens, and feel the tug on his hose as the river of water surged through it.

The second tug nearly ripped the fishing pole out of his hands. Danny’s mind raced, but instinctively he knew that he had hooked a very large fish.

Danny’s father and uncles had tutored him on the wide assortment of game fish in Sacandaga Lake. They regaled him with stories about the stringers of bass, perch, lake trout, walleyes, whitefish, crappie, and catfish they’d caught since they were boys like him. On any given day, his elders said, a determined fisherman with the right bait and a little luck could catch his limit. But reeling it in and getting it to shore was a different matter. That required skill and patience, his elders said. The bigger the fish, the more you had to nurture it and coax it. Danny didn’t know what they meant by nurture and coax, but he knew it took a long time to land a big lunker. Somehow, the good anglers were able to do it. He saw their grinning pictures in the newspaper, holding up their trophy catches, their arms straining under the weight.

His father and uncles had caught some big ones, or so they claimed. Danny never saw them, but he attributed that to his age. How many eight-year-olds had witnessed the netting of a big game fish? Not many. Fathers and uncles avoided taking them on fishing trips. They blamed the eight-year-olds for getting bored and impatient, but Danny knew, like all other eight-year-olds, that it was the adults that lacked patience – with their sons.

Danny yelled. The fish was ripping his arms from their sockets. The pain made him wince and whine and want to throw the pole into the lake. He considered if the Great Sacandaga might have sharks in it. The creature on the end of his line felt like one. Maybe a bull shark. Danny saw pictures of bull sharks swimming upriver from salt water into fresh water, stalking unwary gazelles and boars and the occasional human. The pictures, most of them in National Geographic, kept him up at night and brought on nightmares. But no, this was a lake, he told himself. It was surrounded by farms and hills and fed by streams and creeks. A bull shark couldn’t navigate it. The streams were too shallow and the bull shark was too big.

Danny exhaled. He was pretty sure it wasn’t a bull shark.

But it was a rare day, indeed, when an angler – any angler, even an eight-year-old boy – hooked the size northern pike that Danny Celeste hooked on that summer day in June.

The boy’s first thought was to call his father. He would be near the camp, working on his pile of wood, well within earshot if he howled. Danny mouthed the words. Dad– Dad– No louder than a whisper. Hey, Dad–

But that’s not what happened. Grasping the pole as hard as he could, Danny thought about his teacher, about her dissatisfaction with him. He thought about his parents and their disappointment in his behavior. They used words like distracted and preoccupied and other adult pronouncements that confused him even more. Sometimes he’d walk into the room and catch them in a discussion about him. They’d lower their voices and switch to the weather or comment about what President Kennedy said the other night on the evening news. It made Danny feel like an outsider in his own house and he didn’t like it.

So instead of yelling for his father, the boy decided to catch the fish.

He looked past the tip of his fishing pole to the placid water where the creature lurked below the surface. Danny had something to prove.

When a northern pike strikes it can be a momentous event. All the bitter frustrations of angling for hours, days, and weeks without so much as a bite can be forgotten in the strike of a large northern pike – the kind that whipped Danny’s pole up and down, in and out, like a giant tongue on a toothpick.

Northern pikes can snap a fiberglass fishing rod in two. They shatter wooden poles like rotten sticks. Big ones will swallow two-foot walleyes in a gulp. They’ll take gulls, ducks, and turtles off the surface in a great spray of water. They will attack small, swimming dogs. And divers gliding twenty feet below the waves have often sensed a presence, a shadow, trailing them like a submarine, darting defiantly before them, and have turned to glimpse a four-foot, thirty-pound pike, mouth agape, head-full of half-inch teeth, eyeing them in their rubber suits, sizing them up from ten feet away as if they were ungainly intruders in their underwater world.

Northern pikes are the barons of fresh water. First cousins of muskellunge and more distant kin to barracudas, they are equally as fast and nearly as voracious. These machete-shaped water wolves can grow to more than five feet in length and sixty pounds in weight and strike bait like freight trains. A four-inch minnow is virtually inhaled by a feeding northern. And if hook, line, and sinker are attached, they often go to the stomach with it.

This particular northern pike had chanced upon Danny’s bait, cruising close to shore for the morning feed. Two hundred feet from the dock, its olfactory nerves picked up the scent and movement of a school of shiners. It glided closer as the small fish, spooked by the shift in vibration and light pattern in the water, turned sharply toward shore. Moments later they surrounded another fish of their kind – a minnow swimming spastically in short jerks, a hook through its back.

The predator could smell the blood in the water. It flicked its great tail once, its dorsal rudder aligning the fish in the direction of the prey, its tubular body thrusting forward. The northern pike took the minnow, shredded it, swallowed it. The hook lodged itself deep in the creature’s inner gill, the sensation jarring the fish from its instinctive hunt for more food. It turned toward deeper water.

In his reverie, Danny didn’t notice the first tug. It was the pike’s response to the imbedded hook that nearly tore the pole from the boy’s hands.

Danny’s brain had two seconds to adjust, process and fire a message to his white, clenched fingers.

Reel!

He lurched from a sitting position and knelt straight up, back arched like a drawn bow. He didn’t feel the splintered dock planks grating his bare knees. His eyes were riveted to the water where the nylon fishing line disappeared below the ripples. The line knifed back and forth in a weird zigzag motion. The bobber was nowhere in sight.

Give him more line! Give him more line! That’s what Danny’s father had always instructed him to do when the boy had hooked a fish. Give him more line, or he’ll snap it.

So Danny tried to release the bailer and give his fish some line. Suddenly there was a loud crisp pinnngg like the snap of an over-taut guitar string. The boy looked down to see the blood and the slash where the nylon line had sliced his finger. He grimaced, clenching his teeth. Oddly, the oozing blood didn’t bother him. He glanced at the tip of his pole. It was still arced in a downward crescent. He sighed in relief. The line hadn’t snapped.

The fish was moving fast now, heading straight out from the dock. The line, whizzing off the reel, sounded like the buzz of a thousand bees. Danny loosened the drag on the reel and hung on, hoping there was enough line to trail his quarry into the lake. Only after the fish slowed could he begin to reel.

And then it happened, what every fisherman said would happen after you hooked a big northern pike. The fish stopped. Didn’t move. Just lay there near the bottom, motionless. Old anglers say a smart fish knows when it’s hooked good; knows when it’s in real trouble. It’ll just lay still and play dead, thinking the danger will go away. But it knows. Its instinct tells it there’s still a hook in its jaw; that the danger is still there. Up above. Somewhere on the surface.

Danny’s mind raced. He recalled an illustrated storybook his father had given him once about a whaling expedition that left from Nantucket seeking a white sperm whale that lived in the South Pacific. The pictures were haunting. The whale was smart. It new when to sound and when to conceal itself below the ship. Even more chilling to the impressionable boy, it knew the peg-legged captain who was trying to harpoon it. The white whale rammed the ship, splintering it, and sent it to the bottom.

Danny glanced at the dock under his feet, wondering if the big fish on his line would ram it. He imagined it coming toward him, a big white ghost with its tail and dorsal fin above the surface, leaving a churning wake behind it. The fish, like the white whale, knew him. It understood that Danny was trying to land it. It was smart and it intended a different outcome.

Danny retreated two steps closer to the beach, his bare feet slopping the deck boards. He gauged the distance to the shoreline, telling himself that he could swim the distance if he had to. Danny was a good swimmer, in his mind better than his father and his uncles. If the big fish splintered the dock he’d surrender the pole and leap into the water. Or maybe he’d swim to shore with the pole. Yes, he was up to it. It was all part of proving himself to the unbelievers in the camp.

Danny jerked the pole. The fish didn’t respond. It just lay there on the bottom as if the boy had snagged an old tree root.

He looked