Bass’s voice is so good. Two friends are fishing. There’s the narrator and Kirby. A 10-dollar garage sale couch out on the beach. Diet cokes, rum, lime—Cuba Libres the narrator calls them. It’s cold. Winter on the gulf. Before Kirby and the narrator went on this trip, Kirby and Tricia, his significant other, got into a tiff over feeding the dogs and work. And what happens? The narrator and Kirby are doing everything but catching the elusive redfish. They try for a bit, wading out, casting lines baited with live shrimp. But then there’s everything else they do on the beach like getting a generationally/demographically cliched car stuck in the sand. Burning a lifeguard’s tower. Starting another fire. Running around with the couch. Calling Tricia on a payphone? Riding a horse out into water. Love and friendship. Friendship and love. And fishing?
First published in Esquire in 1988; Collected in The Watch, W.W. Norton, 1989; also in For A Little While, Little Brown, 2016