A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  A cow bawled down in the pasture and he dreaded putting that milk tube up that bitch’s teat again, but her bag was so swollen it looked like it was going to burst. He’d already drained it once, two or three weeks back. Now it had stopped up again. He’d have to get her up first thing in the morning in his old catch pen and try to tie her to where she couldn’t kill him. He had the milk tube in a clean little cloth bag in the bib of his overalls, and he needed to sterilize it again. And he needed some lubricant. Seemed like he had some somewhere. And it was dark now, so he got up and went into the house to see if he could find it. […]

  The back door slammed behind him. The light over the yard went off. The dog kept barking.

  34

  Tommy sometimes has to draw the things he sees in his head in order to be able to see how to make them. He’d had to draw a design for his five ponds that were all connected to each other through the pipes and pumps so that he could show the dirt man who built them exactly what he wanted. He is at his table in the brood house, drawing different types of slings on clean white paper with a freshly sharpened pencil. One he makes looks like a sleeping bag. Another looks like an insect’s abdomen. Then he thinks, Tarpaulin, and quickly draws a rectangle with grommets in it. How long? How long is she? About five feet. Is three feet wide enough? Probably not. Better make it four. The main thing is not to drop her on the concrete. That might kill her. It sure won’t do her any good. Is he going to tell the old man what he’s doing? How’s he going to slip her in if he doesn’t tell him? Can he make up something that will send the old man to his house for a few minutes to give him enough time to unload her? Is it going to be physically possible to carry her some distance? What is the distance? What does she weigh now? Is there any way to weigh her by himself? Probably not. The last time they weighed her he had Bill helping him and they made pictures and now Bill’s gone back to Marked Tree to live with his brother until he can find another job and where are the pictures? Maybe Audrey’s got them. Wherever she is. Maybe she’s gone back to her mama in Dallas. She hasn’t called. She’s pretty pissed. No wonder. The question is whether she’ll get over it or not. Maybe she will and maybe she won’t. All the money borrowed. All the promises made and broken. He imagines spouses go through something like the same thing with their drunk husbands and wives.

  Tommy keeps drawing. He adds short lengths of rope that can be put through the grommets and then the sides can be drawn up around her. Or maybe he should just hire some kid to ride to Mississippi with him to help him unload her in the old man’s pond. Why is he obsessed with figuring out how things work? What makes a roulette wheel work? What makes it sometimes stop on red and sometimes black? Why won’t Audrey call him? Is she going to stay pissed off forever this time? Has he finally pushed things too far? Was all this shit the last straw? Is the last straw the same straw that broke the camel’s back? Was that from the Bible?

  Hell. Can he even keep her alive by herself in one tank for a six-hour ride? Why couldn’t he stop every twenty minutes and check her? Maybe make some kind of a dry run first. What if an aerator quits? How will he transfer her to another tank on the side of the road? Is the whole thing stupid? Should he just put a rope stringer through her jaw and put her on a piece of cardboard and skid her down to the bream pond and turn her loose and forget about her? Hope for the best? Let her take her chances with whoever buys this place from the bank?

  The answer to that is still no. He figures he owes her this. He knows she’s only a fish. She can’t think. She doesn’t have feelings. She’s meat to be eaten. People who catch them her size while they’re grabbling skin them and freeze them and then run them through a band saw and slice them into steaks like a hind leg of beef. A slice of deep-fried catfish as big as your plate.

  But he keeps drawing a sling for a big catfish. He can get a small canvas tarp and cut it down to size and buy one of those grommet-putter-inners and get some grommets and he can lash it around her and he’ll need to have some ropes or something that will join together at the top so that he can put some kind of ring in it that will hold all the ropes together so that he can hook the chain hoist to it and lift her with that. Maybe two rings would be better, one on each end. It’ll be along the same lines as the way they move those killer whales, or dolphins. A safe transport. Once she’s in the tank he’ll take the sling off.

  But he doesn’t want her to fall out, so he keeps drawing. He adds a latch at the front that will close over her head and a drawstring at the back that won’t let her slide backward. He stops and looks down at it. He can make it in a few hours. How much oxygen does she need in an hour? What’s her consumption? What if he gets halfway to Mississippi and she rolls belly up? Will he have the heart to go on and deliver the little catfish? He’ll have to. He needs the fifteen hundred. If he’s careful, if he bets carefully, he can take one third of it and play cautiously until he builds up some capital, and then he can hit the roulette tables. If he could just hit, then maybe he could work everything out, pay everything off, call Audrey at her mother’s and tell her to come back, that everything’s changed, that everything’s going to be all right, that all this has been just another temporary setback. Wouldn’t that be a fine thing to be able to do?

  And then he wonders why he’s kidding himself. It’s all gone to shit now. It’s too late. It’s all over. Katie barred the door. That’s all she wrote.

  Fish. Why did he think they were the answer? For a long time they had been. Fish were part of the real beauty of the natural world. It was good clean fun to fish. Kids could do it. Anybody could eat it. Even old folks. Some of his fondest memories were of fish fries at Uncle LaVert’s house back when he was a kid. Crisp hush puppies, fried golden brown, and fat cut potatoes that were fried in the same oil, and fish. Mounds of fish: bream, crappie, bass, catfish, all crispy in browned meal, piled high on the plate. Wedges of lemon lying on the side. The cabbage slaw Aunt Addie made and kept in the icebox until time to eat so it would be good and cold.

  He wished he could go back to that time and live there again. But that world was gone. He raised his head and looked around. Just like this one was about to be.

  35

  The days were cooler now. School was starting back pretty soon and that’s why there was nobody home that afternoon. Johnette had taken the kids over to one of the malls at Tupelo to start getting them some notebooks and pencils and backpacks and tennis shoes and underwear and shorts and blouses, and Jimmy’s daddy knew there was no telling how much money she’d spend. Put it on a credit card. He wondered how much they owed on that damn credit card. He was scared to even find out, so he never asked. He’d been waiting for Johnette to ask him a bunch of questions about why he’d been out so late that night he’d been down at Lacey’s and she never had. But he had several stories ready in case she did. One involved a couple of flat tires. One involved running out of gas on a dirt road and having to walk a long way to Toccopola and wake a guy up. Another involved fishing and getting drunk with Seaborn. He wasn’t real sure about this last one because he didn’t remember if he’d been carrying his rod and reel with him that night or not. But he could always say he’d borrowed a cane pole from Seaborn.

  He’d been kind of avoiding Lacey at work. Well not really avoiding her, just not sitting in the same area of the break room she did, and concentrating on talking to other people at break and lunch, and trying to make sure he didn’t make eye contact with her, although it had happened a few times. Maybe three or four. He’d just smiled and nodded and then quickly looked away. He’d thought some more about not using rubbers with her. He hoped she wasn’t pregnant. That would be too bad to even think about. He already had to think about John Wayne Payne all the time.

  Jimmy’s daddy wanted to check the brake shoes on the back left because he’d heard something squealing this morning heading in to work, and it was a nice afternoon, so he got the jack from the trunk and found a piece of board and set the base of the jack on that. The car was pretty level where it
was sitting and the hand brake didn’t work very well, so he didn’t set it. But he didn’t think it would fall. He jacked it up a little and then got the lug wrench and started loosening the nuts on the wheel. What he needed as soon as he could afford them were some really nice mag wheels. Maybe some chrome-plated Keystones. He’d checked the price on them at Gateway and they were $118 apiece plus tax, but they’d mount them for free, they said. It would probably be just a shade over five hundred. But damn, wouldn’t they look fine?

  And if he did get divorced, where in the hell was he going to live? Would she want the trailer? What would happen to Jimmy? What if she married some other son of a bitch? Who would raise him? And those girls of hers. They’d run wild. Wind up pregnant by the time they were seventeen or something. Jimmy might fall in with the wrong crowd. Some of those kids in big pickups. And Jimmy’s daddy would miss him.

  He guessed what he needed to do this fall was take him hunting. Maybe he could buy him a shotgun. A little single shot .410. That was a good beginner gun for a kid. Jimmy’s daddy could gather up some beer cans and take him down to the dump or the creek and let him get in some target practice. Blast a few beer cans.

  When he got to thinking about stuff like that, stuff like teaching Jimmy how to use a gun and taking him hunting, and maybe one day starting to take him fishing, he didn’t want to get divorced so much. Sometimes, when he thought about it, he realized how good he had it. He got his clothes washed. He got his meals fixed. He got all his banking done for him. He had a nice bed to lie on while he watched his hunting videos and he only had to work forty hours a week. He had the ’55. He had Jimmy. He didn’t have much of a sex life with Johnette, true, but he had Lacey now. If he wanted her. He knew he was going back sometime, he just didn’t know when. He didn’t want everybody in the whole plant to know he was messing around with her. He guessed he’d have to explain that to her sometime. Surely she ought to be able to understand that. Women were funny, though. They got things in their heads. Like love.

  He got four of the lug nuts off and then jacked the car on up until the wheel cleared the ground. Then he sat down next to the wheel and took off the last lug nut. He put it beside the others and started pulling the wheel off and before he knew it the car had come sideways toward him because the jack and the board he had set it on had slipped in the loose gravel and the wheel started to slip off and he tried to shove it back on to keep the car from falling all the way and it came down on top of his hands, pinning his hands between the wheel well and the tire tread and mashing the shit out of his fingers.

  Jimmy’s daddy closed his eyes and screamed. “Oh shit!”

  He tried to pull his hands loose, but it felt like it was going to tear the skin off them. The car had stopped moving. He tried to stretch his leg out and kick the jack erect, but nothing doing. He had his face up against the rear fender, and he had to scream again.

  “Hey!” he screamed. “Hey!”

  Son of a bitch! It was breaking his fucking hands! Oh my God! Jimmy’s daddy panted hard and tried again to pull them out. He could feel the blood getting squeezed out of his fingers. It hurt so bad he didn’t know what he was going to do. He knew one thing he was going to do if he couldn’t get his fingers out from under that wheel well. He was going to shit in his britches. His stomach hadn’t been in very good shape for the last few days, because he’d been drinking beer every evening for the last few days, and he’d had a light bout of diarrhea just after lunch today. And he’d meant to take a couple of Imodium before now, but he’d forgotten about it. And he’d felt another twinge of it just before he came out of the trailer with a cold beer to start jacking up the car, and it was just one of those little slips you make, not taking something when you needed to, planning on doing it later. It was bad timing. Which would get you every time.

  “Hey!” he screamed. “Hey somebody! I need some help!”

  Nobody answered. Nobody showed up. There was just the silent gravel road beside him. And how long would it take for somebody to come by? What if they didn’t stop? What if they saw him yelling and still didn’t stop? Oh God. His stomach was hurting and he was afraid he was going to shit on himself. He really didn’t want to do that.

  “Hey! Hey! Heyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!”

  Oh Jesus. It was breaking his fingers. Tears squeezed from his eyes, as hard as he tried not to let them. Oh shit. He couldn’t shit on himself and let somebody find him like this. What if he had to stay here until Johnette and them came back? No telling when that would be. It was only about five thirty. They probably weren’t nearly through shopping yet. Oh God it hurt. What he had to do was concentrate on not shitting on himself. What if the girls saw him like this? What would they think? How ridiculous did he look?

  “Heyyyyyyyyyy!” A yelp for help lost in the wilderness.

  And then they’d probably go eat. Maybe even at Seafood Junction. He thought they were open on Wednesdays. She’d probably eat two or three desserts. Shit. They might not be back until nine. That would be after dark. He didn’t think he could sit here that long, with the car mashing the shit out of his hands. But did he really have a choice?

  “Please!” he yelled. “Somebody!”

  He tried again to pull his hands loose. He could feel the rough metal of the wheel well cutting into his hands. Rusty. He’d probably need a tetanus shot. He was trying to think of other things to maybe keep from shitting on himself and he wondered how long it had been since he’d had a tetanus shot. He’d gotten one when he’d stepped on that rusty nail about six or seven years ago. He didn’t know how long tetanus shots lasted.

  Jimmy’s daddy didn’t think he could take it any longer, but he didn’t know what he could do about it. His stomach was hurting worse and he needed to get to the bathroom pretty soon. He was going to have an accident if he didn’t. And if he had an accident he was going to have to sit here with his own shit smeared all over his ass until somebody came along who could reset the jack and get the car off his hands. If that old man who lived up the road could hear him, maybe he could jack it up. He looked like a farmer. He probably knew how to operate a jack.

  He looked at the driver’s door. He wished he’d left it open. If he had left it open, he might have been able to reach out with his leg and maybe get to the steering wheel and start blowing the horn with his foot. If his leg was long enough. Hell, his leg wasn’t that long. He didn’t think. He stretched his leg out to see if it would reach, but he couldn’t make it go very far past the closing edge of the door.

  What was he going to do? Just stay here? Hell. The blood in his hands was getting cut off. He might have gangrene to worry about. What if he lost his fingers? Why hell, he wouldn’t be able to work then. He’d be disabled. He’d have to go on disability. He wondered how much that paid. Probably not enough. How would he hunt? With no fingers he wouldn’t be able to pull the triggers on his guns. How would you throw the line out on your rod and reel? Or learn to play the guitar if you had one?

  His stomach was hurting now. All this pain in his hands wasn’t helping anything. His stomach was letting him know that if he didn’t get to a bathroom pretty quick, something was going to happen to him that hadn’t happened to him since he’d been wearing a diaper. And he didn’t even remember any of that. He knew it must have happened, but he just couldn’t remember any of it. Oh Lordy. He couldn’t stand it much longer.

  He couldn’t even scream anymore. There wasn’t anybody to hear. And sometimes hours passed before anybody came up or down this road. In a way that was good. Sometimes. Right now it wasn’t. Right now he felt like he was going to have a nasty accident in his pants. He didn’t think there was going to be anything he could do about it. He was trying not to. But he was afraid that trying wasn’t going to get it. His stomach was hurting too bad. Something had to give. Oh God. Oh God! And then it happened. Jimmy’s daddy cried while he shit on himself. He couldn’t get his hands loose to wipe his tears away, so he just wiped them on the shoulder of his shirt, the way he did swea
t when he was too busy with his hands to mop it with them.

  An hour later he was still there. He could see his watch just fine and it was six thirty. […] Nobody had come down the road in all that time. He’d been hoping that maybe some kid would come rolling down the road in one of those big pickups, but there hadn’t been a soul. He’d been hoping that maybe one of those caravans of four-wheelers would come down the road, but they hadn’t come by either. Now his hands just felt dead. There wasn’t much feeling in them at all. He was surely going to lose both of them.

  By then he’d gotten to wondering if he was going to die. What if he had a heart attack while he was sitting here so stressed out? He wouldn’t even be able to get loose to go inside and call 911 for an ambulance. They’d find him here, dead, when they came in from shopping at Tupelo, and he could imagine how Jimmy would cry. He knew Jimmy loved him. And he loved Jimmy. He told himself one thing. If he got out of this alive, he was going to start treating Jimmy a lot better. Hell. How long would it take to take the chain off the go-kart and find a small-engine shop and get another chain? It wouldn’t take very long. He knew how much Jimmy loved driving that go-kart. And no wonder. What else did he have to do around here? Watch TV? Hang out with the girls?

  Yes sir. A thing like this could make a man take a look at his life and see what all was wrong with it. And he’d been doing that already. Only now he was doing it a lot harder. He could do better. He could cut back on his beer drinking. It cost the shit out of him anyway. It was an expensive habit. You smoked about twice as many cigarettes when you were drinking. Burned twice as much gas because you were constantly riding around. Which wore your tires out quicker. Made you need an oil change sooner. Things snowballed on you.