A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  And it didn’t rain. Not there. It rained in other places. […] It rained in Texas plenty. It rained in the rain forests all the time. But it didn’t rain there. It wouldn’t rain there at all, while he was waiting for it. So he decided to stop waiting for it. He just ignored it. He just tried to forget about it. But that didn’t do any good because it still didn’t rain. One day when it didn’t rain fed into another day when it didn’t rain like locomotives hooked together on a train and it didn’t rain again and it didn’t rain again […]. Which actually got to be good. Because that meant that the time had to be drawing nearer when it would actually rain. Because he knew it wouldn’t just go forever without raining. Because everything would dry up and die if that happened. The rivers would all run dry. All the crops would fail. All the animals would die of thirst. There’d be a big famine like in the Bible. But that wouldn’t happen. Not in Mississippi. It would have to rain sometime. He didn’t know for sure what the longest amount of time was that he’d gone through without seeing it rain, but it couldn’t be over a couple of months. He’d lost a few corn crops from lack of rain, years and years ago, but never cotton. Cotton could make it without rain if it had to, if you had a good stand up, if it was clean and wasn’t full of weevils and cockleburs, and it might not be the biggest cotton in the world, it might not be over knee high, but it would make a crop and a check. […] But watermelons? Which were mostly water? With no rain? Forget about it. Let the coyotes have them. Which reminded him that he needed to shoot a few of them sons of bitches, too. He was getting tired of hearing them at night. They got all those little bitty dogs down the road stirred up. He thought he’d seen a doghouse up under the trailer before. He wondered if those little bitty dogs lived up under there. He wondered where they’d gotten those little bitty dogs. He didn’t think he’d ever seen any that small. Lucinda when she was a girl had one of them little Chihuahua dogs and it was a lot bigger than these little dogs down the road. Hell, they weren’t much bigger than baby rabbits. Where the hell’d they get them damn dogs at?

  […]

  It just stayed dry and hot and the stalks of Clemson okra in Cortez’s garden grew tall and clustered their fruit together in curvy green fingers and he walked among them carrying a yellow Tupperware bowl from the kitchen and cut the pods off with a paring knife. His tomatoes ripened slowly, hanging heavily from their vines under the shade of the rough leaves, growing from a solid shiny green at the top to a red that began halfway up, and he set them on the old wooden table in the shade of the chinaberry tree and they were firm and delicious when he made a tomato sandwich for lunch. Sometimes he made his wife one. She didn’t have any teeth. He didn’t have enough to write home about. She could gum hers enough to swallow it if she had some cold milk to go along with it. He hardly ever talked to her. If he did it was about the pond. She hadn’t even seen it. She hadn’t said anything about wanting to see it. If she did want to see it, he would have to pick her up out of her wheelchair and carry her out to the truck and then set her down somewhere for a second while he opened the door and put her in. Then he’d have to go back in the house and get her wheelchair and load it into the back end. Then drive her over there. Then get the wheelchair out. Then put her in it. Then try to push her wheelchair down that rough old log road.

  But that would be a lot of trouble. He didn’t figure she cared anything about seeing the pond. Only thing she cared about seeing was Oprah Winfrey. Lucinda liked her, too. So did that dirty-mouthed retard who lived with Lucinda. Whenever they were here, which was usually only at Christmas, all three of them watched Oprah Winfrey in the afternoons. Those were good times to try and have a nap in his bedroom where hopefully he’d wind up back on the clean river’s mossy banks with the naked angel girls. He’d been trying to have that dream again but it hadn’t happened yet. He sure wanted it to.

  Meanwhile it didn’t rain. He wondered, once his pond got full, if it would get low if it didn’t rain for a while. He knew how ponds were. In hot weather they went down when it didn’t rain. Evaporated some of that water. Which came back down somewhere as rain. It didn’t come back down over the pond, though, he knew that. It might come back down in Finland. Or Argentina. There was no telling where the rain that fell on his place had originally come from. Maybe Mexico. Maybe Massachusetts.

  But it didn’t rain, so he drove back out to the pond through the old log road and walked down in it again. What he saw were tire tracks. Small ones. Donuts cut in the new dry dirt. And a bunch of little tiny tracks like a horse trail, only they were paw prints. They looked like dog tracks. And there were footprints. One set that was barefooted, another one that had shoes. Not tennis shoes. A plain flat track like maybe a patent leather shoe would leave.

  Damn kids at that trailer. Had to be. He’d seen that go-kart come flying by, throwing gravel everywhere. They were down here messing around and they didn’t have any business messing around down here. He’d get some POSTED signs is what he’d do. Stick them up around the pond. They had some at Sneed’s. They were coming in on this old road is where they were coming in. He could get some wire and put up a barrier. Maybe barbed wire. No, not barbed wire. That might hurt one of them. They might come flying along in that go-kart and not see it and it might put one of them’s eye out. Or he could just go down to that trailer and tell their daddy to keep them off his place. That might work better than putting up signs and a wire barrier. But he didn’t look like he was home very much. He saw him going up and down the road in that junky-ass old car. Looked like a ’56.

  In a way he guessed he didn’t blame them. They were kids. They got excited easily. He knew they’d get excited about a big new hole in the ground and would probably wonder what it was. He knew that little boy he’d seen on the levee was one of them. He didn’t know much about the family. He’d seen the man’s wife out in the yard a few times hanging clothes on a line she’d strung between a pine tree and a stick somebody had propped up in the ground. He’d noticed that she had a nice big butt. Cortez had always liked a nice big butt. His wife had always had kind of a flat, skinny butt, not really much of a butt, kind of like a partly deflated balloon. He didn’t know why in the hell he’d married her. He’d noticed that the back of the trailer didn’t have any steps on it. And the back door looked like it was about four feet off the ground. Long way to step down. You’d have to jump down. It looked like the guy would have built a back porch by now. A man needed a back porch. He was sure glad he had one. He knew that trailer had been there for over a year. What he’d heard was that they’d bought that piece of land off old Harvey Miller’s boy after Harvey died. And then Harvey’s boy had come up there and bulldozed them a piece of a driveway in and put a culvert in and put some gravel down, even around the back, and it looked like they’d want some grass around that trailer instead of just gravel, but it wasn’t any of his business how they wanted to live. Just as long as those kids stayed off his land. That was one thing he wasn’t going to put up with: somebody coming on his land.

  Cortez got to going down the road some afternoons in his pickup to see if he could see some places where it had rained. He thought maybe it might have rained down near Serepta, so he rode down there to see. But it was dry down there, didn’t look like it had rained. He rode over toward Bruce to see if it had rained down there, but it hadn’t, so he turned and rode through Water Valley to see if it had rained there. It hadn’t. It hadn’t rained in Banner. Or Pine Flat. Or DeLay. Or Paris. Or Potlockney. Or Spring Hill. Or Toccopola. Or Dogtown. All the roads and trees and grasses and yards and pastures were dry. There weren’t any mud puddles out in the cotton fields. He stopped his truck on the bridge over Yocona River to see how low the water was and it was low. Bad low. The banks were about fifty or sixty feet high. He didn’t see any people fishing. A long time ago the river was full of people fishing. A long time ago people would regularly burn the brush along the banks so they could get down there and put out set hooks. There weren’t as many ticks in the woods then, either. A long
time ago the river was so full of bass that people drove down into Halter Wellums’s pasture on Sunday afternoons and he charged them fifty cents a car to park, just at the bluffs. He could remember seeing people climbing up some steep trails that went down the bluffs back then, coming up with stringers of bass long as your leg. And it went on like that for years. Then two businessmen who lived up in Oxford, one of them a drugstore owner, came down to get some fish quick and poured some Red Panther cotton poison in the river, just intending to kill a few fish, enough for a fish fry, maybe, with some cold beer and cards, but what they didn’t know, being a couple of businessmen from town who didn’t know anything about Red Panther cotton poison, was that the stuff was very concentrated, kind of like frozen orange juice, and once they poured a couple of gallons of it in the river, it washed on down and diluted and diluted and diluted some more and then it started killing fish for miles and miles downstream, truckloads of fish, tractor trailers of fish, down through the whole length of the Yocona River, all the way to the mouth of Enid Reservoir, and even killed some down there in the actual lake. Which was a federal impoundment. Paid for and built by U.S. taxpayer dollars. Anybody could fish in it who had a valid fishing license. It didn’t matter where you were from. You could be from Zanzibar and if you had a valid fishing license, you could fish down there. You just couldn’t pour cotton poison in it. But somebody had. And those guys down there didn’t think it was too funny. They didn’t crack too many dead-fish jokes about it. They took it pretty damn seriously. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was in tight control of everything down there, and some members of their units went out in their boats and stood around in them after they got them stopped and started counting dead fish floated up all over the place, bream, crappie, buffalo, carp, flathead catfish, blue catfish, White River catfish, channel catfish, willow catfish, largemouth bass, white bass, paddlefish, alligator gar, too, and got up to a couple of thousand and lost count, got really pissed, even outraged, started counting again and then said to hell with it, did an investigation instead and sent investigators around asking questions to neighbors who lived near the river around Yocona and then owing to their deductions and snooping around and asking more questions and even paying some people to talk, leaned hard on Halter Wellums, with the full backing of the U.S. government, and he had to give the businessmen from Oxford up and the corps of engineers put those two guys’ asses in a sling. They hung their heads before a judge is what they did, and said they were sorry and that they wouldn’t ever do it again, and paid a huge fine. He seemed to remember it was about twenty thousand dollars, and that was a long time ago, when twenty thousand dollars was a lot of money. But Cortez remembered easily what it looked like. It was a terrible thing to see, all those rotting fish on the surface of the river, […] large and small, some flathead catfish that were sixty- and seventy-pounders, their pale rounded bellies turned up, too, flies walking on their bellies, maggots working them over in the water. He saw buzzards walk from one side of the river to the other across the backs of dead ones where there was a fishjam up against a logjam. That ruined the fishing in the river for a long time. Just because a couple of assholes wanted some fish without fishing.

  It didn’t rain for so long that Cortez Sharp got sick of waiting. But there was nothing to do but just wait some more. So that’s what he did. […]

  15

  The two-man press was the largest one in northern Mississippi at that time, imported from Germany, a green monolithic monster that rose twenty-two feet above the grime-encrusted, fourteen-inch-thick concrete floor of the loudly slamming, wheel-whirring stove factory: wham! bang! pow! blang! all day long. All night long when they were running the third shift. It was the kind of press some company like GM could use to make car fenders. Or say if GE needed a bunch of washing-machine panels, or cooktops, it could make them as well. With the proper dies. The press was driven down and back up by a pair of big round gears on top. They were eight feet in diameter and a foot thick with teeth the size of steam irons. Beneath the press was a concrete pit six feet deep and fourteen feet wide and ten feet long where the slugs of round or rectangular or oblong or oval metal that were punched out by the various dies used in the press fell and stuck together with white lithium grease, which dripped down like melting candle wax from the machine. Somebody had to go down in there with a snow shovel and some five-gallon buckets once in a while and clean all that shit out, but Jimmy’s daddy’s job was to take the left gear off the press and fix a bad crack in it before it killed somebody. He didn’t really know what the hell he was doing, had just transferred to Maintenance from Spot-Welding a few months ago, was just doing what they told him to do: take a big gear off. John Wayne Payne, the guy he accidentally crushed, had evolved over the years into a nonpareil forklift driver who still lived with his mother in Water Valley and was smooth and efficient and deadly quiet, his Towmotor muffler noise muffled way down by good mufflers that were put on at the Towmotor factory. He was so good that he could drive his lift up to a railroad car full of dishwashers, stacked in their soft cardboard cartons four high, cross the dockboard without looking down, and squinch his eyes up behind his glasses and peer through the greasy yellow mast and insert the hand-grinder-sharpened tips of his forks between the first and second dishwasher and lift out three without tearing a carton. He could take that same quiet propane-swigging machine and go down the dim and lonely aisles between the tall, rusted steel die racks, next to the Press Department, where hundreds of dies that sometimes weighed thousands of pounds were stacked on dark oily shelves, and pluck one from its resting place thirty-three feet high as nimbly as an osprey grabs a mullet from a marsh. […] One day they’d staged an in-plant forklift-driving contest, no contest. If anybody in the plant had a flat tire by lunchtime, he’d drive his lift out on the parking lot while he ate his sandwich with one hand and raise the car with it to keep anybody from having to jack it up. He’d eaten unfried baloney on white with mayonnaise and two or three drops of Louisiana Red Hot Sauce every single work day on his lunch break for the last nineteen years. Only two sick days, and was actually sick both times, the flu once, and then the heartbreak of salmonella poisoning from some bad chicken his mother fried one Sunday. Didn’t make her sick. Didn’t like chicken.

  But in order to get this gear down off this crucial machine, which was dangerous as hell, since they were way up there in the air messing around with very heavy stuff, which could kill or amputate somebody or maybe even several somebodies real easy if something happened, say something gave, or broke, or slipped, as something sometimes does, what they’d done through an outside contractor in Dallas was set up near the big monster press a huge yellow Mitsubishi bridge-building crane they’d brought in through the tall back doors of the factory and amid all the workers and the other presses and the moving forklifts like the one John Wayne Payne drove and the slamming and the whirring, and Jimmy’s daddy had gone up on a wooden pallet on another forklift, one they called Big Mama, to attach a chain on the crane to the gear and knock out the retaining pin and catch it before it fell and then force the gear off its spline with a hydraulic press so that they could lower it to the floor and fix the crack, weld the crack, and that was taking a while, a couple of days, and slowing down everything in the Press Department, because people who were supposed to be working in the middle of all the bedlam were always standing around rubbernecking and watching them take the big press apart, because it was pretty amazing, what they were doing, up in the air like that, and now Jimmy’s daddy was pausing for a smoke break twenty feet off the floor, standing on the pallet, looking out over everything, the Spot-Welding Department and the Tool-and-Die Department and the Porcelain Department and even down to the edge of the line where they were putting the stoves together, and he could just barely catch a glimpse of that new girl with the God-awful tit-ties who worked down there, unbelievable, like half-grown watermelons, the same woman everybody in the break room snuck looks at while they were eating their baloney sandwiches
. Everybody was chickenshit to say anything to her. Jimmy’s daddy wanted to say something to her, something like Hey, baby, you want to come over here and sit on my face? Who knew? Hell, she might say yes. Fuck her damn brains out maybe. In the parking lot? At lunch? Was that too much to hope for? Reckon what she ate for lunch? Probably not baloney.

  […]

  “You gonna stand there all day with your thumb up your ass or you gonna get that gear off that spline?”

  Jimmy’s daddy looked down. Collums’s face was still looking up. Collums. Chief of the Maintenance Department. Hardly ever said anything. Big guy, gray haired. No teeth on top. Kept his hands on his hips a lot. Mysterious background. Maybe from up north. Had kind of a nasal voice. Always wore neat blue coveralls and a neat blue cap. You never saw any grease on him. It was almost like grease wouldn’t stick to him, and he practically lived in grease. Had the habit of staring at something he was going to fix for a very long time before fixing it. Like he was thinking about how he was going to fix it. Could fix anything mechanical. Could fix any machine in the entire plant, didn’t matter what it was: sheet metal brake, computer, forklift, cherry picker, spot-weld machine, glue gun, press, Mr. Coffee, time clock, Towmotor. Could fix any machine on the entire parking lot: Ford, Chevy, GMC, Dodge, Mitsubishi, Honda, Toyota, Buick. Could weld anything. Could weld aluminum. Most people couldn’t even think about welding aluminum. Drank a half pint of whisky every afternoon. Stopped at C&M liquor store down on South Lamar every afternoon and got one. Jimmy’s daddy didn’t know how many he drank on the weekends because he didn’t see him on the weekends. He didn’t want to see him on the weekends. He saw enough of him five days a week. Jimmy’s daddy dropped his cigarette on the pallet and was going to step on it, but it fell through a crack and landed on top of somebody’s head down on the floor and the somebody looked up and said something. Fuck him if he didn’t like it.