A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  “Are they all still alive?” Cortez said.

  “I ain’t seen a dead one yet.”

  That was good. He was going to get everything he’d paid for. He wondered if maybe the fish man might like a good tomato sandwich after they got through putting the fish in.

  When Tommy Bright had five buckets full of water he started dipping up little catfish and putting them in the buckets.

  “It ain’t gonna take that long,” he said. “Usually I have to count em when I’m somewhere like the Co-op in Oxford. But I counted these when they were just hatched and I know how many there are. You probably got about thirty-three hundred fish. I always tried to be generous to my customers whenever I counted fish. Some die.”

  “I appreciate it,” Cortez said. “I’ll be glad to pay you for them extra fish.”

  “My treat, Mister Sharp,” the fish man said.

  Tommy Bright kept dipping fish and Cortez stood there and watched him. He couldn’t help but think about what a good job the fish man had, getting to mess with fish all the time. He wished he could go see his place, his fish operation in Arkansas. But didn’t he say the bank was foreclosing next week? It was a damn shame. Hell. He’d give him a whole bag of tomatoes. He could take them back to Arkansas with him. Maybe his wife liked a good tomato sandwich. He’d noticed the fish man’s wedding ring. He could see him sweating under the sun.

  “Okay, Mister Sharp,” the fish man said, and leaned his dip net against the side of a tank. He picked up two of the buckets and set them at the very back of the truck. Cortez reached and lifted the first one down and set it on the ground. It looked like it had about forty or fifty fish in it. He reached for another.

  They worked like that in tandem for a while, not talking much, the fish man scooping out the fish and putting them in the buckets and then setting them on the rear of the truck. Cortez started carrying them to the edge of the pond and pouring some water out of each one, then letting some pond water in. Tommy Bright asked for another stack of buckets and Cortez got them. The generator kept running.

  “I should have brought us some ice water,” Cortez said.

  Tommy Bright mopped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his glove. His shirt was already soaked.

  “It’d be nice,” he said. Then he turned back to work.

  It wasn’t long before Cortez had ten buckets lined up on the edge of the bank and he’d already put pond water in all of them. He walked the row of them, looking down, and he couldn’t see any dead fish at all. He looked up at Tommy Bright.

  “You think I can pour em in now?”

  “Yes sir, I’m sure they’ll be fine. Can I have those buckets back up here when you get done? I’ll take me a little break for a minute here if you don’t care.”

  “Shoot naw. Get on down and get under one of these trees. I tell you what I’ll do when I get these poured out,” Cortez said. “I’ll walk down to the house and fix us some ice water and get in my truck and bring it back up here.”

  And the fish man smiled as he got down from the truck.

  “That’d be real good, Mister Sharp,” he said. “That’d be mighty nice. If you could wait till I get the rest of em in the buckets, I can get some pond water in em and let you put the rest of em in when you get back.”

  “Sure,” Cortez said, and he went over to the first bucket in the row and squatted down beside it. He looked at the fish man.

  “Just pour em in?”

  “Just pour em in.”

  Something magical happened to Cortez when he picked up the bucket and tilted it over the water and started tipping it. The water came flowing out in a wide tongue and the little catfish came swimming with it, fins and tails and whiskers, splashing into the pond and muddying the bottom. He upended it until they were all gone. He looked down into the water. They were swimming around. Some were taking off. But others were hanging around at the very edge of the pond. He reached down and touched one with his finger and it sluggishly swam away into the depths. He turned around and looked at the fish man, who was sitting beneath a nearby tree mopping his face with his handkerchief.

  “How come they keep hanging around the bank?”

  “They don’t know what to do yet,” Tommy Bright said. “They’ll finally go on off in deep water. You see any dead ones?”

  “Not a one,” Cortez said.

  “They’re afraid a big one’s gonna eat em,” Tommy Bright said. “It’s instinct. They’ll hide until they figure it’s safe to go out.”

  “Well, they safe in here,” Cortez said. “Since there ain’t nothing else in here but them.”

  The fish man pulled at his ear, leaning against the bark on the tree. A little breeze had picked up and it stirred a few strands of his white hair. He looked out across the water and smiled.

  “You know, people ask me all the time about this and that. How much you feed em, when you feed em. If they want to raise crappie I tell em they need fathead minnows. If they’ve got too many bluegills I tell em they better buy some Florida bass. I been messing with fish for almost twenty years and if things had gone better for me — or if I’d done better, I should say — I’d keep right on doing what I’m doing. But it don’t matter what kind of pond or lake you’ve got or what’s in it. There ain’t but one rule in a pond. You know what that one is, Mister Sharp?”

  Cortez picked up another bucket and turned his head to Tommy Bright.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “The big ones eat the little ones.”

  Cortez kept pouring them in and the fish man took the empty buckets to the back of the truck and climbed up again. He started working with the dip net again and handing the buckets to Cortez and Cortez kept putting pond water in them and then pouring them into the pond. After another fifteen minutes or so, Cortez figured they were about halfway through. Tommy Bright was working on the fourth tank by then.

  “You sure you don’t want me to go on and get that ice water?” Cortez said.

  “Let me get these last ones out, Mister Sharp. We don’t have too many more. Then I’ll cool off while you get the water if that’s okay.”

  “Okay,” Cortez said. They kept working and working and finally the fish man raised the lid on the sixth tank. It was getting close to seven o’clock by then but it was still hot.

  It took more buckets for the eight-inch fish since he could put fewer in each. But finally he had them all sitting on the back of the truck and he was dipping out the last stragglers with the net. He’d been draining the tanks as he went and now there was water soaked all into the red-clay gravel around the truck. He plucked one last remaining catfish from the net and dropped it into a bucket and put away the dip net. He started taking off his gloves.

  “That’s it,” he said, and dropped his gloves on the planks. He took off his apron while he was still standing on the truck and then he climbed down and opened the driver’s door and reached in and killed the generator. He shut the door and walked around and started helping Cortez set the buckets on the edge of the bank. “I’ll take care of these if you want to go get that water for us.”

  “Okay,” Cortez said. “But I want you to stop by the house before you take off. I want to give you some fresh homegrown tomatoes.”

  Tommy Bright reached up with the back of his hand and wiped some sweat from his cheek. Then he smiled again.

  “That’s mighty nice of you, Mister Sharp. I’ll take care of these fish for you and they ought to be ready to put in by the time you get back.”

  “It won’t take me but about ten minutes,” Cortez said. “I’m just gonna head across the pasture.”

  “I’ll be here when you get back,” the fish man said, and Cortez took off down the hill. Damn, he was excited. The grass had really sprouted out after the rain and he needed to get up here with his 4020 and his Bush Hog and Bush Hog it all down. He could do that tomorrow if it wasn’t too wet on the sides of the hills. This old clay ground around here was bad to hold water.

  He walked
on down the hill and looked at his house. He didn’t think it was going to need painting again this year. The boys who’d done it last year had done a real good job. And maybe when it cooled off a little more, maybe next month, he’d get down there and fix that rotted section of fence by the pea patch. He’d have to go to Bruce for some posts and some more barbed wire. He had part of a roll in the barn but not enough.

  He opened the gate at the foot of the hill and let himself into the back pasture and then closed it behind him. Then he walked along the edge of the fence past the old pond which was muddy. Some of the cows were wading around in it, lifting the flies from their backs. One cow was standing with her heavy black bag in the water and a bream was jumping for the blood-bloated ticks hanging there. The others had moved under the big oaks and were lying in the shade, chewing their cuds, swatting at horseflies with their tails. Clusters of houseflies lay resting on them.

  He stopped at the next gate and looked back up the hill to where the fish truck was sitting beside the pond. The fish man was up on the truck, and he looked like he was raising the lid on another tank. Putting all his stuff away, probably. Cortez turned and went on.

  41

  As soon as Ursula got in there she started eating some of those little catfish. Must have been hungry from her trip. Needed a few snacks. She was kind of like a killer whale, bringing part of her head out of the water to scoop them up in mouthfuls in the shallow end where hundreds of them had gathered to hover in dumb anticipation of nothing.

  She scooped them and bit them and swallowed them and chomped them, chasing and catching them, working her way around the edge of the bank, muddying the water, picking up two and three here, one or two there. Most fled. Her stomach fluids would dissolve fins and little bony heads. Mere tidbits of fish. She kept chasing them and eating them until she was full, which only took about five minutes, and then she swam to the deeper end, where the water was colder, and slowly slanted off into the borrow pit and then found its smooth clay bottom with her belly, and there she settled, mouth opening and closing, her gills smoothly working, the water washing out of them on each side, red-laced cartilage as delicately scalloped as snowflakes. The rubber-hose handles on her side fins were gone. Her whiskers were waving gently in the water.

  And there she lay, waiting, seeing the small fish dart by, no end of food in sight. But she wouldn’t come up again until she was ready to feed again. In the daytime, the bottom was where she’d stay most of the time. Unless she found something interesting to eat. Catfish were like that.

  42

  The big red truck didn’t stop at a motel in Oxford. It passed under the green light at the bypass on 6 just outside of town and barreled west toward the turnoff for I-55 at Batesville. It passed farms and houses and fields and furniture stores, mobile home dealers, little barbecue joints, used-car lots, and places where people sold rocks. Or bathtubs. Wrought-iron gate work. People in the ditches with plastic bags picking up cans. The sun was slanting low in the western sky and the truck rolled on down the road like it was trying to meet it. It went by white fences that kept in horses and it went by trailers that sat treeless under the sun day by day and it went by houses under construction, pale two by fours in rows with headers framed in for doors and windows, stacks of asphalt shingles and long lumber wrapped in sheets of Visqueen and awaiting the saw, the hammer.

  It crossed the county line at Rick’s beer store and rolled past the entrance to Sardis Lake. It passed a cemetery filled with flowers where a blue tent stood abandoned, a mound of earth heaped with carnations and daisies, fragile lilies already wilted from the heat.

  The sun dipped beneath a distant ridge of dark green pines and the truck’s headlights came on. It rolled past some business offices and Tri-County Marine outside Batesville, the offices empty, the boats inside the six-foot chain-link fence covered with snugly fitted custom tarps. It rolled past a Lowe’s and a Shell gas station and then it moved to the exit and turned right with its blinker flashing until it joined the flow of eighteen-wheelers and cars and pickups and station wagons and motorcycles and campers towing ski rigs going north toward Memphis.

  The sun dropped out of sight and the truck rolled between tall stands of pines planted years ago on both sides of the highway, and black Peterbilts and green Kenworths passed it, smoke pouring briefly from their chrome pipes as their drivers grabbed another gear. It climbed the long hills, the highway lit now only by the headlights of the vehicles that moved in groups and by ones, yellow orbs lancing through the bugs that danced in their beams.

  The right blinker came on again at the town of Sardis, and it took the exit and came to a stop at the bottom of the hill. The left blinker flashed and the truck sat there at the STOP sign for less than ten seconds, long enough for two cars to pass in front of it going west. The truck pulled out behind them and went up another hill past an abandoned motel with its gangrenous swimming pool, its rotting garden hoses. It pulled in at the Sonic and sat there for ten minutes and then it circled the red-roofed building and came back out on the street and drove on up the interstate to Hernando, through town, past the library and the courthouse, past old magnificent homes with yellow lights showing through the windows.

  When it left town it went into more valleys but not so many hills, horse farms with board fences, the posts skimming by like spokes on a slow-turning wheel. By and by the hills leveled out and the trees diminished and there were fields so gigantic they ran to absolute black out beyond the moving beams of the big red truck. The air laden with the sorry smell of insecticides. The land was flat and some of it was growing rice, other parts of it cotton. The truck rolled forward deeper into the blackness of a Mississippi Delta night.

  At Robinsonville the truck slowed and turned onto the new highway that was well lighted from the lamps that hung on the concrete poles. Out there in the darkness there rose up a searchlight that tracked a white arc across the black sky and then returned to its start. The lights of the casinos cast the night back like a whole city newly arrived and fully formed from the belly of some monstrous mother ship.

  43

  Jimmy’s daddy, in an effort to be a better daddy to Jimmy, decided to take him to Ripley, to Trade Day, to what folks all over North Mississippi called First Monday, since that’s when it happened, the first of every month, winter and summer, spring and fall. But neither of those names was accurate, because it actually started on the weekend, on Saturday, and then went through Sunday, and then Monday. So actually you didn’t have to wait until the first Monday to go to First Monday, but Jimmy’s daddy didn’t understand why they didn’t call it Last Saturday, or Trade Days. They got up early on Saturday — Jimmy’s daddy had consciously avoided overdrinking the night before and had polished off only a six-pack along with a supper of lighter-fluid-flavored hamburgers and watched a little TV before going to bed — in order to get there in plenty of time and have all the time in the world to wander around the old fairgrounds among the booths and stalls and open pickup beds and horse trailers and tables with tents over them and look at everything that was for sale: guns, chickens, chicken cages, chicken grit, pottery, tractors, toys, ponies, mules, donkeys, burros, horses, dogs, quilts, homemade jellies and jams and preserves, ribbon cane syrup, tomato relish to put on your peas, cookware of all types, including rusty cast-iron skillets and dutch ovens, candles, musical instruments, ironwork, new tools, old tools, trailers, antiques of every kind, furniture, knickknacks, rabbits, rabbit cages, rabbit feed, rabbit feeders, rabbit waterers, frozen pen-raised quail, fishing equipment, tillers, lawn mowers, chain saws, stump grinders, portable sheds, portable water pumps, portable generators, portable sawmills, anvils, harnesses, plows, hand-painted mailboxes, handmade-and-hand-painted birdhouses, embroidery, rocking chairs, porch swings, belt buckles and belts, used military insignia, Bowie knives, swords, hunting videos, hunting equipment, baseball cards, trapping equipment, used paperbacks by the box, fake floral arrangements, hot dogs, hamburgers, chicken-on-a-stick, corn pups, r
ibs and chicken, slushes, hand-dipped ice cream, wholesale home remedies, audiotapes and CDs, rugs, pet monkeys, coin collections, arrowhead collections, and lots of other things. Plenty of it cheap. It took a whole day to look at everything if you gave everything a good looking over and you could spend the whole day entertained and get food, too.

  That morning, Jimmy was shaken awake with the words “Come on, Hot Rod.” Jimmy dressed quickly and they ate on the road. Jimmy’s daddy knew a place out on Highway 30 and they pulled the ’55 in there by eight o’clock. They went in and sat down to a red-checkered tablecloth and the sounds of country radio playing and the smells of coffee freshly brewed and succulent meat sizzling, ordered big breakfasts of ham and eggs and french toast and regular toast and molasses and strawberry preserves, hot coffee for Jimmy’s daddy, orange juice and milk for Jimmy.

  Jimmy thought it was about the coolest thing his daddy had ever done for him. It went a long way toward stifling most of the feelings of ambiguity he’d been feeling about his daddy ever since he’d almost drowned him. He would have eventually gotten over it anyway, just because he loved his daddy so much, but this hastened the process. The eggs were cooked the way he liked them with the yellows runny and the french toast was sweet and crunchy at the same time, smothered in lots of Aunt Jemima syrup, something Jimmy rarely got at home. Why? Because Aunt Jemima cost too much to buy, according to Jimmy’s daddy.

  And another thing was that Jimmy’s daddy seemed to be in a really good mood, that’s how it appeared to Jimmy. He was telling Jimmy jokes and stories about the stuff he did when he was growing up, like working in Halter Wellums’s sawmill and digging big splinters out of his fingers in the evenings and walking home through the woods, saving his money to buy his first car. And he went on to tell him what a piece of shit it turned out to be, about all the rattles it had in the dash. Jimmy cut off some more french toast and asked his daddy a few questions about motors just because he knew his daddy liked to talk about motors, and his daddy talked about Edelbrock intakes and Isky cams some. He confided in Jimmy that he was going to have to fix the transmission in the ’55, or maybe get a new one, maybe with a Hurst shifter. Jimmy immediately wondered how much that would cost. He’d pretty much given up on the Kenny Chesney concert, but there was still a little piece of hidden mythical pasture in the dreamy back part of his mind that was labeled Tupelo Buffalo Park.