doors of the van

Then the pounding came, from inside the truck, as if a tire iron was beating at the sides of the vehicle. It was not a timid banging, not a minor signal. Bang! Bang! it came, and Bang! again. And the voice of authority from some place in space, some regal spot in the universe. "I'm not sitting here the livelong day whilst you boys gab away." A toothless meshing came in his words, like Walter Brennan at work in the jail in Rio Bravo or some such movie.

"Comin', pa," one of them said, the most orderly one, the one with the old scout sash riding him like a bandoleer.

They pulled open the back doors of the van, swung them wide, to show His Venerable Self, ageless, white-bearded, felt hat too loaded with an arsenal of flies, sitting on a white wicker rocker with a rope holding him to a piece of vertical angle iron, the crude kind that could have been on early subways or trolley cars. Across his lap he held three delicate fly rods, old as him, thin, bamboo in color, probably too slight for a lake's three-pounder. But on the Pine River, upstream or downstream, under alders choking some parts of the river's flow, at a significant pool where side streams merge and phantom trout hang out their eternal promise, most elegant, fingertip elegant.