by Larry Brown
The heat had gathered into a big white ball above us and it was burning me down. I saw a lady park ranger in a uniform and she had a helmet on, too. It all looked real official.
Lorna gave me her dip net and she gave me a small Styrofoam cooler with a lid that looked like a new one. I told them I was going down and they wished me luck.
So off I went into that teeming mass of humanity, through a gap in the fence that had to be the one Lorna had mentioned the night before, the one that kept the crowd back until it was time to go in for the fish. It was that woven stuff that you put up to keep in sheep or goats or calves but it’s not too good for bulls.
RIFF: Not that Omar got out of wire like
that, only that it’s not much good for bulls.
The year before, he went through some of
that stuff going after one of my heifers, and
nailed her, too, but suffered an I-kid-you-not
serious laceration of the actual calfmaker
itself that had me worried for quite a while,
until I saw that it looked like the flies
weren’t going to blow it and cause it to get
infected and maybe rot off.
It stretched way out there, in a big semi-circle, all the way across the banks of the spillway and across the bottom of it way on down there, and then back around the side so that it encompassed completely the spillway proper. I guessed they’d been pretty serious about people not getting in there early, and in my mind I compared it to a yard sale, where lowlifes are knocking on your bedroom window at four A.M. and the bastards are asking if they can have a certain lamp they’ve checked out by flashlight for two dollars instead of three.
I headed down that sandbag staircase, and I began to see that there’d been some real work going on around there for quite a while, getting ready for this day. Halfway down I paid some attention to an enormous blue pump that looked like it might have come out of the belly of a ship. It was set up on a platform on timbers, resting on a big bed of sandbags. There were cables going up to the crane, and I could tell they’d been using the pump because water kept leaking out of it. And a whole bunch of workers were down in there, too, more guys with helmets, and some of them were grabbing fish. People were coming up past me constantly with pails and garbage cans and washtubs and cotton sacks and steel barrels and plastic barrels and wet cardboard boxes and watering tanks for livestock and even wheelbarrows full of fish, all dead, all looking a little brutalized, a lot of them covered with slime and blood. And down below, the big fish grab was still in full flailing fury. Over-weight teenagers with their pedal pushers rolled up past their knees and old women with those funky knee stockings like the ones Marlana Antonia has started wearing in the last few years were wading in the little pools where fish slapped the thin water and tried to leap, mauling and grubbing and grabbing. Old geezers wobbled goggle-eyed, stunned by the smell of blood or maybe just approaching sunstroke.
Once down in the bottom, I found the wet rocks slick and treacherous, and fish already captured lay stacked in piles everywhere. I saw some tiny catfish too small to grab, a waste of time, their fins so ribbed with razor-sharp bone that they’d get tangled up in your dip net and then you’d be playing risky business trying to get him loose with an excellent chance of getting your Yow! impaled and the worst part is having to pull it out of your living flesh with it sucking at that thing. So I skipped those pools and edged closer to the pit, where the men were still wading. I looked up to see Lorna and Paddy Chayovsky high above the concrete walls, looking a little like movie stars with their matching Ray-Bans. They waved at me and I waved back with the dip net. It was beginning to look like a lot of the fish had already been grabbed, and maybe even most of them.
I walked around the pools some more, but most of the fish in them seemed to be shad, trash, not fit for anything but bait. I hopped from rock to rock and the pickings started to look pretty meager. Lots of small fish flopped around. All the big ones up there had already been captured, that was easy to see. The water wasn’t over a few inches deep anywhere. That had to mean that the rest of the big boys were down on that deeper end, where the real fishdaddies were still wading. I walked over that way.
You could see them grabbing for food, and their ejaculations to each other or to friends or family members on the fence above were amplified within that concrete cavern and those voices echoed back and forth inside the walls, and made things appear even more frenetic, more frantic. A man with a longhandled net slashed out at a truly giant carp, golden, bobbing, escaping. Two others shouted and grappled together with a live thing beneath the surface, but it knocked them loose and evaded them. There was a problem getting down in there: There was a slick and steeply slanted wall that looked to be the only way in. What they were wading through was over my boots easily, but, if I took them off, who knew what broken bottles there might be on the bottom? Stuff in wallet, watch? Dead and dying alligator gar lay taking the full heat of the morning sun all around me, their bony snouts alive with the rapacious flies swarming over them, buzzing their evil songs.
I saw that you’d have to get on your butt to slide off down in there, and you wouldn’t stop until you got to the bottom and how were you supposed to get out? Were they going to bring in ropes to haul people out? I stood there, wracked by indecision, and then suddenly my decision was made for me. The lady park ranger, who had come down the sandbag staircase to stand beside the pump, had a bullhorn in her hand, and through it she said, pretty forcefully: “All right! Everybody out of the pool!” She meant the pool we were in. And just as suddenly as it had obviously begun, round one of the big fish grab was over. And I was standing there with an empty dip net and an empty cooler, as usual about a day late and a dollar short.
Of course people are slow to obey an order like that. They had to waddle to their containers—Did I mention that a good many of these people were already fat?—and begin the slow trek of getting them up to solid ground, within reach of their vehicles. But a gradual movement toward a cease-fire of fishgrabbing was established, and all of us started to move in a more or less somewhat orderly fashion toward the stairs, some of us quite happier than others. Fish were still flopping out there behind us, by the hundreds, maybe by the thousands. It was all so big, it would have taken a long time to scour every pool to see what was still in it. My heart was heavy, and my hands reeked not. It was a long way up to the top, and halfway there I had to do sort of a Good Samaritan thing. These two old dudes who looked to be in their seventies easily were trying to make their way to the top with one of those tall garbage carts or cans on wheels. It was stuffed full of fish. They couldn’t see much for all the sweat they couldn’t keep mopped out of their eyes, and the stringy muscles in their arms were shining black ribbons of fatigue. And they were only about a third of the way up. So shoot, I stopped, told the one in front I’d spell him for a while if he’d hold on to my friend’s dip net and cooler and he did, quick. It was pretty amazing to start lugging it up the sandbag stairs and keep seeing what was coming up all around us, a large wave of humanity, people of all shapes and sizes and ages, all of them lugging at least a few fish, and quite a few of them quite a lot of fish. When we got two thirds of the way up I swapped places with the other old guy and he got to hold the dip net and the cooler for a while and the other old guy took his place back and we finally hauled it up on level ground and they both thanked me profusely and mopped at their faces some more. I got Lorna’s stuff back and went to find them still over by the fence. Pretty soon it became apparent that hope was running high among the crowd that a second, later fish grab might take place once all the water in the last pool was pumped out. We stood around and talked about the possibility of that for a while. Some park ranger types descended into the rocks below to scoop up small catfish with fine mesh dip nets, and eventually these were passed out and taken away in buckets. Lorna and Paddy Chayovsky procured some in this manner.
After some more of that blistering heat we d
ecided to go to their air-conditioned touring van for some cooler air and refreshments. I sat on the middle seat in the back and fixed a big Coke over ice and Lorna and Paddy Chayovsky had cheese sandwiches and drank cold beer and root beer in the front. It was hot enough to make a cow pee on a flat rock.
After a while I got back out and took a walk over to the lip of the spillway and leaned on the regular full-time fence there, the one that had steel posts sunk into the concrete and that heavy twisted wire. What I saw was a thing similar to a pod of whales or a murder of crows or a gaggle of geese: a cuddle of catfish weighing two to five pounds, hundreds of them, swimming around with their mouths out of the water in the pool the people had vacated, steadily sucking air. It was a little weakening, thinking about that water getting pulled down another foot or so and then wading in with a stringer in your hand. I had to go lie down under a tree for a little while, and when I got back up I edged slowly ooooooover the road over the spillway where I didn’t know if I was supposed to go or not, because there were some signs saying that maybe I wasn’t supposed to be over there, but all the construction workers and park rangers were clustered around the crane talking and gesturing and checking their watches, and it wasn’t easy at all to tell what was going on, and I knew that all kinds of potential fishmongers like me, guys or gals who’d missed the crucial first lightning grab, were probably coming up to them over and over and one by one and saying something like, “So, dude, man, y’all gonna let us git back down and dirty with those babies and tickle em a little more, what you think, Bub?” and sure enough they made an announcement that was amplified, said they were going to take an hour for lunch and to “secure,” whatever that meant, and then they’d be back. They didn’t say whether they were going to let us back in after lunch or not. So I wandered on over to the other side of the spillway, just taking a few steps at a time in case anybody was watching me, not making like I was headed straight over there at a hard walk or anything. I just kind of meandered and looked up at the sky once in a while and before I knew it I was over in the other parking lot, the one that was just like the one across the spillway except that it was totally empty. I looked down. Those catfish babies, boy. I was right on top of them. They were just about forty or fifty feet down. But they were swimming around in there, and their whiskers, you could see them, and their fins, and they were all at least a couple of pounds and plenty of them were five pounds, and it looked like more and more of them by the minute were coming to the top to get air just like minnows in a bucket, which made sense. They’d had all that other water but all that other water was now gone. They didn’t know what the hell had happened. They were just hanging out, eating crustaceans and insects and the occasional barbed worm, and their oxygen levels started dropping, and the water got shallower. So then they came to the top for air, and it was bright, and there was noise, and it was getting crowded, and there were all these legs and hands and feet …
I wanted those catfish. I wanted them. I didn’t mind waiting around if they were going to let people go back in. I could probably wait a few hours if I had to. I could get in the shade if Lorna and Paddy Chayovsky wanted to get on home. But I’d already driven all the way down there, over little two-laned roads, crossing the Little Yocona a couple of times on a couple of different state highways. I’d seen red Chow dogs all morning. Almost everybody who lived between where I lived and where I was standing had a red Chow dog. One had been dead in the road with a warped grin on his face. The fish kept teeming below. I looked everything over some more and then wandered back to the van.
Lorna and Paddy had their own deal to go take care of, putting the small catfish in a pond somewhere, and they needed some sleep, too, so they decided to head toward the house. I thanked them and we said bye and they left. After that I decided I’d walk back up to my truck and get in it and drive it closer.
It was a hot walk back up there in my boots. I’d left the truck under a little bitty pitiful tree that shaded just a corner of one of the coolers, and when I got up there I raised the lids on a couple of them and saw that my ice was melting pretty fast. So I fixed another Coke and got in and drove it back down to the kind of pavilion place that you always have in a state park and parked it next to one of those hummerjummers where you go in one side by your gender and do your thing and we all know that sometimes it can be a tad seedy in there with nasty things written on the walls, but you only hope there are not perverts lurking, some whacko whipping his mule in one of the stalls.
I sat there for five minutes or so and then got out and walked around and looked at everything and read a sign about what kind of fish were in the lake with pictures on them next to this roofed-over thing where there were things kind of like sinks but probably more like embalmers’ tables, long slanted stainless steel things where I guess you dress your fish and just slide head guts scales slime and all down this chute and maybe later, I don’t know, a park ranger carts it off somewhere.
I walked up under some trees and stood around under them for a while, probably looked like a dork with those hot boots on, and I walked along the edge of the people fence and saw how much effort it had taken to erect it, and then I watched some water come out of this long hose that was hooked up to the pump they’d been running off and on. It would run a little while and stop. Run a while and stop. Run a little and stop. It might spurt some. It might spurt some more. Then it’d stop. Then it’d run. Then it’d spurt. Then it’d stop. Then it’d run a little while. I got to playing this stupid guessing game with myself about how long it would be between spurts or runs or stops and wasted some time doing that, then finally went on back up under the shade.
Why in the hell didn’t I just go back home?
Any fool could have seen that it was over, man.
Any fool but me.
What had happened, too, was that I’d gotten terrifically hungry. I hadn’t had anything to eat in probably about sixteen hours or so, so there was a noise in my stomach like a small beaver that lived in there and wanted out, and he was gnawing, gnawing.
Lorna and Paddy Chayovsky had scored their cheese sandwiches from a store up the road, they’d said, so I got into my truck with a fresh Coke and my cap and Ray-Bans on and hung a cigarette from my lips and drove out of the little circular grove of shade trees and back up the hump of the road across the dam and alongside the lake with its bright boats and skiers towing their white fans of water, all of it pretty, serene, and actually mind-numbingly beautiful, that mix of water and wind and sun and fresh air, how good to be in old God’s hands in green Mississippi.
I didn’t know where the place was, but I took this fork. It seemed like they’d said something about going over this bridge. I went over this bridge. I looked down and it was I-55, Jackson to Memphis, cars and trucks whizzing, me just poking twenty-five above them, them going north and south, me going east and west, wheeeeeeeee!
I wanted ice and I had to have food. I had to stop at a stop sign on another road and let a few cars and trucks whiz by. Across the road I could see a store, and out front a man was down on his knees and he looked like he was cleaning out an ice machine.
I went on across and pulled into the parking lot, which was gray and hot. I nodded to the man and went on in. What happened next is still not entirely understandable to me. The inside of the store was made up to look like a store, and it had an overabundance of labeled goods in cans, things like sardines and potted meat and Vienna sausage and pork & beans, not just a few of them, and a great stock of Beanee Weenees as well. There were also bright jars of candy, and bright polished walls, and things had little aprons on them, but the people inside the store were the strangest of all. They were older people, and the women had nice hair, and smart blouses and shorts, and the men were dressed in very clean overalls, and had flowing silver hair, and they were all busy being polite to one another. If they noticed that I had entered, they did not give any indication. And I began to feel truly weird. From the outside it had looked like a regular country store.
I looked around for a sign that maybe advertised sandwiches, and there was only a sign for pies. Pies. I didn’t want pies, maybe a slice with coffee after, sure, but right then I wanted a sandwich I could sink my teeth into, some bologna or cheese and bread with mustard or turkey slathered with mayonnaise would have been good, just some food I could stuff in my gut, because my stomach was going crazy, saying all kinds of things about how it would take anything, and a gentler and more reasonable voice inside said No, no, go for a sandwich, see about these strange people, see if they know how to make a sandwich, and I looked at them, and they seemed like caricatures of something they were supposed to be, like downhome country folks, like they belonged in a Cracker Barrel restaurant advertisement, like they were just props or decoration, because they just kept on being polite to each other, like there was a script they were following that didn’t include a fishmonger like me, with rubber boots on, and they never even looked around at me, and so, disheartened and spooked, I backed out through the door, and the little bell above called after me, but none of them did.
Then I had to talk to the guy at the ice machine, who turned to me.
I nodded at it. “Outa ice, huh?”
He nodded kindly. “Yeah. Be bout a hour.”
I nodded uproad. “Is there another store up here?
” He nodded unhappily back at his machine. “Yeah. Bout two miles.”
I thanked him and got back into my dusty little brown Ram 50. The man who had put together the Mitsubishi motor might have had an uncle who had dive-bombed a Mitsubishi airplane at our boys in Pearl Harbor on that Sunday morning before church. They were probably waking up with hangovers from a big Saturday night in Hawaii. I knew there were worse ironies in the world. I aimed south, and pulled out into the road.
