Kenny-John liked Old Joe a whole lot more than he liked most adult men. Old Joe never put his hand on Kenny-John’s thigh and squeezed it, or kissed him on the mouth the way Paw-Paw used to do. Old Joe didn’t talk a lot or ask questions, like did Kenny-John know that ducks had peckers. In fact, Old Joe never used two words when one word would do, and he often communicated with just a nod, a wink, or a raised eyebrow. Kenny-John liked the way Old Joe smiled by pursing his lips like he was sucking on a green persimmon, and the way his stomach jumped like a frog’s when he chuckled. Old Joe was a confident man, satisfied with the sparse lot he’d drawn in life, and it made him good company for a twelve-year-old boy filled with anxiety about his uncertain future, not to mention the secret thoughts and deeds of his present.

The boy lived with his grandmother and a dozen other squatters in an abandoned Public Works Administration camp a half mile up and back from Georgia Route 19, just north of Atlanta. If you followed 19 north into the mountains, you could visit Dahlonega and see the town’s gold-strike museum. But Kenny-John had never been more than the few miles up the road, to Sandy Springs, where every Saturday afternoon in the summer Old Joe took him to help sell the fish they’d caught that morning.

On those steamy Saturdays Kenny-John would wake up the minute Old Joe’s battered 1939 Chevy pickup squeaked across the gravel in the front yard. He’d shimmy into his overalls while still lying on his pallet, then tiptoe barefoot across the one room he shared with Mee-Maw, careful not to stumble over her Johnny pot in the dark and make a god-awful mess. Before Old Joe would let him up front in the truck, he’d nod toward the ground and remind the boy to take a leak before the long ride to the lake. Pee-shy in front of anybody else, Kenny-John would send his stream straight up and out without even turning his back, sometimes having to jump on the running board of the truck to avoid the rivulet he’d created in the red clay dust. Paw-Paw would’ve said, “Son, you just can’t keep peeing up hill.” Old Joe would just chuckle and wink as the boy crawled through the broken-out back window of the Chevy. Then he’d drop the coughing truck into first gear and putter slowly out of the yard, careful to avoid hitting any of the scrawny chickens strutting in the headlights.

During the hour-long ride up to the lake Kenny-John would ask Old Joe question after question, and Old Joe never seemed to get tired of answering, if ever so curtly.

“You knew my daddy before he was kilt by that snake, didn’cha?”

“Un-huh.”

“And they called him ‘Preacher’ because he was a Holy-roller?”

“Yep.”

“Do you go to that church where they play with them snakes?”

“Nope.”

“Do you go to church?”

“Nope.”

“Cause if you did, they’d probably go on a crusade, right?”

“Right.”

Kenny-John didn’t know what a Crusade was, but it always made Old Joe chuckle some more, and he’d keep on chuckling until they got to Highway 41, a two-lane road connecting Atlanta with Chattanooga, Tennessee. Once you got to Chattanooga, you could take a tram up Lookout Mountain and see seven states. But Kenny-John had never been farther north than Acworth and Lake Allatoona, where he and Old Joe fished.

When they reached Dead Man’s Curve, where you could finally pick up WSM out of Nashville, all conversation ceased. Old Joe would drum out the beat on his steering wheel, and Kenny-John would pick up a make-believe guitar and sing along with Minnie Pearl, Faron Young, or maybe Roy Acuff as they twanged: “I got a hotrod Ford and a two-dollar bill, / and I know a spot right over the hill, / the soda pop and the dancin’ is free, / so if you want to have fun, come along with me.”

As sparing as he was with talk, Old Joe relished a good sing, and he’d always join Kenny-John on the chorus: “Hey good lookin’, / what you got cookin’? / How’s about cookin’ somethin’ up with me?”

After each song Old Joe would hit the Chevy’s horn two quick beeps while Kenny-John took his bows, and they’d repeat the ritual with each new song until they’d left the main road and reached McClinton’s Hill, where both had to get out and push for a half mile. When they got the Chevy to the top, Old Joe would turn off the motor and the radio to save gas and glide the truck to the bottom, where he’d pull off onto the shoulder and park a few feet shy of the bridge where the river fed into the lake.

Two miles down a well-worn path was a bleached-out ancient streetcar Old Joe and his friends had pulled up from Atlanta fifteen years before. The windows and the seats were long gone, but there was an old woodstove in the middle of the floor, and more often than not a couple of Old Joe’s buddies would beat them there and have some coffee hot. Old Joe would pour his into a blue speckled tin cup he carried on his belt, but Kenny-John would say, “Thanks, nossir,” because he was afraid to stand up in the boat to pee in the lake like Old Joe did.

While Old Joe listened to his buddies tell the truth about the weather and lie about where they thought you could find some fish, Kenny-John would pull the flat-bottomed boat out from under the streetcar and slide it by himself thirty feet down the kudzu-covered bank and into the water. Then Old Joe would come on down and bolt on his little five-horse Johnson and Johnson motor. He’d make Kenny-John get in the boat first, then sit the heavy burlap sack he was carrying in the middle of the boat and shove off, lifting his pot-bellied but wiry 140-pound body over the side and landing in the bottom of the boat as light as a ballet dancer.

It was then that Kenny-John felt a lot more confident than twelve years of living would allow, because Old Joe trusted him to prime the motor, pull the cord and crank it, then steer out into the lake just as the first shards of light were breaking through the pines and dancing like diamond fireflies on the still, brown water.

Old Joe would sit down flat on his butt, facing forward in the front of the boat, signaling directions with slight waggles of his index fingers. They’d creep around the contours of the lake for as long as it took for Old Joe to spot a cloistered cove or a downed tree trunk where he suspected maybe a school of bream just might be just waking up on the cool bottom.

From there on the guesswork was gone, and so were the fish. Old Joe had the unique ability to smell a bream bed, and it made him the best freshwater fish catcher in North Georgia, backing up for none. He’d signal Kenny-John to cut back on the motor, then he’d climb up on all fours on the sides of the boat and start sniffing like a dog. He’d signal directions right and left with his head, and when he pulled it straight back, Kenny-John knew to kill the motor altogether and sit quietly while the boat glided to a natural stop.

Old Joe would get quickly to work, slipping a two-foot square of naked bedsprings over the side, paying out the attached electrical cord slowly, and hooking it off on the oarlock when he felt the springs graze the bottom. After waiting for precisely ten minutes he’d untie the burlap sack and let it drop it away from an old upright wooden telephone he’d wired permanently to a twelve-volt Sears and Roebuck battery. Then he’d set to cranking the telephone, making a ringing racket loud enough to cause a deer to bolt a mile away and generating enough electricity to charge up the bedsprings to a jolting voltage.

In precisely thirty seconds the fish would begin flipping belly-up by the twos and threes, then six and eight at a time, their eyes glazed like outclassed prizefighters just hit with a Sugar Ray Robinson punch. Old Joe would lay off the crank, cock his head back toward Kenny-John, raise his eyebrows, and utter his first and last two-word sentence of the day: “Hel-loooooooo, fish.”