Dark Waters.

I

We return with these marble-eyed insomniacs who rise from beds of scagweed to scrounge stagnant shallows, sudded mudflats stirred by stickshadows striping the shore whipping triple-hooked harnesses into an industrial wind that spits coke oven ashdrift, pig-iron slag - the backlash of Great Lakes Steel.

We shine high-beamed flashlights into coffee-colored waters sullied by sludge, the riverbottom nowhere to be seen, blindly felt by lead sinkers dragged snagged over slabs of busted concrete, the rusted husks of car wrecks, every so often an occasional drowned body gazing eyeless from its underwater grave.

II

Our father taught us how to bait a hook, told us to tip our spinners with the blood of leeches, to spit into a river to wish for luck. He was a cross-yourself Catholic who'd rush to church after a night spent trolling the Sugar Island cut in his 14-foot outboard, a bucket to bail holy water on bended knees.

Tonight his eyes have clouded over milk-curdled - white like the walleye he could find blindfolded, drifting under a sky blacker than creosote, cutting upriver at the southern tip of Bob-Lo, Lake Erie's mist thick as cheesecloth, the red buoy bell ringing in his right ear reminding him he was returning home from sea.