Decker steered the boat anxiously, monitoring Skink's progress by the bubbles surfacing in the foamy wake. He wondered what the fish and turtles must think, confronted in their inky element by such a hoary gurgling beast. The engine's throttle was set as low as it would go, so the johnboat moved at a crawl; Skink was a heavy load to tow.
When he found what he was searching for, Skink tugged so hard that the rope nearly pulled the stern under. Immediately Decker shifted to neutral so the propeller wouldn't be spinning perilously when Skink came up.
He burst to the surface like a happy porpoise. He held a wire cage, three feet by three. Inside the trap were four healthy largemouth bass, which flapped helplessly against the mesh as Skink hoisted their manmade cell into the bow. He turned off the regulator, spit out the mouthpiece, and tore off his mask.
"Jackpot!" he said breathlessly. "Lookit here."
Hanging from the fish cage was an eight-foot length of heavy monofilament line, transparent from more than a few feet away. Skink had cut one end with his dive knife. 'They tied it to a willow branch—you'd never see it unless you knew where to look," he said. "Get the wirecutters, Miami."
Decker clipped the hinges off the fish cage. Skink reached in and took out the bass one by one, gently releasing each fish back into the lake. It was an oddly tender moment; Skink's grin was as warm as the glow from the lantern. After the bass were freed, he returned the empty cage to the water and tied it to the same dry bough.
Decker had to admit that it was an ingenious cheat. Salt the lake with pre-caught fish and scoop them out on tournament day. Dennis Gault was right: these boys would do anything to win. The more he thought about it, the more disgusted Decker got. The poachers had corrupted this beautiful place, polluted its smoky mystery. He couldn't wait to see their faces when they discovered what had happened, couldn't wait to take their pictures.
Probing the waters around the highway pilings, Decker and Skink located three more submerged cages, each stocked with the freshly caught bass. They counted eleven fish in all, four in the final trap; lifting the largest by its lower lip, Skink estimated its weight at nine and a half pounds. "This bruiser would have bought dirty Dickie first place," he gloated. "Adifa,old girl." And he let the fish go.
That left two smaller bass flopping in the mesh, their underslung jaws snapping in mute protest while starved burgundy gills flared in agitation.
"Sorry, fellas," Skink said. "You're the bait." With a pair of blunt-nosed pliers he carefully clipped the first two spines of the dorsal fin on each bass.
"What're you doing?" R. J. Decker asked.
"Marking them," Skink replied, "that's all."
With the fish still trapped, he securely rewired the door of the cage and eased it below the surface. He made sure it was tied securely to the concrete beam where Dickie Lockhart would be looking for it. By that time, of course, the bass champion would be in a state of desperate panic, wondering not only who was sabotaging his secret fish cages but also how in the world he would ever win the tournament now.
The day the Cajun Invitational Bass Classic was to begin, Dennis Gault was hundreds of miles away in Miami. Though it nettled him to miss the competition, strategy dictated that he sit out the tournament. He wanted Dickie Lockhart to feel safe and secure, knowing his archenemy wasn't around to spy on him. He wanted Dickie and his gang to let their guard down.
Gault spent most of the morning in a surly mood, barking at secretaries and hanging up on commodity brokers who wanted the scoop on the new cane crop. In the morning paper he checked the weather in New Orleans and was elated to see that it was windy and cold; this meant rugged fishing. R. J. Decker called briefly to say things were going well, but offered no details. The other thing he didn't offer was an apology for smashing Dennis Gault's nose. Gault was miffed at Decker's icy attitude but thrilled by the idea that the drama finally had begun. Gault's hatred for Dickie Lockhart consumed him, and he would not rest until the man was not just broken but scandalized.
The cheating was only part of it; Gault would have rigged some bass tournaments himself, had he found trustworthy conspirators. The more virulent seed of Dennis Gault's resentment was knowing that a dumb hick like Dickie was part of the bass brotherhood—the Good Old Boy that Gault himself could never be. Dickie was the champ, the TV personality, the world-famous outdoorsman; he could scarcely balance a checkbook or tie a Windsor, but he knew Curt Gowdy personally. In a man's world, that counted for plenty.
Losing to Lockhart in a bass tournament was bad enough, but watching impotently while the asshole outsmarted everybody else was intolerable. Dennis Gault's venom toward Dickie and his crowd spilled from a deep well. It was the way they looked at him when he showed up for the tournaments; he was the outsider, the dilettante with the money. Their eyes said: You don't belong on this lake, mister, you belong on a golf course. He was constantly referred to as The Rich Guy from Miami. Coral Gables would have been fine, but Miami.He might as well have dropped in from Bolivia as far as the other bassers were concerned. To a man they were rural Deep Southerners, with names like Jerry and Larry, Chet and Greg, Jeb and Jimmy. When they talked it was bubba-this and brother-that, between spits of chaw. When Dennis Gault opened his mouth and all that get-me-my-broker stuff came out, the bassers looked at him as if he were a peeling leper.
Naively Gault had thought this antagonism might abate as his angling skills improved and he began to win a few tournaments. Things only got worse, of course, due in large measure to his own absymal judgment. For instance, Dennis Gault insisted on driving his burgundy Rolls Corniche to ail the fishing tournaments. The purple vision of such a car towing a bass boat down the Florida Turnpike was enough to stop traffic, and it positively ruined the bucolic ambience of any dockside gathering. Many times Gault would return from a hard day of fishing to find his tires flattened, or see that some mischiefmaker had parked his burgundy pride beneath a tree filled with diarrhetic crows. But Gault was a peculiar man when it came to personal tastes; his father had driven a Rolls and by God that's what Dennis would drive. He did not like pickup trucks, but a pickup would have helped him crack the bass clique. With the Corniche he stood no chance.
The incident with the helicopters is what sealed his excommunication.
Long before he had collected any evidence against Dickie Lockhart, Dennis Gault had proposed a monitoring program to deter cheating in the big-money tournaments. Rumors of flagrant bass-planting had surfaced even in the usually booster-minded outdoor magazines, and a few unseemly scandals had come to light. Consequently, professional tournament organizers were in a mood to mend their tarnished image. More as a public-relations gambit than anything, they had agreed to try Dennis Gault's unusual experiment.
This was his plan: to have independent spotters in helicopters follow the fishermen and keep an eye on them during the competition. Gault even offered to pay for the chopper rentals himself, an offer which was snapped up immediately.
The problem with the plan was that largemouth bass don't much care for noise, and helicopters make plenty. The fish didn't like the penetrating thrum of the big machines, nor the waves the aircraft kicked up on the water. This was quickly evident in the Tuscaloosa bass tournament, where Gault's airborne scheme was tried for the first and last time. Whenever the helicopters would appear and hover over the bass boats, the fish would go deep and quit eating. The wind from the rotors made it impossible to cast a lure, and blew the caps and forty-dollar Polaroid sunglasses off several irritated contestants. The whole thing was a truly terrible idea, and on the second day of the experiment two of the helicopters were actually shot out of the sky by angry bass fishermen. Because no one was seriously injured, the offenders were assessed only ten penalty pounds apiece off their final stringers. Dennis Gault finished in fourteenth place and was banished from the national Competition Committee forever.