The Trout Patch

The year Denny and I were seventeen they drained Lake Cumberland forty feet to patch up the dam, and we watched as the roads of the drowned river town emerged from its bottom. We worked at the marina then, gassing up the boats that stayed, shuttling deliveries in a golf cart across the dock. A little island sprouted up off the shore. We called it the Trout Patch. At night we cast our poles off its shore, rigging up with spoons, pulling in trout after trout. We always threw them back, but not before we claimed them. “Looky here,” we’d say, holding one up so the other could see it. “This one’s mine.”

~

For his eighteenth birthday, Denny asked to camp at the Trout Patch. His mom gave us her truck keys and a bottle of whisky. “You’re men now,” she told us. “Don’t act stupid.”

We were in her kitchen, and Denny spun the bottle around, watching the liquor shimmer in the sliver of light through the window like he was casting a spell. I glimpsed the future—Denny and me on blankets in the truck bed, my head against his shoulder. That’s when I’d tell him I loved him.

~

That night we built a fire and sat beside each other on a log passing the whisky. I stared a while at the water’s edge, imagining the moonlight glittering off the rainbow bodies of all of them trout. Before we got drunk, I pulled out a cupcake and lit the candle. Denny used to ask me to buzz his hair, but in those weeks before his birthday, he had grown his curls out in thick ringlets. I had only just started thinking about what it meant that he was Black, and I was white—how different things had been for him and would be. He closed his eyes tight to blow out the candle. Sometimes I believed we wished for the same thing, but it was a sin to ask.

Eventually we crawled in the back of the truck. Denny confused everything for shooting stars.

“Is that one?” he’d say fast, jutting a finger into my line of sight. We’d squished our heads so close together each of us was one eye.

I said it was a plane if it moved, a satellite if it twinkled. I was bent on not believing in nothing then, but that night I felt something moving out there past the hills of southeast Kentucky. It was three weeks till graduation. When I closed my eyes, the sky spun above me, the earth below, so I lay there beside him in the truck bed, cradled by all of it.

“What are you going to do after school?” he asked just like he knew what I was thinking.

Our arms rustled together when I shrugged. “Maybe college,” I said, “or the army. I might just move somewhere—Lexington, Knoxville.”

Denny was quiet a second, then he said, “Jimmy said he’d put me on in his shop if I wanted.” I liked how the grease settled in Denny’s hands when he tinkered with Jimmy. We both knew he was smarter than me. He just wasn’t meant for a classroom.

I could almost feel my mouth making the words: I love you. If Denny was in my future, he had to know.

“Can I tell you what I wished?” Denny asked then. He had both his hands behind his head, elbows flared, like a picture out of some book.

I was slow to speak. “If you tell it, it won’t come true,” I said.

“But I know it will, so I’ve got to tell you.”

He sat up, his arms gripped around his knees, looking right at me. His lips were purple and wet in the moonlight. I couldn’t stop my arm from shaking.

“I wished I’d turn into a fish,” he said.

It took a second for the words to reach me. “A fish?” I asked, sitting up to meet him. “You could’ve asked to get in college or get a job or a truck, but you asked to be a fish.” I almost said he could’ve wish for a girl.

“What’s the use wishing for something real?” he said.

I thought of all my wasted wishes. “Well,” I said, “what kind of fish you gonna be then?”

“What kind you think I am?” he asked.

I considered it, his childish question. “A gar,” I said. I had seen one pulled from the lake, its long snout, razor-sharp teeth like some alien’s.

“Be serious,” he said, punching me in the shoulder.

Whatever he wanted I would give him. “Maybe a trout because you love this spot so good.”

He laughed and said, “I could see it.”

“What about me?” I asked. “What would I be?”

“You’re some deep-sea thing ain’t nobody seen yet.”

“Them ugly things with lights on their heads?” I said. I was scared to touch him, like something hot.

He smiled, and I thought his eyes said I was beautiful.

Then Denny said, “I gotta piss.” I felt him clop down off the truck, one foot on the wheel.

It was midnight. I know because I was looking at my phone when I heard the splash. I jumped up.

“Denny?” I said.

It was quiet, and when I turned my phone around in the dark, the light didn’t do a thing.

I don’t remember calling his name or jumping off the truck or running to the shoreline. I just remember the way my clothes clung to me in the water, my hands groping at the muddy bottom, how heavy I felt, cast off from the shore, saying again and again, “I love you, I love you,” hoping to find his slick trout body and wrench him from the water, writhing, so I could call him mine.