Читать книгу Coasters - Gerald Duff - Страница 12

Waiting for the traffic on the Port Arthur highway to clear enough to venture out into it, Waylon looked at the puffy banks of cumulus clouds on the horizon and decided to turn left toward Sabine Pass rather than heading back home immediately. The clouds were a pure unmoving white against the blue sky, brilliant this time of morning, and the way they looked led him to hope that maybe there would be a few fishing boats that for one reason or another hadn’t left the dock at Bud’s Marina yet for a day on the Gulf.

Latecomers would be milling around the provisions store, buying bags of ice and six packs of beer and Gatorade, checking their gear and updating their licenses, asking the charter boat captains dumb questions about bait and sunscreen ratings and limits on redfish and sea trout and grouper, and he would enjoy watching the daytrippers from Beaumont and Port Arthur and Orange readying themselves for the chance to kill a boatload of something.

Preparing for a thing to happen had always pleased Waylon more than the actual experiencing the object itself, whatever it was. A barbecue brisket sandwich, say, or a cocktail made up in a bar from several ingredients by a skilled mixologist, a woman fully clothed willing and waiting to be undressed, or a car all gassed up sitting in the driveway before being cranked for the trip to somewhere he thought he wanted to go.

Beginning to hum, Waylon leaned forward in the Chevrolet and flipped on the radio, pre-set to an oldies station, catching the last part of the instumental section of the Doors begging for somebody to light their fire, and the image of his father with a lady friend rose in his mind with the beat of the music.

Charlie McPhee must be truly excited, he considered, having lived over fifty years with one woman, the last three of which he spent seeing her fade away in one hospital bed and another until she finally died in the one at home. He must have felt like his own life was over with, surely, at least that part of it involving another person being with him not because she had to be, but because she wanted it. Not kin to him by blood. Not his daughters or sisters or grandchildren, but another human being not related to him at all.

Here he was, Waylon thought, as the oldies deejay yammered about a mystery tune coming up, Charlie McPhee, a widower in his seventies looking finally toward that big blank spot, all of a sudden presented with a new chance. Another life opening up before him, a way to look at where he is rather than where he used to be or is going to end up.

No wonder he’s wearing new pullover T-shirts with emblems on the pocket and worrying about getting grease marks on his clothes. The old boy’s back in the hunt, getting ready to do something, looking forward to the next few minutes because they might be different from the one right now.

The mystery tune on the car radio was “Earth Angel” and Waylon knew it before the lead singer got first groan out of his mouth. “Give me something hard, jerk,” Waylon said aloud to the deejay. “Make me work for it. Why don’t you get some real mystery going in your music for a change?”

The parking lot at Bud’s Marina was bigger than it had been the last time Waylon saw it, and it was crowded with the pickups and stationwagons of the people already out in the charter boats on the water. No improvements had been made to the building, though. Palm-sized flakes of paint hung from its walls and lay in crumbles where rain water had dripped from the eaves, the single gas pump in front of the building still hadn’t been updated since the fifties, and the same woman was working behind the counter, squinting down at a calculator through a plume of cigarette smoke.

She didn’t look up as Waylon opened the screen door and stepped inside, and it was not until he had rummaged through a soft-drink box and placed a bottle of Diet Mr. Pibb on the counter that she acknowledged him.

“Fifty cents,” she said. “I hope that’s the last one of them suckers in the box. Nobody’ll buy a Mr. Pibb.”

“I had to hunt for it,” Waylon said. “It was hid way in the bottom under the ice. You got an opener?”

“Ain’t it twist-off?”

“No,” he said. “It was probably bottled before they discovered twist-off. This here Mr. Pibb’s real low-tech.”

The woman handed him an opener from beneath the counter, and Waylon drank his soda while he wandered around the store, inspecting the boxes of plastic grubs, spools of line, lead weights, leaders, peanut-butter crackers, and filet knives. When he finished the Mr. Pibb, he turned back to speak to the woman studying her calculator.

“Everybody’s gone already, huh?” he said. “All the charters?”

“Nope,” she said. “It’s one boat at the far end still tied up. Party from Beaumont’s not figured out what they’re going to do yet.”

“What’s slowing them down?”

“I imagine they’re like everybody else,” the woman said, punching at the calculator and then looking up at Waylon. “Still trying to get things counted up.”

“It’s the figuring’s slows a man down,” he said, nodding toward the counter. “All right.”

“A woman, too, Buddy-Ro,” she said and lighted a new cigarette.

The boat at the end of the dock was dark yellow and looked homemade, its finish rough textured and the supports of its sun roof two-by-four planks rather than marine lumber. The nameplate at the rear of the vessel was the work of a professional painter, however, declaring the identity of the Gulf Princess in script letters, and Waylon could hear the low mutter of a large inboard engine as he walked toward the group of people gathered on the dock near the fishing boat.

Nobody looked his way as he approached, and Waylon didn’t expect them to, he not being part of the event transpiring near the waters of the Gulf and therefore of no more concern than a brown pelican flying over or a gull perched on a piling waiting for a fish scrap. He stopped at an appropriate distance from the scene and began looking from one person to the next.

There were four, a woman and three men. One of the men was obviously the charter boat captain, his baseball cap faded by the sun to a mottled blue, his forearms the shade of saddle leather, and his footwear a Wal-Mart version of running shoes. He was holding two cardboard boxes of frozen squid under his left arm and a sack of ice in his right hand, and he was listening with his head bowed to one of the other men.

The one speaking was wearing a long-billed cap, he had a dab of white sun screen centered on the bridge of his nose, and his boat shoes looked like they had been purchased in the last month in an outfitters store in a mall somewhere.

The woman, whose she was Waylon couldn’t tell yet, was leaning over the transom of the Gulf Princess and staring into the live well. The way she was standing caused the back of her T-shirt to ride up from the waistband of her pants and revealed about two inches of skin the same pecan-shell hue as that of her arms and what Waylon could see of the side of her face, as she watched the shiners dart back and forth in the bait well. She stuck in one finger and swished it around and increased her lean enough to show another inch or two of skin. Still no tan line.

“What kind’s this one, Teddy?” she said and turned to look toward the third man, who stood nearest her steadily rubbing sun screen squeezed from what looked like a plastic banana into the back of his neck. “The one with the blue stripes.”

When Teddy stepped forward to join the woman at the bait well, Waylon could see that the sun screen container was in fact a plastic banana suspended from a matching yellow string.

“That one there,” Teddy said, “is what’s known as a blue-striped fish. The small-mouth variety.”

“Right,” the woman said, straightening up to face Teddy. As she did, she noticed Waylon and nodded in his direction. “And I guess this boat’s what’s known technically as a fishing boat.”

“Ask Leo,” Teddy said, turning his attention again to the banana and squeezing more lotion onto his finger tips. “He’ll tell you a name.”

“I know that,” the woman said. “But he’s busy talking some talk right now.” She looked at Waylon again, this time for a longer spell.

“Do you know?” she asked. “What kind it is?”

“The boat?” Waylon said, putting on a smile and moving a step or two closer. “Or the bait fish?”

“The fish,” the woman said. “The blue-striped one.”

“I haven’t looked at it,” Waylon said, “but I’d guess a shiner or a small shad.”

“See there, Teddy,” the woman said. “Everything’s got its own name. Mine is Marsue. He’s Teddy.”

“I’m Waylon,” Waylon said. “Waylon McPhee. Y’all are from Beaumont, right?”

About then, the man in the long-billed cap turned to look toward the others, the expression on his face that of a man who had just learned that the insurance payment hadn’t arrived in time or that the fourth-down try was inches short and the Oilers drive was over on the three-yard line and the point spread was again not beaten.

“They don’t take plastic,” he answered to all who might be attending, “and Captain Metcalf says he needs at least two hundred dollars in cash to take us out on the water. How much you got on you, Teddy?”

Teddy let his banana drop to swing freely by its string around his neck and reached for his wallet, and Marsue looked silently at Leo for a space before moving back to peer into the bait well at the shiners.

Between them, Teddy and Leo came up with a hundred and sixty-five dollars cash, and Leo gathered it all into one hand and fixed Captain Metcalf with a pleading look. “What do you think, Captain?” he said. “Can you see your way clear for just under two hundred?”

“I’d love to, gentlemen,” the captain said, including Waylon in his explanation as he looked from face to face. “But for a half-day, I’d just barely break even for that amount. I got to have a little to show for my work. You know, bait, ice, fuel, time.”

Everybody stood silent for a minute, listening to the throb of the inboard on the Gulf Princess and the purr of the air pump in the bait well. Teddy stared at his banana, Leo looked at the money in his hand, and Marsue dabbled her fingers in the water where the bait fish splashed.

“I could come up with the extra thirty-five bucks and go with you,” Waylon said, “if somebody’s got a spare hat they could lend me to keep the sun off.”

“That’s the time,” Leo said, cramming the money back in his pocket and extending a hand toward Waylon. “The name’s Leo Butler, and Marsue’s got two or three extra caps with her, I know.”

Ten minutes later, with everybody aboard and with Waylon wearing a hot-pink cap that said Live the Dream just above the bill, Captain Metcalf pointed the bow of the Gulf Princess toward the channel markers leading to the mouth of Sabine Pass Bay and the open water beyond.

Near its zenith, the sun hammered the Gulf and everything moving on it, and by the time the captain had taken the boat a few miles from shore everybody in the fishing party had stopped trying to talk over the roar of the inboard engine and had found places to sit and wait for some stopping point to be reached.

Leo Butler was perched in front on the seat next to the captain’s, his long-billed cap pushed back on his head so he could lean forward to observe the dials on the control panel, and Teddy and Marsue sat side by side on an upholstered pad on the engine housing facing the rear of the boat. Marsue had taken her shoes off, and from where he sat in a plastic lawn chair, Waylon could finally see where the tan ended on her body.

It stopped with an oval on the top of each foot, fading into white just before the bones of her toes began to show their articulation. Evidently, the woman didn’t wear sandals often, but in Waylon’s opinion that fact hadn’t held her back much. He could imagine himself leaving his plastic chair, crawling across the four or five feet of deck space between them, and leaning forward to kiss each toe there toasting in the sun.

Instead he closed his eyes against the glare and listened to the rhythmic throb of the engine and the regular pattern of the bow of the boat pounding over the line of waves it met in its progress. His body moved in cadence with the motion, and the steady up and down, the to and fro, the backwards and forwards, put him in mind of the roller coaster at Pleasure Island, the amusement park in Port Arthur where he had spent four summers of his teenage years.

The entrance to the ride stood across from the Round Stand where he had sold hot dogs and soft drinks and ice cream in the employ of his mother’s brother, the only relation of his family on both sides who was ever in a position to make any money. All of his kin considered Uncle Runky rich, especially the East Texas branch, and Waylon never had any reason to doubt the truth of the belief.

Certainly, his famous Uncle Runky was tyrant enough to convince anybody of his wealth, working the employees of his food concessions at the park long enough hours at low enough wages to prove his business savvy to any potential doubter of his financial success. His workers all hated and feared him and stole food from both the snack stand and the restaurant every chance they got.

Between waiting on customers at the Round Stand, the hot dog stuffers and the Coke guzzlers and ice cream crammers over from the mainland, Waylon would lift his eyes to read the great sign above the entrance to the ride across the way. “Ride the Coaster,” it proclaimed in large red letters against a white background, “Thrill of a Lifetime,” the word Thrill the largest of the command and the others trailing off, each smaller than the one before until time, the smallest of all, vanished with the final tiny letter e.

And Waylon did, each chance he got, when the crowd in the park was small or when he was on a lunch or supper break or when the maintenance crew was testing the track those few hours each summer week Pleasure Island was closed to customers. The ride was free for him, one of the few fringe benefits to park employees, and Waylon took full advantage of every opportunity to slip into a seat of one of the cars and feel the drive chain engage beneath and begin to tow him up the long first incline to the top of the highest point of the wooden structure.

Scores of rides on the coaster had taught him how to experience the event most completely, and he had learned that on the way up the first incline the true rider looked first to the left to watch the trees shrink away and the ship canal come into view.

Immediately on glimpsing the water, the rider then must look back and to the right for a view of the midway and the Ferris Wheel at its heart, a scene best taken when the lights were coming on and the customers who came to the park after having their evening meal somewhere else were hurrying from the parking lots toward the sounds of merry-go-round music and the clatter of wheels from the games of chance and the calls of the barkers.

About then, the other riders in the coaster car would begin to scream as the top of the first incline came near and they realized there was nothing in view ahead but empty air. The true rider did not cry out or show alarm, but, as Waylon had learned in his long and faithful apprenticeship, looked instead at the hand rails to the left and right of the incline so as to see them tremble as the heavy car reached the top.

There, at the high point, the drive chain carrying the load disengaged beneath, and the car seemed to stop for a moment before continuing its roll forward into the beginning of the descent. It was then the deepest, most panicky breaths were taken and the loudest screams of the entire circuit began, and it was then that the true rider removed his hands from the bar across his thighs holding him in the seat, and threw both arms above his head.

The long fall forward began with a force that pulled him out of his seat and held him suspended against the bar, only the pressure on his legs keeping him inside the car, modulating steadily until at the bottom of the incline, the true rider was crushed into the seat until he weighed more than ever before in life.

The next incline, necessarily shorter than the first, with a sudden hard right turn at the top, was the best for the true rider of all the circuits past and all those to come. For it was here at the top, as the car crested the incline, that true weightlessness came to the one loyal enough to let go of all support and stays and to allow the attending forces to have complete dominion and control.

He floated, the true rider, touching nothing, for a count of two, all that pushed him up and all that held him back equalized and kept at bay in balance, and he drifted in air, having nothing and wanting nothing. At soundless peace, in a still point with the screams of the others about him, neither bound by earth nor taken by sky.

That moment past, the rest of the ride around the loops and beneath the overhanging supports and down the long slide back to the beginning was a steady increase in gravity, so that as the safety bars flipped up for leaving the car, Waylon ended each journey feeling heavier than ever before, climbing from the car with a conscious effort to walk down the exit ramp with his shoes scuffing hard against the pavement.

In his four summers on Pleasure Island, he had ridden the other rides many times—they were free, after all—the Ferris Wheel, the Whip, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Ride-E-O, the Avalanche, the Bumper Cars, but it was only the coaster that spoke to him at the weightless top of the second crest something he could never quite make out and understand, a message to which he wanted to attend again and again in that moment of canceled forces at peace with each other.

“Ride the coaster,” Waylon said out loud, the sound of his words covered by the deep drone of the boat engine, “thrill of a lifetime.”

“What was that?’

Teddy had stood up from his seat on the engine housing and was leaning toward Waylon’s plastic lawn chair, keeping himself balanced by holding on to one of the two-by-four uprights to the sunroof. The vibration of the Gulf Princess plowing through the water was causing his chin to quiver as though he had a slight case of palsy, and his next statement seemed to be forced loose from his mouth one word at the time.

“What’d you say?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Waylon said. “Just trying to remember the words to a song.”

“You like music, huh?”

“Some songs I do,” Waylon said. “Not all of it.”

“How much longer do you think he’ll keep on going like this?”

“The captain?” Waylon said, wishing Teddy would return to his seat by the woman perched on the engine housing. He was not enjoying having to yell into the face of the man just three feet from his own, and he was particularly ready to stop having to look into the man’s mouth as he answered back. “Not much further. They go out for about two hours usually. Charters do. But this one’s only a half-day.”

Teddy nodded, not speaking this time, to Waylon’s relief, and headed back for the front of the boat, pausing to say something to the woman in passing. She laughed and pulled her feet back from out of the sun and was leaning forward to squirt some lotion from a tube onto the tops of her toes when the roar of the engine suddenly subsided and the boat immediately slowed its speed to a wallow, as the captain pulled back on the throttle and looked back and forth from the control panel to a composition notebook he held in his hand.

The sudden quiet seemed louder than the engine had been. Teddy straightened up from the ice chest for which he had been headed when Captain Metcalf slowed things down and held up a can of beer toward Waylon.

“You didn’t get a chance to bring any with you,” he said. “Want one of mine?”

“Later,” Waylon said. “After I’ve caught my first fish.”

“What’s this mine stuff?” the woman said. “Share and share alike on the open seas. That’s the law of the deep, right?”

She was directing her question toward Waylon in the stern while she felt around for her shoes with her feet without looking down. She found one, then the other and stood up to stretch, her gaze still on him. He wondered if her tan line had been altered yet on her feet.

“That’s the way I always heard it,” he said, grinning and then nodding toward Metcalf who had killed the engine and was beginning to rig some rods he had pulled from an overhead rack. “On a boat, the captain is the only law. The judge and the jury.”

“Is that right, Captain?” Marsue asked. “What the man just said?”

“Only boat I know about is a fishing boat,” Metcalf said, reaching for one of the boxes of frozen squid stowed in a floor compartment. “On a charter boat the captain is the one gets to do all the work.”

“At least he gets to put the bait on the hook,” Marsue said, watching Metcalf rip into the cardboard and begin prising individual squid apart from the frozen mass inside. “Bait comes first.”

“Bait,” Metcalf said, holding up a palm-sized squid and reaching for one of the rigs, “is what makes it all happen. Here’s one ready for somebody.”

He held the rod out toward the woman and reached for another one. “But you know I have seen fish hit a bare hook, and I ain’t talking about a plug made to look like something. I mean just the plain old steel hook with the barb on it.”

“It takes a hungry one to do that,” Waylon said, taking the next prepared rod from the captain.

“Starving,” Marsue said. “Just famished.” She held up the hooked squid on her line for examination, poking at it with the tip of a fingernail.

“A fish couldn’t starve, could it?” Leo asked, his hand out ready for the next rod being worked on by Captain Metcalf. “Out here in the Gulf with all these other ones to eat.”

“Naw,” the captain said and handed Leo the rod. “Way before he starved to death, he’d get eat up by something hungrier than he was.”

“A fish gets hungry enough, he loses all caution, I imagine,” Marsue said. “He forgets to keep his head down.” She walked to the bow of the boat and dropped her line over the side toward the water, but it was too short to take the hooked squid and the lead sinker below the surface. “How does this reel work?” she said.

“Sir,” Captain Metcalf said, looking at Waylon, “could you show her while I get this last one rigged? You know how, don’t you?”

“I’ll figure it out,” Waylon said, “if you give me long enough.”

“What are we after?” Leo asked from the other side of the boat. “Right here at this point?”

“Grouper,” the captain said, finishing up the last rig and giving it to Teddy. “They’re a bottom feeder. Let it out until it won’t go any further. When you feel one of them hit, jerk him fast before he backs into the rocks.”

“Oh, he’ll hide from you, then?” Marsue said, flipping the lever Waylon had pointed out to her. The weighted bait slid into the water with a whirring sound of the line off the reel. “Doesn’t want to come in the boat with us, huh?”

“He’s reluctant to leave his element,” Waylon said, moving away to cast his own line into the Gulf. “Afraid he won’t be able to breathe right.”

“Maybe he should learn to hold his breath,” Marsue said, leaning forward to look over the side. “I believe I’ve got there.”

“Flip that lever I showed you the other direction,” Waylon said. “And get ready to catch a big one.”

“I hope he’s not afraid to hit it,” Marsue said. “Suppose he’ll keep his mouth shut?”

“Not if he hadn’t eaten anything in a long time. Not if he’s hungry enough.”

On the other side of the bow, Leo jerked his rod tip up and began to reel, the line singing and throwing off a spray of water as he leaned back and worked the mechanism. “I got one on,” he yelled. “First strike of the day.”

The captain moved toward him and reached out to catch the line as the hooked fish broke surface. “A grunt,” he said. “That’s what I figured the way he was coming up.”

“Aw shit,” Leo said. “No good, huh?”

“It’s good, all right,” the captain said, unhooking a dark-colored fish about a foot long and opening the compartment in the floor to throw it on top of some ice. “You filet it and cook it real fast.”

“Leo will cook it fast, okay,” Marsue said over her shoulder. “I flat guarantee you. Won’t you, honey?”

About then the tip of her rod dipped, and before Waylon could turn to see what Marsue would do with the strike, something hit his bait and moved powerfully downward as he gave a jerk in response.

“Don’t let him back into the rocks,” Captain Metcalf said. “Reel him quick before he cuts the line on you.”

“I guess I ought to be doing the same thing,” Marsue said, pulling back on her line as she reeled.

“Yes ma’am,” the captain said, looking in her direction, “but I believe you got yours coming along fine. This’un here’s the one I’m worried about. I believe it’s bigger than the man that’s hooked him.”

“That’s the story of my life,” Waylon said, rearing back on the rod with his left hand and trying to reel with his right against the weight bowing the tip down. His foot slipped in some water on the deck, banging his knee against an upright. “Everything I hook always outweighs me.”

“Did you set your drag?” the captain demanded, fumbling at the mechanism of Waylon’s reel.

“No, I never remember to do that, neither,” he said and felt more line strip off as the fish, still well-submerged, moved at an angle away from the boat.

“Don’t horse him,” Captain Metcalf said. “Let him do what he wants to do.”

“That’s all I ever do,” Waylon said. “And I still don’t gain an advantage.”

“If he can’t horse it, maybe he can pony it some,” Marsue called from her side of the boat as she pulled an undersized red grouper out of the water and swung it into the boat.

“Is this one big enough?” she said to the captain.

“Not that one, no ma’am,” Metcalf answered, taking it off the hook and lifting it toward his face. Leaning forward, he made a kissing sound in the vicinity of the grouper’s nose and tossed it back over the side.

“Did you just kiss that fish?” Leo asked in an amazed tone.

“I kiss everything I don’t keep,” the captain said, “before I throw it back.”

“I’m going to remember that,” Marsue said, reaching into the bait box for another squid to put on her hook. “Sounds like a damn good policy.”

“Why do you do it?” Leo asked, looking ready to laugh at a witty reply. “Kiss a fish like that?”

“I don’t know. It always just seems like the right thing to do.”

The Gulf Princess was the last boat of the day in at Bud’s Marina. The woman who had been working the calculator behind the counter when Waylon last saw her was standing at the end of the dock with both hands on her hips watching Captain Metcalf and his party proceed through the No Wake area of the channel. She didn’t offer to catch the tie-up line when Metcalf lifted it toward her, and he had to ask Teddy to hop off the front end of the still moving vessel and wrap the rope around a cleat.

“Sorry we getting in so late, Libby,” Metcalf said. “We had to go way out past that Sunoco platform before we got into any keeper grouper.”

“Your radio broke, Bill?” she said, still standing in the same position but backed up a little to allow Teddy to get past her.

“To tell you the truth, I’m afraid it needs working on, and that’s a fact. These folks can tell you I was trying all afternoon to talk at you.”

“I’ll testify to that,” Leo said, hopping from the boat to the dock and giving Metcalf an exaggerated wink after he had turned his back to offer his hand to Marsue. “The way it was cracking and popping, I believe that radio must’ve got seawater in it.”

“Well, ain’t nobody left around here this time of day to help you all unload your fish,” Libby said. “If you got any.”

“We got them, all right,” Leo said. “Didn’t we, partner?” He looked to Waylon for confirmation and laid his hand on Marsue’s shoulder.

“I hope to shout,” Waylon said. “At least you and your wife and Teddy did.”

“You get some of these,” Leo said as Marsue started up the dock toward the building at the end of it. “Share and share alike.”

“I don’t want but one or two,” Waylon said. “That’s all I can use.”

Later, the grouper and grunt and amber jack divided and distributed among three styrofoam chests, Waylon remembered the borrowed hat on his head and walked over to the green Cherokee where Marsue was sitting in the passenger seat looking in a mirror on the visor as she poked at her hair with a brush.

“Thanks for letting me use your cap,” he said. “It saved my delicate complexion.”

“Live the Dream,” she said, reading the words off the visor and then, turning back to the mirror, looked at Waylon through the reflection.

“Everyday and in every way,” he said to the green eyes in the glass looking back at him.

“You can keep the cap,” Marsue said. “For a souvenir.”

“I’d be glad to, if you sign it on the visor for me like the baseball stars do at these card conventions.”

“You got a ballpoint?”

“Always,” Waylon said, digging a pen out of his pants pocket. “Be prepared is the scout’s motto.”

Marsue took the pen and turning the cap upside down wrote something on the underside of the visor and handed the cap and the pen back to him.

“That a Beaumont number?” he said.

“To be called only between ten in the morning and six in the afternoon weekdays. Don’t leave any messages.”

“I don’t talk to machines,” Waylon said, setting the cap back on his head. “Enjoy your fish. A little dill weed’s always nice on that grouper. Gives it a different taste.”

“That’s what I’m looking for.”

Leo and Teddy came walking up, carrying an ice chest between them, and Waylon turned to head toward the Chevrolet.

“We’re sure glad we ran into you, buddy,” Leo said, setting the ice chest into the rear of the Cherokee. “Wasn’t for your thirty-five dollar contribution we couldn’t have gone out and caught all these fish.”

“It was sure worth it,” Waylon said, touching his forefinger to the bill of his hot-pink cap in salute. “It was my pleasure, friend, believe me.”