Thanks.
I've been in Arizona for two days
now and traveling with Sandra, and we did a reading yesterday
in Prescott.
And I thought maybe down here I could escape
the professional outdoorsman.
It says that on the back of my book.
I don't even know what a professional outdoorsman is.
My publisher, who is a great guy, a great publisher,
John Daniels out of Santa Barbara,
thought that would be a great way to promote something.
It would be a hook, and everyone's picked up on it.
I was a park ranger, I was a game warden.
I guess that's hardly professional,
but I guess I got paid, so.
Not very much.
But I found that people who are looking for fiction
don't pick up anything that says hunting and fishing on it.
People who read hunting and fishing generally don't read.
And so it hasn't been a great hook.
The kind of-- I'm going to read a story tonight that's
a hunting story, by the definition.
There is a gun in it.
But this is-- when I write for a magazine called Gray's Sporting
Journal, and that's where I sell most of my hunting and fishing
stories.
They have very little to do with hook or bullet stuff.
So I hope this example will prove that.
And this is the story that got me down here.
This is what I submitted into the contest
and so this story brought me here.
And it's called the Fairest of Them All.
I hadn't heard the float plane, and suddenly Jean
stood outside my door in a dark tailored suit, deep red hair
falling all down her shoulders.
Someone you'd expect to see walking into a skyscraper.
She had to step back so I could swing open the storm door.
Just that tiny retreat made me smile then wince.
I'd never seen her back away from anything.
Once the door was out of our way,
I gave the float plane a wave, letting the pilot know
we were all right.
As he taxied off across the lake,
Jean and I stepped together, half in the house, half out,
and we hugged.
She said, "How've you been, stranger?"
at the same time I did.
Then she took a big shaky breath and looked around.
"This is some hovel, bro," she said.
"Exactly what I expected."
I shrugged and smiled back.
"It's small, but it's dirty."
"The roof leaks, but the windows are broken?"
"Yeah, like that."
We stood there smiling at each other, never
so awkward in our lives until Jean said, "Mind if I come in?"
We laughed a little then, but as I hung up her coat
when I wasn't looking at her I said, "So how are you, really?"
"I'm fine Jim.
Twins are supposed to know that about each other.
Has it been so long we've lost our ESP?"
"Not even ESP can make it that kind of distance, Jean.
Not through LA smog."
She smiled at that too, even laughing
about what she'd gone through to reach Alaska in one day.
"Planes are supposed to have stewardesses, Jim," she said,
"and big jet engines.
And they're never supposed to land on lakes."
Her smile faded and she sat down on the soft couch,
sinking deep.
She sighed.
"I'm sorry, Jim.
I was just a little freaked on the phone.
I didn't mean to worry you.
Just got so fucked there at the end."
"Do you want I should have a word with him?"
I said, talking mafia, touching the shotgun I'd been cleaning
while I waited for her.
She still managed to keep a smile
and I thought maybe she really had just
been blowing off steam when she'd called,
crying and begging me to take her in.
She'd never had to beg for that, not from me.
She brushed her hair away from her face.
"I couldn't believe the judge," she
said, as if she'd been asked to explain.
"Whoever heard of the husband winning child custody?"
"Goddamn Californians," I said, a whisper of an old joke.
"No kidding," she sighed.
Just when I was afraid she might cry she stood up and said,
"But don't give me any shit about LA smog.
At least they've got heat down there."
Still in her expensive courtroom suit,
Jean bent down to the wood stove and started carefully building
a fire, layering the kindling in so it couldn't help but burn.
She surrounded the kindling with bigger sticks, Lincoln Log
fashion, building a little home to burn down.
I watched, tempted to tell her not to get herself dirty.
Instead, when the flames had taken root in the walls,
I walked into the kitchen and mixed a couple of drinks.
We stayed up late, dodging around the custody fight, Jean
only dusting off the barest bones of a court battle.
She talked more of LA and her modeling work.
She'd quit that a few years back to have the kids,
but she talked now as if that had never happened.
I figured whatever she wanted to talk about was her business.
She asked most of the questions.
She wanted to know how my guiding had been going,
and I told her how I'd taken off in the last few years.
I mentioned the names of a few Hollywood types I'd taken out.
She knew a couple of them, and she laughed hysterically,
saying things like, "That asshole?"
Or, "That bitch can't fish, can she?"
When she asked about it I told her, "No.
I never told any of them you were my sister."
She stared at me a moment, but she sounded more tired than mad
when she said, "It's nothing to be embarrassed about, Jim."
"Embarrassed?"
I said.
"Who said anything about embarrassed?
Would have been tooting my own horn.
I was never any good at that."
She didn't look very convinced.
"Besides," I said.
"It would have been bad business,
letting those women know my sister was
the fairest of them all."
That was something she used to ask when we were kids.
"Jim, Jim, handsome and tall, who
is the fairest of them all?"
She asked about my love life now, and kidded me
about my lack of it, saying how they'd
be after me down in LA, what with me being
the strong, silent, mountain man type.
She said everything there depended on type.
Type was critical.
She asked why I wasn't taking any babes out fishing.
"Those Hemingway girls maybe," she suggested.
"They're into this outdoor stuff, aren't they?"
I saw Jean was trying hard to be her old self,
and I'd said, "They just left, both of them.
And those had been a wild few nights."
I said I'd had to kick them out early, telling them
I had an even hotter one on the way.
She got serious though, and said she
hoped she hadn't screwed anything
up by coming on no notice.
I told her not to be stupid.
I tried to be more careful of what I said.
Even though we'd made it a late night, I couldn't sleep
and I was up early.
I built a fire and stood in the kitchen,
looking at the day growing strong outside the window.
The firs swayed in the wind.
I should have seen it was bringing in some weather.
I sipped coffee I'd made too strong because I wasn't paying
attention to that, either.
She snuck up on me, surprising me
when she said, "Thanks for the fire."
I could tell by her morning voice
that she was surprised and pleased
I would have thought of her.
She'd always been that way in the mornings.
"I know how you city girls are," I
said, turning away from the window.
She crossed the room, flushed from the shower,
dressed sloppily in one of my own union suits.
"Got to love that lingerie," I said, but even
through the loose red cloth I could see her breasts sway
as she poured herself a cup of coffee
and dropped into a chair.
I turned away and said, "It really has been too long."
"I know.
My fault."
"Maybe you better chill out on the sexy stuff for a while,"
I said, wagging my finger at the Union suit.
"At least until I can remember you're my sister."
She laughed and cupped one of her breasts through the cloth,
bouncing it up and down.
"These saggy old things would drive anyone to distraction,
I know."
She was quiet a second.
Maybe I blushed.
"Jesus, Jim," she said.
"You've got to get out more often."
Than she let go of herself.
"Milker tits," she said angrily.
"You don't know what kids do to you."
I couldn't think of anything to say after that.
We sat in the quiet while the day grew to full light.
Jean took a sip of her coffee and winced, looking at me.
"I screwed it up," I said.
"Still thinking about those Hemingway girls, I bet."
"That's it," I said.
But for a moment I couldn't remember
what she was talking about.
There was another long silence after that,
as if we'd both forgotten how to talk.
Jean broke the quiet asking, "What would you
be doing now if I wasn't here?"
I shrugged.
"Nothing in particular."
"Standing, staring out the window?"
"Probably, if I'd stayed up drinking til two."
"Still can't sleep late?"
I shook my head, and turned to pour a little water
into my coffee.
It really was terrible.
She held her cup out for some too.
"Were you going hunting?"
"I guess so.
Try to get at least one trip into those ponds
before they freeze."
"Do you mind taking me?"
I stared at her.
"You really want to?"
"I haven't shot in years, or paddled," she said.
She tried her coffee again, wincing even with the water.
"I think I'd love to."
"I've still got your gun," I told her.
She looked so surprised I had to say something.
"Muriel likes to use it when she's up," I said.
"Or maybe it's Margot?
Tell the truth, I can never tell them apart."
On the river, Jean held her old shotgun across her thighs
like we used to as kids, and I crept the boat
around the inside of all the river's bends
and bays and backwaters, hoping to surprise anything
that might be resting there.
Time after time there was nothing,
and she'd let out a long breath, putting her gun back in her lap
and taking up her paddle again.
I told her the ducks would all be on the ponds,
but she'd never been in Alaska, and she
thought every place was like the marsh country in Wisconsin
where we'd grown up.
At least that's how she wanted things to be now.
Looking at her in the bow of my canoe,
at the turned back sleeves of my wool shirts,
and the little-kid-looking rolled up
cuffs on my wool pants, I wondered
if there was anything else I could have given her.
She'd come all the way to Alaska with nothing but the courtroom
suit she'd been wearing.
By mid-afternoon we hadn't seen a duck,
and we weren't being careful going around
the corners anymore.
I didn't talk at all except to answer her rare questions
about the rivers in the ponds and such.
I knew she hadn't come all the way up here to hunt.
She wanted to talk about all of it,
about the things she'd been screaming and crying
about on the phone that night.
So I waited, paddling when I had to,
my ears straining a little in case something
might start leaking out of her proud, broken world.
We still hadn't made a sound, but a teal suddenly
broke out of a side channel, three or four feet
off the water straight away from us in our canoe.
Jean changed her paddle for a gun
and I hunched down, bracing.
The blast emptied into the lowering gray sky, sounding
small and hardly lethal in all that open,
and she followed with a second, but the quick herky jerky
flight of the teal never slowed.
Jean lowered her shotgun and swore.
I said something about taking it easy,
she hadn't shot in years and years.
"A hit would have been a miracle," I said,
"not these two misses."
She told me to go to hell.
She insisted, through clenched teeth,
that she was the lucky one.
She said she'd always been the lucky one,
and she was good at this.
"Better than you," she added, glaring over her shoulder
before turning back to the river and empty sky.
She had been a better shot when we were kids,
but that was a long time ago.
Jean didn't pick up her paddle and I stared at her stiff back,
at her wide shoulders, and instead
of thinking about her temper I remembered when she first
started to lift weights.
I'd found her on my bench doing presses with just the bar.
This was in high school, and her looks
were already otherworldly.
I was the envy of every boy in class,
but I'd always ask, "What could be
more useless than a sister that looked like that?"
She glistened with sweat and between breaths,
she said "The Mae West look is out, bro.
They go for muscles now.
Muscles and boobs."
She'd always talk like that with me,
and she'd always known exactly what she
was going to do in her life.
Jean still wasn't paddling, and the river
twisted through a nest of weathered snags,
splitting the water like broken gray teeth.
I steered through them, coming close to a few
without her helping from the front.
The water curled around the branches
and fell away grumbling.
When I edged the canoe into the bank just downstream,
Jean sat still for a moment, and I waited for her to move.
"Are these the ponds?" she asked without looking.
"Not 200 yards away," I said.
"Right through the willows."
"Want me to get out?"
"No, Margo, I want you to sit there
on that gorgeous ass all day while I hold the boat."
And she laughed, too loud, really for as close
as the ducks were, but it was a pretty sound in the cold air.
I stepped out of the canoe and held it while she got out.
The sand was stiff, but not quite frozen hard.
"I hope they're still open," I said, wondering about ice.
As we reached the willows, pinpoint flakes of snow
began to sift around us.
I touched Jean on the shoulder and pointed.
"Bet you haven't seen that in a while."
"Oh, we go to Aspen every year."
She turned to me and lifted her eyebrows.
It was the first slip she'd made.
"I've kept in touch with the snow," she said.
"And the cold, of course.
There's always been that."
A few of the flakes touched her head and stuck without melting.
They weren't white then so much as icy blue,
with all that dark hair behind them.
Though she was a fair letter writer,
I hadn't seen Jean for nearly six years,
except on magazines now and then.
There hadn't been many of those in the last few years.
I'd almost forgotten how pretty she really
was, not just the way the photographers can
fake everything.
She smiled at me and asked me what I was staring at.
"I was trying to remember if I'd ever seen you without makeup,"
I said.
"Enough to wake the dead, isn't it?"
"Jeff Seymour would die to be here right now," I told her.
"Jeff Seymour?"
she asked, then remembered.
"Jeff Seymour.
My God, how can you remember people like that?
I haven't thought of him in years, since high school."
"I bet he hasn't stopped thinking of you."
"Poor Jeff," Jean said, smiling.
"He had a case of the Jeans for sure," I said.
"Poor Jeff," she said again.
"What a nutcase he was."
We stood there and I saw Jean peel a small strip of bark
from a frozen willow.
When she caught me watching she said, "Ready
to show me your famous ponds?"
We followed a moose path into the willows,
the dead leaves thick on the ground
and loud underneath our feet.
The snow kept up its slow, steady drift,
and I was surprised how low and heavy the clouds were.
They'd snuck up on me like they never had before.
Maybe I had my own case of the Jeans.
As we neared the pond, Jean smiled at the racket
coming from the water.
We sat a second and I asked her how many she could tell, still
tell by their voices.
She knew the mallard right off, and could tell the wigeon
but couldn't remember the name.
When I said it she slapped herself on the forehead.
It was a sudden rip of honking, the deep bark
of the male answered immediately by the higher
call of the female.
Jean leaned into me and whispered, "I
can't tell a goose anymore.
Bury me on the back 40."
I took Jean to the head of an old beaver run,
cutting like a trench to the water's edge.
I told her if she crawled down until she hit water she'd
be breathing down their necks.
I told her I'd go around the pond
so we'd have them between us, and then I'd stand up first.
They'd all be going her way, then.
"You'll have more shooting than you'll know what to do with,"
I said.
She kept nodding without saying a word,
as if she couldn't wait for me to leave her there alone.
I went wide, keeping the willows between me and the pond,
and I was able to jog a little.
It helped me warm up after sitting in the canoe.
I slowed when I turned back to the pond,
and soon I was on my hands and knees, and finally on my belly,
slithering through the tall dead grass,
watching the grounded flakes melt
when they touched my hands.
I'd always hunted this spot alone,
from the beaver run where I'd left Jean.
Most guides will hold back a place or two for themselves,
something safe from the clients.
I'd never come in from this side,
and it looked like an entirely different world.
I wondered if I could do that to other places I knew,
try them from some different direction
and have them become new again.
It would be like discovering untouched continents.
I wondered if I'd ever be able to look at Jean that way,
seeing her in some way I'd missed before.
The grass led all the way to the bank,
and I couldn't have gotten closer if I was invisible.
I lay still, peering through the dead gold bars of the grass
at the covered surface of the water.
There were a few ducks milling about in front of me,
anxious with the change in weather.
Wigeon, pin tail, mallard, teal, scaup, goldeneye,
just about everything.
But on the other side between shore and the abandoned beaver
lodge, a ribbon of geese strung across the water,
even some on shore not 10 yards from where
Jean lay hidden in her trench.
I gathered my knees under me so I could go up all at once,
and I stood.
There was a moment, a quick second, maybe,
when the pond just went still.
The ducks made a few weak paddles turning to me
as if they couldn't believe I was
anything but an apparition, some trick of snow.
Every goose's head came up at once,
like periscopes, their necks stretched to the limit,
dumbfounded.
Then the stillness was over, the honking and flapping
of the geese like an explosion.
The ducks were everywhere, the puddlers leaping straight up,
and the divers running across the water, building takeoff
speed.
I picked out a pin tail, because I wanted to show it to Jean,
and I pulled the trigger.
They were so close and tightly packed
that the drake fell, as did two birds behind him.
On my second shot a Mallard fell alone.
The ducks were confused, circling the pond, offering
shot after shot.
I reloaded and glanced across the pond
realizing I hadn't heard Jean shoot.
I saw her, blurred a little by the snow,
standing still, holding her gun at her side.
The geese were already in a solid group
flying south over the river, long out of range.
I watched her standing alone, making no attempt
at the ducks winging over her, and instead
of shouldering my gun again I turned my back to the pond
and retraced my steps, circling back to my sister.
The snow was coming down a little harder by the time
I reached her.
She was standing at the end of the beaver run,
the pond empty and still now, silent before her.
Only the dead ones drifted on its surface,
blowing our way with the wind that carried the snow.
Jean wasn't crying, but there were
the traces of the last of her tears
across the plains of her cheeks.
I whispered, "Jean?"
She shook her head and turned away, hiding her face.
"All those geese," she said.
I touched her shoulder and she leaned into my hand
until I was holding her up.
"I was so sure I was ready to be a mother," she said.
"You are a mother, Jean.
The courts can't change that."
"Just carrying them doesn't make a mother, Jim.
You couldn't know a thing about it."
"Tell me."
"I don't know if there's anything left to tell."
She dropped her head against my shoulder, both of us still
looking toward the pond.
The snow was thick now, dimpling the water.
While Jean tried to talk I watched the dead ducks
edge over to us, still a long way off.
"He had videos, Jim.
At the trial.
I never even knew about them."
For a second there was a flash, the barest violent outline
of Jean with her small children, colored red, like her temper.
I closed my eyes and whispered, "What kind of videos?"
"Oh, the usual," she said, so casually that I winced.
"When it fell apart, I did too.
I would have gone with anybody if I
thought they really liked me.
Not would have, did.
He had people watching me, filming it."
I hugged her a little tighter, ashamed for what
I've been able to picture.
"They made quite the splash, believe me.
That famous body, naked with all those men.
My lawyer tried to get them blocked as inflammatory,
but I think they all wanted to see them pretty badly.
I left the courthouse.
It was all over after that.
What kind of a mother would a raving slut like that make?
What kind?"
"You're no slut, Jean," I said.
"Oh, I think I am sometimes."
"Well then, you're wrong."
"Yes.
Something is wrong.
I really wanted to be a mother.
I really needed to do that."
She took a deep breath that quivered.
"The modeling was about over, Jim.
We're getting old.
That's the worst type to be.
I decided it was time to be a mother.
That was my next step.
I decided.
Now what the hell am I going to do?"
I didn't have any idea.
I stood in the snow and she let me hold her a little while.
Then she eased away, saying, "What
do you say we get out of here, Jim?
I don't like your ponds right now."
I thought of how I'd saved this place for myself
so it couldn't get ruined.
I said, "Sure, Jean.
I'll get the canoe and pick up the ducks
and we'll get moving."
"The canoe?" she said, smiling bravely.
"You don't swim for them anymore?"
I couldn't quite smile back.
"Not in the snow," I said.
"I'm too old for that now."
I said I'd be back in a second, and I
headed through the willows to the river.
We'd swam for a duck once in Wisconsin, the first fall
after high school.
I'd hit him and he'd set his wings
and crashed far out in the lake.
I'd said I'd get the canoe and Jean teased, "Oh, just
swim out there and get him, you big baby."
For some reason I started peeling off my clothes.
We got to laughing and before I knew what was happening,
Jean was out of her clothes too, and we
were racing for that duck.
It was a pretty sunny day, but the water
couldn't have been much over 50 degrees.
I reached the duck first and threw it back to her.
For a second she put its neck in her mouth
and started dog paddling, but she started laughing too hard,
then, and she threw the duck back at me
and struck out for shore.
She beat me back, and when I got there she
was prancing around naked, hugging herself.
We were still laughing, but swearing too, about the cold.
Then Jean touched her nipples, rock hard and pointed.
She laughed even harder and said, "Well, I
guess the turkey is done."
I hadn't seen her like that in years,
since she'd started her modeling drive, and I looked at her,
feeling suddenly lost, and I stopped laughing.
She said, "You know, like those plastic things
they put in the turkeys that pop up when they're done."
I'd gotten the joke.
That wasn't what I suddenly hadn't understood.
I turned away from her and got into my clothes
before the sun had a chance to dry me.
Behind me I could hear Jean doing the same.
She went to New York later that month,
and though I saw her after that, that
was our last hunt together.
I'd forgotten all about it until she mentioned the swimming.
Now it was clear as yesterday.
I couldn't get over how absolutely perfect
she had been.
I went back to her with a canoe over my head,
crashing through the willows and calling her name so she
wouldn't think I was a moose.
When I was out of the brush I swung in a canoe down
and I saw her.
She was sitting on the bank, knees drawn tight to her chest,
arms wrapped around her legs, shivering, naked as could be.
Her hair clung to her head and wrapped around her neck,
tracing the path of her spine, water still snaking down
her back.
Beside her the four ducks were stretched in a neat row.
"Oh Jesus, Jean," I blurted.
I took off my coat and threw it on her.
She gave a weak smile, her lips blue.
"What the hell are you trying to do?"
I said too loudly.
"You trying to kill yourself?
This isn't Wisconsin, Jean."
She just shrugged at me and her teeth chattered.
"Jesus, Jean, it's 20 degrees out."
"I didn't want to be too old anymore," she said.
As soon as I'd seen her I'd started tearing out
handfuls of grass and I piled them together and broke down
some of the dead willow.
There were old beaver sticks along the banks, too,
and I piled those on.
The grass went like lightning when I touched the match to it.
"Jesus, Jean," I said again.
I helped her up and walked her to the fire.
It burned wildly, dancing through the long dried wood,
melting the snow and the sky.
Jean just stood beside it, and I turned her now and then
until she stopped shivering.
I looked to make sure she was dry,
and I got her long johns from the neat pile
of clothing she'd left at the bank beside the ducks.
"Are you warm enough?"
I asked.
"Yes," she said.
"Thanks."
I held the union suit out, but she
was looking down at herself.
"Look at these." she said, and I followed her point
to the ragged red quilt work of stretch marks
along her sides and belly.
I went behind her and lifted a leg
and slipped the red cloth around it.
I did the same with her other foot
and pulled the underwear up her long body.
I grabbed an arm and shoved it through the sleeve.
She reached her other arm out, like a lady
being helped with a coat.
I slipped a sleeve over her hand.
I came around front, but she was buttoning the underwear
herself, mechanically.
"My children have made me hideous," she whispered.
"God, you can talk some shit," I swore.
"You're the most perfect thing I've ever imagined."
Jean smiled then, looked at me.
"You know, Jim?" she said.
"Ever since I was a little girl, I always
thought it was such a shame we couldn't
get married, you and I."
I smiled a little then too, surprised.
"Me too," I said.
"Is that why you've waited?"
"Oh, for Christ's sakes.
No, I haven't waited."
She stepped forward and hugged me hard.
I could feel the bones of her.
"I love you," she said, adding "bro."
"Me too," I whispered.
I made myself break out of the hug
and I picked up her pants, my hands
trembling as I held a leg for her to step through.
I could feel her looking at me, but she didn't say anything
before she put her foot through the pants leg,
then she whispered, "Jim, Jim, handsome and tall,
who is the fairest of them all?"
And she laughed a little, I think,
some kind of sound like that.
"God," she said, "how did you ever get away?"
It was the last thing I wanted to do.
She let that her hand rest on my shoulder
and she said, "They mate for life, don't they?
The geese."
I said, "Yes, they do," and I thought of her
in the snow holding her shotgun at her side
while the geese flew so determinedly away from her.
"Do you remember back in Wisconsin,
when we'd sit in the blind and hope the geese would
come into our duck decoys?"
she said.
"Sometimes they'd come so close you'd whisper.
'Now if they'll just turn.'
But they never once made that wrong turn, did they?"
"No," I said, "they didn't."
"Even then I wished I was a goose," Jean said.
She took her hand away from me.
"Remember the time I wouldn't let
you shoot that one by itself?"
"You said he was too beautiful."
She laughed weakly.
"At night I think how I was just like that goose.
I knew I was that beautiful, and I thought I was that smart."
She shook her head.
"God, I was obnoxious.
But I thought I had that.
I thought all of that.
"I would have thought it for you if it hadn't."
"It was a long time before I realized
I wasn't like that, Jim."
I picked at the nearly frozen dirt
while Jean stood inches behind me.
"Nobody's like that, Jean."
"I was."
"Well, welcome back," I said.
"I'd rather have a sister than a goose, anyway."
I stood and held out her coat, and she
turned to let me help her.
I smoothed the coat over her shoulders
and turned up the collar, lifting her wet hair over it.
"We better be going, Jean," I said.
"I still wish I was a goose, Jim.
Mated for life."
I ran her heavy hair through my fingers
but couldn't say anything.
I turned and picked up the canoe.
She followed me, but with the canoe scraping
against the willows it was hard to hear when she spoke.
I shouted, "What?"
She ducked under the canoe with me and said, "My kids.
I didn't mean the way I looked.
I didn't mean that's what they'd done to me."
I waited and then said, "What did you mean?"
But she didn't answer.
She said, "It sounds funny under here, doesn't it?
Like everything's hollow."
"It's always like that."
"I would have liked to have heard that before," she said.
"That empty sound.
When it didn't mean anything except that
I had a canoe on my head."
I told her to watch out, and I swung the canoe down
on the edge of the river.
I pushed the boat into the current and held it.
Jean picked up her paddle from the bushes
and stepped into the back seat, the guide's position.
I started to say something, but she just said, "Let me steer.
I haven't done that in so long."
I said something about experience
and how I better be the guide, but she said, "Can I
stay here a while, Jim?
Can I stay here with you?"
I could barely get the words out, but I said, "Of course."
Then I sat down on the front seat
where I had no control, a place I hadn't
been since high school, and Jean pushed the canoe
into the current.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]