In the Cafe

[Ernest]

The men came into the café in ones and twos and hung their wet jackets from the hooks on the wall. The jackets steamed in the warm café. The spring rain came down in sheets against the windowpanes.

The men sat in chairs at the tables or in the booths and signaled to Marlene to bring them cups of hot coffee. None of them were happy with the rain. Some of them ordered donuts. About half of them swore at the rain and settled down to another big breakfast, not expecting to get out to the river until afternoon or evening.

We all knew one another. We were all locals, or guys who had moved away for work but came back on the weekends to the river. Some feared that the river would rise and turn to mud. Everyone hoped against that. The men started to talk about the fish they had seen in the river, the big brown trout that lived in this pool, or the one that fed in that riffle, or another one that swam under a certain ledge if you waded too close. I listened to the stories while looking at the morning paper in my booth. I knew some of those trout, and several weren’t nearly as large in the river as they were in the stories. A couple times someone tried to pull me into the conversation, but I said I didn’t know anything. I looked again at the newspaper. I wasn’t going to talk about the biggest brown I had ever seen, the one that had run from the river up Black Brook and had holed up under a cut bank in the Hendrickson farm pasture. That fish didn’t need all these guys harassing her. No, she should be left alone until the water is just right.