A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  Man, what he’d give for a cigarette. They were right there in his pocket. Not even six inches away from his chin, but they might as well have been on the moon.

  Inside the trailer, the phone rang. It was probably Seaborn or Rusty. It was probably one of them calling to see what he was doing.

  “I can’t come to the phone!” he yelled. It kept ringing. It rang and rang. Maybe it was one of the girls’ friends. They had friends who called them on the phone. But they never came over. Jimmy’s daddy had made it plain that he didn’t want a bunch of kids over at his trailer drinking up all the Cokes and messing the trailer up and talking on the phone to other kids and all that shit. Jimmy’s daddy liked peace and quiet. But maybe if he got out of this okay he should lighten up a little there, too. Jimmy’s daddy’s daddy and Jimmy’s daddy’s mother never would let him have company over when he was growing up. They just didn’t allow it. And Jimmy’s daddy never did get to go home with a friend and spend the night like other kids he knew did. What would that have hurt? The phone stopped ringing.

  Jimmy’s daddy thought maybe something was happening to his brain to help him deal with his situation. The pain had eased, numbed itself, really, he guessed, and he was more peaceful than he would have thought he’d be. He guessed he’d accepted it. He’d had to. He’d shit on himself, yeah, but it wasn’t the end of the world, was it? It probably happened to people every day. And how long did the circulation have to be cut off before you’d lose one or more of your fingers? He had a little feeling in them, just not a whole lot. So that was probably a good sign. That probably meant that there was still at least a little bit of blood circulating through them. Maybe.

  If he could have just gotten one hand loose, he could have done something. He could have at least smoked. This way he couldn’t do anything but sit here and hope for somebody to come along. And it didn’t look like anybody was going to come along.

  And then somebody did. He heard the gravel crunching under the tires long before he saw the car, partly because it was going so slowly, partly because he couldn’t see past the fender of the ’55. So he waited. He got ready to give out a really big yell just as the car or truck or whatever it was passed the trailer. He didn’t care who it was. He didn’t care that he’d shit on himself and was sitting in it and that somebody might see it. He just wanted some help.

  The gravel kept crunching and it got louder and he wondered why the person driving was going so slowly. He turned his head toward the gravel road, waiting, getting ready to suck in a big breath of air so that he could yell plenty loud, and he waited. And waited. And then the nose of a Mercury nosed past the front of his ’55 and he saw Lacey looking out at him from behind the wheel of the car. She grinned and waved. She was creeping at about one mile per hour. Maybe two.

  “Stop!” he screamed, and she slammed on the brakes.

  “Hey!” she said gaily, leaning her head out the window. She lifted a beer and took a drink. “What you doing?”

  Jimmy’s daddy closed his eyes and shook his head. Could she not see what he was doing? Could she not see that he had shit on himself?

  “Come here and help me!” he yelled.

  “What about your wife?” she said. “She not home right now?”

  “Get your ass over here and jack this fucking car up off me!” he screamed, and damn near fainted when she backed up and stopped and then pulled on in and got out to help him. She set her beer on her fender.

  It almost hurt worse when it came back up. Lacey seemed pretty expert at setting up jacks because she took the base of the jack and scraped away the loose gravel down to hard ground and set it on that, and then she hunted around until she found a chunk of wood and set it behind the other rear tire to keep it from rolling. Then she jacked it up. Jimmy’s daddy winced as he felt the rough metal slowly releasing his hands, and it was such a relief that he almost cried again.

  “Oh God,” he kept saying, over and over, and he looked back at Lacey to see that she was almost crying, too.

  “Hold on, baby,” she said, pumping on the jack, her big boobs swinging. The fender well lifted off his hands and Jimmy’s daddy slammed himself backward, flat on his back on the gravel, and he was afraid to look at his hands. They felt all crabbed up. Finally he looked at them. Both his palms had tire tracks printed in them. They looked swollen. They were slightly purple. But miraculously, nothing seemed to be broken. He could wriggle his fingers.

  He dragged himself backward, away from the car, and he rubbed his hands together. His thumbs felt numb. But in them there was starting up that little tingling feeling like a thousand needle points sticking him, just like it did when his legs went to sleep on a deer stand from not moving for so long. When he felt that, he knew he was going to be all right.

  “Help me up,” he said, and she did.

  She waited in the living room while he cleaned himself up in the bathroom. He was a nervous wreck because he knew he had to get her the hell out of here before Johnette and the kids came home. Hell. He’d just say he didn’t know who in the hell she was but that after she’d been good enough to stop and get the car off him, he’d invited her in for a beer.

  His underwear and his pants were lying in the bathtub and he got some clean shorts from the drawer in his bedroom, then pulled a clean pair of jeans off a hanger in the closet. He walked into the kitchen and went to a cabinet at the side of the stove and opened the cabinet door. He got a Hefty garbage bag with yellow ties and looked at Lacey where she was sitting on the couch, having a smoke and drinking a fresh beer that she’d gotten from her Mercury. She looked pretty comfortable. Would she tell anybody that he’d shit on himself? He sure hoped not. They hadn’t talked about it. She’d seen what had happened to him. Couldn’t help but see. But she hadn’t said anything about it. Thank God.

  “You got a nice trailer,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll be done in a minute. Then we got to get you the hell out a here.”

  “I know it,” she said. “If she comes in while I’m setting here, just tell her you don’t know me from Adam and I just happened to come by.”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” Jimmy’s daddy said, and took the garbage bag back to the bathroom and put the soiled underwear and pants inside it, rolled it up tightly, turned on the water in the tub and washed out the inside of it, then took the rolled-up garbage bag back to the kitchen and put it inside another garbage bag that was inside the garbage can. Then he bagged up the trash and took it outside and stuffed it down inside one of the metal garbage cans he kept out there and closed the lid over it. What the hell did she mean coming by here? And how in the hell had she found out where he lived? He was going to have to have a talk with her. But not today. And damn sure not here.

  When he stepped back inside the trailer she was sitting there looking at some pictures of the kids and just generally checking everything out in the living room. She looked up at him and smiled.

  “Let me get my boots on,” he said.

  “I ain’t in no hurry,” she said.

  “Yeah, but I am.”

  He went back to the bedroom and put his boots back on and got his cap and went to the bathroom and popped a couple of Imodium from a bottle Johnette kept in the medicine cabinet. Then he went back out to the living room. But Lacey wasn’t in there.

  “Lacey?” he called.

  “I’m back here,” her dim voice called. Where the hell was she?

  Holy shit. Was she in the back bathroom? “Back here in the bathroom.”

  Back in the bathroom? Fuck! What if Johnette came in now?

  “What are you doing?” he yelled.

  “Taking a leak,” she called. “That dang beer runs right through me.”

  “Well, hurry up,” he called. “You got to go!”

  “I know it,” she said, and he heard the toilet flush.

  Jimmy’s daddy’s hands were feeling better now, but they still had the tire tracks on them. They looked like they’d been imprinted o
n his skin. He’d already tried washing them and it wouldn’t come off. He didn’t know what he was going to tell anybody who asked. What was he going to tell Johnette if she asked? Who was he going to say got the car off him? Some passing kid in a big truck? Maybe so.

  Lacey came up the hall, smoothing her black pants over her hips, straightening the bottom of her flowery blouse, and she walked up to him and stopped. He opened his mouth to say something and she raised one of her hands and placed her fingers over his lips.

  “I know already what you’re gonna say,” she said. “I know I ain’t supposed to be in here. But I’m glad I come by when I did.”

  “I’m glad you did, too,” Jimmy’s daddy said. And he really was.

  “Don’t be mad cause I come driving by,” she said. “I was just out riding around, having a few beers. I wouldn’t have got you in no trouble. I’m heading home now. I’ll see you tomorrow at work.”

  “Okay,” Jimmy’s daddy said. He could see love in her eyes for sure now. And he could see the hurt in her eyes, too. He didn’t know what it was from, only that she had it. She leaned a little closer.

  “I’d give anything to kiss you right now,” she said.

  Jimmy’s daddy stood there. He didn’t say anything because he didn’t know what to say. But he didn’t want to kiss her here. He was afraid he might not be able to stop himself from going ahead with her right here. Or taking her down the road somewhere. And maybe getting caught.

  “But I know I got to go.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “I guess you’d better.”

  “I don’t need to be here when your family comes in,” she said.

  Then you better get your ass in the road, he thought.

  “Bye,” she said, and she opened the door, stepped down the steps, then closed the door. Jimmy’s daddy sat down in a chair. He heard her open her door, heard the door close, heard the car start, heard the car pull out, heard the car go on down the road until the sound of it died away. He got up and went to the door and opened it. Lacey had put the wheel back on while he’d cleaned himself up. She had even put the jack and the lug wrench away. It looked like nothing had happened except for his tire-tracked hands.

  36

  Cortez got up early in the morning like he always did and shaved carefully like he always did. He made some coffee and he made pancakes from a box of Aunt Jemima mix and poured some Johnny Fair syrup all over the stack and sat down alone at the kitchen table and ate while the birds sang outside the screen windows. Since his wife died, Cortez had raised all the windows and had kept the air conditioner turned off most of the time. It got warm sometimes in the afternoons and he ran it then if he was in the house, but he liked to sleep with the windows up at night now since he was alone and could do whatever he wanted to at long last. It was kind of like having a brand-new life. He guessed he could even date now if he wanted to.

  But who would he date? He’d probably have to go to church to find somebody, and he didn’t want to go to church. All the old women he knew around here his age looked like they were all dried up. If he did decide to date somebody, he might want somebody a little bit younger. Say maybe somebody who was about sixty-five or so. Somebody who still had some meat on her bones. He wasn’t sure he could still do it, but he was thinking about finding out. He knew he still thought about it. Even more so now that he’d been watching those dirty movies on the TV. They had kind of recharged his batteries.

  He washed his dishes after he got through eating so he wouldn’t have to do it later. He’d been keeping the house clean, too. Dusted one day, swept and mopped another. He put his rubber boots on and went up to the barn and then he closed the lot gate and turned the heifers out into the north pasture where the grass was belly high and left them there. He got into his truck and drove down past the equipment shed and opened the gate there, drove through, then got out and closed it behind him.

  The sun was bright on the dew in a million points of light and he could see the sun striking the droplets of moisture on the fresh webs of spiders strung here and there, knitted overnight. The cows were down in the bottom pasture and he started blowing the horn when he saw them. They started walking toward him and he turned around and stopped to see if they were coming on. They were. It was a wonder. If there was anything dumber than a cow he didn’t know what it was. They had to be the dumbest animals God ever put on the face of the earth. He blew the horn a few more times and then drove on up behind the barn and parked the truck and got out and opened the south gate and left it open. He walked into the barn and got a bucket and filled it with some sweet feed and carried it back out. The cows were starting to trot toward the trough and he dumped the sweet feed on the rough boards, spreading it in a long row. The cows hurried forward, and he went around the edge of them and waited for the old Brahman to get herself in and then he shut the gate, leaving the rest of them and their calves out there bawling to get in. […]

  He put the bucket back in the barn and shut the door, and then he went over and opened the gate to the catch pen and started shooing them toward it. A couple darted out past him and he let them go back to the trough. But he got the old Brahman and nine other cows with their calves into the loading chute and started letting them out the side gate one by one until he had just the old cow in there. He hemmed her in front and back with some fence posts he’d left lying there just for that. He slid the posts through the six-inch cracks between the boards, rested each of them against a post. He put three in front of her and three in back, too high to jump over. She couldn’t back up or go forward. She didn’t like it and tried to get out, but unless she broke something, he thought he had her. He wondered if he ought to tie her feet. He didn’t want to get kicked in the mouth. With a hoof full of fresh shit. But it wouldn’t be the first time.

  He squatted down outside the wide boards of the catch pen and looked at her bag. It looked like it was holding about five or six gallons of milk. She’d been a good cow and had delivered a big healthy calf every year for the last nine years. He stretched out a hand for one of her teats, the biggest one, to see if he could squeeze some milk from it, but quick as lightning she kicked his hand and then kicked again and almost hurt him before he could get his hand back.

  He looked up at her head. She had rolled one baleful eye back toward him and she was trying to twist her head around to see how to kick him better.

  “I’m trying to help you, you stupid son of a bitch,” he said.

  She bowed up and kicked and tried to heave herself up out of the chute, but the boards were eight feet high and she couldn’t get that high. She could kick the shit out of him whenever he reached in for that teat, though. He was going to have to tie her feet. So he went into the barn, hunting some rope. He didn’t want to get crippled by a cow at his age. Then he’d be in a damn wheelchair. How much dating could you do in one of them? Not much, probably. Unless maybe they had a club for people in wheelchairs.

  He opened the big side door so that he’d have some light. He seemed to remember having some rope somewhere, but there was so much stuff in the barn that it was hard to find anything specific. A lot of stuff was hung on nails, most of it coated with fuzzy dust and the spider webs of years.

  He walked back toward the stalls and stopped beside the door where the trunk was stashed and opened it and looked inside, but he didn’t see any rope hanging on a nail there. He closed it back and latched it.

  Maybe it was upstairs. He went on down the hall in his rubber boots and walked over to the ladder and started up it very slowly. Old as he was, he had to be careful about climbing stuff. And some of the steps were loose, needed replacing. It was hard for a man to take care of everything that needed taking care of. Especially by himself. A long time ago when he’d had Cleve helping him, it seemed that everything got taken care of: fences fixed, tin roofs painted, tomatoes staked, hay cut and baled and hauled, calves castrated, gates repaired, stock all watered. He had a lot more cows then, though. He didn’t want to mess with mo
re than twenty head now. And a day would come when he wouldn’t be able to take care of even one. He knew that. But that day hadn’t come yet. And as long as he could walk and get around and climb up and down from his tractor, he was going to have some cows. There was nothing better than standing at the fence on a summer afternoon and watching them graze. It made a man feel good to look at them and know they were his. No matter what else had happened.

  He went on up the steps, careful of his footing and his grip. His head rose above the floor and he stopped with the top half of himself sticking up into the loft. He hadn’t been up here in a while. The peak of the rafters was twenty feet above his head and he had nailed every one of them on. It had taken two months and six men to build this barn. That was in 1958. And the son of a bitch was still solid. It didn’t even have any leaks in the roof that he knew of. He didn’t see any rope. There were forty or fifty small bales of hay stacked against the back wall and some baling twine was looped around some nails sticking out of the rafters. But that stuff wasn’t strong enough. Or it might cut her. What he needed was some rope. And he couldn’t remember where in the hell he’d put it.

  He climbed on up and pulled himself up onto the floor of the loft and stood up and walked across the boards. He looked around for the rope, but he didn’t see it anywhere. He had spent a bunch of hot June afternoons up here, stacking hay amid buzzing red wasps while men below on trucks threw it up through the opened loft door, which was closed now and hadn’t been used in a while, since he’d switched to large bales he could move around with his tractor. It was easier. Let the tractor do the work. He guessed the world got better in some ways as it went along. And in lots of ways it got worse.

  He remembered screwing his wife up here. That was a long time ago. He’d done a lot of screwing in this barn. He’d done so much he couldn’t remember all of it. It was so big and had so many places to hide somebody that it had been almost easy to get away with it. Somebody could walk in off the road and come in the back door and nobody at the house would even see her. That was how he used to meet Queen. How many times had they done it in this barn? Hundreds. At night. In the middle of the day. On cold and frozen days, wrapped in blankets and lying in the hay. Up here, too. Why in God’s name did he do it? Why didn’t he just run off with her? Would he do the same thing if he had the chance again? He hoped Lucinda never found out about it.