I wasn’t interested in serious fishing. That could wait for a month or so. What I was doing in that river winding through the swamp was to convince the Alexandria post office that I was what I seemed to be, a speech expert who liked to fish. I dropped the small radiator used for an anchor in a little bayou. I baited the hook with one of the worms the owner of the bait shack had sold me in a rusty tin can. I stuck the bamboo pole over the stern and watched the little cork make little ripples in the slow current. From time to time I scraped a flattened tomato can along the bottom of the boat, emptying the water that kept slowly trickling in through the seams. I had three cans of beer along. I drank them slowly in the increasing, savage heat of midday, dropping the empties into the slow river. I was not a good citizen. I didn’t flatten them first. I let the current take them and move them into the swamp. They swirled around a cypress buttress, into the current, banged gently against another cypress, and disappeared among the tangled jungle of vines.
