Page 37 of Pete and His Precious

By that time, Pete has his boots and socks off, and he’s got his jeans rolled up too. Not quite above his knees, but the creek isn’t more than six or eight inches deep. He’s not going to get his jeans wet.

“Zoe?” Pete’s voice rumbles down my spine. It seems to set my ribs vibrating, and wraps a warm ribbon of syrup around my heart.

In other words, I feel it in every part of my body.

“Yes?” I say, about five seconds too late.

Pete looks a little bemused, but he doesn’t ask me what I was thinking about, thankfully. How do I explain to him that I am thinking about his voice?

Of course, he might get it, since he’s complemented mine before. But I doubt my voice does to him what his voice does to me.

“Your Aunt Zoe is coming in the water, right Baxley?” Pete says, holding out his hands, asking, don’t you agree?

“Aunt Zoe!” Baxley says, looking more like a little girl than she has in years. “You’re not going to let me do this by myself? What would mother say?”

She sounds so old-fashioned. Mother. But, she is happy, and Pete wants me, and I shrug and say, “Give me a minute to get my shoes off. If he thinks he’s the only one who used to play in a creek when he was a kid, he’s wrong. I didn’t do a whole lot of things, and I definitely didn’t grow up on a farm, but playing in the creek, I’ve got that down to a science.

It doesn’t take me long to get my things off. Pete holds his hand out for Baxley first, and then me, as we go up the trail, and down into the water.

It is cold. Much colder than I remember it being when I was a kid.

“This feels good,” Baxley says, as she puts her bare feet in the water.

When I played in the creek when I was a kid, I wore some kind of shoes. Like slip ons. They were my creek shoes. The housekeeper, Annette, kept them in the mud room for me to wear whenever I wanted to play. In fact, Kylie and I did this a lot together. She had a pair of shoes as well.

Maybe that’s why the creek feels so much colder. But, I’m guessing it’s mostly because I’m older.

“I bet there’s crawfish in here,” Pete says, as he turns over a rock, already in up to his ankles. “Yeah. Here’s one. That’s a big one,” he says, and before I know it, his hand snaps forward, and it comes out with a crawfish between his two fingers.

Baxley squeals and backs up just a little, although he wasn’t waving it in her direction at all. I think it’s just the idea that there’s something in the creek that she didn’t know about.

“You just want to watch they don’t get your toes,” he says, with a wink.

“Do they really get your toes?” she asks, looking hard in the water, as though she’ll see them.

“They mostly hide under rocks. If they’re scared, or if I put this one down and he goes running towards us, you don’t want to move, because he might grab a hold of you. That’s the only defense mechanism they have.”

“It hurts too,” I say from experience. “But they don’t attack you without provocation, so it’s not like you have to be worried about it.”

“They’re tasty,” Pete says, and it’s my turn to stare at him.

“You don’t eat them?” I say, hardly able to believe it.

“Sure. Didn’t you?”

“No. I looked at them, but I was never really brave enough to pick them up, and I definitely didn’t think about eating them.” That’s a little bit disgusting. I guess they would be like shrimp? I’m not sure, but the idea of eating them is just not one I really want to think about.

“This’ll be a nice size one, too. But it takes a few to make a meal. Kind of like shrimp,” he says offhandedly.

Baxley isn’t quite sure about the crawfish, and maybe Pete senses that she is a little bit leery, because he walks downstream a bit before he sets it back down.

“I won’t pick anymore up. You don’t have to worry about it,” he says as he walks back. The water rushes over his feet, which looked a lot less tough than the rest of him. It makes sense. He probably never goes anywhere without shoes anymore, although I can imagine him brown and barefoot in the summer as a little boy. Wild and free, running everywhere on the farm.

“Did you grow up on the farm?” I asked, remembering that he said that Arley was his aunt.

“My uncle owned it, and I was there every chance I could be, but no. My parents lived down the road a piece. Close enough that I worked on it from the time I was about ten.”

“That’s how old I am!” Baxley says.

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