A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  The man behind the counter was watching through the window glass as the car with the two young men left. She watched him put the hammer back down and rest the butt of the gun on the counter beside her beer. His face was intent, peering out the dirty glass past a neon schlitz sign.

  “Raymond,” one of the women said, and nodded her head toward Lucinda. It was only then that the man seemed to remember where he was.

  “Punkass,” he said, and put the gun away under the counter. Then he looked up at Lucinda.

  “Sorry about the language. But them two thiefs right there —”

  “Hush, Raymond,” the woman said. “Don’t you get your blood pressure up. Go on and ring their stuff up.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Lucinda said, since she didn’t know what else to say. She was hoping Albert wouldn’t say anything. And for once he didn’t.

  “Yes’m, let’s see now, where was I?” the man said, and he looked at his machine as if he didn’t know what it was. Then he looked up at Lucinda and pointed toward the window.

  “You see them two fools right there?”

  “Yes sir,” Lucinda said. She could see now that he was older than he looked. There were twinges of gray hair on the side of his head.

  “That one on the left, one I was talking to, that’s my cousin’s boy. Raised in Chicago. Him and that other one, they robbed Mister Jones up here four years ago and beat him with a pistol. Now they done home from the pen and running loose again.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lucinda said.

  “Hell, I don’t know what I’m doing,” the man said, shook his head, and turned away from the register. He went back behind the warmer and somewhere in the back and he didn’t come out again. The woman who had been talking to him walked over to the register and reached up for Lucinda’s cigarettes and handed them to her. She finished ringing their stuff and Albert walked up and looked over her shoulder as she worked. He had opened the pigskins and was eating some, crunching them happily.

  “Albert, I think maybe you’d better come back from around there,” Lucinda said, and pulled a twenty-dollar bill from her front pocket. Her fingers were trembling just a little. The woman must have seen it.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “That’s twelve dollars and forty cents.”

  Lucinda gave her the twenty and Albert took his time wandering out from behind the warmer. The lady gave Lucinda her change and put the beer and Cokes in a paper sack and dropped the pigs’ feet in on top of them. She pushed the sack toward Lucinda.

  “Y’all come back,” she said. “We sorry about the trouble.”

  “Yes ma’am. Thank you,” Lucinda said. “Let’s go, Albert.”

  She got him out the door and back in the car and then locked the doors after she got the car started.

  And late that night, long after supper, long after Albert was asleep beside her, snoring very gently, she was still lying awake, the last empty can on the bedside table, having a cigarette before she turned in.

  She turned on her side and took the last drag from the smoke, then dropped it in the Budweiser can. It made a slight hiss.

  She rolled over onto her back and put out her hand to find Albert’s. It was partially stuck under his leg and she rubbed his thumb with her fingers. He was warm beside her and he smelled very clean. When they got back home they would rent some movies and buy some steaks and cook them on the grill on the patio and they would resume their lives. She would call and check on her daddy often. She wouldn’t lose touch with him the way she had with her mother. She’d been trying to hold it in, but now, with a six-pack in her and Albert sleeping beside her, in a bed she was afraid to make love with him in because she thought her daddy might hear, she began to cry, very softly, shaking the bed gently, not wanting to wake him up, because he was sleeping so peacefully, curled on his side, his fingers clenched in hers.

  […]

  29

  Jimmy was sitting in the dark, out on the trailer steps, listening to the things in the night. There were plenty of them. He’d been trying to catch lightning bugs earlier, but it looked like a lot of them were gone.

  He could sit out there on the steps and be almost hypnotized by the sounds of the crickets in the weeds and the trees, a constant roar of noise after dark that filled him with wonder. He liked sitting out there and listening to that a lot better than sitting in the living room watching TV with the girls and his mama. It looked like all his mama wanted to do these days was watch TV. And eat. She ate all the time. She ate ice cream and hot dogs and pizza she’d brought from town and she ate big sandwiches she made from ham and cheese and baloney and salami and she used thick slices of bread she got somewhere. Large bags of Cheetos. Fritos. Doritos.

  He didn’t know where his daddy was. Off somewhere was all.

  He stayed gone a lot at night. Even on the weeknights. And Jimmy couldn’t help but wish his daddy would stay home a little more. It was kind of comforting to know that he was home, even if he was back in his room watching his hunting videos. At least you knew he was home. When he wasn’t home, it didn’t feel right. And he thought that was why his mama just ate and ate. And sometimes cried and cried. But he didn’t ask.

  You could hear a car coming down the gravel road he lived on for a long time before it got here. And he’d been listening for the sound of his daddy’s car. The sound traveled a long way at night. From here he could hear a car down on the levee crossing the three bridges, because there was something about the tires rolling over the joints that made a distinctive noise. Once you heard it you couldn’t mistake it for something else. Two cars had come down the gravel road since he’d been sitting out here, but neither one of them had been his daddy’s.

  He decided he’d just sit here and wait on him. He knew it might take a long time. But he didn’t really have anything else to do, with the go-kart chain all messed up. He hadn’t asked his daddy about fixing it anymore. It was plain his daddy didn’t want to mess with it. But he wished he would. He wished he’d fix it for him so he could run it a little more before he had to start back to school next week.

  And he didn’t know if they were going to get to go see Kenny Chesney in concert in Tupelo or not. He’d asked his mama, and his mama had said she was afraid they couldn’t afford it. He wished they could. He’d give anything to see Kenny Chesney. He’d asked his mother why they couldn’t afford it, and she’d said for him to ask his daddy. But he wasn’t doing that. Oh no. He’d learned his lessons pretty well by then.

  Then he heard that dead black lady crying again and went on inside.

  30

  Those peas down by the creek took on a growing spurt after the rain fell on them for several days in a row. Their pods started filling out and Cortez took the tractor down there and plowed between the rows with the scratchers, dragging the grass out and turning the caked earth over to fresh brown dirt that piled up nicely against the plants so that his rows when he climbed down from the 4020 and looked at them were nice and straight and clean. He knew it wouldn’t be long now. He mowed his yard.

  Two days after Lucinda left he got in his truck and drove down the Cutoff road and looked at the trailer where those people lived. He didn’t see anybody outside except a little girl who was sitting on the trailer steps reading a book. She was a strange-looking child, he thought, a long purple dress and some crazy glasses. When he passed she looked up and waved. He didn’t wave back. He guessed she was that little boy’s sister. He wondered what that little boy’s name was. Then he went on down the road into the creek bottom and over the bridge on the other side of where Queen used to live. He didn’t look at it much anymore, but he used to go and sit down on the cracked linoleum inside it and cry. It was just rotted wood and rusted tin, what was left of it. He still owned it.

  He slowed and turned off onto a field road just past there and eased the truck down a slight incline and drove around the edge of the cotton that had been planted there and around the curve of the creek where cane was growing. He slowed to a cra
wl and looked. He wanted some that wasn’t too tall. Some of this was tall enough to use for set hooks. A long time ago he used to bring Lucinda down here to help him cut bean poles for the garden. He’d noticed she took a whole sack full of tomatoes back home.

  He could remember when they cleared this patch of land. It was back in the forties sometime, he thought. A crew had come in and cut the trees and snaked the logs out with mules, and people had come from miles around to get the limbs that were left for firewood, thousands of them, all piled up everywhere.

  He drove on around the curve of the creek and then he was out of sight of the road. There was a patch of smaller cane back there and he drove up beside it and stopped the truck. It was still a little muddy, but he didn’t think he’d get stuck. He shut the truck off and got out and left the door open. He had a sharp machete in the back end and he reached in for his gloves and put them on, then grabbed the machete. The trick with cane was to cut it at an angle with something sharp, in one whack, which would give you a pointed end that was easy to stick into the ground or the bank of the river, depending on what you were using it for.

  The sun was hot and the humidity was up again, but it didn’t take him long to cut twenty canes about eight feet high and whack off the leaves, put them in the back end of his truck. He let the tailgate down and fixed the two chains to it. He wouldn’t be going very fast. He never did.

  After he finished he tossed the gloves and the machete back there again and pulled his water jug from its resting place in the floorboard and opened the drinking spout. He took a long drink of ice water and sat there for a few minutes, wiping a little sweat off his forehead, listening to the water running in the creek, watching red-winged blackbirds flitting about. He saw a hawk circling out over the field and he watched it turn and flare the undersides of its wings, rising on a thermal until it went out of sight beyond the tree line. He took another drink of water and then got back in the truck and left.

  The next day he took the canes and went down to the pea patch and looked at all the tracks and the peas that had already been eaten, even though they weren’t quite ready. There were some little bitty tracks in there, too. Well. They weren’t cute when they were eating your peas. They’d get their little asses shot, too.

  He started sticking the canes into the ground, standing them up straight and gripping them hard with his hands and pushing them into the soft earth as deeply as he could get them, twisting them, making sure they would stand on their own. He put them in a circle about six or seven feet wide. When he finished that he pulled an old tarp from the back end of the truck and then stood up on the tailgate and draped it over the canes so that it resembled an Indian teepee sort of. He left an opening in the front and then duct-taped it in place. He placed a straight-backed chair inside it. Then he stepped back and looked at it. Shit, you could live in it.

  When he got home he went out in the garden and picked a five-gallon bucket full of tomatoes and threw some bad ones over the fence. He took the fresh tomatoes to the rickety table that was sitting under the chinaberry tree and set them out, not letting them touch each other, and then he picked through the ones on the table that were getting soft on the bottom and tossed them over the fence. More tomatoes than he knew what to do with. If those kids down the road hadn’t pissed him off messing around his pond he might have taken some down there and offered them to them. He stood there looking at the tomatoes. They were perfect, fat, beautiful. Nobody to eat them but him. He looked up at the tree. Did he miss his wife? He shook his head. No. Not yet. Would he ever? Who knew?

  Then he had to go cut his okra. It had been a few days since he’d been down the rows and some of it was too big to eat. These big ones he just cut off and left on the ground, but the young and tender pods he put in a small bucket that he kept hanging out there and took a few dozen of them into the house and set them on the kitchen table. It was cool in the house and very quiet. He looked at his watch. It was five o’clock. He needed to water the heifers before he ate supper. Get done with everything and then he could wash his hands and eat.

  He pushed open the screen door and walked across the yard under the big pecans and across the driveway and up to the heifer pen. He turned on the water hydrant. The hose was already in the watering tank and he looked at it to make sure it wasn’t going to kick itself out of the tank from the pressure. Sometimes it did.

  He stood there holding on to the wire at the top of the fence and looked at the heifers. He had fourteen of them in there and they were fat and fine. They’d been riding each other and he guessed he’d turn them in with one of his bulls before long. September October November December January February March April May, they’d calve in May. Good. He didn’t like to have to deliver calves in February or January when it was so rainy and cold. He’d gotten too old for that shit. Especially at night.

  He noticed that their salt block had gotten worn down to a nub and he went over to the barn and got a fresh one and set it down and unlatched the gate and carried it in and put it in the feed trough. Some of the heifers had come up to the watering tank and were drinking from it. They lifted their shiny muzzles, water dripping from them. There was an old apple tree out there that they used for shade, but they’d just about worn all the bark off it rubbing their hides against it. It looked like it was going to die and he didn’t know what they’d do for shade then. He guessed he could open that stall in the barn back up and let them in there. It beat nothing. They needed some shade in this sun.

  “Sook, baby, sook,” he said, and then he went on back to the house. There was still plenty of ham left and he got some of it out and found some bread and a plate and made a sandwich and poured himself a glass of cold milk and carried it all into the room where his wife used to watch TV. He sat down and put his milk on the side table and bit into his sandwich, then lowered it to his lap. The TV remote was lying there and he reached and got it and turned on the TV. News. He didn’t know how to operate the thing very well, but he could learn. One thing he’d found out over the last few nights was that there was a station or two that showed movies of people screwing and messing around naked and stuff, and he tried to find one of those, but there didn’t seem to be any of those on right now. He guessed maybe they didn’t show them at a time when kids might see them. Maybe there would be one on later tonight, when he came back. He hoped so. He hadn’t been able to have that dream about those angel girls again and he needed something to look at.

  After he finished eating he decided he’d take a nap before it got dark. Just in case he had to wait a while. But he probably wouldn’t. The dumb sons of bitches would probably be in there as soon as it got dark.

  He stretched out on the daybed and closed his eyes. He didn’t take his shoes off. He could do whatever he wanted to now. Lie on the bed with his shoes on. Watch dirty movies as much as he liked. Maybe he could even get a video machine now and send off for one of those tapes with those college girls showing their bosoms.

  When he woke the sun was going down. He had to hurry. He got up and turned on the porch light, then went out to the barn.

  A fox barked up in the woods and the moon was shining a pale cast over the rows. The creek was whispering as the water surged past the banks. Then they came.

  They were like apparitions that appeared in pieces, unmelting out of the darkness and their feet sometimes making little crunching sounds. They moved slowly, halting to sniff the wind, push their ears in different directions to hear what was around them. Sometimes they snorted or made little grunting sounds in their throats. Deer language. Maybe Ain’t these some fine fat peas? Or My aren’t these juicy pods particularly juicy? The crickets were screaming and the night was warm and the little tree frogs were calling out there, too.

  The deer came almost single file from a wall of cane he would have thought they couldn’t have gotten through. Like ghosts they materialized from the pale night into things that had legs and heads and moved with the rhythms of the woods. Now that his eyes had become adjus
ted to the darkness and his pupils had enlarged, gathering the available light, he could see them very clearly as they entered the patch and lowered their heads and began to feed. The question was always how much to let them feed. He didn’t want to wait until they’d nearly eaten the whole patch, but he wanted more than this before he started shooting, too. He decided he would wait a few minutes and see if more came.

  More did. They started drifting in from the sides and they joined the ones already there and pretty soon their bodies were a solid mass in front of him, the little ones whisking their tails and then he put it to his shoulder and didn’t aim, just pointed, and the red fire began pouring from the barrel and the rounds were chattering through the magazine and they were falling and running and falling and running and kicking on the ground and he kept raking the rows and the gun kept barking, Brupbrupbrupbrupbrupbrupbrupbrupbrupbrupbrupbrupbrupbrupbrupbrup! until he was out of ammo. By then the makeshift teepee was full of smoke.

  He got up from the chair and touched the barrel with the tip of his finger. It was very hot. He pushed aside the flap of tarp and stepped out. Most of them were dead. He didn’t have a flashlight. He didn’t need one. He knew what it would look like. Dead eyes shining into the beam. Blood soaking into the ground between the rows. The hair the bullets had cut lying over everything like cotton lint.

  A few were kicking. They didn’t kick long. Their heaving sides stopped moving and they stretched their necks out on the ground and were still. He wondered if those people up in that trailer had heard the shots. It was early yet. Those kids were out of school for the summer and they might be outside. And then again they might be inside with the TV on.

  When he saw that nothing else was moving he put the safety on and rested the butt of the stock against his hip while he counted them. Nine. Seven big ones and two little ones. He thought a few ran off that were hit. He’d probably see some buzzards circling for them in a few days. Last summer he had an old cow that got down and sick and waded off halfway into the old pond down in the bottom and couldn’t get back out and he didn’t know she was in there until she’d been dead for two or three days, was already swollen up when he found her, and she stank so bad already that instead of tying a log chain around her hind feet and hooking her to the bumper of his truck and dragging her out of there, he just left her, hoping the buzzards would clean her up, and they did. Eventually. Took about a week. He thought even some coyotes tried to get in on the act because he saw tracks all around the edge of the pond.