A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  “Yeah, just had a smoke, Collums, I’m about to get it,” he said.

  “Don’t let that pin jump out,” Collums said.

  “You done already told me twice.”

  Then he picked up his hammer and started hitting on the retaining pin again. It was about four inches in diameter, about twenty-four inches long, and it was hard to drive out, even with the locking collar off, but he was making progress, hitting it with some steady long swings, only thing, the small sledgehammer gave your arms and shoulders out after a while, and you had to stop and rest, you couldn’t just keep swinging it forever. But he was making progress. It was moving out a little, not much. It was a very tight fit. He guessed it was supposed to be that way.

  Jimmy’s daddy kept hitting it. Where in hell could those people be going on those four-wheelers? How’d they keep from getting caught by the cops since four-wheelers weren’t legal on roads, just off-roads? He’d seen some deputies loading some four-wheelers up on a car hauler one night on the road down below his trailer, where he’d almost wrecked the go-kart. He kept hitting it. He needed to get an inspection sticker on the ’55 before he ran through a roadblock one afternoon. He kept hitting it. Suddenly it jumped out and before he could grab it or try to it fell and bounced off the edge of the press and turned in midair, a flying cylindrical metal projectile, and catapulted into the gray block wall of the Grinding Department and knocked a big chunk out of it about a foot above some guy grinding something with sparks showering his face and dark goggles. Cement dust rained down on the guy’s head and he looked up. It bounced off that wall without killing him, but then bounced across the floor tumbling like a runaway bowling pin. It hit a good-looking secretary from the front office wearing safety glasses who was walking back to the front office through the Press Department in the leg and, since it weighed nearly eighty pounds, broke it. She screamed and fell and kept screaming. A shard of bloody bone was sticking out of her leg and there was grease on her red dress and Jimmy’s daddy could see that she was wearing black bikini panties. John Wayne Payne quietly passed beneath Jimmy’s daddy on his lift at almost the same moment. That was when the crack in the gear, which must have been much worse than they’d thought, gave way close to the chain, and the enormous gear broke into two halves, one to crash thunderously straight down to the floor twenty-two feet beneath, shattering concrete, knocking workers off their feet, raising a big cloud of dust, narrowly missing two running workers, the other to fall directly on the yellow steel cage over John Wayne Payne’s Towmotor, which was not built to adequately protect the driver from something that weighed as much as half the big gear. It made a horrible sound. Like a bomb. Dust flew out.

  It looked pretty awful down there from what Jimmy’s daddy could see. There was a lot of sickening blood. People were gathered around. More were coming. The word was spreading through the plant and from his high perch he could see people walking and running up from the line and the Porcelain Department. Shipping Department. Stockroom. Maintenance. Spot-Welding. Paint. He wondered if the new girl with the big titties was going to run up from the line. Guys in ties were running from the front office. Some of them, when they got there, kept going and ran off behind sheet metal brakes and other presses to hurl. The secretary kept screaming. People were gathered around her, too, making kind of a human wall around her. He thought her name was Ethel. He wondered if she wore black panties all the time. He guessed they’d fire his ass now. Even though it wasn’t really his fault.

  It was so bad that the ambulance people who came to get what was left of John Wayne Payne vomited on the fourteen-inch-thick floor in front of everybody. These were hardened people. And Jimmy’s daddy had to stand up there and watch all that. It made him think about just going ahead and changing jobs and made him so nervous he had to have another cigarette before somebody got on Big Mama and brought him on down. That’s when he got a real good look at what he’d accidentally done to John Wayne Payne. […]

  16

  Same day all that happened, while Cortez Sharp was still waiting for rain, Jimmy made a headlight for his go-kart. He found an old flashlight and went into some of his mama’s drawers in the kitchen while she was taking a nap on her bed with the door open and her hands between her legs and moaning and found some loose D batteries and stuck them inside the barrel of the flashlight and screwed the top back on and wondered if it would work and when he pushed the button sure enough it did.

  He went out and looked at his go-kart, parked under the big pine tree in back. He bent down and touched the chain. It was really loose. It would hardly stay on unless he drove kind of slow. He didn’t want to ask his daddy to fix it any more since his daddy had gotten so mad about it the last time he’d asked him to fix it, which was last week. He’d asked his mama to find out if they made new chains for his go-kart, but she’d told him to ask his daddy, so Jimmy kept his own counsel on that. He wasn’t asking Daddy shit.

  He found a piece of a roll of his daddy’s black friction tape among the old camp stoves and boxes of hunting magazines and broken fishing rods and tackle boxes full of worthless rusted crap in the shed and taped the flashlight to the front of the go-kart, out there between where his feet sat when he was driving it. Then he sat down in the seat and looked at his once-clean machine. It had become battered. Dusty. Greasy and gravel specked, the red paint rock pecked here and there. A sad machine now where once was shiny and bright. He turned the steering wheel in his hands. He wished it was still new. He remembered how good it ran when it was new. How quiet and fast. Back then he could go up in the woods with it, or up and down the dirt road in front of the trailer as swiftly as he wanted, and it wouldn’t matter. The wind would fly in his hair and he’d know a feeling of freedom such as he’d never felt or known was possible. Now the chain was so loose that he couldn’t take it up in the woods, because the rough ground would make the chain come back off, and now also if he went too fast on the dirt road, it would come off. It wasn’t nearly as much fun to drive around as it once had been. Now you had to kind of nurse it along like a bad leg.

  He didn’t know where the girls were. Maybe walking up and down the road. The girls didn’t want to have anything to do with him now, since his go-kart had become crippled. They just stayed in their room and listened to Tim McGraw or walked up and down the road. Sometimes they went wading down in the creek, but his daddy had told him not to, because of the snakes, so he didn’t. It didn’t seem quite fair, though, for them to get to go down there and wade around in the clear running water on hot days while he had to just sit on the bridge and watch them. But Jimmy already knew that a lot of stuff in the world wasn’t fair. Like having to go to school? That wasn’t fair. How about having to do homework? Was that fair? How about not being able to afford Kenny Chesney tickets for a concert in Tupelo? Was that fair? Shoot, naw it wasn’t fair.

  He sat out there in the heat for a while and thought about walking over to the empty catfish pond to look at it again. He wished it would rain, in a way, so the pond would get filled up, and in another way he hoped it wouldn’t rain, because when it rained the road he lived on got so muddy that you couldn’t get out and do anything and just had to sit in the trailer with your half sisters and listen to them talk about Britney Spears. Or go sit out in the shed with the lizards that changed colors, brown to green, green to brown, over and over, like real slow traffic lights.

  Jimmy looked up the road. That old man was mean. Jimmy hadn’t seen him up close since that time he’d yelled at him, but he’d seen him come down the road in his truck since then. The old man had stuck up some signs in the Woods that said POSTED, and he’d strung some hog wire across the road in the woods that ran down to the empty pond, but Jimmy could always walk through the Woods if he wanted to go over there bad enough. He wondered what it was going to look like when it got filled up. It looked like it was going to be pretty big. It was going to be plenty big enough to swim in. Jimmy didn’t know how to swim. Not yet. But his daddy had told him he was going to
teach him how. Jimmy could hardly wait for that.

  One of the dogs came out from under the trailer where they lived in a tiny doghouse and crawled up in Jimmy’s lap and went to sleep. Jimmy sat there, waiting for him to wake up. And then he thought about his daddy’s tools in the shed. Big mistake.

  That night, after Jimmy’s daddy had whipped him really hard and left those stripes on his butt for messing with his tools, Jimmy’s butt was still stinging and he’d cried until it felt like his whole head was stopped up. Like a wet sponge was filling up his brain. His mama’d had to make his daddy finally stop whipping him, because it felt for a while there like he was never going to stop, and his mama and his daddy had yelled some pretty nasty things at each other. She was a fat lazy stupid Hamburger Helping bitch, and he was a limp-dick white-trash red-neck drunk. They’d hurled these insults at each other with Evelyn sitting on the living-room Naugahyde couch in her evening gown, smoking a cabbage cigarette and having a glass of cooking sherry, chewing on her black fingernails while she studied a library book about Frank Lloyd Wright. His mama had gone into the girls’ room crying and slammed the door. Then the girls had gone back there, too. They were all piled up in the bed back there together watching a movie. He hated Evelyn’s guts. She thought she was better than him. Said her daddy was in the oil business in Texas. Said one day her daddy was going to come back and get her and buy her a Corvette. Jimmy knew that was bullshit. Jimmy’s daddy had told him it was bullshit because Evelyn’s daddy was a Corvette thief and was doing time for that in Huntsville, wherever that was. But right now Jimmy’s daddy wasn’t telling him anything. Right now Jimmy’s daddy was back there in his bedroom with the door closed drinking beer and watching his hog-hunting videos. Jimmy was sitting by himself in the living room. Jimmy had watched a few of those videos a few times. In one, guys out in the woods had a bunch of dogs, about twelve or thirteen of them, some of them pit bulls, some of them Airedales, and the dogs chased these huge hairy wild hogs down, and held them by the ears with their teeth until the hunters could get there and stab the hogs to death with big Bowie knives and some spears they’d evidently made. It looked kind of scary to Jimmy. There was a lot of barking and squealing and blood. He didn’t know if he wanted to hunt or not.

  His daddy always went deer hunting in the winter but he never killed anything. Not even a squirrel. Not even a rabbit. And when he didn’t kill anything, it put him in a bad mood. So, since he never killed any thing, he always came back from hunting in a bad mood. He’d come in before lunch on a cold Saturday in his hunting clothes and he’d already be drinking. He’d come in with a beer in his hand and sit down with his muddy boots on and yell at the girls, Turn that goddamn TV down! Jesus Christ! Why don’t y’all clean this fucking pigpen up? Johnette? Where’s my goddamn binoculars? Then he’d start in telling Jimmy’s mama what a lousy morning he’d had, that he only saw some does, started to shoot one of them nanny sons of bitches, could have, easy, twenty times, they’d eat just as good, but Rusty and them would have cut his shirttail off and the fine was high as hell if you got caught with one, damn near froze his ass off and wished he’d eaten some breakfast before he took off, how about cooking him up some French toast and sausage? Couple of fried eggs maybe?

  Jimmy thought about telling his daddy he was sorry about getting into his tools. He wondered if that would make his daddy feel any better toward him. Jimmy loved his daddy so much that he couldn’t stand for his daddy to be mad at him, although he often seemed to be mad at him. Well, not mad at him. Not all the time. There were plenty of times when he was mad at him, sure, but a lot of times he was just grouchy in general. Jimmy thought his daddy probably had to work too hard to support them was why he stayed in a bad mood so much of the time. He rarely even spoke to the girls unless it was to tell them to stop doing something or other. Jimmy knew his daddy had been through a bad day. Jimmy’s mama had told him that something happened at the plant. She didn’t say a word about what it was, but she said it in a way that let Jimmy know that it was something very bad and that his daddy was connected to it and that was why he’d whipped him so hard for getting into his tools and then gone back to his room with some beer. Jimmy wished he’d known that something bad had happened at the plant and that his daddy would be coming home early because of it, because then he wouldn’t have gotten the tools out, thinking he could fix the go-kart and have the tools put away again before his daddy came home, but there he was when his daddy rolled up at two thirty, an hour and a half early, sitting there with the left back wheel of the go-kart propped off the ground on a brick, and all his daddy’s tools scattered out in the gravel in a pile. Caught red-handed on a red go-kart.

  Jimmy eased painfully off the couch. It was dark outside but too early for bed. He eased down the hall past some piled-up clothes toward his mama and daddy’s bedroom. He didn’t make any noise. He stopped on the linoleum outside the bedroom door and listened. He put his head up against the door and could hear a video going, but he couldn’t tell which one it was. He listened to see if he could hear any wild hogs squealing. It might be those guys up in trees with bows and arrows again and if so they were whispering so the deer they were trying to shoot wouldn’t hear them. He reached for the doorknob. He didn’t touch it. He just held his hand near it. It wasn’t the first time he’d done that, held his hand near it. He knew he wasn’t supposed to open that door if it was closed. Ever. Never. It was forbidden. Some things were forbidden. You didn’t drink the last Coke in the refrigerator. You didn’t eat all the Oreos and ice cream. You didn’t bother your daddy at night or if he was in a real bad mood. But he was sure thinking about going in and telling his daddy he was sorry about the tools. He didn’t want his daddy to stay mad at him. And maybe he wasn’t still mad. Maybe he was almost over it. But what if his daddy was in the middle of his favorite part of the video and Jimmy interrupted him and he got mad again and started whipping him again? He didn’t think he could take another whipping tonight. The lick that knocked him up against the tub made him hit his head on the basin, but he didn’t say anything about it because he’d been afraid that might make his daddy just whip him worse. There was a knot there now. He rubbed it. A lump. Tender. Why’d his daddy want to hit him so hard? Didn’t his daddy love him? If he loved him, why’d he want to hit him so hard? Knock him up against the bathtub? Call him a little shit?

  Those were questions he couldn’t answer. So he didn’t open the door, or even knock. He just went back up to the living room and on back to his room and put on his tennis shoes and went outside. The go-kart was sitting in the dark out there, and he stood in the darkness with it and listened to the crickets screaming in the trees and the tree frogs calling and the bugs up in the woods calling to each other in the hot electric black that had settled over everything. He saw a falling star that shot flaming white and died.

  He knew his go-kart well enough that he could crank it in the dark, and he did. It sat there running, the chain rattling, bad loose, loose as a goose. Jimmy knelt down and felt it. It might not even run much more at all. But maybe if he went very slowly, crept maybe, he could creep up the road and back. He looked toward the trailer to see if anybody was going to come out and tell him not to go anywhere, but nobody did. He sat down in the seat, wincing a little, and reached forward and turned his flashlight headlight on. It shone out there pretty good. A lot better than he would have thought. It was almost like a real headlight. Jimmy pushed on the gas pedal gently and the flashlight lit his way out of the driveway and onto the dusty tan gravel of the road.

  It was pretty fun. It was more fun that he would have thought it would be. He wished he’d thought of this a long time ago, when the go-kart was still running good. He could have run up and down the road all night. Nah. They would have made him go to bed eventually, even though he got to stay up pretty late in the summer. When he was on vacation. Like now. He didn’t even want to think about going back to school, so he didn’t. He just went slowly on down the road, seeing what was o
n the road out there in the night. And every moment he was waiting for the chain to come off.

  But for some reason it didn’t. It stayed on past the curve down the hill and Jimmy kept taking it easy, letting it just roll along, bumping gently in the gravel, on down the road toward the wooden bridge. It was kind of a good place to hang out in the summer. It had some big trees for shade nearby, growing on the banks of the creek, and people sometimes came down there and shot .22 rifles at cans and things. Sometimes they sat down there in the shade in lawn chairs and drank beer, and he’d seen his daddy and Mister Rusty take a leak there one time when they were riding around drinking beer.

  Suddenly Jimmy passed through a cold place, near an old house that was overgrown and almost hidden, just off the road. The only thing that could be seen of it was a rusted piece of tin on the roof. It was surrounded by tall weeds and vines and trees that had grown almost completely over it, maybe even through it. He had felt this cold spot before, walking down to the bridge. Then he was on the other side of it and it was normal again. Hot summer night breeze, crickets calling, stars shining high above.

  He stopped on the bridge and sat there for a few minutes, trying to see what was down in there. Somebody had shot a big gray crane and thrown it off in there one time. Somebody else had shot a road sign and thrown it off in there, too. The creek wasn’t deep enough to fish in unless it had been raining lately, and Jimmy had seen some snakes down in there, too. A copperhead and a water moccasin. Jimmy knew his snakes.

  He pushed on the gas lightly and rolled to the end of the bridge and then down into the gravel again. If he kept going straight he’d wind up on the paved road, but he knew better than to go down there. And he didn’t want to get too far away from home in case the chain came off. It might be better to turn around. His butt was hurting anyway. Maybe he needed to just go home and go to bed and try for a better day tomorrow. Maybe he could get a paper route and save enough money to buy a new chain. Or his own tools. Or a ’55 Chevy like his daddy had.