SNOOK.

When I was in high school in Hudson, Ohio, I had a neighbor named Pete Snook. The Snooks lived one street over from us, and our back yards met on a tangent, in a brushy, unlandscaped area of the kind you don't see much today. I made a path through it in the mornings walking to Pete's house so he could drive me to school. He drove a Volkswagen that had no trash on the floor and never broke down. I believe it was his own. Pete was a serious, straightforward, imperturbable guy with a wiry figure and short dark hair and dark eyes. He acted older than the rest of us, like a grownup consigned for a certain number of years to the body of a teen-ager. He was a grade ahead of me, and, aside from the trips to and from school, we didn't hang out together, but I admired his style.

One morning we got to school and were standing near our lockers by a hallway intersection in the main building during the bustle of kids coming and going before class. A younger kid stopped and ragged Pete. The kid was a wise-acre, funny and smart with a big mouth, though not a bad guy. As he was running on, he made a remark about a girl in town. Pete said something back to him, and the kid followed up his first remark with another. All at once, Pete turned and took the kid by the lapels--ours was a boys' school, we had to wear jackets and ties--and lifted him with a quick thrust of his forearms against the wall. With an expression of intense seriousness, he told the kid never to say anything like that again. I remember the poor kid's mouth open so wide he had several double chins, and the wideness of his eyes. He said he was just joking, sorry, don't get carried away--what a person in that situation usually says. Snook then set him back on the floor, and we went on with our day.

The incident passed by in a second and had no consequences that I know of. I never heard it referred to afterward. But it has stayed with me, I'm not sure why. For a blink, I glimpsed through an everyday surface to the machinery working inside. Also, I would have given a lot to be able to make such a move. At sixteen and seventeen, I wanted desperately to be tough. I used to practice my toughness in front of a mirror: "I'm gonna hit you so hard it'll put your entire family in the hospital!" Even given the latitude of fantasy, the effect was laughable. I could not figure out how Snook had pulled it off. Now I think the secret was, first, that he had right on his side, and, second, that his purpose was as much instructional as it was threatening: cheesy comments, especially about girls, have an unpredictable aspect that can call down a thunderbolt. Mostly what I'm remembering, I guess, was a moment of real and instant justice, a rarity in the world.

I think I also admired Snook simply for his name. My grandmother lived in Florida, and when I visited her I fished, dreamily and unskillfully, and, among the many kinds of fish I never caught but wanted to, number one was the snook. I read about snook in sporting magazines, saw them mounted on the walls of tackle shops and restaurants, and thought they were cool. The snook is an elegantly constructed fish. It's narrow, but not too--not snaky like a pike or a barracuda--nor does it grow to be chunky like its distant relative the bass. The snook's shape is close to the platonic ideal for a fish, in my opinion. The slight concavity of its upper jaw gives it a racy, rakish profile. A narrow, ruler-straight line the color of tattoo ink runs along its side, which is an understated silvery-white. The snook does not have the pointy teeth that make similar predatory fish look forbidding and comical, the implication being that it hunts so well it doesn't need them.

Snook live in tropical and near-tropical places. They're an oceanic fish, but they also like brackish water inland--coastal rivers and mangrove swamps subject to big fluctuations of tide. A snook finds a good place in a dark pool beneath some mangrove roots and waits, and when prey comes within range he strikes swiftly and with authority. He moves seaward, occupying new ambuscades, as the tide recedes.

For years I never got a good look at a snook in the flesh, or in the fish. At a New Year's Eve party in Key West, I recall people drinking on a pier, dock lights overhead, baitfish gathering underneath in the light, and suddenly a big fish scything through the bait, strewing them around in splashes as they tried to escape. We looked over the edge and watched. Someone ...