A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  He worked the fish closer and worked himself closer to the edge of the bank, and then he saw it. It was a little catfish about eight inches long, swimming back and forth. It had part of the worm hanging out of its mouth. Was it big enough to eat? It looked big enough to Jimmy to eat. He kept turning the handle and working the fish closer, and just when he thought he could raise the rod tip and swing it onto the bank, something happened. He didn’t know what it was. Just something big that grabbed the little catfish, which caused the bobber to go back out of sight, and when Jimmy tried to turn the handle, it wouldn’t turn. It wouldn’t turn at all. It was like it was locked. But it wasn’t locked. Something was pulling really really really hard and Jimmy didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know anything about setting the drag. He hadn’t read his owner’s manual. He didn’t know that there was a small thumb wheel right there on the reel that would allow line to be pulled off without breaking if a big fish got on. So he just stood there tugging on the rod, trying to raise it, but whatever had taken his little catfish was going deeper and deeper and deeper and pulling the rod tip down and down and down and the line sliced across the water with drops of water leaping from it until Jimmy was forced to hold it straight out and he knew that he couldn’t hold it because it was pulling too hard and he almost cried out for some help and then the line went zing! and broke. Jimmy had been leaning backward against the pull of whatever it was and he had to take a step back to keep his balance.

  Jimmy stood there, stunned, his line lying limp in the water. He reeled it in and looked at it. Everything was gone, bobber, sinker, hook. He caught the end of the line and looked at it. It was pretty thick line. Then he looked back out at the water, which had gone all black and still now that all the commotion had died down. And it had happened so fast.

  Something mighty funny going on here, Jimmy thought. Mm hmm. But he didn’t want to take a chance on messing up his new rod and reel, accidentally breaking it or something, so he loaded up all his stuff and went back down the road toward the trailer. He looked down toward Mister Cortez’s house when he passed his driveway, but he didn’t see him. He was probably still sad over losing his wife, so maybe he’d better not go see him right now. He thought he’d ride around a little before supper since he still had plenty of gas. So he did.

  Jimmy’s daddy was home earlier than usual that evening, and he seemed to be in a pretty good mood. He was already in when Jimmy got in from fishing and riding around. Jimmy’s daddy wasn’t drinking, and he helped Velma with some of her homework, and he cooked some french fries in the kitchen while Jimmy’s mama was cooking minute steaks and gravy, and the two of them were talking in there and sometimes even laughing. They all sat down and ate supper together, and Jimmy’s mama had made a salad with tomatoes and lettuce and croutons and Bac’n Pieces and slices of cucumber, but Jimmy didn’t like cucumber, so he slid his to the side of his plate. The girls talked about school and Kid Rock and Jimmy’s mama talked about the new girl they had working at the bank and Jimmy’s daddy said he might go out and look for some deer sign this weekend. Jimmy’s daddy helped Jimmy’s mama clean up the kitchen and wash the dishes and Jimmy heard his mama tell his daddy that she sure appreciated him helping her cook and clean up, that it was a whole lot easier when you had two people doing it, and he said he was glad to and was going to try and do it more often.

  After supper, Jimmy went outside and opened his tackle box and looked around in the bottom until he found a little booklet he’d seen in there before but never had read. It had a picture of Jimmy’s reel on the front of it, so Jimmy took it inside and opened it up and started reading it. That’s when he found out about the drag on his reel. He raised his head and looked over at his daddy, who instead of being back in his bedroom by himself watching hunting videos and drinking beer, was sitting in the living room on the couch watching Law and Order with Jimmy’s mama. The girls were in the bathroom, fussing quietly. Running the hair dryer and playing the radio.

  “Daddy?” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah, Sport?” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  “You know how to set the drag on my reel?”

  “I imagine so,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “Bring it in here in the kitchen and we’ll look at it.”

  Jimmy got up and went back to his bedroom and brought it out. He wasn’t trying to hide his new rod and reel from his daddy, but at the same time he didn’t want his daddy messing with it without his knowledge. His daddy was already up, standing in the kitchen putting some ice cubes into a glass, pouring some straight Coke in. His daddy sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette and then laid it in an ashtray. Jimmy put the rod and reel on the table and sat down. Jimmy’s daddy sipped his Coke and picked up the rod and reel and looked at it. He did something with a little wheel next to the thumb button. Then he tugged on the line. It didn’t move. He did something else to the wheel and tugged on the line again. It didn’t move. Then he did something else to the wheel and this time when he tugged on the line, it made a peculiar sound almost like a cricket chirping as it peeled off the reel and out through the ferrules.

  “C’mere, Jimmy,” Jimmy’s daddy said. Jimmy got up and went to stand next to his daddy. He almost put his arm around him. His daddy turned the reel toward him.

  “See this little wheel right here?” he said.

  “Yes sir?” Jimmy said.

  “That’s your drag, Hot Rod. You can adjust it for tight or loose. That way if you hang a big fish, he can pull the line off and give you a chance to wear him down and land him. If it’s set too tight, and you hang a big one, he’s liable to break your line. You always got to set your drag before you go fishing.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Jimmy said. He wished he had known it. He wished to hell he’d known it! He might have caught that big thing whatever it was.

  “Oh yeah,” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  “Can I try it?” Jimmy said.

  “Sure,” his daddy said, and handed him the rod and reel and picked up his cigarette and sipped his Coke. Jimmy’s mama walked into the kitchen and walked behind Jimmy’s daddy’s chair and put her hands on Jimmy’s daddy’s shoulders. She looked happy for a change and Jimmy was glad to see that.

  “What y’all doing?” she said.

  “Showing Jimmy how to use his drag,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “We gonna go fishing one of these days.”

  “I wish you would take him,” she said. “It sure was nice of Mister Sharp to give him that rod and reel. You can tell he spent some money on it.”

  “Oh hell yeah,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “I know that rod cost at least fifty bucks and the reel probably eighty. He’s got thirty or forty bucks’ worth of fishing gear. New tackle box. I wish I had stuff that good.”

  Jimmy wasn’t listening that closely to what they were saying since he was busy pulling on the line and turning the wheel and then it dawned on him how it worked. It was simple. If you tightened the wheel all the way, the line wouldn’t slip off. If you loosened it, it would. But then he had a question. What would it take to break the line if the drag was tightened all the way down? He’d figured out by then that the drag had been tightened all the way down this afternoon. And he’d also figured out that some huge turtle had already gotten into Mister Cortez’s pond, and that that was probably what had grabbed his little catfish and eaten it.

  Jimmy’s mama bent over and kissed Jimmy’s daddy on top of his bald head since he had his cap off. Then she got out the ice cream from the top of the refrigerator. Jimmy’s daddy was sitting there smoking and sipping his Coke.

  “How strong’s this line?” Jimmy said.

  “I don’t know,” his daddy said. “Was that your little booklet that come with the reel you’s looking at while ago?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Bring it over here for me, how about it?”

  Jimmy got it from the coffee table and brought it back over, still carrying his rod and reel. Jimmy’s daddy opened it up and looked at it for a minute, reading in it. Then he
pointed to it with his finger.

  “Right here. ‘This reel is prewound at the factory with twenty-pound test DuPont monofilament.’ There you go. Twenty-pound test.” He handed the booklet back to Jimmy.

  Jimmy said, “Does that mean it takes something that weighs twenty pounds to break it?”

  Jimmy’s daddy picked up his Coke and his cigarette again. Jimmy’s mama was scooping Rocky Road into a bowl. She also had a big pile of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies. Like ham and cheese Hot Pockets, Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies didn’t last long around there either.

  “Well … yeah,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “Basically. But if your drag’s set right, it would probably take something that weighed more than twenty pounds to break it. Cause it’ll just keep coming off if the drag’s set right. I mean if you don’t run out of line. I mean if you ain’t out in the middle of the ocean or something.”

  Jimmy stood there thinking about that. More than twenty pounds? More than twenty pounds?

  He almost told his daddy. He almost almost almost almost almost told him. Almost told him everything, almost spilled all the beans. Almost told him about the big red fish truck, and the man with white hair, almost told him about the three thousand little catfish, almost told him he’d hung something in Mister Cortez’s pond this afternoon that had broken his line. But when his daddy asked him where his casting plug was, Jimmy just told him that he’d taken it off. Which was no lie.

  53

  Jimmy’s daddy went to bed by ten that night. The kids were already in their beds since it was a school night. Johnette said she thought she might watch a little TV and Jimmy’s daddy told her he thought he’d try to get a good night’s sleep for a change. She told him she’d be in later and told him again that she appreciated him helping her with supper and cleaning up afterward and he said she was welcome. Jimmy’s daddy kissed her and she kissed him back and rubbed his back some while she was doing it, but he left it at that. Was she losing weight? Maybe they needed to go back to Seafood Junction at Algoma sometime. Maybe they wouldn’t run into the preacher and his stupid dog stories. Maybe he needed to fuck her.

  He didn’t take a shower. Jimmy’s daddy didn’t take many showers because showers were a lot of trouble. You had to take your clothes off and get wet and then get dry and then get more clothes on. They took too long. He didn’t stink anyway. At least he couldn’t smell himself. He went back to their bedroom and got undressed and standing there in his shorts and gray fuzzy socks he stuck a hunting video into the VCR and picked up the remote and pulled the covers back and got himself an ashtray and plumped up a few pillows and piled them against the headrest and got into bed and pulled the covers up over him and pushed Play. Then he turned off the bedside lamp so that it was nice and dark except for the TV screen, kind of like being in a movie theater, all he needed was some popcorn. But it seemed like every time he ate popcorn, he wound up getting a hull or two between some of his teeth and would sometimes have to dig at it with his tongue for two or three days, almost drove him apeshit.

  He’d seen this one before, but only five or six times. It was a hog-hunting video, too, except this one had been shot in some mountains with snow all over them up in Tennessee somewhere. It was pretty hairy. The hunters were out in the snow, wearing white clothes and tramping around in hog country with Ruger .44 Magnum rifles, and every single time they saw a hog, the hog charged. These were not feral pigs like the ones down in the river bottom on Old Union Road. These were genuine badass Russian boars somebody had imported to Tennessee. They shot about four or five of them. Talk about some big tuskers. One of them ran the cameraman up a tree. Shit. He didn’t want to watch that crap again. He got out of bed and ejected that one and put it on the dresser and got one that showed guys in black wet suits like the one Burt Reynolds had worn in Deliverance wrestling big monster catfish out of logs in some reservoir and shoved it in. […]

  He got back into bed and lit a cigarette and pushed Play again and the video started up. Jimmy’s daddy lay there and thought about watching Jimmy through the binoculars this afternoon. When he’d come in from work, Jimmy was gone, and the girls had told him that Jimmy had left on his go-kart, and Jimmy’s daddy had just driven up from the county road, and hadn’t met Jimmy anywhere, which meant that if he was on his go-kart and in the road, he was off in the other direction. So he got his binoculars from where he’d stashed them on the top shelf of the closet in his bedroom and he walked up the road toward the old man’s place. He kind of had an idea that Jimmy might be up there. Since the old man had been so nice to Jimmy, and had given him that nice new rod and reel, and a tackle box, and all that gear, Jimmy’s daddy thought that maybe the old man had told Jimmy that it would be all right for him to go up to the pond.

  It only took him a few minutes to walk up there. When he got close to the old man’s barn, he stepped into the woods along the other side and got off the road and when he got up even with the new clay gravel road that he’d already seen, he stopped beside a tree and raised the binoculars and looked through them at the pond. That’s when he saw Jimmy. He was sitting on the ground beside his go-kart doing something, and when Jimmy’s daddy focused the glasses on Jimmy’s hands, he could see that he was rigging up a line. Then he saw him get something from a paint bucket that looked like one that had been in the shed. Worms probably. Maybe some night crawlers. Then Jimmy threw his line out there. Jimmy’s daddy stood there leaning against the tree watching Jimmy fish. It kind of made him feel funny to watch him like that without Jimmy knowing it. He wondered what the fuck he was going to do about Lacey. What if Johnette found out about it somehow and he had to get divorced? He’d lose Jimmy. And he didn’t want to lose Jimmy. And he wasn’t ever going to whip him again as hard as he’d whipped him over the tools. That had been wrong. And standing there watching him and thinking about all that made Jimmy’s daddy feel bad in his heart. But in about two seconds Jimmy’s daddy stopped thinking about all that because by then Jimmy had one hooked. But what had he hooked? Had the old man already put some fish in his pond? Hell, it wasn’t even full of water yet. But he’d hooked something. And he was reeling it in. Doing a pretty good job of it, too. That was when the rod bowed almost double and then suddenly Jimmy was fighting hard with something big. Jimmy’s daddy watched it, his heart kicking a little faster, and he could see how hard Jimmy was trying to fight the fish, and it was easy to see when the line snapped because Jimmy took a step back to regain his balance. And then he just stood there. Damn. What the hell was that?

  The guys in the boats on the TV screen were talking to somebody in another boat while they were going out over the water. Then it cut to a scene where the boats were stopped and the men were getting out of them into chest-deep muddy water. But Jimmy’s daddy wasn’t listening to what they were saying. He was wondering what that old man had in that pond.

  There was one thing about it. He was damn sure going to find out. He didn’t like it that the old man had fixed Jimmy’s go-kart. It kind of made him feel a little embarrassed that he hadn’t known how to fix it and/or hadn’t taken much time to try and fix it. It wasn’t any of the old man’s business, what went on down here. The way he looked at it, the old man was poking his nose into Jimmy’s daddy’s business. Aw, he knew the old man was grateful to Jimmy for calling the fire department when he was under his tractor in his pond and all that shit. But still. Jimmy was his boy, not the old man’s. In his mind, it gave him a good reason to go on up there sometime and see if he could hook what Jimmy had. Revenge or something like that. At night. In the dark. Maybe with a flashlight.

  But how did a fish that big get in there that quick?

  Unless somebody had put it in? Nah. Shit. Go your ass to bed.

  54

  Cortez’s 4020 was in the tractor shop at Batesville after the John Deere people drove their low boy over and loaded it up with a winch and took it away. He hated to see it gone from the stall where it always sat in the equipment shed. He felt useless without it. It
was the first time there hadn’t been a tractor sitting on the place in all this time. He couldn’t even move his Bush Hog from where they’d unhitched it and left it sitting beside the pond. If it rained it was going to get rained on. He didn’t want it to get rained on.

  He kept feeding his fish at night, wondering why he couldn’t feed them in the daytime. Wouldn’t they eat in the daytime? He didn’t see what difference it made, but that’s what the fish man had said, and if he’d been in the business for all those years, he ought to know. So Cortez would wait until dark, and then get into his pickup and go up the driveway and turn down the road to the new road and drive down to the pond and park there. He’d get some feed from the steel garbage can, and he’d throw it out there, and it wouldn’t be over twenty seconds before a whole lot of little splashes would be forming across the top of the pond. He hated that cold weather was coming so soon, because it meant they’d stop eating over the winter. He wondered if they’d grow any over the winter, without being fed. If so, by next spring, plenty of them would be big enough to eat. He stood there a lot of nights, listening to them feed. He’d thought about taking a flashlight and looking out there with it, but he was afraid that would scare them off and they’d quit eating.

  One night he heard something that was splashing out there in the dark, and it was making so much racket that he couldn’t figure out what it was, so he drove back down to the house and got his flashlight and drove back up there and turned it on. All the feed was gone. The water was black and smooth. He got some more fish feed from the garbage can and threw it out into the pond. When the splashing started up again, he looked again with the flashlight. Hundreds of little eyes were out there, showing red in the flashlight’s beam. There were so many of them that they were making a hell of a splash. So that’s what it was. Just so many of them. He nodded to himself. Next year the splashes would be much bigger. And with the winter rains, the pond would probably be totally full of water by Christmas. He was really looking forward to seeing that. Jimmy could fish all he wanted to next spring and summer. Shoot. Maybe they could fish together once in a while. That would be nice. That would be almost like it had been with Raif. Just as he got into the truck he heard another big splash.