The Other Side of the Bridge Read Online Free PDF Page A

being the doctor’s son, the teachers’ expectations of him were irritatingly high.
    They fished. Pete used a jigger—a stick with fishing line attached and minnows or bugs for bait, or sometimes just a weighted hook with a bit of deer fur on it. Ian used his fishing rod, which was a good one, a birthday present from his parents. If tonight was like other nights, and it would be, he would catch one fish to every four or five caught by Pete. If they swapped equipment, Pete would continue to pull them in and Ian would continue to get next to nothing. It was a fact of life and he had accepted it long ago.
    They’d met through fishing—Ian wasn’t sure if he actually remembered it or if his father had told him the story at some later date. It was before they’d started school, so they would have been about four or five. Ian’s father had been teaching him how to fish and had taken him around to Slow River Bay, and over by the sandbar at the mouth of the river they’d seen another boat, which had turned out to contain Pete and his grandfather, also in the middle of a fishing lesson. Ian’s father knew Pete’s grandfather the same way he knew everybody within a radius of a hundred miles, and he drifted over to say hi, and the two men started talking. Pete and Ian had eyed each other up and down, their fishing lines hanging in the water, and while they were busy doing that both lines were grabbed. There had been a few minutes of chaos—Ian did remember that—spray flying, boats rocking wildly, both men trying to help without looking as if they were helping, and when the fish were finally landed and held up to be admired, Pete’s was a fourteen-inch pike and Ian’s was a four-inch sunfish. Neither boy had been able to figure out why the two men laughed so hard—Pete’s grandfather had tears running down his cheeks. But the boys held up their catches triumphantly, grinning at each other across the gunwales of the boats, two skinny kids with their bellies sticking out, fishermen for life. The fact that from then on Pete had continued to pull in the big ones and Ian had continued not to was just one of those things.
    Ian reeled in his line, checked the lure, and stood up to cast again. He whipped the rod back and forth, listening to the hiss of the reel as the line played out, and let it fly. The lure sailed out over the water and then dropped down, light as a raindrop. Not a bad cast. He began slowly reeling it in, the line drawing a delicate V-shape across the surface of the water.
    “Got a job today,” he said after a while.
    “Yeah?” Pete said.
    “Yeah. My dad said I should work this summer. Saturdays too.”
    “You still have time to fish?”
    “Oh sure. I’m working eight till six. I’ll still have evenings free.”
    Pete nodded. He looked after the store in the summer while his grandfather acted as a guide for tourists who fancied themselves woodsmen and loved the idea of a real, live Indian guide. “Found this old Injun up in the woods in Northern Ontario,” they’d say to their friends back in the manicured suburbs of Toronto or Chicago or New York, nodding casually at a bear’s head nailed to the rec room wall. “Knows the country like the back of his hand.”
    “I’m working on Arthur Dunn’s farm,” Ian said offhandedly. He reeled in his line, checked the lure, and cast again. He was aware of Pete looking at him curiously. “I thought it would beat being cooped up in town. There’s a job going in the drugstore, but I didn’t fancy standing behind the counter all summer long, listening to people complain about their headaches.”
    Silence from Pete.
    “Or listening to women complain about…women’s stuff,” Ian went on, and then paused, suddenly wondering if that could be his mother’s problem. The menopause. He’d read about it when looking through his father’s books in search of something—anything at all—to do with sex. The whole business had sounded gross. But his mother