A Miracle of Catfish (38 page)

“Redneck redneck redneck,” Evelyn said.

“Shut up, Evelyn!” Jimmy said.

“You're Redneck Junior,” Evelyn said.

“Mama!” Jimmy yelled. “Evelyn's calling Daddy a redneck!”

“I'm gonna take a bath,” Velma said.

“Don't use up all the hot water, you little whore,” Evelyn said, and then sat back down and called up somebody on the phone.

Jimmy sat back down, too, and tried to finish the rest of his homework. He thought school would be pretty cool if all you had to do was read about Indians. He was planning on taking his arrowheads to school one day for Show and Tell whenever they had it. Last year for Show and Tell he'd taken a shed deer horn that his daddy had found in the woods, one that had been gnawed on by animals for the minerals in it, with gouge marks like a beaver had been ahold of it, but his teacher said it was probably squirrels and mice. A lot of the kids in the class had laughed at Jimmy for bringing in an old gnawed-up deer horn that had turned partly green from lying out in the woods for so long, but it was about the best thing that Jimmy had been able to come up with. He'd bet they wouldn't laugh at his arrowheads because none of them probably had anything nearly that cool.

He did his arithmetic and listened to Evelyn talking to her boyfriend on the phone. She was giggling a lot and talking about the movies she'd seen and she kept lowering her voice and talking in whispers, then laughing out loud. That kind of got on Jimmy's nerves because he couldn't sit there and concentrate on his homework while he was wondering what they were talking about. He heard the tub draining. Evelyn got up with the phone to her ear and went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and Jimmy turned his head to see what she was getting and it was another raw hot dog. She brought it over to the couch and ate it a bite at a time while she was talking on the phone. The bathroom door opened and Velma came out in her white bathrobe and went down the hall to her room and then came back with a brush and sat down on
the couch beside Jimmy and started brushing her hair. She looked at the TV. One of those shows was on where people redo a house. She looked over at Jimmy.

“You watching this?” she said.

“Naw,” Jimmy said, without raising his head. “I'm working on my homework. How much you got?”

“I ain't got none,” Velma said, brushing her hair. It was long and pretty and black. Jimmy liked her better than he liked Evelyn, which wasn't saying much. He kind of felt sorry for Velma because of the way Evelyn treated her, and he'd seen her cry a lot of times from it. It seemed to Jimmy that Velma tried to be nice to Evelyn, because he'd seen her do stuff like bring Evelyn a cold Coke from the refrigerator or loan her some barrettes. But it looked like Evelyn just wanted to be a bully to Velma and make her cry. He wondered sometimes if it had something to do with them having two different daddies. He didn't even know who Velma's daddy was, and he'd only heard about Evelyn's, the Corvette thief. Jimmy wondered sometimes about the history of his family. He knew he had a dead grandmother, but he never had seen a picture of her. That was his daddy's mama. He knew he had a dead grandfather, who was his mama's daddy, and he'd seen pictures of him, but he'd only met his daddy's daddy a few times, and Mama Carol, his mama's mama, lived down close to Bruce, and he used to go down there sometimes and eat hot dogs on Saturday nights while his mama and daddy went to Seafood Junction at Algoma. But it had been a long time now since they'd gone over there.

“You got the remote there, partner?” Velma said.

Jimmy picked it up and handed it to her, then got back on his science homework. This one was explaining about the needle on a compass and why it always pointed north. Then he got to reading about earthquakes and magma and tectonic plates and geysers and hot springs and the Richter scale. Velma flipped it over on Cinemax and a naked man and a naked woman were in a bed.

“Gross,” Velma said, and Jimmy looked up at the TV. He'd seen stuff like that before. He'd gotten up one night in the middle of the night for a drink of water from the bathroom and hadn't been trying to sneak up on his daddy or anything, had simply gotten out of bed and walked down
the hall and had to go through the back part of the living room to get to the bathroom, and his daddy had been sitting in a chair in the dark, with no lights on, only the light from the TV, drinking beer and watching a movie like that. Jimmy was starting to get an idea about things like that, about what men and women did when they took their clothes off and got into a bed. He'd heard kids at school talk. He thought he was beginning to get the picture. Velma changed the channel. Evelyn giggled sexily on the phone.

Jimmy was lying in bed when he heard his daddy come in. It wasn't even ten o'clock, but his mama always made him go to bed early on school nights. She always said a growing boy needed his rest. A long time ago, when Jimmy was younger, he might have gotten up to see his daddy if he'd been lying in the bed and heard him come in and hadn't seen him all day. Not now. The missing spear point. The ass whipping he'd taken for getting into his daddy's tools. The near drowning. The tore-up go-kart. Never actually getting to go fishing.
You little shit.

He heard the car pull up in front of the trailer, heard it die, heard his daddy's car door open, heard it slam. Then nothing. The front door didn't open. He didn't hear his daddy's steps. His daddy was still outside, and Jimmy figured he was probably going to the bathroom. He did that a lot, went to the bathroom in the yard, but Jimmy's mama had told Jimmy's daddy that nice people didn't do that sort of thing, at least not around other people. Another thing she absolutely hated was for Jimmy's daddy to go to the bathroom inside the trailer, but then leave the door open, so that if you walked by you could hear him peeing in the toilet. Jimmy had heard his mama ask his daddy to please not do that anymore, that surely he hadn't been raised in a barn, and that it wasn't the right thing to do, especially in front of the girls, and his daddy had said that if they never had seen one, they wouldn't know what the hell it was.

Jimmy kept lying there, waiting to hear the door open, his daddy's steps inside the trailer. He hoped his mama was asleep, because sometimes when his daddy came in late on a weeknight and she was still up, they had fights. And Jimmy hated to have to listen to their fights. It made it hard to go to sleep if you were already in bed and trying to go to sleep. He was pretty sure the girls hated to listen to them, too, because
whenever a fight started, you could hear the volume come up on the TV in the girls' room, like they were trying to drown out the noise.

One of the things that Jimmy hated most about the fact that they didn't have the money to go to the Kenny Chesney concert in Tupelo was that it meant he wouldn't get to go to Tupelo Buffalo Park either. He'd been kind of hoping that if they got to go to see Kenny Chesney in concert, maybe they could go over to Tupelo a little early and swing by Tupelo Buffalo Park. He'd heard about it from advertisements on the radio. It sounded like they had buffaloes you could ride, and they also had the tallest giraffe in the world over there. Jimmy had asked his mother if they could go to Tupelo Buffalo Park sometime, and she'd said maybe they could when they were over at Tupelo sometime, but they'd gone shopping for school clothes a while back, and he'd asked her that day, while they were over there, if they could go to Tupelo Buffalo Park, and his mother had said they didn't have time. He could imagine himself riding a buffalo. He imagined the buffalo had some kind of a buffalo saddle.

Jimmy rolled over in his bed. […] He lay there and thought about Evelyn's breasts. He wondered what they looked like. Then he rolled over on his other side. The door didn't open. His daddy's footsteps didn't walk across the trailer floor. He wondered what was taking him so long. Then he heard his mother's door open. The TV went off. He heard her steps down the hall, and then there was silence.

Cortez was sitting by the phone when it rang. It was Friday afternoon, about three. He'd been sitting there watching the TV, but there weren't any sex shows on at that time of the day. He'd flipped through the channels looking for something good, and the best thing he'd been able to find was a rerun of
Rawhide.
So he'd watched that, waiting for the phone to ring. Cortez picked it up. He knew it was probably the fish man, and he hoped he was just down the road somewhere. He turned down the TV.

“Hello?” Cortez said.

“Mister Sharp?” a voice said.

“Yeah. This is him,” Cortez said.

“Tommy Bright, Mister Sharp,” the fish man said. “How you doing today?”

“I'm doing good,” Cortez said. “What about you?”

“I'm doing all right,” Tommy said. “I'm setting up here on the Mississippi River bridge at Memphis. They got all the traffic stopped both ways.”

Memphis. Cortez hadn't been up there in a long time. He knew what the bridge over the river looked like, though. How high it was. How muddy the water was and how wide.

“Aw yeah?” Cortez said.

“Yeah,” the fish man said. “They got some idiot who's trying to jump off, I think. Cops everywhere. I thought I'd be there by four but I've been sitting here for a half hour already and I thought I'd better call. I'll be on down there soon as they let me by.”

“Well,” Cortez said. He thought about the fish on the truck, how many thousands of them there were. “You still got them fish?”

“Oh, yes sir,” Tommy said. “I still got the fish. I stopped outside of Blytheville and checked em and they're fine. I ought to be there by five if they let me on through.”

“Well,” Cortez said. He wished the son of a bitch on the bridge who
was thinking about jumping off it would make up his mind and either do it or not so his fish could get on out here and he could feed them.

“I'll give you another call when I get rolling again, Mister Sharp,” Tommy Bright said. “Sorry about the delay. I left in plenty of time.”

“That's okay,” Cortez said. “You think you know how to get out to my place?”

“Yes sir, I think so,” the fish man said. “I see a cop waving people through. I'll talk to you later,” he said, and then the phone went silent.

“Okay,” Cortez said, and hung up.

It was five thirty before he rolled into the driveway and Cortez was sitting on the front porch about to have a fit waiting for him. The big red truck rolled to a stop out at the mailbox and then backed up. Cortez waved. The wheels turned toward the driveway and Cortez got up. He could see the fish man inside the cab and then the truck was rolling down toward his front porch. He wished Lucinda could be here to see this. He stepped down from the porch as the truck pulled up and he walked around to the driver's door. The fish man left it running and it rolled an inch or two until he pulled out the brake and Cortez heard the wheels crunch in the gravel. The fish man got down and shook hands. He'd called again an hour ago, on his way.

“Mister Sharp?” he said. He had a head full of white hair but he didn't look that old. Cortez wondered about that. What would turn a man's hair that white at his age?

“That's me,” Cortez said. “Come on up here and set down and rest. You have any trouble finding my place?”

“A little. But I saw a boy just down the road here at a trailer and stopped and asked him and he knew where you lived.”

That was the kid with the go-kart. The one he'd yelled at.

“I can fix you some tea if you want some,” Cortez said. “My daughter left some Diet Cokes over here but I don't never drink them.”

“Some tea'd be fine,” the fish man said, so Cortez took him in the house to get him some. Cortez told him he could fix him a sandwich if he wanted one but the fish man said he was all right for now, that he'd gotten a cheeseburger at the Waffle House in Senatobia.

So they sat on the porch for a few minutes. Just talking. The shiny red
truck sitting there running. The sky had evened out into a solid blue hue with some fluffy white clouds drifting in it and they talked about cows and fish and cotton. The fish man said they'd had a lot of rain over in Arkansas. Cortez said it had been so dry here that his corn hadn't made much corn. The fish man said that the fish would be big enough to eat next year if Cortez fed them through the fall until October and started again in March, or as soon as the water warmed up. It took two weeks to train them to feed. You fed them at night. He finished his tea and set his glass down.

“You ready to see em?” he said. “I can raise the lids on the tanks if you want to get up on the truck and take a look.”

“I sure would,” Cortez said, and they went down the steps and over to the truck. Cortez hated he couldn't feed them in the daytime.

“It's a big step up,” Tommy Bright said, and he climbed up on the back of the truck first and then extended a hand down to Cortez. Cortez took the hand and felt the strength in the fish man's arm as he pulled him up. Then he was standing between two banks of stainless steel rectangular tanks. A wood floor between them. Things were humming and bubbling. There were two round canisters marked
oxygen
strapped to the back. Tommy Bright opened one of the fish tanks and told Cortez to look in. What he saw in there thrilled him. The clean bubbling water was black with tiny catfish, a moving herd. They hovered in the water singly and in masses, and he could see them swimming beneath the rippling water, their little tails waving. Their tiny side fins and their small whiskers. He looked up at the fish man.

“Is this three thousand in here?” he said.

Tommy Bright smiled and opened the hatches on two more tanks.

“Oh no,” he said. “That's five hundred of your four inch. I've got five more tanks with the rest of them and your eight inch. Come on over and look at these, Mister Sharp.”