Toledo Bend sits on the Texas and Louisiana line like a very large misunderstanding that both states decided to keep. It is a hundred and eighty thousand acres of flooded pine country, which means that under all that green water there is a whole forest still standing there in the dark, wondering where everybody went. In September the crappie leave the shallows and go down to live in it. They are not hiding. They are simply doing what a crappie does in warm water, which is find shade and a reason not to move.
The fishing here is really a fishing for brush piles, and brush piles on the Bend are treated the way other families treat silver. People sink them, mark them, and pass the numbers down. There are men on that lake who will discuss their marriage before they discuss their coordinates. We had four piles of our own, sunk two Februarys ago out of hackberry and cinder block, and about nine that we had found honestly, which is to say by idling around for an hour staring at a screen and pretending we were checking the weather.
The first pile had nothing on it but two bass and a stump full of opinions. The second pile had crappie stacked eighteen feet down over a bottom at twenty four, sitting in a tight cloud the way they do, and every one of them entirely uninterested in a minnow that arrived too fast. That is the whole trick down there in September. You lower the bait to just above them and then you do nothing, which sounds easy and is not, because doing nothing with a rod in your hand runs against everything a person believes about fishing.
The bite, when it came, was the usual insult. No thump. The line just went a little slack, the way it does when somebody upstairs takes the weight off, and you set the hook on faith and hope there is something on the other end. There was, for about forty minutes. We put fourteen in the box, most of them a solid pound, and one true slab that came up sideways and flashed white and made a grown man say a word he does not use at home. Then a pontoon full of very friendly people idled directly over the pile and the school went to bed.
We ran two more piles at dusk and picked up a handful, enough for supper and enough to talk about. Somebody asked whether we should share the good numbers with a cousin who had been asking all summer. We agreed that we should, absolutely, and then nobody wrote them down.
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