A Miracle of Catfish (16 page)

“I can't right now. We're just too busy. We're having a dinner party tomorrow night and we're getting ready for that. Albert's got a pretty bad cold and we're trying to get him over that. Maybe we can get over at Christmas and see y'all for a few days. Or maybe we could come over sometime around Thanksgiving.”

“Well,” Cortez said. He started to just go on and blurt it out, but he didn't think he could do that. He wished to hell she hadn't died right before Lucinda called. Lucinda hadn't called in about two months that he knew of. She might have called that he didn't know of. For all he knew his wife might have talked to her every day while he was out of the house because he stayed out of the house all he could. It was tougher in the winter. You could only sit in the barn so much without some kind of heat. It got cold as hell out there in the wintertime. Ice would freeze in a bucket. And in the cows' watering troughs. You had to take a hammer to it and bust it.

“What you been doing?” Lucinda said.

Cortez was glad for that question because he had a ready answer and had secretly been hoping that she'd ask him what he'd been doing. Besides killing flies on the front porch. And picking worms off his tomatoes. And listening to the damn TV screaming night and day like some unwanted houseguest he wasn't allowed to kill.

“I been waiting on my pond to fill up.”

“Pond? You mean that old muddy thing down in the pasture the cows wade around in?”

“Naw. This is a new one. I just had it dug this summer. It's up on the hill.”

“Whereabouts up on the hill?”

“Up there on the ridge by the road. Up there where all them big white oaks was.”

“What did you do with the trees?”

“He bulldozed em down.”

“Who did?”

“Newell Naramore.”

“All those big white oaks?”

“Yep.”

“Oh my God, Daddy. Do you know what that timber was worth?”

“I don't give a shit what it was worth. I wanted a pond built.”

“Where did you find this Newell Naramore?”

“Schooner Bottom. He used to live over in Muckaloon.”

“Oh. Well, how big is it?”

“It's pretty big. He took out two hundred and sixty-seven cubic yards of dirt.”

“I don't know how much that is,” Lucinda said. He could hear her blowing the smoke from her cigarette back out in Atlanta. In a bar. No telling who all was in there with her. No telling what they'd do when the bar closed. He figured it was dangerous over there. He didn't figure it was safe to walk the streets.

“It's a shitload,” Cortez said. “I'm gonna put some catfish in it soon as it fills up. I just been waiting for it to fill up. We had a big rain today. Supposed to get some more tomorrow.”

“You just can't get good catfish in Atlanta,” Lucinda said.

It sounded like a whole bunch more people had just come in because it was getting louder in there with her. It sounded like they turned the music up, too. It was getting harder to hear her. Maybe the battery in his hearing aid was getting low. He'd have to check it. But on the other hand, sometimes he didn't mind being almost deaf. If you were almost deaf, there was a lot of shit you didn't have to listen to.

“Maybe you can come fishing later,” Cortez said.

“Maybe we can.”

“Does he know how to fish?”

“His name is Albert, Daddy. And I can show him how.”

“He needs to be careful he don't get finned,” Cortez said.

“Albert is very smart, Daddy,” Lucinda said. “And I've told you over and over that he can't help what he says sometimes.”

“Yeah, but he sure does cuss a lot,” Cortez said. “I don't guess you can take him to church much.”

“Daddy. I'll hang up on you,” she said. Then she muttered, “Goddamnit. Call over there to see how you're doing and you start that shit up again.”

“Where you at?” he said.

“I'm at the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead. In the bar. We come over here for drinks sometimes.”

“You using their phone?” Cortez said.

“Whose phone?” Lucinda said.

“I don't know. Hotel phone, I guess.”

“I'm on my cell phone, Daddy.”

“Oh,” Cortez said. He'd heard of them. Then he couldn't think of anything else to say. It was like his mind was going totally blank. He
kept looking at his dead wife sitting there in her wheelchair. He started to ask Lucinda if she was dating any regular men, but he already knew she didn't like that question, so he didn't ask her that. She was strong headed sometimes. Ran away from home once when she was seventeen. Said nobody understood her and nobody could understand what her life was like or how horrible it was. The police picked her up in Memphis and they got her back home. Cortez knew she'd been lucky not to be found naked and raped and stabbed to death in a field out by the airport.

“Okay. I was just calling to check on y'all,” Lucinda said. “I guess I was feeling kind of guilty because I hadn't called in a while. I just get busy with everything I'm doing. Work. Albert. You know.”

“I don't know nothing,” Cortez said. “I know I'm gonna walk over in the morning and see how much it rained in the pond.”

“Well. I don't want to get too close to it. I never did learn how to swim. Wish I had. I'd like to take a cruise, but I'd be scared to get on a ship in case it sank.”

“They got lifeboats,” Cortez said.

“Did you ever see
Titanic
?”

“Naw.”

“If you had, you'd know what I'm talking about.”

He could tell that she was getting ready to get off the phone and he still didn't know what to do. Just to blurt it out seemed wrong. To have to call her back tomorrow and tell her that her mother had died last night seemed wrong, too.

There was silence on the line, and Cortez couldn't speak. He could hardly hear her with all the shit going on wherever she was.

“Well,” she said. “I guess I better let you go.”

“Well,” Cortez said. “Okay.”

“Y'all think about coming over to Atlanta sometime, now.”

“I don't know,” he said. He wished she'd shut up about it. He wasn't getting on an airplane. Not unless they held a gun on him and tied him down in it. And they'd play hell if he knew they were coming for him and he could get to his Thompson. Splinter the whole damn wall of the barn with that son of a bitch. He could see himself shooting it out with these imaginary people, whoever they were. He wondered if anybody
else ever thought of the crazy shit he did. Probably not. But then again, if he did, why didn't other people?

Lucinda spoke to somebody for a moment and he thought how strange it was to be listening to a small part of her life in Atlanta, sitting right here at home with his dead wife. Lucinda was out in a place in Georgia with lights and tables and chairs with some people he didn't even know, drinking. Whooping it up. Probably laughing and telling jokes. Not caring that she didn't have a regular man. Content that she had a retard. And slept in the same bed with him. He heard her say something else and then she was speaking to him again.

“I think we're closing our tab, Daddy, so I guess I'll let you go. You take care of Mama, okay?”

“I'll take care of her,” he said.

Then he hung up the phone. Right in her ear. Same way he did everybody. Even Toby Tubby.

Lucinda put her cell phone in her purse and reached for the last of her drink. Albert was exhibiting some of his tics and watching her from across the table. His right eye was blinking and he was sniffling from his cold.

“Don't block my dock with your cock,” he said.

“I may have one more,” Lucinda said. She didn't know what had set him off this time. Sometimes it was a ringing telephone. Sometimes it was a rabbit. Around Easter, it could even be a
picture
of a rabbit.

“I saw Buck fuck a woodchuck,” Albert said.

“Maybe I'll just have half of one,” Lucinda said, and reached back into her purse for her cigarettes and lighter. “Then we can get on home if you want to. I know you're ready to go, sweetie.”

“I'm a hick with a big dick,” Albert said, and he got up and headed toward the bar. He had on good slacks and a nice wine Polo shirt.

Lucinda watched him walk away and then looked down at the table and thought about how she needed to go home and see them. Her mother was frail now, had gone downhill fast after the stroke. And she couldn't help but feel guilty about not visiting more often. They'd raised her. Bought her her first car with cows her daddy sold. Sent her to five years of college. And she was grateful for all that. But she just couldn't stand to stay there for more than a day or two. Not when she had Albert with her. Daddy wouldn't even try to communicate with him. She'd tried to explain to him that Albert wasn't retarded, that he had Tourette's syndrome, but Daddy didn't pay any attention to that. He just believed what he wanted to believe. Albert couldn't help it that he'd been born that way.

She sat there and looked around in the dim bar, tapping the filter of her cigarette on the table. She liked coming here after work a few nights a week. It was pretty fancy, with dark wood moldings on the walls and round tables with marble tops and padded chairs. Well-dressed and beautiful people talking and laughing and having drinks. The waiters
were polite and soft spoken. The drinks were high in here, but you got what you paid for. You paid for hanging out in a nice place like this, where sometimes some of the Hawks and the Braves and the Falcons hung out. A couple of them had hit on Lucinda a few times, but they always turned away with a puzzled look on their faces when she pointed to Albert and told them she was with him. Especially if he was blinking his eyes at intervals, left then right.

She could see Albert talking to Earl behind the bar and laughing at something he'd said. After you hung around Albert for a while you could see that he was totally harmless. It was true that he got worse in certain social situations, but most times people could see that there was something wrong with him and usually they acted accordingly. Still, you had to look out for him. Two people had punched him out just since she'd known him, once when he'd said something particularly filthy in front of a child in a Burger King and once in front of somebody's girlfriend at a yard sale. It was awful to see somebody hit him, and he wouldn't hit back. She was often afraid that somebody would hit him. But they didn't stay home because of it either. You couldn't. You couldn't just hide from the world.

Tonight had been pretty good. They'd gone to a strip club earlier, a funky place Albert liked near the Margaret Mitchell Center where the girls danced on a dented piece of linoleum to loud heavy metal and hard rock. Some of the girls were kind of heavyset and they were all popular with the crowd, which was mostly a bunch of old drunks and laid-back yuppies. She and Albert had sat there for a couple of hours, she sipping her beer slowly, Albert yelling obscene rhymes at the girls, sipping Cokes. All the girls knew by now that he had Tourette's and they didn't care what anybody said anyway. He couldn't drink very much because of the way it aggravated his condition. At Christmas she let him have a little bourbon in his eggnog and then locked the door. She lit her cigarette just as Albert came back with the drink and set it down and then slid into the chair next to her. He crossed his legs and swung his foot back and forth as steadily as a metronome.

Lucinda pulled the fresh drink closer. She stirred it with the plastic stirrer that was standing up in it. Then she picked it up and sipped it. She thought about her daddy, sitting on the daybed at home, her mother
already asleep. They were so old. Lucinda was afraid her mother would have another stroke sometime. And Daddy. He was just … Daddy.

“I'd suck muck to fuck a rare Bohemian guck,” Albert said.

“How about me when we get home instead?” Lucinda said.

Albert gave her a happy look and smiled.

“I'll need that rubber sock on my cock,” he said.

“You always do,” Lucinda said. She sipped her drink. “I get tired of using them. Sometimes I'd just like to feel you. You know what I mean?”

He didn't want to talk about that. He didn't want to take a chance on getting her pregnant because he was afraid the child would be like him. She'd been on birth control pills for a long time, but she didn't like what they did to her body, so they'd gone back to condoms. He jerked his head to one side like somebody had pulled it with a rope. He barked and a few people at tables nearby pulled back from their drinks and looked at him.

“I probably shouldn't finish this whole drink,” she said.

They sat there for a few moments without talking. She tried not to blow her smoke in Albert's direction. It was the only thing she did that he didn't like. It was the only thing that kept them from being together almost constantly. If Albert was gone, she smoked her head off, smoked in the kitchen, smoked in the bathroom, smoked in the bedroom. And Albert would complain about the smell whenever he came in. But Lucinda wasn't planning on quitting. Her nerves needed cigarettes. She could make it fine whenever she went to the studio downtown for her photo shoots, because they had a smoking lounge just down the hall and she could go down there and have one while they were changing sets or setting up lights.

“Was your father a bother?” Albert said. He was blinking again and he still had his foot going, maybe a little faster now.

“He was watching TV,” she said. “He said Mama had already gone to bed.”

“I thought Mom was at the prom with Tom.”

“He said she was worn out.”

“He's a thick prick,” Albert said.

“I don't know about going over at Thanksgiving or not,” Lucinda said. “I know it's a pain in the ass for you. Just because of Daddy. But it's so
hard to get away except on a holiday. And then the airport's jammed, and everybody's trying to fly, and it's such a hassle. But I hate not to go see them.”