Meanwhile he keeps smiling

Two brothers, the tall one and the short one, stand in front of the 1975 Chevrolet Silverado. The short one, younger by 5 years, hitches up his short pants and grins lopsided at the camera his father aims back at him, while the tall one watches and mugs too, for a snapshot that includes a friend wearing a vertical striped shirt - blue, light blue, yellow, green, red, white, and so on. The friend's strewn hair, terse smile, and shoulders hunched forward into the wind mark his reluctance.

There's a river to the left of them that you don't see in the picture, and that he watches out of the corner of his eye. It weighs on this boy's mind. He's seen the boat he's supposed to sit in and he's known all along that there will be fishing going on, and that in itself gives him a low in the gut feeling - not unlike a millstone, or a carp, catfish, or northern pike that turns and reels in the river. 

Of course some of these thoughts I'm articulating for him. I doubt, at the age of 11, that he knows the name of the fish that swim in the Pembina. It's the namelessness of things that daunt him - the murky water, the myriad rivets lacing the hull together above it, the unlikely sputter of the 6 horse Mercury. How long does it take to fill a boat to sinking if a rivet fails? If 2, or 10? 

The 2 brothers, already scrambling down the bank, heave themselves over the gunwales. They yell, Dad hurry! Let's go! They sit on the benches and rock the boat. They look up at him and tell him to get in. He hates them for it.