A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  He’d always liked coming to the hardware store. Back in the old days you could buy steel traps and you could still buy pocketknives and screen wire and hinges and paintbrushes and screws and plumbing supplies. The store had been up on the square for years, right there at the corner of Jackson Avenue, with a plank floor and wooden barrels of sixteen penny nails. This new place was brightly lit and the people who worked there wore red vests that said ace and now they had hummingbird feeders and electric bug killers and air-conditioner filters and shiny new log chains.

  […]

  “Is there something I can help you with?” a kid working there said.

  “Naw. I just need to pay y’all for a garbage can is all.”

  The kid pointed toward the register where a few people were waiting with copper tubing and paint rollers and sandpaper and PVC glue.

  “She’ll take you right there,” the kid said, and Cortez nodded and got in line. He didn’t notice her at first because he was looking at the screwdrivers and cans of WD-40 and small plastic bins of fingernail clippers they had displayed near the checkout so that people would hopefully grab something else on their way out. Then he looked toward the register and saw her. Damn. One of the best-looking black women he’d ever seen in his whole life was laughing and talking to the customer she was ringing up. He was close enough to read the letters on the name tag she had pinned to her red vest: Zula.

  She looked like she was about twenty-five. Tall. Shiny black hair and a big smile and a mouthful of clean white teeth. She was a big girl and Queen had been a big girl. Big breasts, big legs, a big behind. He realized he was staring at her and stopped. But it was hard not to look at her. He hadn’t been with a woman since he’d buried Queen behind the pea patch, all those years ago. He hadn’t been with his wife ever again. He hadn’t wanted to. Had no desire to. Not after Queen. How did you go back to what you’d had before you had the best thing you ever had? And how long had that been? He knew exactly. It was thirty-seven years come September 17. All that time. How had it passed so quickly? Thirty-seven winters and thirty-seven springs and thirty-seven hay cuttings and thirty-seven gardens and all the work all that took. Lucinda had been six then. She had been in the first grade. […]

  The first customer in the line paid for his stuff and picked up his bag and walked out and the line moved forward. Cortez very much enjoyed listening to the girl’s voice while she talked to the next customer. It was a voice that was rich and husky, one that laughed easily. It was the kind of voice you wouldn’t get tired of listening to your whole life.

  He stood there and looked at some garden hose and squirrel feeders while he was waiting. Somebody was making some keys on the key-making machine and he could hear the machine grinding. He was going to take the garbage can and the feed straight over to the pond when he got in and set the can next to a tree and then open both bags and pour them in and it would be ready when the fish got there.

  She finished with that customer and the guy in front of Cortez moved on up and set down his rollers and his PVC glue and a few sheaves of sandpaper. Cortez noticed that he had both rough and fine, figured he was sanding down some furniture. He glanced at the girl again. She had big brown eyes that were so dark they shone. Her skin was beautiful to him. Under the bright lights of the hardware store, surrounded by things he didn’t need, he remembered undressing her so many times, and the way her breath would catch in her throat when he caught her nipple between his thumb and finger. And being inside her. With his mouth on her throat and her pushing back against him, moving her hips, her breath getting faster.

  He snapped himself out of it. He was a crazy man. Only a crazy man would do what he had done. He needed to be in the penitentiary was where he needed to be. Rotting away in Sunflower County one day at a time.

  The guy in front of him finishing paying and then it was just him. He moved on up and the pretty black girl smiled happily at him.

  “How you doing today?” she said.

  “Pretty good,” Cortez said, reaching for his billfold. “I need to pay you for one of them steel garbage cans out front,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said, and reached beneath the counter for a bound notebook with a plastic cover which she opened.

  “I think it’s sixteen ninety-five,” Cortez said.

  She looked up.

  “Is it a big one?” she said.

  “Yeah, big one,” Cortez said, pulling a weathered twenty out and putting it on the counter. She closed the notebook and put it away and rang it up. She told him how much it was with tax and he shoved the twenty across.

  “I had to get me one of them steel garbage cans,” she said, and picked up the twenty. She turned to the register and started punching buttons.

  “You did?” Cortez said.

  “I sure did. I had to get me something where them coons wouldn’t get in my garbage ever night. They got to where they’d wake me and my husband up when we’s trying to sleep. Come right up on the back porch.”

  Cortez looked down and saw the tiny diamond on her finger then.

  “My daddy had a pet crow that would steal anything he could carry off,” Cortez said.

  “Is that right?” she said, and rolled open the cash drawer on the register. She put the twenty in and started getting his change.

  “I’m gonna put my fish feed in this garbage can,” Cortez said. “I thought maybe that would keep the fire ants out of it.”

  She shook her head and handed him his change and his ticket.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Them fire ants get in just about everthing. I just hate them things. Reckon where they come from anyway?”

  “They come from South America,” Cortez said.

  She looked up at him and her big brown eyes got bigger.

  “They did? How’d they get way up here?”

  “They brought em in on a ship loaded with dirt for ballast. I think it was the Port of Mobile. Back in the thirties.”

  “Well I swear,” she said. “Somebody messed up, didn’t they?”

  “They sure did,” Cortez said, folding his little paper and folding his dollar bill and sliding them and his change back into his overall pocket. “They’ll eat the eyes out of a calf if his mama has him close to one of them mounds.”

  She let out a little shiver of revulsion.

  “Eyes,” she said.

  “Yep,” Cortez said. He wished he could stay here and talk to her, but he knew he couldn’t. There was somebody already behind him.

  “I know they hurt when they bite,” she said.

  “Some people’s allergic to em,” Cortez said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “My auntie’s allergic to em. You have a nice day okay, now?”

  “I sure will,” Cortez said. “You watch out for them coons.”

  She smiled at him and turned to the next customer. He went on out through the glass door and picked up his garbage can and carried it over to his truck and set it in. Then he took the lid off and dropped it in the floorboard and laid the can on its side so it wouldn’t maybe blow out on the way home.

  He went on down the street and caught the light at the bottom of the hill on green and drove past the new Walgreen’s they were building. The bricklayers were up on scaffolds with their water coolers beside them and there was heavy equipment moving around on what he guessed would be the parking lot. One thing about his wife dying was he didn’t have to go to the drugstore any more. Not unless he needed a thermometer or something. And he thought he had one of those somewhere.

  He went past McDonald’s and turned right at the light and went up the hill past the bank and through the parking lot and parked down near the end, away from most of the other cars. The parking lot was pretty full and there were lots of people walking in and out of Big Star and Fred’s.

  As soon as he got inside he saw that they had changed everything around and he didn’t know where anything was. But surely they hadn’t moved the meat market. He walked down an aisle and came out the othe
r end looking at some chicken. He looked right, left, then went right.

  He saw a whole rack of baloney and sliced ham and salami and stuff like that and knew he was close to the bacon. Was he out of milk? Shit. Where was it? Over there on the far wall. He guessed he’d better get some milk. Now that his wife was dead he’d let the cleaning woman go and she used to bring the groceries evidently too because these days there was almost nothing in the refrigerator and he guessed he hadn’t paid too much attention to where the groceries had come from. Now that he was in here he realized that maybe he needed a shopping cart to get a few things to eat. So he went back up front for one.

  He didn’t need any tomatoes. The ones they had didn’t look nearly as good as his anyway, and he picked up a few of them just to make sure, then set them back and picked up a bunch of bananas. He’d get some cereal and some milk and he could slice the bananas over the cereal. He got some eggs. Did he have butter? Better get some. Cheese? Did he want some cheese? He got a chunk of cheddar. He got some milk and orange juice.

  Some other people were drifting up and down the aisles. Old women with their old women friends and young women with their children. He wondered if those kids down the road who lived in that trailer had started back to school yet. He hadn’t seen the school bus come down the road. He wondered what grade that little boy was in. Third or fourth?

  He walked by some young black man in a long white apron who was stocking shelves from a cart. He looked up and smiled as Cortez went by.

  “Hi,” he said. “How you doing today, sir?”

  Cortez just looked at him and went on by.

  They had what looked like some homemade chocolate-chip cookies down at the end of the aisle and he got a pack of them. He slowed down at the meat market again, gazing over the chicken. He got a pack of wings for frying. Even he could fry chicken. They had some tasty-looking, thick-sliced ham, and he got a pack of that. Could fix that with eggs for breakfast. Or cook with french fries for supper. He got a six-pack of Cokes. He got a big pack of the cheap bacon. A pack of hot dogs. A package of sliced baloney. He went up the cereal aisle and got some cornflakes.

  Over on the far side they had some cakes in a cooler and he reached in for a small German chocolate and put it in his cart. He got some bread and dinner rolls, and then he went back the other way and found the ice cream and got a half gallon of black walnut. Then he stood there for another minute looking and reached in for a pack of grape Popsicles. Did he even have any mustard and mayonnaise? The cupboard had looked pretty bare last time he’d looked. He guessed he have to make a list the next time he came for groceries. He turned his cart and went back the other way and looked for a couple of minutes until he found the mustard and mayonnaise and got a jar of each. He saw olives. He liked them. He got a jar. Then he saw a big jar of dill pickles and got them, too.

  “That’s enough,” he said out loud, and some woman he hadn’t seen who was looking at the rice raised her head and looked at him funny.

  “Harm quarm farm,” Cortez told her, and pushed his cart on up toward the checkout.

  When he got home he parked the truck close to the back door so he wouldn’t have to carry his groceries very far. He had three bags and the little bit of stuff he got cost about forty dollars. But he had plenty to eat. He’d already picked some peas and put them in the deep freeze. It was too bad he didn’t like deer meat or he could have eaten it year round.

  He put everything away and then got the milk back out and set it on the kitchen table and got a glass and poured some in it. He sat down at the table with the pack of cookies and opened them and ate a few of them, washing them down with the milk, and it was cool and quiet in there. Slowly he had been getting rid of the things that had belonged to her, some old clothes, the police bullhorn, pincushions and heating pads and her teeth that had stayed in a glass of water in the bathroom every night for over twenty years. He sat there and bit into a cookie and was glad he still had some of his. But hers had never been good. He’d spent thousands of dollars on her mouth. And then she’d wound up having them all pulled anyway. Might as well have thrown that money down a hole in the ground for all the good it did.

  He put the cookies away and finished the milk and set the glass in the sink, put the rest of the jug back in the refrigerator. Then he went back out and got in his truck and drove out his driveway and up the dirt road to the front corner of his property and down the new road to the new pond, and pulled his truck over next to the big white oak. The new road looked great, and now he only had to wait two more days. He could hardly believe that fish guy was going to drive a truck full of catfish right up beside this pond and dump three thousand of them in here. It was going to be something to see.

  Cortez was happy with the way the pond looked, even though it was only half full. The muddiness had settled out of it and it was calm and had a dark tone to it. A lot of grass had already grown up across the dirt that had been shaved off by the dozer blade, most of it on the sloping sides of the banks where it was kind of steep. He might need to bring his Bush Hog up here and mow it sometime. He just needed to be careful on that slope. He could bring the Bush Hog up here before long and cut it, make it look nice and neat. What he’d do, next year, when the fish got bigger, was bring a lawn chair up here and maybe some cold drinks and sit under this white oak and fish in the afternoons. Sit in the shade and reel them in. Fry up a mess for supper that night. Just like he used to do when he was a boy. There was nothing better than fresh fish you’d caught for supper.

  He unloaded the garbage can and set it under the tree and then he took the bags one at a time and pulled the sewn strip of tape from the tops and poured both of them into the garbage can. For a minute there it looked like it might not hold both of them, but he mounded up the last bag over the top of what he’d poured in there and was just barely able to squeeze the lid down over it. There. That’d keep the rain out of it. And it would be right here every day, to feed them. He’d make some kind of signal the fish would understand, to let them know it was feeding time. Bang the lid on the side of the garbage can or something. Maybe a whistle? Shit. Blow the truck horn. He needed to bring a quart fruit jar up here, too, to scoop the feed out.

  He sat on the ground under the tree, looking out at the pond. He hadn’t seen that little boy up here again. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen the go-kart running up and down the dirt road in a long time now. He wondered if they’d sold it, or if it had torn up. He oughtn’t to have yelled at that kid that way. Probably scared him clean off. He probably wouldn’t be back. Reckon what his name was?

  It was hot and Cortez could feel the sun peeking down between the leaves above him to warm his neck. It was almost lunchtime but he wasn’t that hungry. A baloney sandwich might be good, though. He could take a piece and fry it in the skillet and put some mustard on the bread and slice some slices off one of those dill pickles and put them on it. He thought there were still some potato chips that Lucinda had bought in one of the cabinets. Then he could take a nap. Go down there and see if there were any more peas left. He could pick them if there were any left. And if the deer had come back and gotten the rest of them, it wouldn’t be any big deal. He had plenty to eat and plenty of money to buy some more. And he was already thinking about how good that ham was going to be for supper.

  Two more days. Two days and three thousand fish. He’d bet that kid down the road would like to see that.

  37

  Cleve was trying to get the son of a bitch out of his house and down to the river was what he was trying to do, but it wasn’t working. He knew if he ever got him down to the river he could take care of him, but the two of them were making it hard for him. She probably knew what he had on his mind. And if she did, what the hell did she bring him back here for anyway? And how did a son of a bitch who was supposed to be in the army get so much time off? Why wasn’t he over there fighting with the rest of them? They had a war going on, didn’t they? They showed it on TV every night, didn’t they? He was AWO
L was what he was. Had to be.

  Cleve was in his rocking chair on the front porch, rocking a little and watching the wind blow through the catalpa trees in his front yard. They’d had a good crop of worms this year. Back in June he’d taken his cane pole and knocked twenty or thirty down and put them in a bucket with a piece of screen wire over the top of it to keep them from crawling out and he’d gone down on Mister Bramlett’s place on the river and parked on the side of the levee. It had grown up a lot from what it used to be and he’d had to watch for snakes while he waded the briars and mud holes until he could get over to the bank and then pick his way up the river, around a couple of bends, almost up to the pipeline where there was a deep hole under a big old beech that spread its shade out over the muddy river. He’d taken his seat on a chunk of wood, in the midst of dead brown leaves and little green vines and creepers, easing the half pint of whisky out and his pistol with it. He sat there with his cane pole and caught nine nice catfish in a couple of hours, one of them a four-pounder. And had they been good for supper that night? Shoot. But he didn’t like that son of a bitch eating his food.

  Now it was too hot to fish, but that fool probably didn’t know that. Army wasn’t going to miss him. Wasn’t nobody going to miss him but Seretha, and he’d done turned her head clean around anyway, taking her to Memphis and buying her clothes and where did he get the money for that? He was stealing or selling dope, one. Had to be.

  He had his guitar in his lap and he slid his old bottleneck down the strings and made it wail. He picked in the box some, going up and down with his slide, and the old Fender amp beside him growled gently. Usually this guitar would bring him out. But it sounded like they’d been fighting. He’d heard some yelling back there where they stayed. Best thing would be just get rid of him. Before she turned up pregnant. She needed a decent man. Not somebody who wouldn’t even stay in the army.