A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  […]

  Jimmy’s daddy punched in at 6:59 and saw Collums eyeing him when he walked into the Maintenance Department, which had a big table with a lot of disassembled tools and loose nuts and bolts and welding rags and rods lying on it, and a bunch of metal cabinets hung on the walls with tools in them, air hoses, work lights, air wrenches, and a cleared space on the grease-soaked concrete floor for parking Towmotors that needed work. And they all needed work. Just about every day. Because every one of them was a piece of shit. Because the company wouldn’t get any new ones and just kept buying parts for whatever tore up on them, and getting Collums and Jimmy’s daddy and a few other guys who worked in Maintenance to fix them. It got old. Crawling around on the floor.

  “What’s up?” Jimmy’s daddy said to Collums, who was sitting on an upturned five-gallon plastic bucket, sipping a smoking cup of coffee.

  “You look like you had a rough night,” Collums said. “And the damn toilet in the ladies’ pisser’s stopped up again. So you better get on up there and fix it.”

  “Aw shit,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “I done fixed that son of a bitch eight times already.” Well, he’d unplugged it eight times anyway.

  Collums sat there sipping his coffee in what looked like utter comfort. He brought it from home every morning, piping hot, and sat there sipping it, and it never failed to chap Jimmy’s daddy’s ass. And the son of a bitch never offered him any either. Like right now, Jimmy’s daddy couldn’t think of any one thing that would be better than a hot cup of coffee, but do you think the son of a bitch would offer him any? Hell no. Stingy bastard.

  “I think they using the wrong kind of toilet paper in it,” Collums said. “I thought toilet paper was toilet paper,” Jimmy’s daddy said, wondering if there was any way he could sneak into the break room for a cup of that watered-down coffee that was sold from a machine. And then he stopped thinking about it. He knew there was no way he could because somebody would see him and nobody was supposed to be in the break room unless it was break time except for the people who took care of the break room, swept it up, emptied the trash cans, wiped off the tables, emptied the ashtrays. He’d bet they snuck a cup of coffee sometimes. Lucky bastards.

  And how did Collums get away with sitting on his ass on a five-gallon bucket and sipping coffee after 7 a.m.? That was easy. They were scared to make him mad. Afraid he’d quit. The people in the front office wouldn’t say shit to him. They needed him too badly. And the plant manager knew it, too. Even he wouldn’t say anything to Collums. But it looked like the son of a bitch could at least offer Jimmy’s daddy a little coffee.

  But he didn’t. So Jimmy’s daddy grabbed his tool pouch and a pipe wrench in case he needed it — he didn’t know why he would, but it might be better to take it just in case — and a rubber plunger and headed down the aisle toward the assembly line, first past the Spot-Welding Department and then the Porcelain Department, where Lacey worked, and hoped maybe she’d have her back turned when he walked by.

  And she did. She was spraying a stove liner with liquid porcelain. She had her mask on and she had her right arm raised holding the spray gun and the liners were coming by her on hooks and she was concentrating on what she was doing. That was real good. That was terrific. He had no time to talk. Up ahead he could see the brightly lit cavern of the two assembly lines, where the stoves were built up from the porcelain-coated liners. Then the insulation was wrapped around them. Then wires were put in. Hinges. Handles. Heating elements. Thermostats. Dials. Broiler pans. Each person stood there all day on the concrete and put one or two things on the stove and sent it on down the line, where somebody kept doing something to it until it was all pretty and new and finished and ready to be boxed up by the people holding the glue guns down on the very end, who rolled them down a little ramp to a waiting pallet, where eventually somebody on a forklift would come to get it and all the others and store them in the warehouse on the other side of the tall block wall until they were put into trailers by people in the Shipping Department. Some days they made hoods. Some days they made self-cleaning double ovens, some days non-self-cleaning single ovens. Nobody seemed to know why they built what they built on any given day. It all came down from the front office through some mysterious process. Jimmy’s daddy knew he could have run the whole thing if they would just let him. But of course they wouldn’t.

  Here was going to be the tricky part, turning the corner, going right, and walking down the side of the first line, right past the edge of the Porcelain Department, where if Lacey was looking up for the six or seven seconds he’d be in sight, headed to the stairs to the women’s bathroom, she’d see him going by with his bag of tools and his plunger and his pipe wrench. And the big question was, Should he turn his head and see if she was seeing him? Or should he just ignore her and walk on past? What if he turned and looked at her and just waved and kept going? There wouldn’t be anything she could do about it because the liners were coming through and she couldn’t stop what they were doing because somebody on the other end was loading them onto the hooks from a long rolling cart that held about twenty of them, with some more lined up behind it. And they’d keep coming until the baking booth was full of them.

  He got closer and he could begin to see all the people scattered up and down the line, men and women, old and young, pleasant and skanky, dark hair and gray, spectacled and unspectacled, fat and skinny, all shapes and sizes. They were all busy working and some of them were wearing safety glasses that were just cheap plastic things like you wear to run a Weed Eater. The line was rolling slowly along and a boy on a forklift was lowering a long pallet of insulation to the end of the line where the workers were wearing gloves against the itch of the rock wool they were wrapping around the stove liners. The foreman was walking around and smoking a cigar, his tiny desk set up in the middle of all the bustle, air hoses hanging from the ceiling, and the noise: clanking and whirring and talking and shouting and laughing, the high whine of the air wrenches and the hundred little zipzipzips of screws going into stoves destined for the kitchens of America. […]

  He went on down the aisle beside the assembly line and over to the metal stairs that led up to the second floor and clanged on up there. He stopped outside the door. He couldn’t just barge in. He had to wait for a woman to come out or a woman to head in. If one was coming out he’d have to ask her if anybody else was in there and if one was going in he’d have to ask her when she came out if anybody else was in there. Then after he’d made sure there were no women in there, he’d have to prop the door open with a MAINTENANCE WORKING sign that was stored in the broom closet just around the corner. He went and got the sign and then he stood at the rail overlooking the assembly line while he waited. He could see all of the line from here, and there were eighty or ninety people working down there. He could see the edge of the Porcelain Department but not the spot where Lacey was standing since it was hidden by the baking booth.

  He stood up there for a long time. If he didn’t fix the damn thing pretty quick and get on back, Collums would say something about him taking so long. He was about tired of Collums’s shit. He was damn sure tired of fixing those ragged-ass Towmotors all the time. One of them had gotten in such bad shape that it wouldn’t even think about cranking without a shot of ether in the mornings, like an old man needing a shot of whisky.

  He went over to the door of the bathroom and knocked on it with his knuckles, but it was made of metal and hurt his knuckles, so he stopped. Well shit. He guessed he might as well have a cigarette while he was waiting. Somebody would have to take a piss sooner or later. If Collums said something to him about it taking so long to fix the toilet, he’d just say, Well, Collums, I can’t make em piss, you know. That’d shut his ass up.

  Jimmy’s daddy lit a cigarette and stood there at the rail smoking it. He wondered if the Shipping Department boys had any coffee back there. They had a nice big office with a desk and a couple of chairs and even a radio and they had some big glass windows and he woul
dn’t be surprised at all if the foreman had a little private Mr. Coffee or something back there. It wouldn’t take him two minutes to walk back there and see.

  Nah. He’d better wait. Some woman might come up the stairs at any minute. Or out the door at any minute. Then he got to wondering how a woman down there on the line took a piss without getting behind on all her stoves. Did she get somebody to cover for her, do her job as well as theirs while she went to the bathroom? Did the foreman take over for her? Maybe he did. Hell, he probably knew every assembly procedure on the line. Kind of like one of those orchestra conductors who has to be able to play every instrument in the orchestra before he can conduct it. Jimmy’s daddy figured it was the same kind of deal: orchestra, factory.

  He looked at his watch. He’d already been at work for twelve minutes. Break wasn’t until nine thirty. What he was going to do was kind of ease away from whatever he was doing about a minute before break and be somewhere poised to bolt out the door and into the break room and hopefully be the first one in line to put some money in the coffee machine, sip it, have a few cigarettes, maybe a sausage and biscuit if that new machine had any. Maybe what he could do was be the first in line at the coffee machine, put his money in, punch the buttons for the kind of coffee he wanted, with cream and sugar, extra sugar, extra creamer, wait until the cup rattled down, then rush over to the new sandwich machine and put the money in and push the buttons for a sausage and biscuit, get it out, then rush back to the coffee machine in time to take his cup out. But then he’d probably have to microwave the sausage and biscuit because all that shit in the sandwich machine was cold. He damn sure didn’t want a salad for his morning break. And he damn sure wasn’t going to drink any beer this afternoon when he got off. He saw where that shit got him.

  And too he had to figure out what he was going to tell Johnette about where he’d been last night for all that time. Missed supper again. He could say he was out with Seaborn, he guessed. Or he could just say he’d been riding around. For about seven and a half hours. Was that believable? Or would she call bullshit on him? Hell. He could say he’d been down to the VFW in Calhoun County drinking beer. Since she didn’t know anybody down there, there was no way she could check to see if he was lying. Or hell. Maybe she didn’t give a shit where he’d been.

  […]

  Then Jimmy’s daddy heard some feet on the metal stairs and he turned around to see who it was, hoping it wasn’t Lacey. It was Lacey. Her head rose vertically as she climbed the last step and she was already grinning. He figured she’d seen him walk by.

  Jimmy’s daddy flicked the ashes off the end of his cigarette and leaned against the rail. She walked up next to him and stopped.

  “Well hey,” she said. She looked like she had more than a little makeup on. A different color lipstick. She was wearing a pretty nice blouse and pants outfit, too. He wondered if she had done this for him.

  “Hey,” he said. “How you?”

  “Pretty good.” She looked out over the line and then looked back at him. Then she lowered her voice as if someone were listening. “I sure did enjoy last night. Damn, baby.”

  “Me too,” Jimmy’s daddy said. He glanced around. Nervous.

  “When you coming back?” she said. She was looking up at him and he could remember what she’d done with that mouth. […]

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t get in till one.”

  “You didn’t get in no trouble, did you?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t talk to her yet.”

  “What you gonna tell her?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out before I get home, I guess.”

  She was looking up at him with some kind of shine in her eyes. She looked damn near delirious with happiness.

  “What you doing?” she said. “I seen you walk by.”

  “I got to go in here and fix the toilet,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “I been waiting on somebody to come by. How bout going in and see if they’s any women in there for me?”

  “Okay. How you gonna fix it?” she said, still smiling.

  He lifted his plunger.

  “I’m gonna plunge it,” he said. “That’s what I usually do. I done fixed this son of a bitch eight times.”

  “They’s one in there that’s always stopped up.”

  “That’s the one I’m gonna fix.”

  Jimmy’s daddy took a last pull on his cigarette and then dropped it on the concrete and stepped on it. Then he looked up at her. She was still watching him and smiling, and it began to dawn on Jimmy’s daddy to wonder if she was going goofy over him. He hoped to God she wasn’t going to ask him to eat lunch with her. In front of everybody.

  “You want to eat lunch with me?” she said.

  And Jimmy’s daddy just lied right off the top of his head because he didn’t want to. He didn’t even know if he wanted to go back to Water Valley anymore if he had to put up with this shit at work.

  “Aw well, naw, I got to run to town on my lunch break.”

  He didn’t know why he said that. He never went to town on his lunch break, even though they were very close to town. They were down on Old Taylor Road, which wasn’t far from the bypass that went around Oxford. You could be on the square in five minutes if the traffic wasn’t bad. But it was hard to get something to eat in town and then have time to eat it in only thirty minutes. And if the traffic was bad, you might be screwed. You might be late punching back in. And you didn’t want to do that. They frowned on that big-time. They might even say something to you. Shit. They probably would say something to you.

  “Oh yeah?” she said. She looked a little defeated, and nodded a few times, but then she looked at him again with a brave smile.

  “What you got to go to town for?”

  “Parts,” he said, not thinking, just any bullshit he could feed her.

  “I like that fifty-five,” she said. “My brother had a fifty-six and people always thought it was a fifty-five. I don’t know how many times he had to tell somebody it was a fifty-six instead of a fifty-five cause you know they look almost exactly alike cept for the tail fins and the taillights.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy’s daddy said, and then looked around again to see if anybody was watching them. A few people down on the line were. One of them was the big-tittied heifer. He looked back at Lacey. “Well, look here, I got to get in here and fix this thing and then get on back to Maintenance fore Collums comes looking for me. Can you go in there and see if they’s anybody in there for me so I can put this sign up?”

  “I’d be glad to,” she said, and turned and pushed open the door. She stayed gone for a few seconds and then she came back to the door. Stuck just her head out.

  “Did you know you can’t see this door from the line?” she said.

  “Naw. I don’t guess I ever noticed.”

  She kept standing there with just her head stuck out. She was doing something with her hand and he couldn’t tell what it was. And then she pulled the door open and backed up and held on to it and lifted the front of her blouse and showed him her big tits. She was smiling. Then she ran her tongue around her lips very slowly. Then she smooched a kiss toward him, dropped the front of her blouse, and disappeared behind the door. He stood there waiting. He heard steps and then another woman came up the stairs. It was that Jones woman who had that plant romance going. She was smiling, too. He coughed and reached for another cigarette.

  By lunchtime, Jimmy’s daddy was really pissed. Since he’d told Lacey that he had to run to town on his lunch hour, he actually had to leave the plant. And he really didn’t want to go. For one thing, he didn’t know what he was going to eat for lunch or how he was going to get it and get back with it in thirty minutes and still eat it. Since he was going to have to leave the plant, he wasn’t going to be able to get a can of chili, probably, not unless he just left the plant for ten minutes or something and then came back … hell, that wouldn’t work. She’d know he couldn’t go to the parts st
ore and back in ten minutes. And what if she asked him again tomorrow about eating lunch? He could see a problem growing already. But he’d just have to deal with it later. Right now it was 11:58 and he was washing some of the black grease off his hands with some Go-Jo they kept beside the sink in the men’s bathroom. He washed his hands good and then dried them on some paper towels and dropped them in the trash and went out the door. He looked at his watch: 11:59. What the hell did he tell her he was going to town for? What else could he have told her to avoid eating lunch with her, though? That he usually ate with Seaborn? That would have worked. That he didn’t want everybody in the whole plant to know he had a plant romance going? That would have worked, too. If she couldn’t deal with it, tough titty. She knew he was married. She knew he had to be careful. And now he was going to have to leave the damn plant because of her.

  The buzzer rang and Jimmy’s daddy rushed over to the rack of time cards and grabbed his from its slot. He could see the plant manager watching him through the glass in the window of his office, which was planted squarely across from the time clock so that he could watch everybody punching in in the morning and punching out at lunch and then back in after lunch and then out at three thirty. He didn’t miss a thing, and he’d probably noticed how fast Jimmy’s daddy had made it over to the time clock. Fuck him. He was just the plant manager.

  Jimmy’s daddy punched his card and stuck it into the rack on the other side of the time clock just as a whole herd of people started filling up the aisles, all headed toward the time clock. He walked fast out the front door and dug his keys from his pocket, hoping like hell she wasn’t going to follow him out to the parking lot. […]