A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  “I just want to go see how much he’s got done,” he said.

  “I’m getting hungry,” his wife said.

  “Eat them biscuits,” he said, and went out the door.

  His truck was parked in back near a big chinaberry where his PTO post-hole digger hung on a rusty log chain. It was a hell of a lot easier to get it back on the tractor if he left it hanging on the chain, and he’d been doing it for years. It was getting to be just about too much for him now, since he was finally after all this time older and a little bit weaker, to take it off and put it back on, since it weighed over three hundred pounds, and was one dangerous son-of-a-bitching piece of machinery, almost as dangerous as a Bush Hog, and he was afraid he’d drop the damn thing on himself one day, and then where would he be with her in there watching those trashy people taking their clothes off and talking about how many people they’d screwed while they were married to some other damn fool who was sitting there in a chair listening to it in front of an audience? She’d never hear him yelling. It might take days for somebody to find him. It had been hanging there for seven months, ever since he’d finished putting that new two-hundred-foot section of fence in on the east side by the road. Close to where those people had that trailer and kept all those little bitty dogs. He wondered if those little dogs would tree squirrels. But he was going to have to put it on sometime. Almost that whole section down there by the creek was rotted and he’d need to dig some new holes for some of that. It was the oldest part and he knew some of those posts had been in there for forty years. He didn’t want to even think about what he’d been doing forty years ago. Damn sure not this. Living with an old woman you couldn’t stand to even talk to. Listening to her snoring at night. Putting up with all her shit. All her bitching. Getting her medicine from town. Fixing her something to eat. Having to help her get dressed. Damn, he got tired of it. He’d thought about hiring somebody to help around the house just with her. He didn’t know how much longer he could handle her by himself. She was four years older than him and he didn’t know why in hell he’d married her. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. But sometimes things didn’t work out over time. Sometimes over time you found out that you’d messed up pretty bad. That’s how he felt most of the time. Most of the time he just wanted to be left alone. He couldn’t believe his only daughter was living with a retard in Atlanta. And didn’t even know how to swim.

  9

  The first thing Jimmy’s daddy did after he gave Jimmy a red go-kart was to get on the go-kart himself, just to make sure everything was working. He filled it up with some gas from the shed, then took it speeding down the dirt road, over the wooden bridge and past the rotted old house and the cotton fields, while the children screamed and waved their arms in the gravel. They and the herd of tiny yelping dogs ran after him, following his thin cloud of dust down toward the paved county road. Jimmy was running harder than his two half sisters, his little knees pumping, his hands balled into fists, his tennis shoes untied, yelling through rotten front teeth.

  Jimmy’s daddy looked both ways before he pulled out. He’d always wanted one of these little sons of bitches. His parents had stayed so broke from drinking beer all the time […] that they never could have bought him one, no need to ask. Same way with a car. He’d had to buy his own after working in a sawmill for Halter Wellums, some old guy his daddy knew, for thirteen weeks in the summertime, off-bearing pine slabs. Talk about splinters, shit. Get one of them bastards about a half inch long buried up in your finger and have to take a straight pin and dig around in there with it. Make you want to shit in your britches. And that was just the down payment. And then the son of a bitch dropped a rod. And broke a crankshaft. And needed a new chunk for the rear end. And had a bad rattle in the dash. Drive you nuts going down a dirt road.

  He had to say one thing: the little son of a bitch felt like it would run. Hell fire it ought to, five horse. He looked back at the kids running down the road behind him and he waved them back and they stopped, because Jimmy’s daddy’s kids were nothing if not well trained. They knew how to say Yes sir and No sir and to not interrupt adults. Jimmy’s daddy’s kids knew better than that shit. They better. Get the shit slapped out of them if they didn’t. He got the shit slapped out of him plenty when he was a kid and it didn’t hurt him none except that he didn’t much like his daddy.

  He looked back over his shoulder at them. The three of them were standing in a group under a sweet gum tree, yelling some things he couldn’t hear for the motor on the go-kart. The sink needed fixing, but a workingman deserved to fish and ride around on the weekends drinking beer, too. The tiny dogs had their mouths up in the air barking. Jimmy’s daddy spurted a rooster tail of gravel from a back tire and shot onto the county road and was almost run down by a tall black Kenworth tractor blaring its air horn and hurtling toward him at sixty with a load of forty-foot sweet gum logs, limber and bouncing, red flags tied to their ends, scraps of bark whirling in a cloud following it. Oh shit! Jimmy’s daddy whipped the wheel to the left, which let him with a severe jolt into the ditch and the Kenworth past, but he heard the wail of its angry air horn for a long way down the road. One mad son of a bitch. And who could blame him?

  He sat in the bottom of the ditch heaving for a few seconds, his chin down on his chest. Damn. He’d nearly gotten mashed flat as a fucking bug. He lifted his head. Right in front of the kids, too. He was glad Johnette wasn’t home yet. She would have had plenty to say about that. She had plenty to say about everything. And hell, the kids would go ahead and tell her he’d nearly gotten run over. The little shits told her everything. Somebody was cutting the grass across the road at the Rock Hill Missionary Baptist Church. Some black guy on a riding mower. Looked like a Cub Cadet. How come they had church all day? Didn’t they get hungry?

  Jimmy’s daddy had to get off the go-kart to push it out of the ditch, and he was sweating and needing a beer. He made sure nothing was coming before he got it back up on the pavement. He saw somebody with a garbage bag in a ditch picking up cans but it didn’t look like his daddy.

  Once Jimmy’s daddy got the go-kart out on the actual blacktop, he found out that it was almost impossible to turn it over. He found out by steadily increasing his speed and then cutting the wheel sharply, and no matter how hard he turned it or how fast he was going, he couldn’t turn it over. It only took about three minutes to find that out. By then the children were standing down at the end of the dirt road, and Jimmy was jumping up and down, and the tiny dogs were moiling around thick as maggots on a dead mouse.

  He’s wanting his go-kart, Jimmy’s daddy thought, and he was going to let him have it pretty soon, but first he started weaving in between the broken yellow stripes in the middle of the road, weaving, speeding up, cutting the wheel, working it into a rhythm, getting it going back and forth, making it slide, making it slide, working to a glide, making a slide, having a ride, enjoying the glide, and then a wheel caught on a rough place where the road guys had patched the asphalt and it flipped. Jimmy’s daddy felt the blacktop scraping very painfully across the top of his head and knew the go-kart was on top of him and then it flipped again and slammed Jimmy’s daddy upright in the middle of the highway, and a car was coming. He stomped the gas and shot back into the dirt road. The children and the […] dogs covered him and the go-kart like ants. In the midst of all the excitement, Jimmy burned his hand pretty badly on the hot muffler. He cried hard, he cried fast.

  A few hours later Jimmy’s daddy was lying on the king-sized bed in his trailer’s master bedroom. He hated its frilly purple curtains, made him want to fucking puke, propped up against a real comfortable pile of pillows, sipping a cold one and watching his deer-hunting tapes. He had some he’d gotten for Christmas last year where they slowed the action when the arrow hit the deer and you could actually see the arrow going all the way through the deer, appearing out the other side as a shiny red blip, and even though the deer took off running, you knew that son of a bitch was dead. He might run a
little ways. He wouldn’t run far. He might get dizzy and run in circles. He’d lie down. Bleed out. If you left him alone and waited. Didn’t start trying to track him right away. There was plenty of time. No big hurry. You could have a smoke or two. Take a piss. Take a shit if you had some toilet paper with you. Son of a bitch wasn’t going to just resume his peaceful browsing life after having almost three feet of tubular aluminum shot all the way through him at however many feet per second.

  With a razor-sharp broadhead.

  With razor blade inserts.

  With spring-loaded tips that would actually insert the razor blade inserts into the deer’s aorta if you hit the aorta. Son of a bitch didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.

  The top of Jimmy’s daddy’s head was bandaged up. Johnette had done it, poured some alcohol on it, which hurt like crazy, stung […]. Then she put some Neosporin on it and a couple of Band-Aids. Wasn’t any trouble with the hair interfering because he was so bald. Thirty-two years old and hardly anything left up there at all. He wore it long, with a cap, at work and on the weekends. He rarely took the cap off. Only at home or at a funeral or some other function where he had to be in a church, which wasn’t often, thank God. […]

  So he was just having some cold beers and watching people with com-pound bows up in trees on tree stands waiting for deer, and whispering to each other, and turning to whisper things to the cameraman, who was up in the tree with them, their breath fogging in the cold. He wondered how they kept from fogging up the camera lens. It had gotten completely dark before Johnette had gotten Jimmy off his go-kart. Jimmy had asked his mama to get him up an hour early in the morning so that he could get in an extra hour of driving his go-kart tomorrow. There was also a small problem. There was probably less than a pint of gas left in the shed, which wouldn’t run him all day, not if he drove it the way Jimmy’s daddy knew Jimmy was going to drive it. He’d already told Jimmy that, and Jimmy had begged him to go to the store down the highway, just a few miles, wouldn’t take long, before they closed tonight, please please please, Daddy, and get him a fresh gallon of gas, and Jimmy’s daddy knew he should have, but he’d also been bleeding at the time and needed prompt medical attention, and a few cold beers, and then he didn’t want to drive down to the store on the other side of Yocona after he caught a buzz. It was a regular Texaco gas station / country store, and they had a bulletin board in there next to the ice-cream box, and there were sometimes things on it. Once he’d seen a computer-printed note that said:

  LOST: Small beagle dog, white with brown spots called Bobby. He is a house dog, not a hunting dog. He will not hunt cause he is scared of guns. Please do not shoot a gun around him. Please be careful if you find him cause he has a broke tail.

  Next to it was a picture of an alligator snapping turtle the size of a picnic table hanging from a tree limb. Somebody had probably caught it out of the river. They made sandwiches at the store and they also cooked pizzas at the store and there were always a lot of people standing around waiting for the pizzas to cook, or for the sandwiches to get made, and they also had some tanning beds, so people were in and out for that, sometimes slightly chubby country young ladies in two-piece swimming suits and short terry-cloth robes, and house shoes, and all the old retired country geezers, who’d farmed all their lives and fixed fences and messed with cows and pulled cows out of mud holes or worked for the state highway maintenance department their whole lives, and didn’t have anything better to do than sit around the store all day and sip coffee and eat sausage-and-biscuits and play dominoes at a big table in the back, liked to sit around some more and wait for some of the young ladies to maybe show up, and the people who owned the store must not have wanted to pay for very much help, because there was usually only one very nervous and upset young girl to work the counter and the register and the tanning beds and the gas machine and get crickets for people and fix flats and make sandwiches and still keep churning out the pizzas, which included sausage, pepperoni, and combos, taking her plastic gloves off and then putting them back on, probably went through about twenty or thirty pair a day, and usually there was a screaming baby in a playpen behind the counter, because it seemed that each of the young girls who worked at the store had a baby they had to bring to work, and sometimes Jimmy’s daddy saw a toddler standing in dirty underpants on the gravel out by the gas pumps eating cigarette butts, and then there were people who pulled up for gas, and kept coming in to pay, and others who pulled in behind them and waited for the ones in front to move so that they could get up to the pumps, and the gravel parking lot wasn’t very big, so it, too, was often crowded with delivery vehicles that included gas trucks, milk trucks, bread trucks, drink trucks, and even Cockrell Banana Company trucks, so it had gotten to where sometimes it was so crowded inside with people standing around waiting on one thing or another that you had to stand around and wait for them to get through with their waiting and step on up to the counter and pay for whatever it was that they’d been waiting for for ten minutes even if you were only buying a five-cent piece of gum. Sometimes it wasn’t worth the trip. So Jimmy’s daddy hadn’t gone for the gas. […] But he knew he’d have to talk to Jimmy before Jimmy went to sleep.

  And pretty soon he did. Jimmy came running into the bedroom in his pajama bottoms with a big Band-Aid on his badly burned hand and climbed up on the bed next to his daddy and put his hands on his daddy’s chest. He’d had a bath but his fingernails still showed crescents of black.

  “Daddy,” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah,” Jimmy’s daddy said, and leaned his head around him in order to see a guy make a shot he’d already seen him make about forty-three times.

  “What am I gonna do about my gas?”

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy’s daddy said, and took a sip from his beer. “Get some tomorrow. Get on to bed now.”

  And since Jimmy’s daddy’s kids always minded him, that was the end of that. You dang tootin’, Fig Newton.

  The next day at work at the stove factory, Jimmy’s daddy didn’t tell anybody about his near-fatal accident with the go-kart. He’d told some people about seeing a matching pair of pale yellow oblong UFOs one time about fifteen years ago when he was parked with some old girl on a dirt road and had almost gotten laughed out of the break room, even though there was no doubt that those two guys in Pascagoula had been picked up by aliens back in ’73, because they’d both passed lie detector tests and told the exact same story over and over, to different police officers in different offices and under hypnosis. He wished he could talk to those guys. See if their experience had any connection to his. He kept his cap on even when he had to crawl up under a Towmotor and fix it.

  At lunch he lifted his cap briefly to check his head in the mirror in the bathroom and it looked okay. Damn, that new girl down on the line had some big titties. Whew. He hadn’t seen any like that in a while. He didn’t see any blood leaking through the Band-Aids. It was sore as a rising, though. He touched it gently with his fingertips. It sure had been fun sliding the go-kart until it tipped over. He bet he could have slid it forever if he’d had it on some smooth concrete, like maybe a slab for a house before they put the house on it. You’d have to watch out for those plumbing pipes stubbed up, though.

  That afternoon, when Jimmy’s daddy got home with the gas, they’d already been out of gas for over twenty minutes and were almost frantic. Since the motor had cooled down, Jimmy’s daddy let Jimmy fill the tank himself, cautioning him sharply about sloshing it and wasting it. Told him to slow down, be careful. Jimmy slowed down, was careful. Then he cranked it, got into the seat, and roared away. Jimmy’s daddy walked up the steps into the trailer and got a cold one and sat down on the couch. Damn, he was tired. Crawling around on that hard concrete all day. They were going to have to take that big press apart. What a pain in the ass that was going to be. Take two weeks probably. Slow down production in the Press Department. Front office would raise hell. Well, fuck them. He could hear the go-kart going around and around the traile
r, and then he didn’t. He sat there and listened. He could hear the kids talking. He took another sip of beer. Then the go-kart fired up and took off again. Had they flipped it already?

  Jimmy’s daddy got up and went to the back door where he’d been meaning to build a back porch. There wasn’t any porch, just a drop of about four feet to the ground. Another thing Johnette stayed on his ass about all the time. He opened the door and looked out just in time to see all three of them on the go-kart, the tiny dogs yelping and running alongside, all of them going up the dirt road toward the woods and pastures that belonged to that old man who was building that pond. Jimmy’s daddy had already walked over there and looked at it. He wondered again if he was going to put some catfish in it whenever it got filled up with water. That’d be nice. Just walk over there at night and catch a few. He listened. He could hear the motor noise getting smaller and smaller. He knew they’d probably get it stuck in a mud hole. And would want him to stop what he was doing and come get it out. Fat chance of that.