Sidekick for Sammy by Doug Bond

We hauled everything out, the ice, the twelver of Bradors and got started. Finished my third and was tying off the fly when Sammy picked up a good sized rock and started pounding the stakes, but they wouldn’t grab at all in the sand. “All right man let’s go!” It was at least two, maybe three miles back to the bar. Sammy’d been coming up to this place since high school. I figured he knew where we were, where we were going. The trail cut in and around the pines and then there was no trail at all. We both went bombing down the dunes, feeling the effects of the big beers to the core, tripping and sliding out onto our knees. At the bar the girls looked pretty. He told me not to worry, just to play kind of fringe and quiet, like a sidekick. That way, he said, I’d get the shy one who doesn’t know what she’s doing and he’d get the one that wants rough. “It’s always that way, they’re always opposites. Never the same.” ~~ The shy one was the stronger. She helped me load Sammy into the back seat of her girlfriend’s car. It took all three of us to get him into the tent. I had the first one, warm and inside, and the other one out, both of us shivering with the wind as the fly flapped and yanked against the hollow spanner pole and the light just coming to the sky.

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