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He was Harry Pena, a professional fisherman. He was also Chief of the Pisquontuit Volunteer Fire Department. Harry had two fish traps offshore, labyrinths of pilings and nets that took heartless advantage of the stupidity of fish. Each trap was a long fence in the water, with dry land at one end and a circular corral of stakes and netting at the other. Fish seeking a way around the fence entered the corral. Stupidly, they circled the corral again and again and again, until Harry and his two big sons came in their boat, with gaffhooks and malls, closed the gate of the corral, hauled up a purse net lying on the bottom, and killed and killed and killed.

Harry was middle-aged and bandy-legged, but he had a head and shoulders Michelangelo might have given to Moses or God. He had not been a fisherman all his life. Harry had been an insurance bastard himself, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. One night in Pittsfield, Harry had cleaned his living-room carpet with carbon tetrachloride, and all but died. When he recovered his doctor told him this: "Harry—either you work out-of-doors, or you die."

So Harry became what his father had been—a trap fisherman.

Harry threw an arm over Fred's suety shoulders. He could afford to be affectionate. He was one of the few men in Pisquontuit whose manhood was not in question. "Aaaaah—you poor insurance bastard—" he said, "why be an insurance bastard? Do something beautiful." He sat down, ordered black coffee and a golden cigar.

"Well now, Harry—" said Fred, with lip-pursing judiciousness, "I think maybe my insurance philosophy is a little different from what yours was."

"Shit," said Harry pleasantly. He took the paper away from Fred, considered the front-page challenge hurled by Randy Herald. "By God," he said, "she takes whatever kind of baby I give her, and I say when she gets it, too, not her."

"Seriously, Harry—" Fred insisted, "I like insurance. I like helping people."

Harry gave no indication that he'd heard. He scowled at a picture of a French girl in a bikini.

Fred, understanding that he seemed a bleak, sexless person to Harry, tried to prove that Harry had him wrong. He nudged Harry, man-to-man. "Like that, Harry?" he asked.

"Like what?"

"The girl there."

"That's not a girl. That's a piece of paper."

"Looks like a girl to me." Fred Rosewater leered.

"Then you're easily fooled," said Harry. "It's done with ink on a piece of paper. That girl isn't lying there on the counter. She's thousands of miles away, doesn't even know we're alive. If this was a real girl, all I'd have to do for a living would be to stay home and cut out pictures of big fish."

Harry Pena turned to the "Here I Am" ads, asked Fred for a pen.

"Pen?" said Fred Rosewater, as though it were a foreign word.

"You've got one, don't you?"

"Sure, I've got one." Fred handed over one of the nine pens distributed about his person.

"Sure he's got one." Harry laughed. And this is what he wrote on the coupon facing the ads:

Red-hot Papa, member of white race, seeks red-hot Mama, any race, any age, any religion. Object: everything but matrimony. Will exchange snaps. My teeth are my own.

"You really going to send that in?" Fred's own itch to run an ad, to get a few dirty replies, was pathetically plain.

Harry signed the ad: "Fred Rosewater, Pisquontuit, Rhode Island."

"Very funny," said Fred, drawing back from Harry with acid dignity.

Harry winked. "Funny for Pisquontuit," he said.

Fred's wife Caroline came into the news store now. She was a pretty, pinched, skinny, lost little woman, all dolled-up in well-made clothes cast off by her wealthy, Lesbian friend, Amanita Buntline. Caroline Rosewater clinked and flashed with accessories. Their purpose was to make the second-hand clothing distinctly her own. She was going to have lunch with Amanita. She wanted money from Fred, in order that she might insist, with something behind her, upon paying for her own food and drink.

When she spoke to Fred, with Harry Pena watching, she behaved like a woman who was keeping her dignity while