Summer of Pearls by Mike Blakely Read Free Book Online Page A

catfish do you expect us to catch?” Cecil asked, throwing a small mussel shell into the skiff.
    Billy dropped the mussel he had been looking at and started feeling around with his feet as us boys were doing. “Enough where I can fry a catfish dinner twice a week or so.”
    We hunted for almost an hour, joking and taunting each other, as boys will. Billy hardly said a word to us. He just searched silently for mussel shells, finding a few, studying them, comparing them. I still idolized him, but I was beginning to think he was a little peculiar. “How many varieties of mussels live in this lake?” he asked us at one point. We didn’t know.
    When we had waded out to our chins, and Billy to his chest, we finally had enough mussels to bait our trotline. We towed the skiff back to shallower water and sat on an old pier that stuck up just above the water level. We decided to go ahead and open the mussels there, so we could bait our line quicker when we set it out.
    There’s a trick to opening mussels. Between those two shells they’re almost nothing but solid muscle, and they don’t open easy. It’s a little dangerous. You’re likely to slip and cut your hand if you don’t watch yourself.
    The way Billy had been studying the mussels we found, I was of the opinion that he had never seen one before that day. So, when we got our pocket knives out, I thought I’d show him how to open mussels. I didn’t want my hero sticking himself. And, to tell the truth, I wanted to show off a little.
    â€œHold it like this, Billy,” I said, “and stick your knife in right here, then twist it open.” I wrestled with the mud-slick mussel shell for some time, poking clumsily at it with the knife, until I finally pried it open. I pulled out the shapeless little animal, threw it in a bait bucket holding
a little water, and handed Billy one to try on his own.
    His knife moved so quickly that I couldn’t follow it. In less than a second, the shell was open in his hand. He pulled out the mussel and felt it between his fingers, as if looking for something hidden in it. He dropped it in the bait bucket, then ran his finger along the pretty purple inside of the shell. He angled it in the sun to catch the iridescent rainbow sheen of the shell lining. He had that look on his face again. His eyes darted and sparkled, and he almost smiled. Then he grunted, tossed the shell in the water, and grabbed another mussel.
    He looked at me and found me staring. “What are you looking at?” he said.
    â€œNothin’,” I answered.
    Cecil and Adam hadn’t noticed anything unusual. They were arguing about where to put the trotline.
    â€œThe best place is over on the edge of Mossy Brake, right across from Taylor Island,” Cecil said. “That’s where all them big opelousas cats live.”
    â€œYou’ve got to have live bait to catch an opelousas cat,” Adam argued. He didn’t know too much, but there wasn’t a thing about hunting and fishing he didn’t know. “We won’t catch anything but willow cats on these mussels.”
    â€œMaybe some humpback blues,” Cecil suggested.
    â€œNot in Mossy Brake. You have to go out in the Big Water to catch them.”
    They went on arguing and shelling mussels until only a few were left. I was listening to them yammer and trying to figure out how Billy could get those mussels open so quickly, when I realized he was just sitting there on the pier with his feet in the water, staring at an open mussel shell in his hand.
    It was a big washboard mussel—the kind old Esau scraped his dead pigs down with when he was slipping the hair from them at butchering time. The inside of the shell glistened a kind of pink rainbow color. I didn’t see what had Billy so captivated until he nudged the mussel with his finger. Then I saw him uncovering a perfectly spherical bead of
translucence perched on the rim of