Ellis pushes the hook up between the minnow’s lip and tiny gray dot of a brain. He is crappie fishing with his best friend, card-playing partner, and part-time lover, Gus. They are an odd couple, Ellis skinny in his tight black leather jacket, a nationally known playwright, and Gus in another polyester disco shirt, big bellied with a mustache like Dale Earnhardt, chuckling about the understanding he has with his wife. While not the first two gentlemen you’d expect to see tied up under Blowout Bridge with C-clamps gripping the steel I beams at five in the morning, fishing on Lake Guntersville by lantern as the wind whips through and choppy waves slap the jon boat, they are, despite a few eccentricities, Alabama boys, through and through.

Gus has shitty luck in life that transforms into miraculous luck fishing. His job at the poultry farm sucks and his son has a disability. But Ellis has his own grievances at the moment. He has not had a single bite, for instance, while Gus has already caught three slabs. Ellis knows the SOB is secretly vain about his fishing. He knows Gus thinks it is not luck but skill, which is true, but only partly true, and not as true as Gus believes.