I met Fish Hook by the Galveston Channel on a breezy evening earlier this year. As he sipped an Icehouse tallboy and fiddled with a cigarette he had yet to light, I asked him how he had ended up here. “I was running from the Feds,” he said, a floppy bucket hat with a skull-and-crossbones patch slightly obscuring his tanned face. He said he’d grown up on a dairy farm about eighty miles northeast of Dallas, in Sulphur Springs, but around twenty years ago he fell in with the wrong crowd, the kind that ultimately leads a young man to throw away his cellphone, change his name, and head to a part of the state where folks disappear. Fish Hook (who told me his real name was James Crider) now works as a commercial fisherman, and when he’s in port, he lives in his GMC Yukon SUV with his dog. “I love the deep water,” he said with a sigh as he stared out at the muddy channel glittering with moonlight. His job suits him, he said—“I don’t tell people this, but I’d pay to do it.”
