On Sundays in the summer, when the shadows made it look to us as if there was another city in the lake, we kept our rocks for the slow ones and let the Skinnie Minnies go. The Skinnie Minnies were the boats that could go faster than the slow ones and leave streaks behind them, and they would go out far, where it didn’t matter what shade the water was or what the name on the boat was anymore. To us, all the boats looked the same then, the same striped awnings moving around out in the middle, where a rock was a waste and a name above the water just disappeared. The names we could go after, we went after with a rock. We went after the slow ones who went back into the shadows of the buildings on the water, the ones who stayed just close enough and went just fast enough to keep their names in the running. We went after Night Crawler or Day Sleeper and we followed the other slow boats around also, the ones that had names on them that sounded faster than they could ever go.
On a warm Sunday in the summer, when it was early enough still to get a Skinnie Minnie or a boat with a name on it that sounded faster than it could ever go, and there were only two or three boats out there in the middle, we watched a man in a white suit, carrying a white sack, get down into the boat that we said had the slowest-sounding name on it. We watched the man in the white suit sit down in the back of the boat with the white sack next to him, and we watched the man who did the boats at the dock, push the boat out toward the part of the water that looked to us like a dark city.
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