A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  “I caught a nine-pound striper out of the spillway last summer,” Herschel said. “What kind of rod and reel you got?”

  “I got a Shakespeare rod and a Abu Garcia reel.”

  “Naw you don’t,” Herschel said.

  “Yes I do,” Jimmy said.

  “You sure it’s a Abu Garcia?” Herschel said.

  “I know it is,” Jimmy said. “It’s got Abu Garcia wrote on it.”

  “Dang,” Herschel said. He was obviously impressed.

  “What kinda rod and reel you got?” Jimmy said.

  “I got a Zebco thirty-three and my daddy give me his old Eagle Claw rod,” Herschel said. “It’s a good rig.”

  “That is a good rig,” Jimmy said, feeling good about being able to be so magnanimous to Herschel about his inferior tackle.

  The school bus turned off the main highway and went up a blacktop road for a while and then stopped and let off the first kid. It pulled into a driveway and turned around and then it went back down the blacktop road and turned off onto a dirt road.

  “This is where I live,” Herschel said.

  Jimmy nodded. It was the first time he had ever spent the night away from home. Herschel had told him that his daddy had a whole bunch of old Playboy magazines stashed in his closet and that they were going to sneak a few of them out of there and take them out to the tent and look at them after they got finished with their hot dogs because one of them had Anna Nicole Smith in it and she was butt naked and they could beat off. Jimmy didn’t know what beating off was, but he said okay anyway. Herschel’s daddy was supposed to come out and tell them some ghost stories around the campfire. Jimmy was really looking forward to everything. Things were always so bad around the trailer that he didn’t much like staying there most of the time, and he’d been using that as an excuse to get out on the go-kart with his flashlight headlight after dark, in the little bit of time he had when he wasn’t doing homework. Which wasn’t much.

  The road turned to hard-packed sand and it led between walls of pines planted closely together. A sign on a tree said TREE FARM.

  “My granddaddy planted all these pine trees for me,” Herschel said.

  “He did?” Jimmy said.

  “Yep. They’re for my college education. He planted them eight years ago and in ten more years they’ll be ready to cut for pulpwood. You know how much an acre of pine trees is worth?”

  “Naw,” Jimmy said. “How much?”

  “About six hundred thousand dollars,” Herschel said. “Enough for me to get me a car and go to Duke.”

  “What’s Duke?” Jimmy said.

  “It’s up in North Carolina,” Herschel said. “That’s where the Blue Devils are.”

  The bus pulled to a stop in a clearing in the middle of the trees and the doors opened. Jimmy saw a wood-sided house set back from the driveway, and he got up with his books and his backpack when Herschel did and went down the aisle and stepped down the steps behind Herschel and they got off and the doors closed. The driver waved and the bus pulled off, back down the driveway.

  “Come on in,” Herschel said. “We’ll get us something to eat.”

  Herschel’s house was really nice. It had green shingles and brown wood on the walls and there was a rock chimney coming out the roof. The front porch was made of broken tile laid in mortar and there were big posts that looked like trees holding up the porch roof. A huge pair of deer horns were hanging on the front wall and there were rockers out there. Jimmy followed Herschel inside and there were paintings of ducks on the walls. Some stuffed flying turkeys were on shelves and there was a stone fireplace and leather couches and rugs. It was the nicest house Jimmy had ever been in and he wondered what Herschel’s daddy did for a living. Maybe he was some kind of a rocket scientist or something.

  “Come on and you can put your stuff in my room,” Herschel said, so Jimmy followed him down the hall. It was unbelievable how big Herschel’s room was and how much stuff he had in there. He had a personal computer and a stereo and a big-screen TV and a DVD player and a ham radio and an ant farm and racks of CDs and posters of KISS and The Dukes of Hazzard on the walls. He also had a gun rack with several guns, and a fishing rod rack with several fishing rods. Jimmy checked out the Zebco 33 with the Eagle Claw rod. Herschel had a Heddon’s Tiny Lucky 13 hung on the end of it.

  “You sure got a lot of neat stuff,” Jimmy said. Herschel’s room made his look pitiful. He saw right away that he was going to have to get some more stuff for his room, because he was hoping that maybe Herschel could come home and spend the night with him sometime. Ride the go-kart. Take him up there and show him the pond.

  Herschel sat down on his bed and started taking off his school shoes. He pulled some tennis shoes from under his bed and started putting them on.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s cause I’m a only child. I can get about anything I want.”

  “You can?” Jimmy said.

  “Just about,” Herschel said. “They won’t let me have a high-powered rifle yet. I have to wait till I’m twelve. And they won’t let me have a four-wheeler because this kid we knew got killed on one last year. Just put your stuff on the desk if you want to.”

  Then Herschel took Jimmy back to the kitchen, which had two stoves and several tall stools arranged around a counter. There were shiny copper pots hanging from a thing in the ceiling. Herschel swung the refrigerator door open and asked Jimmy what he wanted to eat. Jimmy took a look in there and saw that it was loaded with food. Good food. Sliced turkey and sliced ham and sliced roast beef and salami and bologna and Jell-O pudding in little plastic packs and fruit cocktail and french onion dip and Cokes and Sprite and orange juice and milk and corn dogs and hot dogs and cold dill pickles, and then Herschel opened the freezer section of the refrigerator and told Jimmy to look in there and he saw that it was loaded with ham and cheese Hot Pockets and half gallons of ice cream and Eskimo Pies and Fudge Bars and Nutty Buddies.

  “Can I have a Nutty Buddy?” Jimmy said.

  Herschel got one and handed it to him.

  “You can have anything you want,” Herschel said. “You’re my guest. How about a sandwich, too?”

  “Sure,” Jimmy said, and started unwrapping the Nutty Buddy. He pulled back one of the tall stools and sat on it and started contentedly nibbling the cold hard chocolate and chopped nuts off the top of the Nutty Buddy while Herschel hauled out stuff from the refrigerator and got down some plates and a bag of fresh hoagie buns and started making them some sandwiches with salami and bologna and cheese and mayonnaise and sliced tomatoes and lettuce and sliced banana peppers. He put salt and pepper on them and he opened a big bag of Lay’s potato chips and then got the french onion dip and a spoon and put a big dollop of dip on each plate.

  “What you want to drink?” Herschel said.

  “Milk,” Jimmy said, and Herschel poured him a tall glass and got himself a cold Sprite in a green bottle. […]

  “Let’s go out and eat on the patio,” Herschel said. He went over and opened the door and they carried their plates and drinks outside to the patio, where there was an oval-shaped pool and a table with an umbrella over it. A dog barked and Jimmy looked out there and saw a German shepherd on a long chain. The dog was sitting on his hindquarters with his tongue hanging out. He’d killed most of the grass around him with the chain.

  “Is that your dog?” Jimmy said. He set his milk and his plate on the table and pulled back a chair. The woods were thick behind the house.

  “Yeah, that’s Rex,” Herschel said, and sat down beside Jimmy. They sat there eating and Jimmy wished he could eat like this all the time. Herschel really knew how to make a sandwich. It was so big that it was hard to get it in your mouth, but boy, it was good, all cold and wet and spicy.

  “I’ll show you all my arrowheads after we get through eating,” Herschel said, after they’d eaten for a while. “Did you ever get your spear point back?”

  “Naw,” Jimmy said. “I think maybe my daddy lost it.”

>   “That’s too bad,” Herschel said. “A good spear point is hard to find.” Jimmy nodded and kept chewing. He was looking at the German shepherd, who had unsheathed an inch or two of his penis and was watching Jimmy with his head at a slight angle.

  “How come you got him on a chain?” Jimmy said.

  “He killed some chickens that belonged to one of our neighbors,” Herschel said. “And he got some other dog pregnant.”

  “Oh,” Jimmy said. Herschel had put so many potato chips on Jimmy’s plate that Jimmy didn’t know if he could eat them all.

  “We can have some cookies after this if you want some,” Herschel said.

  “I’m pretty full,” Jimmy said.

  When they got through eating, they carried their plates back inside and left them in the sink after Herschel ran some water over them. Then he took Jimmy into the living room and showed him all the arrowheads his daddy had put in glass display cases. He had hundreds of them and they were arranged in circles with the tips pointing outward. […]

  When they got through looking at the arrowheads, they went out into the carport and Herschel picked up the duffel bag that held the tent and all the stakes and the poles. He got a hammer from the utility room and they took the tent out into the backyard and started setting it up. Jimmy didn’t know anything about setting up a tent, but Herschel knew it all. He showed Jimmy how to lay the floor of the tent out flat and then drive the stakes into the corner loops and the side loops. Then he put together the aluminum poles and ran them through the loops on the walls and top of the tent, and together they raised it. It didn’t take over ten minutes.

  “Dang, that’s neat,” Jimmy said, once the tent was standing.

  “Come on in,” Herschel said, and unzipped the door. “We need to sweep it out before we get our blankets and stuff in there.”

  The tent smelled like pine needles on the inside. Herschel had already raised the side flaps that covered the screens, so Jimmy could see outside once he got in. The dog was looking at him and wagging his tail.

  “I got some air mattresses we’ll inflate after a while,” Herschel said. “And we got to get some wood up for the fire.”

  “Where we gonna get that?” Jimmy said.

  “We’ll go down in the woods behind the house,” Herschel said. “There’s plenty of wood down there.”

  “This is really cool,” Jimmy said. He wondered how much a tent cost. If he had a tent, he could camp out in his own backyard. If he’d had a backyard. It might not be too comfortable setting a tent up on gravel. But then, if you had an air mattress, it would probably be all right.

  They went down into the woods and picked up some wood and made three trips altogether, their arms piled high with broken branches and pine knots. Herschel had some rocks at the side of the house and he made a fire ring in the yard with them, not too close to the tent. Then they piled the wood up in the middle of the fire ring and saved some for later. Herschel’s mama had already put some coat hangers on a little table for them and Herschel got a pair of pliers from a kitchen drawer and they straightened out four of the coat hangers, two extra just in case Herschel’s mama and daddy wanted some hot dogs. By then it was almost dark, but it looked like everything was ready. Jimmy had already seen the hot dogs sitting in the refrigerator, and he’d noticed a pack of fresh buns on the counter.

  “Now all we got to do is get some blankets and pillows and the air mattresses,” Herschel said. “Then we got to get them Playboy magazines out of Daddy’s closet fore he gets home.” Then Herschel said, “Oh crap!”

  “What is it?” Jimmy said.

  “I gotta go to the bathroom,” Herschel said, already moving rapidly toward the house.

  “Okay,” Jimmy said.

  “You can play with Rex while I’m in there,” Herschel said, and hurried toward the house and went inside. The door slammed behind him.

  Jimmy looked at the dog. It was sitting there watching him, and it held up one paw, obviously inviting him to come over and shake hands. Jimmy went over, bent down on one knee, and reached for the paw.

  “Hey, Rex,” he said. The German shepherd was a big dog, a heavy dog, and he knocked Jimmy over and somehow turned him around and then started hunching enthusiastically against his butt and groaning. Jimmy was on all fours and horrified and he tried to pull away, but the dog growled in his ear and then locked his front legs around Jimmy’s neck, pounding at him. And making this terrible groaning. And scratching the hell out of Jimmy’s neck with his claws. Jimmy tried to pull away again, and the dog let loose a ferocious growl against Jimmy’s ear, and Jimmy was too scared to move. But he didn’t really want to stay where he was either, so he started trying to crawl away very slowly. The dog went with him, steadily humping against Jimmy’s butt. Jimmy wondered if he should scream for help. But who was there to hear him? Herschel was in there sitting on the commode. Jimmy didn’t have any idea what was going on, but he thought he might be getting pregnant. Would it make him have puppies? It might. He thought about hitting the dog, but he was afraid the dog would bite him if he did that or maybe even tear his throat out. He kept trying to get away and the dog kept humping him and they went across the yard like that, until Jimmy got to the end of the chain, and then he made a big jerk and pulled away from Rex. Finally. His neck felt scratched.

  He got up and dusted his hands off and looked at the dog. His red rubber rod was way out. Oh my God, Jimmy thought. I’m pregnant. He tried to look around and see the seat of his pants, but he couldn’t see anything. He didn’t know if anything had gone up inside him or not. It kind of felt like maybe something had.

  […] Herschel’s daddy, Herman, came home before Herschel could get out of the bathroom, and Herman came out in the backyard and introduced himself to Jimmy and petted Rex, and then Herschel came back out and they lit the fire with some old newspapers. They didn’t get to get the Playboy magazines from the closet. It wasn’t actually cold enough for a fire, […] and the smoke kept shifting and getting in their faces, and then Jimmy kept burning his hot dogs because the coat hangers kept drooping down way too low over the fire, so that they were burned totally black on one end, and raw on the other end […].

  And then the ghost stories that Herschel’s daddy told after dark around the campfire weren’t very scary, and Jimmy had a pretty good suspicion that Herschel’s daddy was just making them up as he went along, because he kept pausing to think of what came next, and even when he finished one it wasn’t very good. They went into the house for some ice cream and cookies at one point, and Rex kept whining on his chain, and later Jimmy could hear him through the thin walls of the tent while they were trying to get to sleep. Probably wanting another go at him. Sometime during the night he saw dimly Herschel doing something to himself, down there, with his hand, and figured he was probably beating off. Whatever that was.

  The next day they got up and messed around with Herschel’s daddy’s metal detectors, but one of them had a low battery, and the other one was according to Herschel a real piece of shit and would go off for something like an old ink pen, so they spent most of the day messing around the foundation of a bait shop up the road that had been torn down about ten years ago, just some cinder blocks sitting in the weeds, and they didn’t find anything but bottle caps and a key and a few rusty nails and a hair barrette and nuts and bolts.

  […]

  They went out to eat that night at Applebee’s, but it was pretty crowded, and they had to wait in line for about forty-five minutes until they even got to put their name on the waiting list, because Ole Miss had played football with Alabama that day and had lost, so all the Alabama people were still in town and gloating over the win and wanting to eat and drink and gloat some more before they went home, so it took a while to get inside. And after they got seated, the manager had some kind of screaming shouting match with one of the waitresses and fired her, right in front of a bunch of people, and Jimmy sat in a padded booth and watched all that and wondered if he was pregnant with a bunch
of puppies. And if he was, where would they come out? Would they come out his butthole? And how long did it take? Because he was pretty sure something had gone up inside him. Sitting there looking at the menu, trying to decide between chicken fried steak and fried chicken, he wondered about it. He wondered what beating off was. Had he missed anything by not joining Herschel in beating off? Was he going to have some puppies? He sure hoped not. Wouldn’t they drown in the toilet bowl water when they came out?

  59

  Jimmy’s daddy was freezing his ass off. His feet were so cold that he couldn’t feel them anymore, and the sun wasn’t even up yet. He was perched shivering on a metal deer stand that he and Rusty had hauled into the cutover in Old Dallas a few weeks back, and raised up and chained to a pine tree. Jimmy’s daddy didn’t much like sitting in a pine tree. It didn’t seem natural. He would have preferred to be sitting in some thick woods in something like a big white oak, but there weren’t any of those left anywhere close around him, since cutover was just what it sounded like. All the big trees were gone except for some dead snags still standing here and there, nothing but roosts for buzzards. And there was nothing out there in front of Jimmy’s daddy but hundreds of acres of small pines about four or five feet tall, and he knew already that he wasn’t going to see anything mainly because it was a shitty place to hunt. He wasn’t in a very good mood, and part of that was still because of Lacey. She wouldn’t even look at him at work now, like she’d already written him off completely, and she was starting to show. She also seemed to be pretty happy. Whenever he saw her in the break room, she was laughing and joking with her friends. The big-tittied heifer had quit, but since he wasn’t on speaking terms with Lacey anymore, he couldn’t ask her where the big-tittied heifer had gone. He didn’t care anyway. She wasn’t nothing but a bitch. Sticking her damn nose in places where it didn’t belong.