Then a taxi drove up, which made Mr. Kim grab her arm. Or he'd be waiting for us at the boxcar or the netting. He had a little drool at the corner of his mouth, and he turned to me and grinned from ear to ear. Nobody was in a rush to see another fish at the end of Tom-Su's line.
By our third day at 300, though, the fish had thinned out terribly, and because we had to row back across in the late afternoon, when the port was at its busiest, we needed more time to get to the fish market with our measly catches. Tom-Su popped a doughnut hole into his mouth and took in the world around him. We said just a couple of things to each other before he reached us: that he looked madder than a zoo gorilla, and that if he got even a little bit crazy, we'd tackle him, beat him until he cried, and then toss his out-of-line ass into the harbor. "Then take him to Harlem Shoemaker, Mrs. Harlem Shoemaker was the school for retarded children. IN the beginning it had bugged us that Tom-Su went straight to his lonely area, sat down, and rocked, rocked, rocked. Drop fish bait lightly crossword clue. "... it's for special cases like Tom-Su, " Dickerson said, handing her the note. A couple of us put an arm around him to let him know he'd be all right in our company.
The first few days, Tom-Su didn't catch a fish. We sold our catch to locals before they stepped into the market -- mostly Slavs and Italians, who usually bought everything -- and we split up the money. On the walk we kept staring at Tom-Su from the corners of our eyes. Or how yelling could help any. Drop into water crossword. At Sixth and Harbor the tracks branched into four, and on the two middle tracks were the boxcars. Several times during the walk we turned our heads and spotted Tom-Su following us, foolishly scrambling for cover whenever he thought he'd been seen.
It was Tom-Su's mother, Mrs. Kim. He hadn't seen us yet. They were salty and tough and held fast to the hook. He shot a freaked-out look our way. That whole week before school was to start, Tom-Su seemed to have dropped completely out of sight. Sometimes they'd even been seen holding hands, at which point we knew something wasn't right. We didn't want to startle him.
He was goofy in other ways, too. When Tom-Su first moved in, we'd seen him around the projects with his mother. For the rest of that day nobody got the smallest nibble, which was rare at the Pink Building. Drop bait on water crossword clue puzzle answers. It was average and gray-coated, with rough, grimy surfaces and grass yard enough for a three-foot run. We brought Tom-Su soap and made him wash up at the public restroom, got him a hamburger and fries from the nearby diner, and walked him back to the boxcar. Wherever we went, he went, tagging along in his own speechless way, nodding his head, drifting off elsewhere, but always ready to bust out his bucktoothed grin. He clipped some words hard into her ear as she struggled to free herself. He still hadn't shown.
My teeth might've bucked on me, too, with nothing but seaweed for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. On the walk to the fish market and then to the Ranch we kept looking over at Tom-Su, expecting him to do something strange. The cries came from Tom-Su. Under it, in it, on it. But that last morning, after we'd left the crowd in front of Tom-Su's place and made our way to the Pink Building, we kept turning our heads to catch him before he fully disappeared. From a block away we stood and watched the goings-on. Tom-Su bolted indoors. Like that fish-head business. But we didn't know how to explain to him that it was goofy not only to have his pants flooding so hard but also to be putting the vise grip on his nuts. Once, he looked our way as if casting a spell on us. I'm sure up on the roof we all had the exact same thought: why doesn't he check out the boxcar?