Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon by Cameron Pierce Read Free Book Online

with Jerry on some small freshwater lakes when I was a youngster. We caught smallmouth bass together on several occasions. But fishing for smallmouth bass with my daddy and I is not what killed Mr. Tibbs. No, Mr. Tibbs was killed by a whale. It is one of those terrible fortunes of life, to go out fishing on the Pacific in the boat you own because you are successful, and after a good day’s fishing, the next thing you know, a whale breaches on your boat and you’re knocked overboard and swept out to sea in the dead of night and you’re screaming for help and you see the lights of the boat but you are hundreds of yards away, cold and wet and drowning fast and drifting further and nobody can find you nobody will ever find you. That was Mr. Tibbs’ fate. He died on the ocean. They never found his body. Friends say he caught a big halibut that day. They filleted it and served the meat at his wake the following week. My daddy and I were present and we enjoyed that halibut, but it didn’t hold a candle to Mr. Tibbs’ ribs. His wife and oldest son took to running Mr. Tibbs’ Ribs after his death, but the ribs just weren’t the same. There was a special way Mr. Tibbs’ secret sauce made you smack your lips. And oh boy these were still real good, but they weren’t lip-smacking good. The death weighed heavily on Patty Tibbs, too. She no longer cooked the cornbread fresh every day. You were lucky to get a piece fresher than two days old. It’s kind of funny because my daddy and I had been invited to go out on the ocean with Mr. Tibbs many times before, but my daddy thought I’d get seasick. So we’d always just gone out fishing for bass on local lakes with Mr. Tibbs. Kind of funny to think of Mr. Tibbs now. I can’t remember a word he ever spoke, only his barbecue. He was a kind man, I know. He must’ve had kind eyes and a kind voice and a kind smile, considering how often he invited my daddy and I out fishing, but I remember none of that. Only his barbecue and the yellow tables in his shop and for some reason a flier for his wife’s real estate company, showing you houses that were for sale in the neighborhood. Naïve as I was, I always expected my daddy to say, after ordering our barbecue, “And I’ll take that house too,” pointing to a house on one of the real estate fliers, as if you could buy ribs and cornbread and a house all from the same joint. But my daddy didn’t have the money for that, and that’s not how the world works. How the world works is that whales kill people. Lip-smacking. That’s how I’d describe it.





 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Doug Marsh, proprietor of Hawthorne Bait and Tackle, was updating the catch report bulletin when a stranger entered the shop. Doug ground the chalk between his calloused fingers. “We don’t open till six,” he said to the young man, whose eyes were bloodshot, his clothes soaked.
    “I think you’ll want to see this,” the man said.
    Doug pocketed the chalk and took up his mug of steaming coffee, then followed the man—a teenager, really—out to the parking lot. He grumbled to himself about forgetting to lock the door again. Anglers, eager to hit the river, were always trying the door as early as four in the morning, even though the posted hours said Hawthorne Bait and Tackle opened at six sharp. Sometimes Doug found sleep troublesome. Nightmares awoke him, or else the dread of experiencing such nightmares resulted in him working through the night, repairing tackle, tying flies, molding lead weights, reading, sweeping, drinking coffee, drinking bourbon, shuffling up and down the musty aisles of the shop, gazing through his thick-framed glasses at the trophy fish mounted on the walls. With increasing frequency, owing either to his sleeplessness or age, Doug forgot to lock the shop door after smoking a cigarette out front. That was how the Eager Earls, as he referred to these non-store-hour-abiding folks, got in. But sometimes