Excerpt from Thomas Sparrow’s crime noir Northwoods Standoff.
Dedicated to the brave souls of the Occupy movement. May their resolve maintain.
PART TWO
I went into the house and changed into my warmest stuff: Carhartt bibs, down jacket and Sorel insulated boots. Roy sat in the kitchen and rolled joints. Before we left I grabbed the last six-pack of Bud from the yellowing Kelvinator refrigerator.
We drove about thirty minutes through the blackness to a little road leading to a small lake. Up high in the clear sky, shining down on a little shack about twenty yards from shore, was a three-quarters moon. The new snow looked bright and soft and peaceful.
“We going after muskies here, Roy?”
“Nah, gotta go a little further for them. Here we might get a northern or some panfish. Maybe even a bass.”
After trudging through the shallow snow to the small wooden shack, we sat on canvas chairs in the glow of a Coleman heater and bounced tiny jigs tipped with minnows, using the bottom halves of old fiberglass spinning rods. The beer, the smoke and one of Madison’s rock stations coming out of a little one-speaker radio made the night a beautiful thing. In between catching four crappies, six bluegills, one perch and a three-pound northern pike that flopped around on the ice while we laughed hysterically, we talked a lot. More correctly, Roy talked a lot. I learned more about Roy Hollinday than he did about Randy Slade.
(To be continued)
