The shack stood a little back from the launch, low, no bigger than it had to be, which is the whole logic of it. It was built to the size of worms, ice, and a cash drawer, and it had not asked for an inch more. The walls were plywood gone soft-gray, the roof a single slope so the rain ran off toward the lake where everything here was headed anyway.
The window was a screen, not glass, cut into the front and propped up on a stick, and through it came the cold and the hum. The hum was the cooler, an old chest one against the back wall, working hard, its motor cycling with a rattle you felt more than heard. That cooler was the reason the building existed. Everything else was a box around it to keep the sun off.
The smell reached the road before I did. Minnow water, that green-tin smell of a tank that has held small fish for a long time, and under it the cold flat nothing-smell of styrofoam, and wet concrete, and worm dirt. It is not a bad smell. It is an exact one. You could not build that smell anywhere but here.
The signs were all hand-done. NIGHTCRAWLERS over the window. LEECHES on a smaller board, the S run backward and left that way. A coffee can lid with WORMS $4 in marker gone pale. The letters had the confidence of a hand that did them once and never redid them.
A worn place ran along the sill of the window, the plywood rubbed pale and smooth, where hands had rested to pay and to take the cup. That is where the whole building happened, in that one worn foot of sill. The traffic came, leaned, paid, took its styrofoam of squirming, and went to the water.
The screen had a rust stain bleeding down from one corner staple, orange into the gray, and behind it the cooler cycled off, then on again, holding the ice one more degree against the afternoon.