Like I Told Nancy

ONE MORNING’S THE SAME AS THE NEXT. You show up in the dark, mop and spray down the worst of the fish-gut stench. And you have to do that right away, otherwise it gets to where you can’t smell it because you’re used to it, and when all the tourists come in they make those squeezed-up faces like they need to use the bathroom. I’m told that’s how come folks are able to work in sanitation: a body can get used to anything. But this would turn out to be, well, not one of those mornings. I had just come up—half past four, like usual—to get the pier ready for the day. Spraying down and mopping the quarter-mile of concrete usually takes a couple hours. I’ll sometimes even forget I’m forty feet above the Gulf of Mexico until a porpoise fin breaks the surface of the water out of the corner of my eye. Of course, sometimes there’s the early-morning tourist-dressed-as-fisherman that occasionally springs on me, mucking up the whole routine. The earlier in the morning it is, the chattier that type of person seems to be. It’s like they think I’m there solely for their entertainment, asking all kinds of questions about who caught what the day before. If I told them what I really think, I’d have to say: Seems your yammering is an excuse to stall the actual fishing project a while longer. Seems vacation with the family may not be going so hot if you’re down here long before dawn instead of snuggled up in your condo you saved all year to pretend to afford. But they’re not interested in what I really think, and that’s a fact.