A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  “What we got to eat?” he asked Jimmy.

  “Hot dogs,” Jimmy said. He was surfing the channels.

  Hot dogs. Fucking hot dogs. He was sick of hot dogs. Could she not buy anything else to eat? How about some sliced ham and salami? What about some cheese around this place once in a while? Had she ever heard of that? Of cheese? You couldn’t find a bag of potato chips around here that hadn’t been already opened and about half of them eaten and then the rest of the bag just rolled up instead of having a Chip-Clip put on it, and there were plenty of Chip-Clips right there in a drawer. He didn’t know why these damn kids couldn’t use them and help keep the rest of the potato chips halfway fresh for the next person who might want some potato chips with a sandwich if you could find anything around here to make one out of.

  “We ain’t got any frozen pizza?” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  “I think the girls ate all it.”

  Jimmy’s daddy leaned forward and pulled the ashtray closer to him and thumped some ashes in it. Well fuck. Would it be worth going out there and jacking up the car and changing the flat by flashlight to be able to ride up to Oxford and maybe get something to eat from the Sonic? But then he wouldn’t have a spare. What he needed was two spares. He had room back there in the trunk. He could keep an extra one that way and not have to worry about it. If he put the good tire on the ground tonight and rode up toward town and then had another flat he’d be fucked. He’d be stuck on the side of the road is what he’d be. There wasn’t much that Jimmy’s daddy hated more than being stuck on the side of the road. Especially at night. Nobody was going to stop and help you. You’d have to walk to somebody’s house and hope they didn’t have a biting dog and knock on the door and get somebody to come to the door and ask them if you could use their phone. And if he did change it, and did head toward town, and did have another flat, and had to walk to somebody’s house to call somebody, who in the hell would he call? Jimmy? Here? What good could he do? Rusty? Hell no. He was going out to Applebee’s to eat. Hell, if he went to town, Jimmy’d probably want to go with him if he went to the Sonic. Shit. He’d bet Jimmy could jack that car up, if he told him how to do it. He’d had it in the back of his mind all day to try and sneak off and ride down to Water Valley tonight to talk to Lacey and see how she was doing, but in another way that he didn’t deny, he didn’t want to have to deal with it. He was going to have to deal with it, no fucking doubt, just when was the question.

  “What’d you eat?” he said.

  “Hot dogs,” Jimmy said.

  […]

  “We ain’t got nothing to make a sandwich out of?” he said.

  “I think Mama eat all that,” Jimmy said.

  “I wonder what she expects us to eat,” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  “Hot dogs, I guess,” Jimmy said.

  Fat bitch. No damn telling where she was. Or what she was doing. If her daughter was sucking off boys on the school bus, her daughter might be sucking some off at the skating rink. She ought not to go to a damn movie and just leave her kids in there like that. Oh, he knew they had grown people working there who were supposed to watch them, sure, but how did they know what went on in the bathrooms? Kids were sneaky. You had to watch them all the time. And he damn sure didn’t want to tell Johnette about what Jimmy had told him, but he couldn’t see how he could ignore it either. The next thing would be fucking. If she wasn’t already. Hell. If her daddy was a Corvette thief. What kind of genes was that?

  […] He heated some water in a pan on the stove. He dropped a couple of hot dogs in there and stuck some of his beer in the icebox. And then he remembered that he had a can of that stuff you use to inflate a flat tire in the shed. What? Stop Leak? Something.

  After he ate, he got Jimmy to help him with the flat. It didn’t take long, the two of them. He iced down some beer and told Jimmy he’d be back later. And then he left him standing there watching him leave.

  And then he stopped and backed up and told him to get in.

  46

  Jimmy’s daddy told Jimmy where they were going and then drove him through the night, up an old dirt road that Jimmy dimly remembered, down close to Potlockney. It wound through the woods, and the gravel on the road jumped up and hit the bottom of the car, and there were tall pines along the road. Not many houses. There were deer that ran into the woods. They saw a fox and two coons. They saw a possum eating an armadillo. There were gates here and there with POSTED signs hung on them and Jimmy asked his daddy what those places were. His daddy told him they were private hunting clubs. You paid a membership to join. One sign said NUB’S CLUB and Jimmy wondered who Nub was. Jimmy asked his daddy why didn’t he join a private hunting club and Jimmy’s daddy said he couldn’t afford it. So Jimmy wondered how much that cost. His tooth was starting to hurt a little worse, but he didn’t want to say anything about it because he was afraid they’d send him straight to the dentist for a root canal. Might even take him out of school for it.

  The road went around curves and it climbed hills and sometimes they’d pass a place where all the trees had been cut and there was a vast wide-open darkness out there beyond the edge of the road. In these spots there could be seen a tall tower way off in the distance where three red lights blinked. Jimmy didn’t ask what it was. He was consciously trying to avoid asking too many questions because he knew that got on his daddy’s nerves and he didn’t want to do that. Not tonight since it was just the two of them, going somewhere again. He hated the last trip had turned out the way it had. It had actually been kind of fun going to jail, though.

  Once they met some people on four-wheelers, a string of them with small headlights set close together, and Jimmy’s daddy moved the car over to the side of the road and slowed down as he met them. There was a cloud of dust following the line of four-wheelers and Jimmy’s daddy rolled his window up as he met them. When the four-wheelers had gone past he rolled the window back down. Jimmy wondered how much a four-wheeler cost. One of those would probably be a lot better than a gokart. He’d bet the chain wouldn’t come off a four-wheeler.

  They kept driving. There were brown birds that sat in the road and waited until the car was almost on top of them before they flew up and flared away. Jimmy asked his daddy what those birds were and his daddy said they were whippoorwills. He said when they called at night they said, Chip off the white oak. So that’s what those were behind the trailer.

  […]

  They drove for a long time without seeing a house. There was nothing but the black woods around them, and more gates with the signs on them. Once they met a big jacked-up pickup with lights and chrome all over it and Jimmy’s daddy said something about little bastards running up and down the road. Jimmy could see the stars out the window, little dots sprinkled across the black sky. He didn’t tell his daddy this, but he couldn’t wait to get a big jacked-up pickup and run up and down the road. He had already made up his mind that when he got grown and out of school, he was going to work in the stove factory where his daddy worked, save his money, and buy a big jacked-up pickup. He had it all planned. He could ride with his daddy to work while he was saving his money, and then after he got his pickup he could give his daddy a ride to work and back home. Swap off every other week or something. He’d get some Merle CDs for his daddy to listen to. Keep him some cold beer in a cooler in the back.

  They rode and rode. The can of Stop Leak was riding on the seat between them. The ’55’s dash rattled some on the gravel road, but Jimmy’s daddy compensated for that by turning up the volume on the radio. They listened to solid country gold for a while and then the station ran some more commercials. One of the commercials was a guy selling mobile homes. Jimmy’s daddy turned the volume down.

  “You hear that guy?” he said.

  “Yes sir,” Jimmy said.

  “Hear him trying to sell people trailers?”

  “Sounds like they got that easy payment plan,” Jimmy said.

  “I guarantee you that guy don’t live in no trailer,” Jimmy�
�s daddy said. He took a drink of his beer and lit a cigarette.

  “He don’t?” Jimmy said.

  “Why, hell naw,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “The son of a bitch probably lives in a brick house from all the money he’s made selling trailers.”

  “Oh,” Jimmy said. His daddy turned the radio back up since the commercial was off. Then they played some more solid country gold.

  After a while, Jimmy’s daddy flipped his cigarette out the window and turned off where a rusty mailbox was sitting on a post and onto a side road where there were some light poles planted with wires running overhead. This road didn’t have gravel on it. It was kind of spooky looking and dark and bumpy and covered with dead leaves and sticks, narrow in places. They squeezed between banks of eroded red clay and once Jimmy’s daddy had to stop the car and get out and move a big limb out of the way. Then they drove until they came to a clearing in the woods where an old camper trailer sat almost engulfed by piles of aluminum cans.

  There was just one little light burning inside it when they pulled up and stopped. Jimmy’s daddy killed the headlights and shut off the car and turned his head to Jimmy, who was sitting kind of close to the door.

  “Old fart may not even be up,” he said. He sipped from his beer. Jimmy just sat there. He had run back inside for a moment to grab a T-shirt and his house shoes, too, since it was starting to get a little cooler at night. […]

  “Why don’t you go knock on the door?” Jimmy said.

  “He knows we out here,” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  “How’s he know who it is, though?” Jimmy said.

  “He knows who it is,” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  That seemed kind of mysterious, so Jimmy just sat there, looking at the place where supposedly his grandfather lived. Unlike the trailer Jimmy lived in, this one still had the wheels on it. It was a faded blue with a striped awning hanging over the front door, and there was a tank of something hooked to it. Jimmy guessed that was cooking gas. There were some electric lines hooked to it, too, coming off a pole that sat beside it. Some old furniture was lying around in front of it. Some fishing poles were leaned up against it. Jimmy hadn’t known that his grandfather fished, but he hadn’t met his grandfather very many times. He thought he’d only met him about twice. And about all he remembered about him was that he smelled bad and cussed a lot and sometimes got to coughing so hard from all the cigarettes he smoked that he’d bend over and get to going Bleah heah heah heah heah! with his red and fuzzy tongue hanging out about six inches. Then he’d light another one and cuss.

  They sat there some more. Crickets were chirping all around them. Some of them had gotten inside the car. There was some kind of flickering light going on inside the trailer. Jimmy figured that was the television. He looked at his daddy. His daddy was just sitting there sipping his beer. Jimmy looked back at the trailer. It had rusted holes in it and there was an old-timey TV antenna sticking up from the roof.

  Jimmy wondered if now would be a good time to tell his daddy about talking to the man who was driving the big red truck that had TOMMY’S BIG RED FISH TRUCK painted on the doors that day. Getting picked up by the cops had messed it up the time before, when he’d been thinking about telling him. There was one thing for sure he didn’t want to tell him and that was about using his binoculars over the last few days to try and see if the mean old man had put some catfish in his pond. Jimmy had found the binoculars while crawling around under his mother and daddy’s bed one afternoon before either one of them was home, looking for some change. He knew that whenever his mother moved a bed to clean, there was always money under it. And he’d thought that maybe if he could scrape up a little change here and there, and save it, and maybe get a little more, here and there, then maybe he could eventually buy a new chain for his go-kart. He didn’t know how much one cost. He just knew he needed one. And while he was crawling and looking for some change, he found his daddy’s binoculars. In a nice leather-looking case with the word BUSHNELL printed on it. With a long black strap you could hang around your neck. Even Jimmy could tell that they cost more money than a bunch of old rusty tools in an old rusty toolbox. That meant they were probably more hazardous to mess with than his daddy’s tools. Which had turned out to be pretty hazardous. So he had been wary about opening the case and looking through the binoculars at something. But it wasn’t like he could really stop himself either.

  He looked at his daddy. His daddy was still drinking beer.

  “Too damn good to come out and speak,” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  Jimmy didn’t say anything, still sticking to his not-asking-Daddy-too-many-questions plan. He’d taken the binoculars that afternoon and looked through the window at some trees and bushes, and it was amazing how close the glasses brought them up. They made everything bigger and clearer. It was a risk, true, but Jimmy remembered his daddy asking his mother one morning when he came back from hunting if she’d seen his binoculars, and they’d probably been lying under their bed the whole time. And if they had, that probably meant that Jimmy’s daddy still didn’t know where they were. It was a risk, yeah, messing with something that belonged to his daddy, but Jimmy took the binoculars outside just before it got dark and went up the road and got off into the woods and walked there, instead of out in the road, up toward the mean old man’s place, which wasn’t any trouble, because the woods were filled with big tall trees and there weren’t many bushes growing in between them, and the walking was pretty good. He stopped when he got in front of the pond. He took the binoculars from the case and glassed the pond. There wasn’t anybody there. He swung the glasses left and looked down toward the old man’s house, but it was hard to see it for all the trees. He could see part of the driveway. He could see the barn. He could see some of the pasture, but it was getting darker fast.

  “Unsociable old fart,” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  “I wish I had a Coke,” Jimmy said.

  “Why didn’t you bring one from home?” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  “I didn’t think about it,” Jimmy said.

  “Well, see, you need to plan ahead,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “That’s what I try to do. Plan ahead. I knew I’d want some beer so I brought some. How about handing me another one out of that new cooler I bought back there?”

  Jimmy moved the blanket off the cooler and got the beer for him and Jimmy’s daddy tossed the empty one out toward the tiny trailer. It bounced off the front door onto a pile of cans. Jimmy thought for sure that would bring his grandfather out if he was really in there, but it didn’t.

  “Probably passed out,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “We gonna set here ten more minutes and if he don’t come out, we leaving.”

  “Where we going then?” Jimmy said.

  “You going back home,” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  It took some guts for Jimmy to ask his daddy the next question, but he did anyway:

  “Where you going?”

  “Don’t you worry none about where I’m going,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “I’m going to town to get this flat fixed. So I’ll have a spare. I got to have a spare before I go back to work Monday.”

  “Oh,” Jimmy said. He waited a few moments.

  “Can I go?”

  Jimmy’s daddy turned his head to look at him. He had slumped back in the seat and he had his beer can sitting on his belly.

  “What you want to go for?” he said.

  Jimmy spoke the truth.

  “Just to be with you,” he said.

  Jimmy’s daddy didn’t answer at first. But he turned his face back toward the windshield. Jimmy could tell that his daddy was getting drunk. He’d seen this transformation before. His daddy slowed down. He talked slower, he moved slower, he thought longer before he spoke. He was doing that now, thinking long. He thought so long that Jimmy thought he wasn’t going to answer him. And then he did. In a low, husky voice. A very quiet voice that came deep from somewhere inside him and didn’t sound like him at all.

  “Look,” he said. “A man’s got st
uff he’s got to do. I mean, I might want to go up to a bar and have a beer or something. And I can’t take you in there cause you ain’t old enough. You’d have to just set in the car and wait on me.”

  “I wouldn’t care,” Jimmy said.

  “But I would,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “I would.”

  Jimmy just nodded. He decided he wouldn’t tell his daddy right now about the man who’d been driving the big red fish truck. Or of how he’d sat there in the darkening woods for a while the day he’d found the binoculars, motionless, hidden behind green leaves, watching across the road through the binoculars, not moving very much, even when the mosquitoes whined close to him. He even let some of them bite him. He figured that’s what you had to do when you were hunting and were supposed to be still. So he was still. He kept the glasses close to his eyes and swept the length of the pond with them, examining the dark still water, and then something making ripples along one of the banks. He couldn’t tell what it was. Frog? Snake? Snapping turtle? Whatever it was didn’t ripple long. The water stilled. Jimmy kept watching the spot and didn’t move the glasses. Then he saw another ripple. And then he heard something coming and swung the glasses to the left and saw a very big headlight moving toward him and took the glasses down long enough to take a look and see the mean old man coming up his driveway. Jimmy almost got up and ran, but then he remembered how still the hunters in his daddy’s hunting videos stayed when they were up in a tree and not talking to the cameraman, so he just stayed still. He wasn’t on the old man’s land anyway. He was on some land across the road. And his daddy had already told him that somebody in Memphis owned that piece of land. So Jimmy just stayed where he was. He sat very still with his heart pounding as the old man stopped at the end of his driveway, and then pulled out, headed toward where Jimmy was sitting. The truck passed on the dirt road, screened by the green leaves in the woods. Then it turned down onto the new road that Jimmy had already noticed riding by it on the school bus. He put the glasses back up to his eyes and everything was blurry, even though he could tell he was looking at the pick-up’s tailgate. He focused the glasses with his thumb and then he read the license plate. At the bottom it said MISSISSIPPI. Jimmy adjusted the glasses as the truck pulled down into the woods, and he saw the old man get out and slam the door of the truck about a second before he heard it. Jimmy kept the glasses on him as he walked over to a tree and took the lid off a steel garbage can. The glasses were so good that he could see the old man scooping up with a quart fruit jar something that looked kind of like dog food, only smaller. And then he walked over to the edge of the pond and started throwing it out over the water. Turning the jar up and pouring it into his hand and then flinging it. It flew out into the air and sprinkled on top of the water like raindrops. Then the old man sat on the ground. Nothing happened for a long time and Jimmy sat there in the woods and watched the old man. He just kept the glasses on him and looked at him. The old man’s face was turned to one side as if he were listening for something. Jimmy felt some sort of strange feeling from watching him and knowing the old man didn’t know it. What was that stuff in the garbage can and what was he doing with it? And why was he just sitting there? Was he sick? Jimmy’s mama had told him that the old man’s wife had died a while back. And the day she’d told him, they’d driven by the cemetery, and had seen a blue tent set up, and Jimmy had asked his mama what that tent was for, and she’d said it was for Mr. Sharp’s wife. Jimmy knew he was looking at Mr. Sharp. And that Mr. Sharp was probably pretty sad, missing his dead wife. He didn’t look that mean from here, where you could take your time and get a good look at him. He was big. He had gray hair, but he had a lot of it. His hands looked strong. The main thing Jimmy remembered was him yelling Get the hell off my place! at him. It was almost too dark to see.