A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  The dozer dude ate his lunch. Fried chicken, cold biscuits, some olives in a plastic bag. A nicely folded paper towel. A homemade fried apple pie crimped around the delicately crusted edges with a fork as evenly as teeth on a gear. Then a good nap beneath the shade of a giant bur oak with a black Cat cap with the yellow letters over his face. The crows sat and jeered and watched him from their limbs.

  You think we ought to sneak in on the ground for them scraps? He ain’t got no gun. Least I don’t see one.

  Naw, man, he may be just playing possum. They do that sometimes. That’s how my uncle got killed. My mama told me. Fell for one of them owl decoys and a good mouth caller. Let’s just watch him for a while.

  I think he done eat it all anyway. What was it? Fried chicken?

  Yeah. Fried chicken. Wing and a leg and a thigh.

  That’s another bird, too. I mean if you think about it. Seems kinda cannibalistic if you know what I mean.

  I ain’t related to no chicken, but I can see that other biscuit from here.

  Well, if you so badass, why don’t you just fly your black ass on in there and get it?

  I could if I wanted to. I’m swuft.

  In your dreams maybe.

  I caught a rat other day. Beat a hawk to it.

  A hawk would whip your young ass.

  I can dive-bomb like a freight train.

  Well, do it, punk. Fly on in there and get that biscuit.

  I think I’ll just wait till the time’s right.

  That’s what I figured. Set up here in a tree and talk shit like a juvenile.

  Later on in the afternoon diesel smoke drifted again through the woods, and deer at their grazing in sun-dappled and beech-shaded hollows stopped and smelled it, and their little spotted ones stopped and smelled it, too. It seemed to alarm them a bit. They were used to smelling honeysuckle, cedar, tender shoots of grass, acorns, somebody’s nice patch of purple hull peas if they could find it. For which they’d often get the hell shot out of them with 00 buckshot. Maybe Brenneke rifled slugs. Depending upon whose place they were on, maybe even machine-gun slugs. They trotted off toward a trail that led into the forest, single file, tails down, not scared, just moving away to somewhere else, picking up a few more ticks. The bucks’ horns were just bulbous branches full of blood at this time of year. They lived there and they weren’t about to move just because somebody was building a pond. A regular drinking hole in the woods was actually a pretty good idea.

  3

  Jimmy’s daddy was lying in the hot gravel in front of his trailer with his head beneath a 1955 Chevy two-door sedan with a wrench in his hand, studying the rusty undersides of it. Saturday. Everybody gone. Shopping in Tupelo with the kids. Nice and quiet. The radio was going through the window of the trailer. Mainstream country. Lots of commercials for car lots and mobile homes. The Shania Twain they were still playing was six months old. Like maybe the station couldn’t afford any more records. But he knew better than that. On a busy street where clouds floated across the face of a glass-paneled tower in Nashville, there was some guy sitting in an office drinking good Kentucky bourbon with a pile of demo tapes on his desk, and he was the one who decided who got on the radio and who didn’t. This one was in, that one was out. Rusty had told him all about it. If you wanted to get into country music, the deck was already stacked against you. Unless maybe you were Garth Brooks. Hell. Even if you were Garth Brooks.

  This car was special. It was unique as far as cubic inches. Most of the V8-equipped ’55s came out with 283s in them, but this was one of the rare ones with a 265-horsepower 265. You didn’t see a lot of them. You could still get parts for it. Water pumps. Rebuilt generators. Tie-rod ends. He reached his finger out and touched a black spot of oil. He pulled his finger back and looked at it. On it was a black spot of oil.

  He wiped it on his jeans and reached up with the wrench for one of the rust-frozen nuts that held what was left of the manifold gasket between the rust-flaked exhaust manifold and the rusted exhaust pipe, a gasket that was ruined with heat, crumbling apart, leaking exhaust, and making a lot of noise but probably increasing his horsepower half a horse or a horse or a horse and a half since putting headers on one everybody said would give it about five. He knew it would come off a lot easier if he had some WD-40 to put on it, painted blue-and-white spray can, take the little red plastic straw off the side where it was taped to the can, stick it in the nozzle where you could pinpoint your spray and spray the threads, watch it foam whitely, inhale that high giddy petroleum aroma and know it would help, let the thin greasy liquid soak deeply into the threads and penetrate the rust and help his wrench to free it. But Johnette had used up his last can trying to get some charcoal going in the grill — stoned again — and he hadn’t thought to run by AutoZone yesterday to see Rusty and get some more. He needed some better tools, too, by God, just for this car. Not this piece of shit off brand stuff from years ago at Otasco he was still using. Something that wouldn’t slip on a nut and bust your knuckles. Johnette was still on his ass over paying eighty-five hundred dollars for the car, just about draining the savings, but most of what had been in savings had been off his settlement on his and Rusty’s wreck from when they ran into all those chicken coops in the road and wrecked his Bronco, so it was his money anyway. What he needed to do was just tell Johnette that he needed the shit, and go on up there and get it. Stick it on a credit card just like she did whenever she went to Tupelo and wanted a new lamp. Pay for it later. But have the use of it now. She didn’t wait for what she wanted. Why should he? This car was like a free car. It didn’t really count. It was like a gift. But it wasn’t going to pass inspection being so loud. Unless maybe Rusty knew somebody who’d slip it through and give him a sticker. They wouldn’t slip it through at Gateway, that was for sure. They checked everything on one out there. Exhaust system, headlights, windshield glass, taillights, brake lights, ball joints, turn signals, horn, tire tread. He didn’t know what the big deal was. He thought it sounded good loud. But they wouldn’t pass it loud. And they had all the power when you went out there. When you slipped yourself into their domain. And you had to deal with it. On the other hand they were bonded. They could get in a lot of trouble doing strangers favors.

  This wrench wasn’t going to get it. He should have known he’d need a socket. That nut was kind of up in a little hole there with that flange sticking down around it. Dumbass. Now he’d have to roll over. Crawl back out. Crawl over to the toolbox. Move it closer. Then get back under. Shit took forever. And what if he couldn’t break it loose then? Break it off, that wouldn’t be good. Unless he could break both of them off and put new ones on. But he didn’t have any new ones. He’d have to go to town for that. He didn’t have time for that. Not today. He had to go drink some beer with Rusty after a while. In about another hour, when he got off. That Old Milwaukee was sitting over there in the Igloo chest right now. Packed in ice. Little rock salt sprinkled over the top of it. So damn cold it would make your teeth ache. Yep. And it was almost time for one. How sweet it was gonna be. All right, now. The bottom was a half inch. He didn’t know what the top was. Probably a half inch.

  He rooted around in his tray and found a half-inch socket and an extension and snapped them together and snapped them to the ratchet handle. He ratcheted it to see which way it was going. Wrong way. He flipped the lever. Now it was going right. He knew it was going to back off counterclockwise. He found a box-end half-inch wrench to hold the top of the bolt in case it turned on him and crawled back up under there. He put the box end on the bolt head and held it. He put the socket on the nut and pulled. He needed to grow some grass. Damn gravel was rough on your back working on a car. Trailer had been sitting here over a year and he still didn’t have any grass back there by the pine tree. He’d been meaning to go out to Wal-Mart and get some grass seed and sow some. But there wasn’t time to do everything. He hoped Johnette wasn’t wanting to go over to Seafood Junction at Algoma tonight and eat again just because it was Saturday. It
was good, yeah, but it was expensive as hell. Bunch of assholes you didn’t even know always eating over there. Damn dry county, too. He pulled on it harder. If they took Jimmy and them it was really expensive. It was a lot cheaper to just drop them off down at Mama Carol’s and let her feed them some hot dogs. And since they didn’t serve any beer over there, they wouldn’t let you bring any in either. He pulled on it harder. So he had to just keep it in the cooler, down in the floorboard by her feet, and drink a few on the way over there, and then drink another one in the parking lot, while she sat there and told him to come on and hurry up, that people were looking at him, and that it was a dry county, until he turned it up and finished it, and they got out, and went on in. He knew people could probably smell beer on his breath if they got close to him. Fuck em. If they didn’t like it they could kiss his white ass. It might be a dry county but it was a free country. Long as the cops didn’t catch you. He pulled on it harder. And half the time they saw the Baptist preacher over there, and he knew that son of a bitch had already smelled beer on his breath three or four times, and one time they’d had to sit down and eat with the bastard just because of the way it happened, it hadn’t been his suggestion, it had been the preacher’s, and Johnette didn’t have the guts to say No, and went ahead and said Yes, and Jimmy’s daddy hadn’t gone back out to the Bronco for another beer after his first plate from the seafood buffet line like he usually did because he was so pissed off. He pulled on it harder. And then when she got up to fix her another plate after she’d finished her first one, which had been totally loaded with fried catfish fillets and fried shrimp and fried green tomatoes, he’d had to sit there and talk to the preacher all by himself, which hadn’t been just real comfortable, and he didn’t have anything against the fucking preacher, but she’d stayed gone and stayed gone filling up her damn plate again and the preacher started talking about his mother’s dog they’d had to put to sleep because it was so old — it was like twenty-three years old, maybe, he couldn’t remember exactly how old now — and how terrible all that had been, and how close everybody in his family had been to the dog, because the dog had almost saved his little brother’s life by dragging him out of a pond one time, only not in time, about thirty minutes too late, actually, and the preacher just stopped eating and started letting his food get cold and went into this long very detailed spiel complete with tangents that went nowhere about how everybody in the family which included their kinfolks up in Akron felt like the dog was the last connection they had with his little brother, which made it a lot worse when the dog finally died, because it had been on life support for a while, just because everybody in the family already knew how bad it was going to be when the dog died, and they were trying to put it off as long as they could, and had even chipped in money to the vet hospital to try and keep the dog going, and he’d nodded and agreed and said it was awful and a shame and that he didn’t know why stuff like that had to happen and had kept shoving catfish fillets and french fries and fried shrimp and hush puppies and bites of fried frog legs into his mouth, and wishing he had a cold beer to go along with it instead of this iced tea, and he could see Johnette just taking all the time in the world refilling her plate at the buffet line, talking to people she didn’t even know, laughing, wearing those tight shorts with her fat ass, never even looking back at him to see how he was doing by himself with the preacher. That was the kind of shit she did. Drove him batty. Talking on the telephone. To who? Who knew? Why’d he want to marry a woman with two kids already? From two different marriages? What had he been thinking? She wasn’t fat when they were going together, hell no, she wanted him to marry her and support her kids. Now look at her. Fat as a fucking hog. And love to fuck when they were going together? Oh my God. She’d damn near break a nail on your zipper trying to get to it. Now it was too much damn trouble. Who wanted to fuck her fat ass anyway? He was feeding both hers, though, wasn’t he? And he was buying Jimmy that go-kart, he didn’t care what she said. […]

  The wrench slipped off while he was pulling really hard and he busted his knuckle on the rusty exhaust pipe something horrible. Oh God. It hurt so terrible bad he thought he was going to throw up. Oh shit! It hurt like a son of a bitch. It hurt so bad it made his stomach hurt. He didn’t even want to look and see how much hide he’d torn off this time. He just gritted his teeth and laid his head back on the gravel and put his hand between his knees and squeezed it hard with his knees and didn’t look at it and looked at the side of his transmission instead. Something was wrong with third gear in it. It made a bad noise in third gear but Rusty said he knew a guy down at Bruce who could fix it. But it would run the way it was. You just had to get some RPMs built up in second before you dropped it into fourth. It would grind a little bit. He needed to get some insurance on this thing, too, before something happened to it. Some asshole might slam on the brakes in front of him with no warning.

  He looked at his black knuckle. Some skin was torn off it and some blood was leaking out of the black grease. It still hurt like a son of a bitch. He needed some WD-40 after all. It might be worth going to town just for the sake of his knuckles. He wondered if this son of a bitch would crank. He thought that battery had a weak cell. Or maybe that rebuilt voltage regulator wasn’t regulating the voltage just exactly right.

  He pulled his head out from under the car. Somebody was coming up the road that led past his trailer, and it was just gravel, and it hadn’t rained in a long time, and a big cloud of dust rolled up and in and drifted over him when the car went on up the road, and got all in his hair, and settled over the pores of the skin on his face, and he lay there on his back and cussed whoever it was for driving up the road he lived on. He raised up and looked over the fender to see who it was. It was a white Jeep. Mail girl. […] In a way that he couldn’t have explained to anybody, he thought of the road as his. He wondered if that old man up the road was building a catfish pond with that dozer he kept hearing. He sure hoped so. The old man would have to stock it sometime if he wanted some fish in it. And a mess of catfish would be nice. Especially if it was free. Be better than fucking Seafood Junction. […]

  4

  A Tommy’s Big Red Fish Truck had compartments. For gloves, dip nets, clear polyethylene fish-hauling bags, for little cardboard boxes of thick rubber bands to tie tightly around the necks of the bags after the little fish were in there, in ice cold water, with plenty of oxygen shot in there through a hose to get them safely to your pond, scales to weigh fish, fish fertilizer to make the fish grow, turtle traps to catch turtles that robbed fishermen of their catch by eating them off the stringer where it was tethered to the side of a boat or a dock or a bank, bream traps to keep bream from overcrowding in ponds, spare canisters of oxygen, fish feed, sales slips, promotional brochures, order forms, and other fish-selling paraphernalia […]. It had compressors and generators and refrigeration units built in. There were pens and pencils, black Magic Markers, sure. One always stayed parked in Tommy’s driveway when he wasn’t in Vegas so that he could make deliveries to privately owned fish ponds and lakes across the mid-South and Midwest in order to secure capital. Tommy’s hair had turned white from trying to secure so much capital.

  Mostly a Tommy’s Big Red Fish Truck had tanks of live fish. It had channel catfish anywhere from four to eleven inches long. It had black crappie one to three. It had largemouth bass two to four. It had hybrid bluegill one to six. It had straight bluegill one to three. It had one- to three-inch redear bream. It had fathead minnows. They were small. It had white amur grass carp. And they were about a foot long. You didn’t need them unless you had lily pad problems and you wouldn’t think to eat them unless you were Chinese.

  It was built on a Ford chassis and it had banks of compartments down two sides with the tanks inside them, so that there was a walkway up the middle of the back of the truck, and it was a very heavy truck because a truck like that had to be built very heavy because of all the water on it that weighed so much, about eight pounds per gallon, which adds
up pretty fast, hundred gallons, eight hundred pounds, so it had a big axle and dual wheels on the back for that same reason as well, and it was red like a new wagon at Christmas. Or a fire truck. It was probably the closest thing there was to a fire truck.

  […]

  It also had counters that were made of wood, and unfortunately it was some kind of wood that splintered easily, and some of Tommy’s boys and even Tommy himself sometimes got a splinter in his hand and that was the only thing that wasn’t cool about the truck, because if it went in deep enough, then you had to get a straight pin and dip it in a bottle of alcohol that was in another compartment of the truck or strike a cigarette lighter and hold the pin over the flame for a few seconds in order to sterilize it and then stick it in the hole in whoever’s finger and make it come out by poking it around in the hole and it was enough to make the boys on the fish truck dance around beside the compartments whenever it happened. They’d be talking while it was happening but they wouldn’t be talking normally. They’d have their eyes closed while Tommy dug around in there with a straight pin and a bunch of people who were lined up to buy some fish off the truck watched. There was a lot of pain to be had in just a finger. Which was usually where they got finned, too. By those eleven-inch catfish. That were just aching to get into somebody’s pond. And eat. And grow. And be free. Unlike Ursula.