A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  He stood there for just a moment, watching her, and then he closed the lid on her tank, latched it, and climbed down off the truck. He got back behind the wheel and pulled the truck out from under the chain hoist and left it hanging. He drove the truck back outside and stopped it again and then went back and shut off all the lights and closed the two side doors. He’d drain her tank, lift her out, set her on the back of the truck.

  He didn’t waste any time looking at everything that had been his. He just pulled out his cell phone and consulted a little tablet he carried around in his pocket all the time and called Cortez Sharp in Mississippi. When he answered, Tommy told him that he was on his way with his fish. And the eager happiness in the old man’s voice was a real good thing to hear. It almost made it all worth it.

  But not quite.

  39

  Another thing that wasn’t fair among all the things that weren’t fair as far as school went was all the homework they gave you to do as soon as school started. It was like maybe the teachers had worked on all this stuff all summer long while they were off so that they’d be ready to load you down with enough arithmetic and Mississippi history and science and English and social studies homework to make sure you didn’t have time to go out and ride your go-kart any before dark if you had a go-kart. Jimmy couldn’t believe how much homework he had the very first night and how long it took to do it, sitting on the living-room couch with his books and his tablets, trying to get it done while the girls talked on the portable phone and watched TV and his mama fixed herself sandwiches and leaned over into the refrigerator for a container of french onion dip and took it and a big bag of potato chips back to her room and lay down on the bed and flipped through the channels looking for something to watch. She was also tugging on those funny-looking cigarettes she smoked sometimes that smelled odd. Tangy. Sweet. He’d noticed that she never did this when his daddy was around, but she apparently didn’t mind doing it while Jimmy and the girls were around. He’d asked Evelyn one time what was that stuff Mama was smoking and Evelyn said it was weed. Jimmy asked her what weed was and she said it was boo. He asked her what boo was and she said it was shit. He asked her what shit was and she said it was tea. He asked her what tea was and she said, Don’t ask so many questions, you little rotten-tooth son of a bitch, she’s getting stoned. When Jimmy told her she was calling her own mother a bitch, that shut her up for a while.

  Jimmy in his homework had been reading about all the Indians who used to live in Mississippi, mainly Choctaws and Chickasaws. He wished they still did. He liked anything about Indians. Arrowheads, for instance. He had a couple of real good dark red ones he hadn’t shown his daddy that he’d found in the fields below the old rotted house where he’d seen the dead black lady, before he’d seen the dead black lady. Some kid at school, a boy named Herschel Horowitz with big glasses, had told Jimmy during a conversation they were having about arrowheads that his daddy, Herman Horowitz, was pretty crazy about going out and hunting arrowheads and often took Herschel along with him and that the best time and place to find arrowheads was in a field that had just been broken up in the spring, right after a rain. Herschel said what happened was a natural thing, that the rain washed the dirt away from the arrowheads and made it easier to find them. And it turned out that Herschel had been right. Jimmy had gone down in the field below the rotted house back in the spring to see if the men who worked the land had their tractors in the field yet, and he had to go a couple of times, hanging around and waiting on the side of the road, looking for snakes, wishing he could wade in the creek, seeing how many birds he could see, looking for turtles, but eventually he saw a big green tractor plowing the ground and then he just waited for a good rain, which was only two days later, since it was April, and he’d walked out in the muddy field with his tennis shoes getting soggy and had looked for a long time and just saw mud and mud and mud and mud and walked some more and looked some more and just saw mud and mud and walked some more and looked some more, saw more mud, looked and walked and saw more mud and then a point sticking up that was chiseled, Stone Age, handmade, sharp enough to cut meat. He reached and plucked it like a flower and it was not an arrowhead, it was a spear point, a nearly perfect one, and Jimmy had gotten really really really excited and had taken it back home to show his daddy, and his daddy had borrowed it to show it to somebody at work and never had given it back, and now Jimmy didn’t know where it was. He’d asked his daddy about it a couple of times and the second time he asked him his daddy got madder than he had the first time so Jimmy didn’t ask him anymore. He had gone so far as to complain to his mother, but she just said she couldn’t do anything with him and that if Jimmy would be good and not cause any more trouble than there already was in the trailer, then maybe the next time Kenny Chesney scheduled a concert for Tupelo maybe they could go. Now she was saying they definitely didn’t have the money. She was backing out. Crawfishing. They’d already argued about it some, a couple of times. He said he never got to go anywhere and had to stay home all the time with the girls and she said that she’d only said maybe and Jimmy said that school was fixing to start back up and talked a little about how nice it would be if they could all go to a Kenny Chesney concert together and she said they never would be able to get his daddy to go over there because he didn’t like to go anywhere except to work and hunting and fishing and riding around drinking beer with his buddies and Jimmy said he didn’t think his daddy liked to go to work. He mouthed off a little bit more and even whined some but pretty much gave up when he realized it was a question of money, which was something he could do nothing about. But tonight while he was doing his homework he still had a few questions going through his head. One of them was, How much did big fat sandwiches cost? Another one was, What about those great big bags of chips? And, How come the girls got CDs and he didn’t? And, Where was his daddy again tonight? Wasn’t he hungry? Didn’t he want some supper? How come he stayed gone so much? Jimmy had already eaten some hot dogs. And he had a tooth that was hurting. It wasn’t hurting bad. It was just kind of hurting. This had been a problem for a while, his rotten front teeth, and having to look at them in the mirror and be ashamed of them. And he was. Had been for a long time. Jimmy sure hoped he wouldn’t have to go to the dentist. He was kind of scared of the dentist after listening to his daddy tell some horror stories about what some dentist had done to him when he was a kid. Jimmy had already decided that he didn’t want to meet any dentists.

  Jimmy did some arithmetic homework and some science homework and watched part of Back to the Future and part of Conan the Barbarian and the tail end of Jaws while the girls changed channels and talked some more on the phone. His mama came in and fixed herself a chocolate milkshake and got a handful of Oreos and turned to go back to her room. Jimmy raised his head.

  “Where’s Daddy?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” his mama said.

  “He’s off drinking beer,” Evelyn said.

  “Or riding around,” Velma said. “In his ragged-out fifty-five he thinks is so cool.”

  “Y’all’s guess is as good as mine,” Jimmy’s mama said, and went on back to her room. She shut the door.

  “I’m gonna go take a bath,” Velma said, and got up. She was in the fifth this year. She had hardly any homework at all, looked like. If she had some, she wasn’t doing it. She wasn’t doing anything except looking at a Seventeen magazine and talking on the phone whenever Evelyn wasn’t talking on it.

  “Don’t use all the hot water up,” Evelyn said.

  “Oh shut up,” Velma said.

  “Don’t you tell me to shut up,” Evelyn said, and got up.

  “I’ll tell you to shut up any time I want to,” Velma said.

  “No you won’t,” Evelyn said.

  “Yes I will,” Velma said.

  “You might get the shit slapped out of you, too,” Evelyn said.

  “You might shit and fall back in it, too,” Velma said.

  Jimmy laughed. Evelyn looked at him
.

  “What you laughing at, you little fucker?” Evelyn said. “I’ll slap the shit out of you, too.”

  “I’d like to see you try it,” Jimmy said.

  Jimmy’s mama came storming out of her room and she was mad.

  “All right!” she said. “I heard all that. Evelyn, I’m gonna wash your mouth out with soap if you don’t stop talking to your brother and your sister that way! You think I’m kidding, Missy? Try me!”

  “He ain’t my brother, he’s my half brother,” Evelyn said in a pouty way. “And she ain’t my sister, she’s my half sister.”

  “I don’t care,” Jimmy’s mama said. “Just stop all that. I don’t want to listen to it tonight,” she said, and went back to her room.

  Evelyn waited until she heard her mother’s door shut and then she walked over to Jimmy and leaned down in his face. She had on a V-neck shirt and when she leaned over Jimmy could see part of her breasts, which were growing and already pretty big for somebody who was only in the seventh grade. He’d noticed over the summer that they’d been growing some the same way he’d noticed that his feet were getting too big for his shoes. He figured Evelyn was probably going to be a whore. He didn’t know exactly what a whore was but he figured she was a good candidate for being one.

  Evelyn said: “You little smart son of a bitch, just wait till they’re both gone sometime. I’ll call my boyfriend over here and he’ll beat the dog shit out of you.”

  “No he won’t,” Jimmy said. “I’ll tell Daddy if he does.”

  Evelyn gave him a hateful smirk. “That redneck? What’s he gonna do?”

  “Don’t you call my daddy a redneck,” Jimmy said, and he stood up and put his schoolbook down on the couch.

  “Redneck redneck redneck,” Evelyn said.

  “Shut up, Evelyn!” Jimmy said.

  “You’re Redneck Junior,” Evelyn said.

  “Mama!” Jimmy yelled. “Evelyn’s calling Daddy a redneck!”

  “I’m gonna take a bath,” Velma said.

  “Don’t use up all the hot water, you little whore,” Evelyn said, and then sat back down and called up somebody on the phone.

  Jimmy sat back down, too, and tried to finish the rest of his homework. He thought school would be pretty cool if all you had to do was read about Indians. He was planning on taking his arrowheads to school one day for Show and Tell whenever they had it. Last year for Show and Tell he’d taken a shed deer horn that his daddy had found in the woods, one that had been gnawed on by animals for the minerals in it, with gouge marks like a beaver had been ahold of it, but his teacher said it was probably squirrels and mice. A lot of the kids in the class had laughed at Jimmy for bringing in an old gnawed-up deer horn that had turned partly green from lying out in the woods for so long, but it was about the best thing that Jimmy had been able to come up with. He’d bet they wouldn’t laugh at his arrowheads because none of them probably had anything nearly that cool.

  He did his arithmetic and listened to Evelyn talking to her boyfriend on the phone. She was giggling a lot and talking about the movies she’d seen and she kept lowering her voice and talking in whispers, then laughing out loud. That kind of got on Jimmy’s nerves because he couldn’t sit there and concentrate on his homework while he was wondering what they were talking about. He heard the tub draining. Evelyn got up with the phone to her ear and went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and Jimmy turned his head to see what she was getting and it was another raw hot dog. She brought it over to the couch and ate it a bite at a time while she was talking on the phone. The bathroom door opened and Velma came out in her white bathrobe and went down the hall to her room and then came back with a brush and sat down on the couch beside Jimmy and started brushing her hair. She looked at the TV. One of those shows was on where people redo a house. She looked over at Jimmy.

  “You watching this?” she said.

  “Naw,” Jimmy said, without raising his head. “I’m working on my homework. How much you got?”

  “I ain’t got none,” Velma said, brushing her hair. It was long and pretty and black. Jimmy liked her better than he liked Evelyn, which wasn’t saying much. He kind of felt sorry for Velma because of the way Evelyn treated her, and he’d seen her cry a lot of times from it. It seemed to Jimmy that Velma tried to be nice to Evelyn, because he’d seen her do stuff like bring Evelyn a cold Coke from the refrigerator or loan her some barrettes. But it looked like Evelyn just wanted to be a bully to Velma and make her cry. He wondered sometimes if it had something to do with them having two different daddies. He didn’t even know who Velma’s daddy was, and he’d only heard about Evelyn’s, the Corvette thief. Jimmy wondered sometimes about the history of his family. He knew he had a dead grandmother, but he never had seen a picture of her. That was his daddy’s mama. He knew he had a dead grandfather, who was his mama’s daddy, and he’d seen pictures of him, but he’d only met his daddy’s daddy a few times, and Mama Carol, his mama’s mama, lived down close to Bruce, and he used to go down there sometimes and eat hot dogs on Saturday nights while his mama and daddy went to Seafood Junction at Algoma. But it had been a long time now since they’d gone over there.

  “You got the remote there, partner?” Velma said.

  Jimmy picked it up and handed it to her, then got back on his science homework. This one was explaining about the needle on a compass and why it always pointed north. Then he got to reading about earthquakes and magma and tectonic plates and geysers and hot springs and the Richter scale. Velma flipped it over on Cinemax and a naked man and a naked woman were in a bed.

  “Gross,” Velma said, and Jimmy looked up at the TV. He’d seen stuff like that before. He’d gotten up one night in the middle of the night for a drink of water from the bathroom and hadn’t been trying to sneak up on his daddy or anything, had simply gotten out of bed and walked down the hall and had to go through the back part of the living room to get to the bathroom, and his daddy had been sitting in a chair in the dark, with no lights on, only the light from the TV, drinking beer and watching a movie like that. Jimmy was starting to get an idea about things like that, about what men and women did when they took their clothes off and got into a bed. He’d heard kids at school talk. He thought he was beginning to get the picture. Velma changed the channel. Evelyn giggled sexily on the phone.

  Jimmy was lying in bed when he heard his daddy come in. It wasn’t even ten o’clock, but his mama always made him go to bed early on school nights. She always said a growing boy needed his rest. A long time ago, when Jimmy was younger, he might have gotten up to see his daddy if he’d been lying in the bed and heard him come in and hadn’t seen him all day. Not now. The missing spear point. The ass whipping he’d taken for getting into his daddy’s tools. The near drowning. The tore-up go-kart. Never actually getting to go fishing. You little shit.

  He heard the car pull up in front of the trailer, heard it die, heard his daddy’s car door open, heard it slam. Then nothing. The front door didn’t open. He didn’t hear his daddy’s steps. His daddy was still outside, and Jimmy figured he was probably going to the bathroom. He did that a lot, went to the bathroom in the yard, but Jimmy’s mama had told Jimmy’s daddy that nice people didn’t do that sort of thing, at least not around other people. Another thing she absolutely hated was for Jimmy’s daddy to go to the bathroom inside the trailer, but then leave the door open, so that if you walked by you could hear him peeing in the toilet. Jimmy had heard his mama ask his daddy to please not do that anymore, that surely he hadn’t been raised in a barn, and that it wasn’t the right thing to do, especially in front of the girls, and his daddy had said that if they never had seen one, they wouldn’t know what the hell it was.

  Jimmy kept lying there, waiting to hear the door open, his daddy’s steps inside the trailer. He hoped his mama was asleep, because sometimes when his daddy came in late on a weeknight and she was still up, they had fights. And Jimmy hated to have to listen to their fights. It made it hard to go to sleep if you w
ere already in bed and trying to go to sleep. He was pretty sure the girls hated to listen to them, too, because whenever a fight started, you could hear the volume come up on the TV in the girls’ room, like they were trying to drown out the noise.

  One of the things that Jimmy hated most about the fact that they didn’t have the money to go to the Kenny Chesney concert in Tupelo was that it meant he wouldn’t get to go to Tupelo Buffalo Park either. He’d been kind of hoping that if they got to go to see Kenny Chesney in concert, maybe they could go over to Tupelo a little early and swing by Tupelo Buffalo Park. He’d heard about it from advertisements on the radio. It sounded like they had buffaloes you could ride, and they also had the tallest giraffe in the world over there. Jimmy had asked his mother if they could go to Tupelo Buffalo Park sometime, and she’d said maybe they could when they were over at Tupelo sometime, but they’d gone shopping for school clothes a while back, and he’d asked her that day, while they were over there, if they could go to Tupelo Buffalo Park, and his mother had said they didn’t have time. He could imagine himself riding a buffalo. He imagined the buffalo had some kind of a buffalo saddle.

  Jimmy rolled over in his bed. […] He lay there and thought about Evelyn’s breasts. He wondered what they looked like. Then he rolled over on his other side. The door didn’t open. His daddy’s footsteps didn’t walk across the trailer floor. He wondered what was taking him so long. Then he heard his mother’s door open. The TV went off. He heard her steps down the hall, and then there was silence.

  40

  Cortez was sitting by the phone when it rang. It was Friday afternoon, about three. He’d been sitting there watching the TV, but there weren’t any sex shows on at that time of the day. He’d flipped through the channels looking for something good, and the best thing he’d been able to find was a rerun of Rawhide. So he’d watched that, waiting for the phone to ring. Cortez picked it up. He knew it was probably the fish man, and he hoped he was just down the road somewhere. He turned down the TV.