A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  Later on, Jimmy was in the backseat of the ’55, and they were going down the road passing some turf fields and a big green pump. Pallets piled up in the corners of the fields. Sage grass at the edges of the woods. Jimmy was lying on a wet towel and his head was wet and his hair, his swimming suit. First time he’d worn it besides trying it on after he got it home. He coughed and turned over. The insides of the car smelled like they were rotted and his stomach felt like it was full of water. He wanted to puke but he didn’t think he could.

  Up front, his daddy at the wheel glanced over his shoulder and said, “How you doing there, Hot Rod?”

  Mister Rusty turned his head to look at him, as well as Mister Seaborn, who was sitting in between them. Mister Seaborn had recently had two of his front teeth knocked out by a skunk that made him fall down.

  “I’m okay,” Jimmy said. He wasn’t really okay, but he thought he’d better say that. He didn’t want to get his daddy upset any more than he already was.

  “You need to stop and throw up?” Jimmy’s daddy said. He was still glancing over his shoulder.

  “Better watch the goddang road there, Sweet Pea,” Mister Seaborn said, and lifted his beer. It made a sucking sound when he drank from it.

  “I’m watching the damn road,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “Say you all right?” Jimmy’s daddy turned his head back toward the front after he said that, but Mister Seaborn and Mister Rusty kept looking at him and drinking beer. They were both kind of halfway turned around facing him. Mister Seaborn was wet, too. His hair was plastered down, too, but now in the wind that came through the windows of the ’55, sprigs of it were starting to dry out and float around his red balding head.

  “I guess so,” Jimmy said.

  “How you feel?” Mister Seaborn said.

  “Kinda sick,” Jimmy said.

  Mister Seaborn took a drink of his beer. Jimmy’s daddy took a drink of his beer. Mister Seaborn said, “Well, I got a good reason for asking. I went to school with a boy that drowned one time. Drowned in his swimming pool. Right there at home. Stayed down about thirty minutes fore anybody seen him. He was cold as a mackerel when they pulled him out. Dead as a damn doornail.”

  “Maybe it was one of them cold-water drownings,” Mister Rusty said. “I’ve heard of them before.”

  Mister Seaborn looked like he didn’t appreciate Mister Rusty interrupting him. He turned to him briefly.

  “Hell naw, it wasn’t no cold-water drowning,” Mister Seaborn said. “It was a fucking swimming pool. In August.”

  “Oh,” Mister Rusty said.

  “How deep was the damn water?” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  Mister Seaborn didn’t turn around or answer Jimmy’s daddy because he was focused on Jimmy, and Jimmy was paying attention because hardly anybody ever focused on him and he liked it. He wished more people would focus on him more often.

  “And see, back then, they didn’t know nothing about all this mouth-to-mouth shit like Rusty done on you. They used to have to like pump your arms up and down. Like this here, up and down. They had to pump all that water out of his lungs and he said when he woke up he felt so damn bad he wished they’d just gone on and let him die. Hell, he was already dead. Dead as a damn doornail. So my question to you is, you feel like that? You wish you’d just gone ahead and died?”

  “No sir, I don’t reckon,” Jimmy said. “I was hoping maybe we’d get to go see Kenny Chesney in Tupelo next month.” He looked at his daddy.

  That must not have been the answer Mister Seaborn was looking for. He took another drink of his beer and then looked at Jimmy again.

  “Well, did you see any of that big white light at the end of a tunnel like they say folks see when they have a near-death experience?”

  “No sir, I don’t reckon so,” Jimmy said. “It just looked muddy.”

  “See anybody dead you knew, like your great-granddaddy?”

  “Aw shit, leave him alone, Seaborn,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “He feels bad enough as it is.”

  Mister Rusty turned back around and lit a cigarette. Jimmy sat up in the seat. He coughed a little. Mister Seaborn reached out and patted him on the back, not unkindly. Then he turned back around, too.

  “Why don’t you send him to the YMCA?” he asked Jimmy’s daddy. “They could teach him how to swim.”

  “Where’s a YMCA at around here, dumbass?” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  “They got one in Memphis,” Mister Seaborn said.

  “Memphis?” Jimmy’s daddy said. “You know how far away that is?”

  “Hell yes, it’s seventy-five miles,” Mister Rusty said.

  “It’s closer to seventy-eight if you go up Seventy-eight,” Mister Seaborn said with a mild chuckle.

  “Why don’t you get him in the Cub Scouts?” Mister Rusty said. “I think they teach kids how to swim. I know they teach em how to camp out. Start a fire with rocks. All that shit.”

  “I’ll teach him how to swim myself,” Jimmy’s daddy said. Then he said: “I don’t know why it didn’t work. It worked for me.”

  Mister Rusty leaned forward and said, “So, your old man just pitched your ass in and you come up swimming like a duck.”

  “Hell naw,” Jimmy’s daddy said. He nodded toward Jimmy in the backseat. “I looked about like he did. They had to come in and get me, too. Four times. They just kept on throwing my little ass in. I didn’t have the heart to do it to him.”

  “Each generation gets weaker,” Mister Seaborn said.

  “That’s the damn truth,” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  Then Mister Rusty said something that was pretty amazing. “Me and you would’ve fought if you’d throwed him in again.”

  And everything got a little quieter. The ’55 slowed. They passed a guy in the ditch with a garbage bag picking up cans.

  “Is that right?” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Mister Rusty said.

  “Aw-right now, boys,” Mister Seaborn said.

  “He ain’t your kid, Rusty. He’s my kid.”

  “I know whose kid he is. It ain’t right to throw him in like that and him not knowing how to swim. Shit. His heart could have stopped or something. Happens to these kids playing football.”

  Jimmy’s daddy thought it over for a few moments.

  “Yeah, it does,” he finally said. He turned his head briefly to speak to Jimmy. He looked embarrassed. Jimmy didn’t see him look that way very often. He only looked that way whenever he made a mistake.

  “Don’t tell your mama I throwed you in, all right?”

  “No sir, I won’t,” Jimmy said.

  “Raises hell about every damn thing already,” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  Things were quiet for a few more moments. Then Mister Seaborn said, kind of murmured, “Where’s that big lake up here got all them bass in it?”

  Jimmy’s daddy took a drink of his beer.

  “It’s right on up the road here. He won’t let you fish in it, though.”

  “How you know? You done asked him?”

  “Everybody in the country’s asked him.”

  “I heard it’s got some big bass in it,” Mister Seaborn said.

  “Hell yes,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “Crappie, too.”

  “I thought crappie wouldn’t live in a pond,” Mister Seaborn said.

  “This ain’t a pond,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “It’s a lake.”

  “How big?” Mister Seaborn said.

  “About sixty acres,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “It’s a watershed lake. Government built it about three years ago.”

  “We could go down on the river and fish,” Mister Seaborn said.

  “Yeah, if you want to get a bunch of ticks all over you,” Mister Rusty said. “Last time I went down there I come back with about fifty on me. Them little bitty ones? Them deer ticks?”

  “That’s the ones carries that Lyme disease,” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  “That’s right,” Mister Seaborn said. “I saw it on TV.”

 
Mister Rusty said, “My uncle when he was in World War II was in a infantry company in Texas somewhere and they went out on a bivouac one night and he set his pup tent or whatever it was up in a big grove of pine trees and he got so many ticks on him he even had one go up inside his dick.”

  “Ummmhhhhh!” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  “Sheeeit!” Mister Seaborn said.

  “Hell yeah. Doctor had to take some tweezers and go up in there and get it. He said he like to shit on his self.”

  They shuddered some more and they all took a drink of their beer and Jimmy just sat in the back on the wet towel and listened to them. He didn’t ask any questions or try to interrupt whenever they were talking because he was so well trained about how to act around grown-ups. He could sit there for hours while grown-ups were talking and never say a word. Which is what he did again, riding in the backseat while they kept drinking beer, his wet swimming suit getting colder as the sun went down.

  But he was also glad to be alive, and counted himself as very lucky, so he didn’t say anything about being cold. He didn’t ask them to roll up the windows. It seemed a small price to pay and eventually they’d go back home. There were plenty more hot dogs at home. If Evelyn and Velma hadn’t eaten all of them already. Evelyn could eat about six by herself. Raw.

  23

  […] Out in the barn, there wasn’t any light at all except for a kerosene lantern that was hanging by a piece of coat-hanger wire over a wobbly table that held a tray with tools and things, and Cortez Sharp’s gun. He was cleaning it. He’d had it a long time. It still worked fine. He shot it only a few times a year since it made so much noise. Plus he didn’t want anybody to know he had it because he was pretty sure it was still illegal for him to have it. He didn’t want anybody coming over and trying to take it away from him. Somebody would play hell doing that. If there was more than one of them there’d be more than one would play hell.

  The wind had stopped sighing through the cracks with the coming of dark. He raised his head from his work and listened, seated at the little table, the faint chirping of crickets leaking through the plank walls. Everything was singing tonight after the rain, frogs in the trees and frogs in the creek, frogs in the grass and frogs in the gravel. And the air smelled different. On it floated all kinds of scents, cow shit and green clover and dried hay from up in the loft and old fertilizer stacked in damp bags in darkened corners and burned oil saved for keeping in milk jugs on the floor of the barn.

  Cortez liked cleaning his gun. He cleaned it three times a year whether it needed it or not, and it never had let him down. Never had jammed, never had rusted, never had misfired, never had gotten so hot it cooked off a round in the chamber, never had done anything but exactly what Mister Thompson had designed it to do: shoot and shoot some more.

  He wished he could shoot it tonight. Boy, he wished he could shoot it tonight. It would be a good night to shoot it if it wasn’t so dark you couldn’t see anything. If it wasn’t so loud it would probably wake her up. If she was asleep. He hoped she was. She didn’t sleep much. Moaned when she did. Like she was having bad dreams. She probably was. They were probably about Raif. He hoped his were over. About him. They seemed to be. He hadn’t had one in a long time.

  He picked up a gun rag from the tray. It was soft with the grease and oil that had soaked into it over the years and it was limper than a dish-rag. He picked up a small plastic squeeze bottle of Remington Rem Oil and squeezed some of it onto the cloth. He also had a spray can of Rusty Duck Premium Gun Action Cleaner. He also had a spray can of Birch-wood Casey Gun Scrubber. Some folks would put WD-40 on a gun but not him. Oh, it made one slick and shiny, sure, for a while, but that shit evaporated later and left you without a thin coating of protective oil. Left you high and dry, buddy. That’s when they started rusting. They’d rust right there in the gun cabinet. You had to oil a gun. You had to take care of it. You had to love it. A gun loved oil the way a goat loved a gourd.

  And Cortez loved this one. He’d owned it for so long that he’d developed a deep fondness for it. And who knew? How did you know that one day you wouldn’t be surrounded by government agents with guns intent on taking you away? You didn’t. You didn’t know from one day to the next what the hell was going to happen with the way the country was going now. Hell, look what they’d done in New York City and Washington. Just flew some airplanes right into a bunch of buildings. Killed all them people. Lucinda flew up there and looked at it. He didn’t know why. He didn’t want to look at it. The damn world was crazy and sometimes he was not afraid to know that he was somewhere near the end of his life. Maybe. Hell, who knew? He might make it to a hundred. His granddaddy did. Only had one arm. Lost it at Shiloh. Blind, too. He’d been ninety when Cortez was born and Cortez could remember him sitting in a cane-bottomed chair in front of the fire, spitting his snuff at the edge of the bricks, his long white beard stained with snuff juice. He sat there rubbing the gun with the oily rag, in the little circle of light, with straw scattered around, the air still and laden with the rain and the night things calling out there down by the creek. It had rained more than a couple of inches, and the forecast was for more of the same. That sounded pretty good to him. He thought maybe if it would rain for four or five days in a row, it might fill the pond maybe halfway up. He would have gone over this evening and looked if it hadn’t rained for so long, and if it hadn’t been so muddy. He needed some new ground grips on his truck but he just never had gotten around to getting them put on yet. It didn’t matter. He could walk over through the woods in the morning. Put on his rubber boots. See how deep the water was in it. And he needed to ask Toby sometime when was the next time the big red fish truck was coming. He didn’t want to get behind. He wanted to be there waiting in line when the pond was ready and the fish truck was in town.

  He had a little linseed oil in another can and he unscrewed the metal cap from it and poured some of it on a clean piece of cheesecloth and rubbed some on the stock, sliding the gun across the padded surface of the wobbly table, watching the scratched and dented wood shine under the kerosene lamp. He rubbed some on the fore end as well. Then he put the rag down and pulled the gun over in his lap.

  He opened the bolt and checked the tension on it, watching it slam shut when he let it slip off his finger. The round canister clip was sitting there and he stuck it into the belly of the gun and opened the bolt again, watched the brass-cased slug slide up out of rotation, and he let the bolt slip again, sending one into the chamber. He sat there with it on his lap, pointed up. The muzzle had little grooves cut into the end of it to let the excess gases out. It was just like the ones they used to have on The Untouchables, that old TV show. Eliott Ness. Now that was a good TV show. Not like this stupid shit now. He put it to his shoulder, aimed at a bag of feed, almost touching the trigger. Then he put the safety on and got up with it. Fully loaded.

  He reached up and lifted the kerosene lantern from the coat-hanger hook and used it to light his way to one of the back stalls. His shadow loomed large around him as he walked, throwing scant light into dark corners, the lantern swinging in his hand, the gun heavy with its belly full of lead.

  The harness room had a cobwebbed wooden door and Cortez pushed the sliding latch aside and opened it. He stepped up into a walled box that held leather mule collars, his wife’s old cracked sidesaddle spewing its stuffing, some singletrees hanging by nails from the walls, and an old trunk of the kind people used to haul around on steamships and trains. He knelt and set the lantern down and opened the trunk.

  He started to put the Thompson inside, in the top tray, but then set the gun on the boards of the floor and lifted out the tray instead. It was full of old things: rusted red-and-white bass plugs, a rusted bayonet that was still sharp. He tested its edge with his thumb. Last time he’d used it was to stab a deer to death. Dried blood still showed on the blade. He set it back and looked around in the tray. He always did. There was a small tobacco sack and he lifted it out. The strings that pouched its mo
uth he drew open with his fingers. And reached in. Caught hold of the chain and drew it out, then the locket followed it. His knees were hurting, so he sat down. The white gold glowed dimly in the wavering light from the lantern, and he heard an owl hoot down in the woods. The chain was supple in his fingers. The cool of the metal. Money he’d spent on her himself. At Elliott’s on the square. He didn’t need to open the locket. He didn’t need to look at what was in it again. But he’d known all along that he would. And he did.

  She looked like she always had, smiling stiffly, standing in a South Carolina photographer’s parlor in 1946. Just before she moved here to be with her mother and help her work for Cortez’s mother. Just down the road. At fourteen. He said to himself, I loved a nigger. Damn me but I did.

  Cortez sat there for a long time, silent, studying her image, knowing his wife was probably sitting in her wheelchair in the blue glow of the television, wondering where he was. He closed the locket, stuck it back in its little bag, dropped it back in the tray. And started to set it back in there, and then put the gun away, but he didn’t. He set the tray aside, and reached into the bottom of the trunk, and pulled a folded quilt up out of the way, and pulled out the long robe. It was yellowing now, and starting to rot, and he brought it closer to his nose, and it still smelled faintly of wood smoke. And pine tar. Maybe even blood. He couldn’t tell.

  He looked at the once-white hood, its eyepieces making it a vacant mask. It had been a long time since he’d worn it. And he knew he’d never wear it again. Why then did he keep it around? He didn’t know. Maybe the same reason he kept the locket. To have something to hold on to. A man needed something to hold on to, even in this world today, which had certainly gone straight to hell.

  He sighed, something he hardly ever did. He was hungry and he didn’t know if there was anything good to eat in the house. He could have a peanut butter sandwich he guessed. Or a tomato sandwich. Except he’d fixed one of those for lunch. He could fry some bacon to put on it maybe.