A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  He took a drink and shut the door. If they got it stuck they could just get it out.

  Little shits.

  Little heathens.

  That was what his daddy always used to call him: little heathen. And of course that was where he got all the ass-whipping philosophy, too. You could see it didn’t hurt him any. Hell, he turned out fine.

  […]

  10

  Jimmy and his two half sisters and the herd of tiny dogs stopped on top of the hill in the shady green woods and looked down into the pool of sunshine below them. The go-kart sat there running, the new muffler keeping it not too loud. Yet. Later it would get louder. Later the chain would get loose. Then it would come off. He’d put it on. It would come back off. He’d put it back on. It would come back off. Back on, back off. It would get to where it would come off all the time. It would get to where it would stay off more than it stayed on. Jimmy would try to fix it. Jimmy wouldn’t know how because the go-kart had not been built with any kind of a chain-tightening system to account for normal chain stretching. It would turn out that Jimmy’s daddy had bought a cheap go-kart, an off-brand piece-of-shit go-kart probably made by some fly-by-night operation that had already landed somewhere else by now. Jimmy would get desperate. Jimmy would do something he wasn’t supposed to do, which was get into his daddy’s tools in the shed. He’d take a good whacking for that one. His little pale butt naked that night getting into the tub would wear five or six deep red stripes from that little escapade. But all this was before all the trouble with the pond. Right now the pond wasn’t even finished. But there was an enormous hole where the great trees had once stood and it was laddered with tracks and that was what had almost taken the children’s breath, sitting in the go-kart, watching the dozer dude work in the clearing he had made in the middle of the woods, a small yellow machine in a large bowl of brown sun-warmed earth. Worms popping up all over. All kinds of birds flying down and getting them with their beaks, stretching them out of their holes until they popped in two, hungry little buddies gobbling those hermaphroditic babies down in the July heat.

  The dozer was running backward hard with black smoke pouring from the pipe and the man on the seat was looking over his shoulder. If he saw the children watching him, he didn’t let on. He stopped and lowered the blade and pushed it into the earth, making the dirt pile up on the blade until it almost ran over the back side, and then he pushed the dirt up an incline he was building, digging it out below him, pushing it up, coming back for more, slowly hollowing and hollowing the earth, and the green remaining trees all around held him in partial shade that he kept running in and out of steadily like a shuttle on a loom. Far down the hill sat a redbrick house.

  “What’s he doing?” Evelyn, the older half sister, said. She was thirteen. Wore a purple evening gown most of the time. Black patent leather shoes with silver buckles and light blue argyle socks. Freckles and red hair and granny glasses. Wanted to be an architect in Ecuador.

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “Looks like a racetrack, don’t it.”

  “It’s a drive-in movie theater,” his other half sister, Velma, said. She was eleven, only a year and a half older than Jimmy, had black hair, a different daddy from Evelyn’s. She wore jeans and tops. Knew how to roller skate. Didn’t get to go much. Crazy about Tim McGraw and mayonnaise sandwiches. Would wind up pregnant in Chicago by Navajo progressive country singers by the time she was seventeen.

  “Aw shit, it ain’t no drive-in movie theater,” Jimmy said.

  “It’s a parking lot,” Evelyn said. She reached down and picked up one of the little dogs. It sniffed Jimmy’s elbow.

  “It’s a new hamburger joint,” Jimmy said.

  “Now, would they put a hamburger joint out in the woods like this?” Evelyn said, and put down the dog. They sat there watching. The dozer man saw them sitting there and waved briefly, then turned his machine and went the other way with it, scraping and moving more dirt. He was down in the bottom of the big hole, with one side going out at a gradual slant into the remaining trees and the other ending abruptly where all the dirt was being pushed up in a sloping wall almost like a small piece of the Great Wall of China.

  “Oh shit!” Jimmy said. “It’s a fucking catfish pond!”

  “Don’t say fucking,” Evelyn said. “You don’t even know what it is, you little rotten-tooth fucker.”

  “I do, too,” Jimmy said.

  “Shit. You wouldn’t know which arm to look under for it. Would you?”

  “I would, too,” Jimmy said.

  “Okay, which one, then, if you know so damn much?” Evelyn said.

  “Well. I know what a motherfucker is,” Jimmy said uncertainly.

  “I’m gonna tell,” Velma said.

  “Tell what?” Evelyn said.

  “Way y’all talking.”

  “How we talking?” Evelyn said.

  “Dirty,” Velma said.

  “Oh you shut up, you little whore,” Evelyn said, and slapped her.

  “I’m gonna tell Mama,” Velma said, and cried. Evelyn kicked her off the go-kart where she rolled in the dirt and cried some more.

  “I bet he puts some catfish in there,” Jimmy said. Then he hit the gas and the shiny red go-kart spun in a tight circle in the loose dirt, the chain clattering, the herd of tiny dogs cavorting and somersaulting in the dust, they and the little girl chasing the go-kart bouncing back through the brown leaves on the old log road and the green leaves in the shady woods toward the grassless mobile home that was no longer mobile, merely home.

  11

  It looked mighty fine when the dozer dude was done. Great big dry brown hole. A big brown bowl. Not a speck of grass in it. And nary a torn tree root sticking up through the huge levee where it might cause a leak. Nineteen and a half feet deep. Newell knew a nice spillway worked, too. It cost Cortez Sharp six thousand for three weeks of dirt pushing but he felt like it was plenty worth it. Cortez had gobs of money stashed in the First National Bank in Oxford. Last time he’d checked he had about seven hundred thousand. Inherited a lot of it from his daddy. Land. Cows. Timber. Cotton. He didn’t really give a shit about the money. It wouldn’t do him any good after he was dead. It might do Lucinda some good. Maybe she could build her a house somewhere. Stop paying rent. Throwing money away. But it wasn’t any of his business if she wanted to throw her money away. He just wished she’d get rid of him.

  He paid the dozer dude in cash, counting the remaining hundreds into his muddy hands under one of the last monster white oaks. The dozer dude had left it for shade and he said that he always tried to leave a place better than he’d found it. It looked like he had.

  He asked Cortez about coming back and getting the wood one weekend, but got a crisp No with no explanation. Then the dozer dude left. To be seen there only one more time. And years down the road.

  Cortez Sharp stood there looking out over the vast expanse of his new but empty pond. It had turned out so much better than he’d dared to hope for that it was like a big bubble of happiness in his heart and it was wide open, open to the sky that would bring the rain to fall. And slowly fill up the pond. Once the rain, then the fish on the fish truck. So he set in to wait. For all of it.

  He waited the first day on his front porch in a rocker, watching the sky for any signs of darkness from his old and slightly chipped redbrick house. He had a pretty big yard out there but no flowers this year.

  The sun shone bright and the TV droned on in the living room, coming through the wall. All the fools hollering and selling.

  He kept going over there to look at it. He’d stand there and look at it and wonder how many rains it would take to fill it up. And how it would look once it was done. He’d have to pick a spot to feed them. Maybe underneath the big white oak that was left. Shady there. Once the pond filled up, the tree would be close to the water.

  One day he walked down and stood in the bottom of it, marveling over how deep it was, and how high over his head it was, and looked up at the li
p of the levee. A little boy in baggy shorts was standing on top of it watching him. A little boy who grinned through rotten teeth and waved.

  “Get the hell off my place!” Cortez yelled, and the little boy dropped from sight like a puppet snatched from a puppeteer’s stage.

  He’d be back, of course.

  12

  It was a bad stretch of road between Oklahoma and home, but Tommy didn’t stop to rest. He was way behind, pushing hard, trying to get back before daylight. So much work to do. So little time to do it. Shouldn’t have lost all that money. Shouldn’t have done it again. Not again. Now he was going to have to work even harder, maybe get mad over nothing at the barn and fire a few people. He could sell the new pickup. He’d have to. And what the hell was Audrey going to say? She’d probably leave him for sure now. After all his promises. And all her begging and crying for him not to let them go under. Now that they’d come so far. And had done so good. All the work he’d done would be shot in the ass. All the work she’d done, too. She’d been out there in the brood ponds with him day after day back in the old days, gathering the little fish in chest waders, holding her end of the seine, when they were still hopeful for things to get better. And they had. He still remembered the day she’d come up with the idea of painting all the trucks a shiny bright red, like a fire truck, and getting them fixed with gold letters like a fire truck, only all theirs said TOMMY’S BIG RED FISH TRUCK. And it had worked. His big red fish trucks were rolling everywhere, hauling catfish and bass and crappie as far as Iowa City and Minneapolis. There were lakes all over the place and they always needed more fish. And he’d taken it to them for years, in little towns all over the Midwest and the south, dipping out fish for long lines of customers who had arrived early to meet him and his truck, all day long, different towns, more highways, more stops, until he’d sold everything he had on the truck. The fact that they were all happy to see him and eager to buy his fish and talk to him had always made his job a lot more pleasant, so that it was easy to get up and go to work in the mornings, and it made him feel like he was doing a good thing for his fellow man. He saw a lot of old guys, and lots of times they told him they were stocking ponds for their grandchildren, little girls and boys who would hold rods and reels or cane poles in their hands and sit on the shady bank of some farm pond with the old guy, close to him, watching their bobbers, talking quietly as they waited for the fish to bite. He envied them spending time with children. That had to be precious. Sometimes they even brought the kids to see his truck.

  He pulled in for burnt coffee at Stillwater, a college town. He had to take the big truck by a service station and gas it up anyway, and he stood out there in the new concrete parking lot under a bright overhead light at a BP just like all the others around the country and watched laughing kids lounging around their cars and playing their music loud. Kids these days, they were troubled. They were lost. That was why so many of them ended up in prison. All because nobody cared about them. Or they didn’t have a daddy around. Or got mistreated when they were little. Some people didn’t even need to have kids. He didn’t know how people could do the stuff they did. But look at him. Standing on the concrete in Stillwater, needing sleep, putting more gas on a card that was already almost overdrawn. He should have walked out when he was up eighty-seven thousand dollars. Three months ago. He could have walked out the door with the money and paid almost everything off. Instead of being how he was now. One hundred fifty-three thousand dollars down. It was scary. He was going to have to make that payment to the bank. And it was nineteen thousand dollars. Where was it going to come from? Hell. If he sold the fish farm he might as well just go ahead and die. He didn’t want to go back to working for somebody else’s fish farm.

  You could have held it together, he told himself. But no. Not you. […]

  He finished and went inside and paid for the gas and the coffee and some gum. He climbed back up into the seat and started it and pulled out. He could feel the water sloshing in the tanks. He knew that all the fish back there were already dead, black crappie, redear bream, channel catfish, bass. The aerators had been off too long while he was in the Indian casino. He’d have to dump them somewhere before long or he’d have a rotted clotted mess to clean up back there when he got home. Oklahoma’s roads were lonely and black and strung with rusted barbed wire. The radio played songs by homeboys. Toby Keith. Vince Gill. Garth Brooks. The radio sang their songs and the tires sang theirs through the night toward Crowley’s Ridge, the geological phenomenon where he lived. Lots of hawks there, too. Almost one for every fence post. Redtails mostly. They were there because of all the updrafts around Crowley’s Ridge that made it easy to sail and lift without having to flap their wings very much. It was the same reason fish liked water. It was easy for them to live in.

  And what would he do about Ursula?

  Oh shit. What would he do about Ursula?

  13

  They were men and women, boys and girls, some small ones not big enough to drive one yet since they were still in Pampers strapped on their mothers’ backs like papooses in knapsacks with holes cut for their chubby legs. The grown people wore caps and T-shirts and blue jeans and dungarees and pants suits and overalls and some of the women who were older had their hair in pink curlers. They were on ATVs, Kawasakis, Yamahas, Suzukis, Polarises, Hondas, Arctic Cats, green and red and blue and black and tan, all slowly churning dust, all headed somewhere in a solid line, like covered wagons crossing a prairie, up the gravel into that slanting evening sun on the road that climbed the hill past Jimmy’s daddy’s trailer’s yard that had no grass.

  He stood there transfixed and watched them with a new exhaust manifold gasket for the ’55 in his hand. They came from somewhere out of the river bottom, he supposed, and they were always strung out in a line that proceeded with dignity and purpose, their hands firmly locked on the handlebars, their cold beers between their legs, riding in foam-rubber Koozies, riding along with them. Sometimes they lifted one hand and took a drink. Whenever they came by they all waved, even the children. Even the little children. Some of them were holding their own bottles and waved with them. Their coolers were in racks behind them, strapped snugly down with black rubber cargo cords like NAPA sells. A few outriders had nylon-stocked .22 rifles slung across the handlebars as if looking for trouble. Or free meat. What with twenty-pound logger-heads crossing the roads in dry spells looking for water sometimes. The chance feral suckling piglet, trapped squealing in rusted roadside hog wire. The succulent vealish steaks of the apparently orphaned spotted fawn. Jake turkeys too stupid to run from a gun. Sometimes they displayed their captured roadkill, dead bunnies or stiffened squirrels strapped to coolers like coup feathers that danced on a war lance.

  They were strung out behind each other in a long line and they raised a thin stream of dust like horses on a trail and they swept uphill in a caravan of four-wheelers, the fat black rubber tires churning, the little papooses asleep or bawling, the old darkly tanned guys in their retirement years with their John Deere caps sipping beer as they rode, the children bringing up the trail end. Into the wooded hills. Into the sunset. Drinking cold beer. In a caravan. Where did they go? What did they see? The sight of them always put a longing in Jimmy’s daddy’s heart to go with them, down the road, into the woods, wherever they were going, wherever that was. Maybe one day he would. Maybe one day he could.

  14

  It didn’t rain. It didn’t rain and it didn’t rain and it didn’t rain. It didn’t rain a drop. It would not rain. It refused to rain. It didn’t rain in the morning, didn’t rain at lunch, and it sure as hell didn’t rain in the afternoon or in the evenings or at night. It didn’t rain at all. And that was just the first week.

  Cortez Sharp sat around on the porch and waited for it to rain. He studied the sky, but the sky didn’t need to be studied. The sky was clear. It didn’t have any rain clouds in it. There was no thunder in the distance to hear. No crackling lightning walked blasting down from the line of the dim wa
tershed in the distance to stab the nights jagged in white electric fire.

  He watched the weather report. This was not something new. Being a farmer, he’d always watched the weather report, ever since they’d invented TVs and started selling them. The first one he’d owned, back when he was still farming with mules, was a large wood cabinet model, an RCA Victor with a round screen. Had that little label with that dog listening to a gramophone. Back before Victor got out of the picture. That must have been back in the late forties. And it wouldn’t pick up much. There wasn’t much to pick up. Just the big stations and their few small affiliates around Memphis and Tupelo and Columbus. Later on, on up in the sixties, on Saturday afternoons, you could get The Porter Wagoner Show out of Nashville with Dolly Parton before she got famous. But even before he’d gotten a TV, he’d always listened to the weather on the radio. That was back when he used to pick up the Grand Ole Opry live out of Nashville. He’d listened to Hank Williams himself for a couple of years in the very early fifties. He used to listen to him duet with Kitty Wells. That was fifty years ago. Then he died in the backseat of a Cadillac. Where did the time get off to that quick? And why did it go so much faster when you got older? How come you didn’t think about it when you were young?

  […]

  One day about two o’clock it pissed down a few measly raindrops. Big deal. […] There was a cloud up there about as big as a box of dog biscuits. A few drops hit the tin roof and splattered off into the dust and soaked away and that was it. Cortez leaned out from the porch and held his hand out. When he pulled it back it was dry. […]