A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  25

  The movie started at 8:20 in Tupelo and Johnette dropped the girls off in front of the doors at 8:10 with enough money for admission and Cokes and candy and popcorn. They had her cell phone number if something happened. She was parked near the curb and she watched them walk into the lobby of the Malco from the driver’s seat of her Toyota. By 8:29 she was sitting on a bar stool at the Rib Cage downtown, sipping a margarita on the rocks and looking for her date. She didn’t have long since she had to be back at the theater by 10:30 to pick up the girls.

  He came in after she’d been there only a few minutes and sat down next to her. She turned around and smiled at him because she was very glad to see him. And horny? My God.

  “Hey, baby,” he said. “How much time we got?”

  “A little less than two hours,” she said. “I wish it was longer.”

  “It’s long enough on short notice,” he said. “You ready to go?”

  “Sure,” she said, and she picked up the rest of her drink and drained it. He left some money on the bar and took her arm as they went out the door. She’d slipped her wedding ring off. She always did.

  The Trace Inn was just up the road and by 8:55 they were in the room and he was mixing himself a drink. She took her pot and her one-hitter from her purse and slipped into the bathroom and changed into a black negligee in between taking tokes off the one-hitter. It was good weed and she needed to get some more of it.

  He was already under the covers when she came back in, his clothes hanging neatly folded over a chair. They tried to get together about once a month, but it didn’t always work out. Other shit sometimes interfered.

  The TV was going, but they didn’t watch much of it since it was only showing the war. After a while he turned over and set his drink on the table and reached for her. She pulled him on top of her.

  They went at it hard for about an hour and did a little of everything, made her come three times and scream. After that they rested. He’d been trying to talk her into taking a trip with him, but she’d already told him that she couldn’t pull that off, that it was hard enough just to meet him in Tupelo or Oxford once in a while.

  She got up and went to the bathroom while he fixed himself another drink. When she came back in and started putting on her clothes he was already dressed and standing there sipping from his blue Solo cup.

  “I got to run,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “I do, too.”

  He put the room key and the money on the bedside table and then walked over to her and kissed her.

  “Call me when you can,” he said.

  “I will,” she said, and he went out the door.

  She sat on the bed and looked at the money. Then she reached out and picked it up. Six fifties. Always the same. Always pinned together neatly with a regular paper clip. He always said it was just some money to help her out. She’d gotten used to taking it. And God knows she needed it. She stuck it down in her purse.

  […]

  26

  Cortez Sharp slept with his dead wife that night. Not in a literal sense. Not in a figurative sense. In an actual sense. He cut off the lights and curled up on the daybed without his supper, beside her where she had stiffened in her wheelchair, and took off his brogans, drew his knees not quite up to his chest, pulled the little worn bedspread over him, and tried to sleep. But it didn’t work. There were too many things going through his mind. One was, what if a doctor looked at her and said she’d been dead longer than what Cortez was going to say when he called them in the morning and what would happen if he did? Another thing was, when was he going to call Lucinda and tell her she was dead? He couldn’t call her tonight. It was late. She was probably already asleep. He didn’t want to wake her up with bad news. He knew what she’d have to do. She’d have to get up and call in and take a day off work and pack and drive over to that airport she lived close to and stand in line and buy a ticket and fly to Memphis and rent a car, buy some gas, get out of Memphis, drive all the way down here, bring some clothes for a funeral or enough to stay a day or two, and she’d probably bring that retarded guy with her. He was probably one big mess when you had to take him somewhere. Cussing and all. And they’d have luggage. Shitloads of luggage. He didn’t know why they needed so much luggage. Most of it looked like it was made out of brown alligators. And they’d probably have to sleep in there in Raif’s room again like they did the last time they were here. And he didn’t have any idea how long it had been since the sheets had been changed on that bed. He guessed the last time they were here. And when was that? Was it last Christmas? He couldn’t remember. It seemed like she’d been here since Christmas. But when was it? Had she been here this year? Yes. Had she been here since it got hot? No. Had she been here when it was cold? Yes. Had it been raining? Yes. Was it March? No. Was it February? Maybe. It might have been. But what would she have been doing here in February? She didn’t come for Valentine’s, did she? Maybe she did. She usually only came at Christmas. She used to come at Thanksgiving. But it had been three or four years since she’d done that, come for Thanksgiving.

  He couldn’t remember when she’d been here. It had been a long time since the sheets had been changed anyway. Maybe he needed to go in there and do that. But not right now. Hell no. He wasn’t going to get up in the middle of the night just to make up a bed. No way. He had to lie here and figure out what in the hell he was going to do.

  And what the hell was he going to say to Lucinda about when she’d died? What if the doctor looked at her and then Lucinda talked to the doctor? Well, he’d just say he didn’t know she’d been dead that long, that he’d been out in the garden that afternoon working and that he’d gone in a few times for a drink of water and heard the TV running, which told him that she was still alive, and he hadn’t actually checked on her, had just figured she was all right, and that later on he’d been out in the barn piddling around — he wouldn’t say anything about the machine gun because he didn’t want her to know about it or the Klan robes — and that he just hadn’t known she was dead and had gone on to bed. Would she believe that? What if she didn’t? What if she asked him point-blank if her mama was dead when she was talking to him that night on the phone, what would he say then, would he lie, would he tell the truth, what would he do? He probably couldn’t tell the truth, hell, no. That wouldn’t work. She’d have a screaming damn fit if he told her that shit. He’d just have to think of something before then.

  But that was really nothing new. He’d had to think of things before. Sometimes pretty fast. Like a long time ago when he’d screwed that woman down the road in the barn one afternoon in hot weather and another woman had come walking by and heard them and walked over and looked through a crack in the barn and had gasped and gone on up the road to probably blab it up at the store. He’d gotten rid of the first woman in a hurry and had gone over to the house and gotten his wife and carried her over to the barn and laid her down on some bales of freshly baled fescue hay and screwed her, too, right away, so that later on, if the woman who had been walking down the road and had peeked through the cracks told Cortez’s wife that she’d seen him screwing somebody in his barn, his wife could just cackle and flap her hand and say, “Oh, silly goose, that was me, Cortez wanted him some in the middle of the day and we did it in the barn, hee hee!” Cortez didn’t have STUPID written on his forehead.

  He was going to have to go to the funeral home and pick out a casket, make arrangements; the grave would have to be dug. He’d have to do all that tomorrow. People would start finding out about it. They’d start calling over here. All her old biddy friends. He’d have to talk to all them. They’d be crying and stuff. It wouldn’t be any fun. It’d be pretty unfun. He dreaded all that shit.

  Then there would be people over here at the house. They’d bring food. They’d put the food on the kitchen table and the whole house would fill up with people and they’d sit and talk and eat and cry and tell fishing stories and stories about his wife and they’d sit on
the furniture and leave napkins on the floor and chicken bones on plates in the kitchen and he’d have to clean all that shit up and take out a couple of bags of garbage and maybe sweep the chicken crumbs off the floor.

  He wondered how much the funeral was going to cost. Probably a pretty good bit. It seemed like he had a funeral policy, but he didn’t know where in the hell it was. He’d have to start looking through the drawers and try to find it. He didn’t know how much it was worth. Probably not much.

  He lay there and looked at her. He could remember when her hair was brown. Her remembered one time when they’d gone swimming at night, naked, down on the shoals of the river. They were very young then. They hadn’t been married long. She wasn’t pregnant with Raif yet. He remembered how she had wandered naked along the banks of the river, getting mud on her feet and laughing, and then how they had lain down on a quilt they’d packed, and had screwed right there on the clean white sand of the river with the frogs calling and the crickets screaming, so loud it almost hurt your ears. That was a long time ago. Everything now for him was a long time ago.

  He was awful hungry. He wasn’t used to going to bed without his supper. He hadn’t done that since he was a little boy, one time when there wasn’t any supper, and he still knew what that felt like. It was a scary feeling. His daddy had been gone to the lumber camp working and he hadn’t come home with any money and his mother hadn’t been able to find anything to fix for their supper. She’d gone out with the rifle that evening and tried to kill some squirrels, but she came back empty handed and said they were too wild, that she hadn’t been able to slip up on any of them, and had cried for a while in front of the hearth, with the old man sitting there supperless, too, with his empty sleeve pinned up, and then they’d just gone to bed. When he woke up the next morning it was to the smell of fresh pork tenderloin frying on the woodstove and his daddy had been there and there was coffee brewing and everything had been okay. He’d gotten up and eaten the brown eggs his daddy had bought on the way home, that his mother had fried in lard in a black iron skillet. The man his daddy had been riding with had gotten the wagon stuck in a mud hole because he was drunk and his daddy had gotten down from the wagon and walked the rest of the way home. He had started walking at midnight and he had walked for the rest of the night and had come out the woods down the hill just as day was breaking, carrying the food, his heavy leather boots wet from the dew. That was in the log house, the one his daddy had built from pine logs he’d dropped in the forest with an ax and hauled out with mules and a log chain and a pair of snaking tongs and had set them up in what would become the front yard and had hewed them flat on their sides with an adze and had notched them and laid them together on the corners and had raised the walls with a block and tackle and the mules, and other men, bit by bit, and Cortez could remember how the woods almost steamed on summer mornings with the dew melting off the leaves and the birds calling and the squirrels jumping from limb to limb. The smoke from cooking fires, washing fires.

  Back then when people died the women fixed up the bodies and they took down a door and laid the body on it and everybody came over that night and hung around and ate and then the next day the preacher came over and they brought a plank coffin and put the person in it and loaded the person into a wagon and hauled the person over to the graveyard and they had a simple service and then went home.

  But it wasn’t like that now. Now you had to mess with all these people. You had to make all these decisions. And should he wait for Lucinda to get here before he made all those decisions? What if he went ahead and made all the decisions and then she got here and didn’t like any of them? He didn’t want to have to fuss with her on top of everything else.

  Thinking about all that made his head hurt, so he stopped thinking about it. He just lay there in the dark beside her, looking at her, not knowing what else to do. He didn’t want to be doing this but he didn’t know what else he could do. So he just lay there. Waiting. For what he did not know. Enlightenment, maybe. The hand of God. A tomato sandwich. But it seemed too dark to venture toward the kitchen. So he just stayed where he was. Curled up on the daybed.

  He guessed he’d have to get used to being alone now. But it seemed like he’d been pretty much alone ever since Lucinda moved to Atlanta. And how many years had that been? About fifteen, probably. He could count on his fingers and toes all the times she’d been home since then. And it was fine whenever she came home by herself. But then she started bringing that dirty-mouth retard with her, and that made things different. He didn’t feel comfortable sitting around talking about his tomatoes in front of somebody like him. Who was sleeping in the same bed with his daughter. And mostly they just sat around and watched TV. And he didn’t care anything about that. They never showed The Untouchables anymore, hadn’t for years.

  He started to get up and get his flashlight and go out to the barn and get his gun and just shoot it. Just shoot it for the hell of it. Just to listen to it. Just to feel it kick. But what good would that do? He’d just have to come right back in here and lie down beside her again.

  Maybe he ought to just call the funeral home now. They probably had somebody who sat up and took calls at night. Somebody who was just sitting in a chair waiting for the phone to ring and say that there was somebody dead somewhere who needed to be brought to the funeral home. But the more he thought about that, about calling them now, the more he worried about what they were going to say about her being so stiff and dead for so long. What could he say? Could he say that he’d found her sometime this afternoon and just couldn’t bring himself to call until now? Would they buy that? They might. He hadn’t done anything criminal. Not to his wife anyway.

  He could hear the chains on the swing on the front porch creaking. But why? Why would they be rattling? It was probably Queen. She hadn’t been around in a while, but maybe now she was going to come back. Make him pay some more. Stand out there and rattle the chains on the swing and moan through the windows again. His wife never had heard it. Or claimed she hadn’t. He’d asked her about it a couple of times, had asked her the next morning several times if she’d heard anything during the night, when he had, and she’d said no, she hadn’t. Maybe he was the only one who could hear it. Maybe he was the only one meant to hear it.

  Shit. He’d just call them early in the morning. Tell them he hadn’t been able to do it last night, and what would it matter anyway? There was plenty of time. But he had to call Lucinda. That was the thing he was dreading the most. Telling her. She was probably going to take it hard, even though she and her mother hadn’t been that close. Not in these last years.

  Boy. It looked like stuff could go right in your life, but a lot of times it didn’t. He wondered if it was like that for everybody. Probably so. It was probably tough for everybody. Even those people down the road in the trailer. What was it going to hurt if those kids came on his land? Would it hurt one thing? Probably not.

  And then he thought about the pond. About the rain that had fallen into it. He was dying to know how much water it had in it.

  So he got up. He didn’t turn the light on in there. He went up the hall and turned the light on out there and got his rubber boots from the closet and found his flashlight and turned the porch light on and went out, through the front yard, up the hill toward the new pond. Lighting his dim yellow way. The little hidden wet frogs cheeping. His boots slurping in the fresh mud. A big cow bawling to a little cow baby and a hoot owl hooting harmony backup, Hoot hoot, who, who?

  27

  Jimmy’s daddy was standing at the vending machine getting his lunch since he hadn’t gotten up early enough to fix a baloney sandwich, which is what he sometimes had. He’d noticed that lots of people at the plant ate baloney. Sometimes Vienna sausage and crackers. Or sardines and crackers. Potted meat and crackers. You had to switch it up so you didn’t get burned out like a dog eating the same kind of dog food 365 days a year. […] He was about to go sit down with Seaborn and some guys from the Tool-and-Die De
partment when the new girl down on the line walked in with two other girls, both of them kind of short and to his way of thinking dumpy. He’d heard that one of them had given somebody a blow job in the parking lot one day, which was pretty interesting, but he didn’t know which one since they looked pretty similar.

  He tried not to stare at them, so he just kind of watched them out the corner of his eye to see where they were going to sit while he was digging his change out of his pocket. The break room was pretty filled up with people, but there were always a few open tables, since they’d expanded it. It looked like they were heading toward the back. Jimmy’s daddy got out some quarters and dimes and shoved some of them into the machine and punched R6 for a small can of Castleberry’s chili, and he watched a metal arm slowly push it off a shelf, where it rattled down through the machine and hit a little door at the bottom. Jimmy’s daddy reached in and got it. He ate it pretty often, since it was easy and quick, which helped him smoke a few more cigarettes before he had to get back to work. […]

  He couldn’t remember how many times he’d begged his mama to make him some chili. But she wouldn’t do it. She always said she didn’t know how to make it. Then she’d make some more of that fucking meat loaf. Shit. He could think about it now and almost get indigestion.

  He leaned to one side and looked past Hootie Pearson, who always had a baloney-and-cheese sandwich that he had to microwave, to see if he could see where that big-tittied heifer and her buddies were sitting. He couldn’t see them. Maybe they were behind the Coke machine. Sometimes some of the girls and women sat back there and grouped up and gossiped.

  He wished the damn line would hurry up. He looked to see who was up front. It was Garson, who worked down on the line, had some glasses that looked like they were about half an inch thick, and he was evidently roasting his lunch, because the microwave had been running for about a minute at least, because that was how long he’d been standing in line, he figured. He looked toward the back of the break room again and just then saw the new girl walk across the room, throw something in the garbage, and walk back. She was wearing a tight light blue T-shirt with LYNYRD SKYNYRD written across the front of it and he didn’t know they still had a band. He got a pretty good look at her breastworks as she made her way back to the table. Then, while he was watching her, not noticing that Garson had gotten his turkey pot pie from the microwave steaming hot and had turned away with it, carrying it on a pot holder he had evidently brought from home, and let the next guy up to the microwave, which caused Hootie to take another few steps forward, leaving a gap between himself and Jimmy’s daddy, she turned and looked straight at Jimmy’s daddy and gave him a look that was definitely not friendly. It was actually a look that let Jimmy’s daddy know that she knew he was looking at her breasts when she caught him. She stared coldly at him for a few seconds while she was walking and then disappeared back behind the Coke machine.