Delray’s Live Bait, but the door, when we pulled on it to get it to open, it did not open up. There were other buildings with the same two words on it, Delray, Delray, some of them, these words, spray-painted on pieces of wood nailed into brick, DEL RAY, DEL RAY, but these doors, too, to these other buildings, they wouldn’t open up for us either. So what us brothers did then was, we turned back around and we decided in our heads to head ourselves back downriver. If we started walking along the road that runs its way along the banks of the river, we’d get home before the night began its turning into day. We were walking back this way, back downriver, back toward where we lived in a house with a mother and father inside it, when Brother turned and said that he was tired of all this walking. Would you rather swim back home? was what I said to Brother. Brother said what we both knew, it was too cold for us to be all the way back home in the river swimming. What we need, Brother said, is another boat. I looked at Brother. I nodded with my head at what Brother said. Brother was right. Us brothers, we did need us a boat. It didn’t have to be a fancy boat. The dead man’s boat, it wasn’t a fancy boat. It was a boat that floats is all that it was, a boat that we found washed up on the river’s dirty river banks one day when the man that it once belonged to had fallen and drowned when he pissed into the river for luck. What other kind of a boat did brothers like us need? So we started looking with our eyes into the backyards of these unlit houses to see if we could find us a boat to get back on the river. But in the backyards of these houses, houses not far from the banks of the river that runs itself down and through our dirty river town, there were cars rusting in the backyards of these houses — cars with no wheels and cars with the windows in them busted out and cars with weeds as tall as us brothers growing up on all sides so that the cars were hard for us brothers to see. But boats: there were no boats to be seen in these backyards for us brothers to see, no boats for us brothers to get back out on the river, to take us brothers back home. Us brothers, we were standing out on the corner of Jefferson, that road that runs along the river, all the way from the big dirty city back to our dirty river town, when out of the dark, us brothers, we could see the shadow of a man coming on toward us. This man, this shadow, who here in the near river dark did not seem to have a face that us brothers could see, he walked right up to us brothers, as if he knew us, and asked us what were we looking for. Who says we’re looking for something, was what Brother’s mouth opened itself up to say. When Brother said this to this shadow of a man, this man without a face, I shot Brother this look. There was this look that us brothers sometimes liked to look at each other with. It was the kind of a look that actually hurt the eyes of the brother who was doing the looking. Imagine that look. When this man didn’t say anything to this, I stepped in front of Brother and said that it’s true, we were looking for something. A boat, was what I said into this man’s shadowy face. This man, when I said this to his face, the look on his face seemed to lighten. It was like a light winked on when I said the word boat. Then he turned his face away from us brothers and he started walking down along the river. Come, this man said. Stay close. Us brothers, we did what we’d been told. It’s true that, us brothers, we’d been told, by our mother and father, like most boys have been told: Don’t talk to strangers, don’t talk with your mouth full, don’t walk into the house with mud on the bottoms of your boots. But us brothers, we weren’t the kind of boys who liked to listen to this sort of talk. When we heard our mother say the word don’t, us brothers, what we did was, we did. And so, us brothers, we walked in the shadows of this shadowy man, this man whose face was more shadow than it was flesh or even fish. We walked down along the river, past bars with steel bars rusted on the boarded-up windows, past more buildings with the words DEL RAY written on their sides. After a while, we found ourselves standing outside the fenced-in yard of a hardware store, its backyard filled with boats. It was a boatyard of boats, this backyard was, and it was, to our eyes, like finding a river in the desert for us to make mud with. Us brothers, with our eyes, we looked and we looked at all of those boats. There were boats made out of steel and boats made of aluminum and boats that were made out of wood. Us brothers, we liked boats made out of wood best because it was hard for us to figure out how a thing made out of steel could float. What, we wondered, kept it from down to the river’s bottom sinking? This was something that us brothers, we hadn’t yet learned the reason why this was so. So, the man turned and turned his shadow face to ours, which boat would you boys like? There was a wood boat there that looked like it had been painted with mud. Us brothers, we both looked at each other and knew that this boat was made for us. We pointed with our hands toward this mud-colored boat. The man who was more shadow than flesh or fish, he pointed with his hand, he pushed at this fence, and the gate of it swung away from its rusted lock. You boys sure you want that boat? the man asked. You could have any boat here. He waved at them all with his hand as if to say that they were us brothers’ boats for us to take. It doesn’t have a motor on its back, the man pointed this out. We’re sure, we said, and nodded our boy heads. We don’t need us a motor for us to get back home, we said. The river will take us where we need to go, we said. Then it’s yours, the man said. I’ll even help you walk it down to the river. And this, we did. Us brothers, we lifted this boat made out of wood, this boat the color of mud, this boat that almost looked like it might be made out of mud, we held up its back, and the man who was a shadow to us brothers, he lifted this boat up by its front. And then we walked it, like this, this boat, down to the river, down to where the river’s edge was a mix of mud and stones and broken slabs of concrete. We set the boat down, there at the river’s muddy-watered edge, and got in it. The man with the dark face dug his heels into the mud and pushed us brothers off and out into the river’s dark. We paddled with our hands out into the river’s swirling current. It was a good current. It wouldn’t be long before we drifted ourselves back and to our town. Us brothers, we raised our hands above our boy heads to say to this man goodbye. Thank you, we said with our mouths, but only the river heard this. This man, at us brothers floating away, he raised up his hand at us too. He was a good man, us brothers, we knew. This man, like us brothers did too, he knew a good boat when he saw it. The moon in the sky was now rising up out of the river. This moon, it threw down its rope of moony light but still that man’s face was a face that us brothers could not see. We could not see any eyes on that man’s shadowy face. We could not see a mouth. His mouth was just a hole in his face that sounds sometimes came out of. Somewhere in there there must have been a tongue, us brothers figured. Unless this man was the father of Boy, that boy who was a brother to nobody, born with a full head of hair but with no tongue on the inside of his mouth. We’re going home, was what I said to Brother then, and I turned to look at him in his face. Brother’s face, it was a face like mine, a face with a nose and two eyes and a mouth and a chin that sometimes had mud dried on it. It won’t be long now, Brother nodded and said. Tomorrow, I said, will be a new day for us, Brother, with a new boat for us brothers to fish from. For this, we had that man, whose face we could not see, whose name we did not ask for or know, to thank. Us brothers, we turned one last time back upriver to wave at this man our thanks. In the moon’s rivery light, we could see him walking, this man, out into the river, out onto the river, and the river, it was holding him, this man, up. He did not see us, this man, as he walked and kept on walking on, he did not turn to look our way, until he had walked himself all the way across the river to the river’s other side, walking and walking and walking on until there was nothing left on the river for us brothers to see, there was nothing left for us brothers to hear, only the sound that the river sometimes makes when a stone is skipped across it.