A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  He rode over a few ridges and then around a few more curves and he saw a pair of green eyes up in a tree and slowed down and looked and saw a raccoon up in a persimmon tree eating green persimmons. He burped. He didn’t want any green persimmons. Jimmy’s daddy’s daddy had talked Jimmy’s daddy into biting into one one day and he still remembered how it puckered his mouth and how the awful, bitter taste wouldn’t go away for a long time. He never had understood why his daddy had done that to him. And then laughed like hell. He went around another curve and crossed a narrow bridge and went up a hill where some young oaks were growing on each side and the road was so lumpy with repair patches that the ’55 bumped even with its new shocks all the way around.

  Okay, he shouldn’t have married her. Big mistake. Now what? Keep on staying with her or get the fuck out? What did they ever do together? Went over to Algoma, that was about it. And that cost the shit out of money. Spend money. Spend money. That was all she thought about. Working at the bank she ought to make some money since they had all the money. He didn’t even like to go in there. Hardly ever did. He didn’t like to write checks or have to screw around with an account. He didn’t like to be around people who dressed better than he did and probably thought they were better than him.

  He wondered what the hell she was doing. Evelyn said she’d gone out with some people from the bank. Some thing she had to go to. Probably a meeting. She had to go to things sometimes, things the bank had. Meetings. Dinners. He didn’t know what all. He knew they went out and had drinks sometimes, and that always chapped his ass. She needed to be home with the kids. Yep. That was her job.

  He’d tried to call Rusty earlier but he hadn’t been home. Probably out at Applebee’s eating supper and drinking beer. Rusty went out there a good bit and he knew the bartender out there. Jimmy’s daddy had been out there before but it cost money to go out there, too. Married people who worked for a living couldn’t eat out like that all the time. Johnette was always bitching that they didn’t go out enough to eat. Or at least she used to. She didn’t bitch about much anymore. Not like she used to. She seemed sometimes like she’d calmed down a little bit, but that probably wasn’t too hard to figure out. She was probably smoking the hell out of that damn shit again. He’d tried to talk to Rusty about it a few times and tell him about all the problems he had with her, but Rusty didn’t seem to know what to say about all of it. He’d never been married. He had it made. He could take his paycheck and spend it on whatever he wanted to, wood for a boat or a new 7 mm Mag or a four-wheeler — damn, Jimmy would like one of those, wouldn’t he? — and he didn’t have to put up with all the shit that Jimmy’s daddy had to put up with. Rusty was a bachelor. And Jimmy’s daddy remembered when he used to be a bachelor. He had it made back then. Could go out with all the women he wanted to and spend his paycheck on whatever he wanted to. And then he met Johnette with Rusty and Seaborn over at Tupelo at the Gun and Knife Show.

  They were hunting for a Henry Golden Boy .17 caliber rifle and she was looking for a pistol because she was a single mother. A divorced mother, actually. They’d helped her pick out a good pistol and then they’d all gone out for beers at the Rib Cage. Turned out her family was from down at Bruce. And yeah, she had two kids. He remembered when he saw them for the first time a long time ago. Both of them cute as hell. Hard to keep from hugging them. He remembered when he used to go over to Johnette’s trailer when she was still living down on Old 6, all the nights he’d spent there, back in her bedroom after she’d put the kids to sleep, and then she’d gotten pregnant. Just because he hadn’t used a rubber one night. Just because they’d started messing around and she’d gotten hot and before he knew it he had it in her and she’d had her hot thighs wrapped around him and it felt so good he didn’t want to stop, and he had gone ahead, and now look where he was. Married to a fatass bitch who wouldn’t even stay home and take care of her kids. But he had Jimmy. He had him. He shouldn’t have whipped him so hard. Just because he got into his tools. But he wouldn’t have whipped him so hard if he hadn’t accidentally crushed John Wayne Payne. But he did. Mashed the living shit out of him. […]

  He wondered where her fat ass really was.

  Probably not out fucking anybody. That was one thing he didn’t have to worry about. He knew nobody was shucking his corn. No sir. And she used to be so damn fine. He could hardly get over it, how time changed somebody’s ass from fine to not fine.

  But he had to admit that he liked his mother-in-law pretty good. Carol was okay. Hell, she’d drink a beer or two with you. If she’d been twenty years younger he probably would have wanted to fuck her. She had a nice ass for an older woman.

  He sipped some more, rode some more. And then he got to thinking about selling Jimmy’s spear point for fifty bucks of beer back in the spring and felt bad all over again. He wondered if the guy he’d sold it to would sell it back. On the other hand, Jimmy could probably find another one sometime. So he stopped thinking about it. If you wanted to get technical it was just a rock anyway.

  20

  Jimmy’s daddy was about six or seven. He lived then in an old rotted house that leaned slightly to the right, a two-story dogtrot of unpainted boards on the sides and rusted tin on the roof. His daddy was already bad to drink and he was sometimes dangerous to be around because he was likely to hit if you did something that made him mad. Jimmy’s daddy didn’t want to get up on the stump that day because he was afraid something would happen, like maybe getting hit. The stump was in the backyard by the cistern where they caught rainwater and the stump stuck up six or seven feet high, and it had been left from where some men had sawed it off after a storm came through and tore off most of the big elm’s limbs.

  He didn’t want to get up there, but he did because his daddy told him to. His daddy was standing beside the stump and he was holding a pint bottle of whisky in his hand. Jimmy’s daddy climbed not easily up on the stump and then he stood there. His daddy had his arms open, one hand holding the whisky.

  “Jump to me, son,” he said.

  “Jump?” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  “Jump,” his daddy said.

  Jimmy’s daddy stood there and thought about it. What if he jumped and his daddy moved? But surely his daddy wouldn’t move. Would he? He was going to catch him, wasn’t he? But what if he hit him in the head with that whisky bottle when he caught him? That wasn’t going to feel too good. What if it broke?

  “Jump,” his daddy said.

  Jimmy’s daddy stood there. He wanted to jump. He didn’t want to jump. He knew he was going to have to jump, but that didn’t make it any easier. He didn’t want to get hit in the head with that whisky bottle. And he didn’t want to get a whipping for not jumping. He tried to avoid whippings at all cost because his daddy sometimes went a little crazy when he was whipping him and it was like he lost control of himself for a few minutes and it turned into a beating.

  “You gonna catch me?” Jimmy’s daddy asked his daddy on that day so long ago.

  “Jump to me, son,” his daddy said again.

  Jimmy’s daddy was six or seven. His mother sewed patches on his pants because they couldn’t afford new pants for him. He got shoes only when he completely wore out the ones he had. He was sneaking butts out of his mother’s ashtrays already. And he was more afraid of his daddy than anything else in the world. So he jumped. And his daddy moved out of the way.

  Jimmy’s daddy hit the ground hard. He landed on his chest and it knocked the breath out of him and he hurt his arm. He hurt his arm so badly that he started crying. He looked up at his daddy and his daddy told him something. His daddy told him: “There. Now that’ll teach you not to trust nobody.”

  21

  It was late, and Tommy was working at his desk in the barn in Arkansas. It was dusty and quiet in there, and they had lots of cats for the rats that came for the fish feed. Audrey had already gone to sleep, and he was working on his bills and making some payments, things that had to be taken care of, feed and fish fertil
izer and paychecks for the boys who worked for him and gas bills and oxygen bills and plastic bag bills. It was all squared away for another month. He didn’t know what he’d do after that. If he could have just hit that damn seven on that last roll last weekend. But he hadn’t. And that was some shit he didn’t even need to waste time thinking about, because he hadn’t hit it, and he was still down by $137,000, and nothing was going to change that fact. He wasn’t going to sell $137,000 worth of fish in the next month. He’d be lucky if he sold ten. Summer was almost over. People didn’t stock many fish over the winter. He didn’t even raise many fish over the winter, just enough to keep the brood stock going and some Florida bass that he sold to people down in Florida. The busy season for him was almost over. Pretty soon it would slow down. And he’d have the whole winter to take care of things, do maintenance, try to find a way not to gamble. He’d probably have to let Bob and Barry go. Maybe even Bill. He hated to. Bill had been with him a long time.

  He didn’t want to kill himself. Had no desire to. He’d known people who had and he’d never understood it. If you killed yourself, your life was over. Last chance. But sometimes it seemed there wasn’t any other way out. He didn’t see any way out of this. Except bankruptcy. And that meant starting all over. He was too old to start over. He was fifty-seven. He ought to be thinking about retiring instead of all this bullshit. Hell. A man got old and tired. He got tired of the things that happened to him on his job. He’d lost count of the times he’d been finned by catfish, but he remembered the worst ones. The one that got him all the way through the thumb that day in Hot Springs. The one he stepped on that day in Batesville, Mississippi, and drove the fin up under his big toenail. He had very nearly shit on himself for real when that one happened. But hell. Everybody had something on their job to worry about. Firemen risked getting burned up. Ironworkers had to deal with the reality of falling to their deaths. Getting finned was a part of Tommy’s life. You just tried to minimize it as much as you could. It helped to wear leather gloves.

  He had a roll of stamps on his desk and he pulled them out and peeled some off and stuck them to the envelopes for the bills and bundled them all together with a rubber band so that he could take them down to the mailbox in the morning and get them on their way. He could operate for another month. He could go that long. And then. Well shit.

  He wasn’t dead yet. And if you weren’t dead there was always hope, wasn’t there?

  He stood up and gathered the outgoing bills in his hand and turned off the light over his desk and stepped across the floor he’d laid himself in what had been an old tack room, and turned off the lights in the hall of the barn, and then, like he always did, he stepped back there where the big round tank sat bubbling in the semidark, with only one dim and dusty bulb burning above it, and he stepped up to the side of it, and laid his hand on the cool rim of the concrete curbing that he’d poured himself, and looked down. And she was there. Like always. Floating in the dark water, her fins slowly and gently waving, about a foot off the bottom.

  He was very fond of her. She was responsible for everything he had built up, everything he had made. She was almost like some kind of greatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgrand-mother. How many millions had she caused to be hatched, and how widely spread were they across this whole country, from New Mexico to New Hampshire? And what would happen to her if he went under? How did he know somebody might not wind up just butchering her and eating her? He didn’t want that to happen. If he went under, he wouldn’t let that happen. He’d turn her loose somewhere first. Some pond out in the country somewhere, some quiet lake. He didn’t know where. He could find some place to turn her loose where at least she’d have the chance not to be caught. Or to tear loose if she was hooked. Whoever hung her would have to have some good strong line, at least thirty-pound test, and a good rod and reel, and would have to know how to use the drag. No lucky kid with a cane pole was going to catch her. She’d snap a cane pole. He stood there and envisioned slipping her out of the tank somehow, maybe with a hoist, and hauling her on the truck, and putting her in some dark pond in the middle of one night.

  Kind of like turning an old horse out to pasture.

  But then there wasn’t really any need of thinking about that. Because he wasn’t going under. He was going to do something that would pull them out. He didn’t know what yet. He’d been trying to think of something specific to pull them out for a long time, but nothing had come to mind. He’d bought some lottery tickets, knowing he was throwing money away. But that was nothing new, throwing money away. Don’t bet the baby shoe money. Somebody had told him that a long time ago but he couldn’t remember who it was now. It might have been his great-uncle LaVert, who’d been dead for over forty years, who had already been old when he’d first come to know him. He still remembered going into his house walled with raw planks on the top of Crowley’s Ridge and seeing a bunch of fuzzy yellow chicks in the living room, huddled in a washtub pulled up close to the wood-burning stove, a lightbulb hanging low from the ceiling to help keep them warm, the house filled with their cheeping, owls hooting out in the woods behind the house when he slept in the back bedroom that was always cold because they didn’t run the gas heater back there.

  So many of his people were gone now. They had all slipped away from him one by one. He wished LaVert could have seen this fish.

  He stood there for a while longer, looking down at her, wondering what he was going to do with her. But he’d think of something. He’d have to. He couldn’t lose all this. It was unthinkable. Wasn’t it?

  Ursula. He remembered when he caught her, when she weighed only twenty pounds. She bit a piece of Rod ’n’ Reel shrimp. Horsed her in after only about ten minutes on his old solid glass two-piece rod and his […] Zebco 33. But he had new line on it. Thirty-pound test. And he knew how to work his drag. That was a long time ago.

  “Take it easy, old girl,” he said, and left.

  22

  The air over the Cold Hole felt hot as Jimmy sailed through it, briefly, for one unforgettable moment of his life, in his new dry swimming suit, the leaves in their trees overhead lending shade down on the rippling pool of water, the edges lapping at the little rocks that lined the pool, the water steadily pouring through the big pipe that ran under the road from the cold spring up the hill. As he plunged into it headfirst and drawn up, crablike, he couldn’t help but yell. What? He didn’t know. Something. Umyammahokaywhee! Then he was under. Drowning his ass off. Mouth full of cold muddy water and gulping more down. He clawed his way to the top and spit it out and took a deep breath, trying to spot his daddy, or call out for help, but he didn’t know how to swim or kick his legs correctly and he soon went under again, mouth full of water, swallowing some, coughing, and then he clawed his way back up. His hair was plastered down over his forehead. He felt the doom of death closing over him on such a sunny day. He could hear his daddy yelling something. He knew they were up there on the road above him, drinking beer, his daddy and Mister Rusty and Mister Seaborn, where they’d been standing for a couple of minutes, before his daddy had thrown him in, but he couldn’t see much for the water in his eyes and then he was going under again. The water was very cold and he didn’t know how deep the pool was, but he didn’t touch bottom. Nobody had given him any instructions about holding his breath, but he’d seen some scuba diving on TV one night and thought to pinch his nose closed. Only thing was, now he couldn’t seem to get back to the top. He was just hanging under the surface, clawing rapidly at the water with one hand and his air was running out. He knew there were people in distant lands who lived around distant oceans and could dive for pearls or oysters or sponges or tourists, but he just couldn’t seem to get back up. He knew his daddy was going to be disappointed, and he tried to get back to the top. Plus he needed another breath of air before he died. But he just couldn’t seem to do it. He held his breath as long as he could and then he had to let it out. And when he did, the only natural thing was to draw i
n another breath, but his mouth filled with water, and he sucked some into his lungs, and then he knew he’d messed up. He felt himself sinking. He heard two big splashes above him. Then the cold cold black closed in. And, for just a few moments, Jimmy died for the first time.

  […]

  When Jimmy came back to life, his head was on the rough pavement of the road and some people he didn’t know had pulled their cars over and were standing around. He was coughing and he was surprised to be alive since he’d been pretty sure he was going to be dead. Mister Rusty was soaking wet and pulling back from him, kind of hovering over him, and Jimmy couldn’t get all the water coughed out of his lungs fast enough. He gagged some, too, and tried to puke, but just strings of thick watery stuff came out and that was all. Then he looked over to the left and saw some chunks of the hot dogs he’d eaten for lunch lying in the road beside him. Had evidently puked while unconscious. He didn’t know you could do that. He gagged some. He gagged some more and said, A … A … Ack!

  He coughed some more and tried to sit up, and then his daddy was kneeling beside him, dry, with a beer in his hand. His daddy put his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. Jimmy’s lips felt mashed, his nose pinched.

  “Boy,” he said. “You all right?”

  Mister Rusty looked more than a little pissed when he turned his head to Jimmy’s daddy.

  “Hell naw, he ain’t all right, you like to fucking drowned him.”

  Jimmy’s daddy had some kind of look on his face that Jimmy couldn’t say what was. He never had seen him look like that before. He wondered if he was still mad at him about the tools. Then he went dizzy for a moment. It was all too much for his head. […]