A Miracle of Catfish (43 page)

He grabbed a short green glass Coke bottle and started pounding the first piece of meat with the small end, a steady banging that made the fly-coated fly strips hanging from the smoked-up ceiling boards sway lightly. The puppy dozed. Cleve stopped and took another drink of whisky and walked over to the pantry, stepped inside the curtain, and came out with a black iron skillet that he set on the stove. He turned on the oven and poured a little Crisco into the skillet, then turned the burner beneath it on medium.

While the skillet was heating he took a few more drinks and kept pounding the deer meat with the Coke bottle. He tenderized both sides of the meat. When he'd finished, the steaks were flattened out, much bigger than they had been, the tissue separated, fragile cutlets now. He dredged them in flour, salted and peppered them, and started laying them in the hot oil. They sizzled lightly along their edges, and bits of
flour floated away into the oil and settled on the bottom and started browning. Red juice began to rise from the centers of the steaks where the white flour was dusted with black pepper. He kept putting them in as the ones frying began to contract back to their original shapes. And finally there was no more room in the skillet. They were starting to brown, but they didn't stick. Another thing he knew how to do was season a black iron skillet. But he didn't learn that in prison. His mother had taught him that. Corn bread. Cracklings. Catfish.

He looked at the puppy.

“Hey, little man,” he said.

The puppy stretched out on his belly and wagged his stub of a tail and wiped one paw over an eye and then put his head back down on the rug and closed his eyes with a deep and satisfied sigh.
You it
, he seemed to say.

When the oven was ready he greased a blackened baking sheet and put the biscuits on it and shoved them into the oven. Then he sat down in a chair that he pulled from the table and reached for the whisky. He took a sip and held it in his hand. He watched steam rise from the skillet, a wavering wisp in the dim room. He heard the thermostat in the electric oven kick on. Last winter the power had gone out which meant his electric heaters had gone out and he'd had to keep himself and Seretha warm with an old woodstove that he and she had to get back inside the house, just the two of them struggling with the heavy son of a bitch across the iced-over grass and up the back steps and in through the door, and then he had to find the old stovepipes and take out a window and run the pipe through the hole and then nail boards and plywood around it to keep the wind out. He had plenty of wood. Some of it was rotten, but it would still burn. They'd hovered around the stove trying to stay warm for three days while the power crews crept down the icy dirt roads and fixed the lines that had been torn down from the weight of the ice. He and Seretha eating soup from cans they'd open and heat on the stove. Playing Go Fish. That was before she met that son of a bitch. And they'd done all right by themselves for those three days. They had spring water and they had Kool-Aid and instant tea and even hot chocolate in those little packs. Sardines on the shelves and plenty of crackers. Hot sauce. Then he shot a rabbit down by the creek with his .22
and skinned it and cut it up and chopped up some carrots and onions and a few potatoes and poured in some canned tomatoes and put it all in a small cast-iron pot on top of the stove and built the fire up and let it simmer there for five or six hours, and that night when they ate it with some warmed-up and buttered loaf bread Seretha said it was the best thing she'd ever had. Now look where they were. He took another drink. Yankee nigger son of a bitch. Think you gonna come down here and knock up my daughter? In
my
house?

He got up and turned the meat over and put a few paper towels on a clean plate. He stood there at the stove with his whisky and a fork, pushing the meat around in the skillet, checking the biscuits from time to time. When the meat was done he took it out and put it all on the plate with the paper towels and then he picked up the plate that still held some flour and he took the fork and raked some of the flour into the bottom of the skillet. He stood there and worked it into the oil with a circular motion. It started browning a little and he turned up the heat a bit. Not too much. If you burned it, you might as well just throw it out. Now if he had a can of sliced mushrooms to throw in there it would be good. Or a can of mushroom soup. But he didn't have either, so he kept stirring. When he judged it to be nearly right he went to the sink and drew a tall glass of cold water, then went back to the skillet and poured some in. The gravy hissed and rose up in bubbles. He started stirring it hard, working it back down, adding more water a little at a time until it was thick but not too thick. When he had about an inch of smooth brown gravy made and it was gently smoking, he put the meat back into it and lowered the heat. He took the biscuits out. They were brown on top, pale on the sides. He slid them off the baking sheet onto a plate and set them on the kitchen table.

He dipped up a little of the gravy with a spoon and poured it into a cracked saucer and set it down beside the puppy. The puppy woke and stood up and lowered his face to the saucer, and his tongue came out and he started licking it up. Cleve stood there watching him.

“You the man, little man,” he said, and then he got another plate from the cupboard and filled it with meat and gravy and biscuits and then dipped gravy all over everything, and sat down at the table to eat. Moths were batting against the lightbulb hanging from a cord in the ceiling.
Out there in the night past the windows, the things of the night called to each other.

He heard them come in after he was already in his bed, the walls dark and the puppy silently sleeping on the covers close enough to where he could put his hand on the slick little hairs of his head. The lights rose up outside the window and he heard the sound of the motor running, and then it died and the lights went off. He lay there. He hadn't wanted to get drunk because he didn't want a hangover in the morning. He could get drunk tomorrow night if he wanted to. Play some. Sit on the porch and listen to her crying. Her belly was swollen just a bit now. Just enough to tell.

He lay there in the blackness of his room and heard them come in through the front door. There was some talking and then he heard them in the kitchen. Seretha came to his door and knocked, but he didn't say anything. She turned the knob and the door opened, but he'd closed his eyes to slits against the slice of dim light from the kitchen.

“Pappy?” she said, but he pretended to be fast asleep. There wasn't any need in talking to her tonight. He should have left when he had the chance.

As soon as he got Montrel down to the river the next morning, he set out the fishing poles and the red worms he'd dug two days before and he got out a cooler of cold beer and a fresh pint of whisky. The good stuff. Canadian Club. Cleve carried the fishing poles and the bait and the whisky, and Montrel carried the cooler. They went down a cut in the bank that people had been using for years to a spot shaded by willows and covered in clean white sand. You could just barely see the spot from the bridge on DeLay Road. Cleve told him to throw his line just out at the curve, that there was a hole there where the catfish stayed in the deeper water. He squatted beside him and twisted the top off his whisky. He drank deeply and then offered the bottle to Montrel. Who took it gladly.

Cleve didn't even unroll his rod and reel. Didn't even make a pretense. He just sat in the sand and watched Montrel fish and drink beer. Sat there and thought about how bad the crying was going to be.

It was awful hot. It was only about ten o'clock. They kept sitting there fishing and drinking. Montrel's line in the water was as unmoving as the bank he sat on. The water in the river was falling. Any dumbass knew they didn't bite that good when it was falling.

He kept passing his whisky bottle to Montrel and encouraging him to drink from it, and Montrel obliged him. He was sitting on the cooler and whenever he needed another beer he just rose up on his legs long enough to get the lid up and got another one and then closed it back and sat down on it again. Threw his cans in the river. Litterbug, too.

Cleve sat there and listened to him talk. He listened to him talk about basic training and he listened to him talk about the blues clubs in Chicago and he listened to him talk about all the women he'd fucked, and the drunker he got the more he talked about how smart he was and how bad he was and how he was going to make a fortune wheeling and dealing. Maybe even rapping, like LL Cool J. Cleve kept offering him the bottle and he kept taking it and finally when Montrel was weaving on the cooler, Cleve told him he had to go back up to the truck for a minute.

Montrel asked him what he needed to go to the truck for, but Cleve didn't answer. He went back up the cut like a goat, pulling himself up the loose dirt banks with his hands sometimes, and he emerged in the high grass along the top of the bank and walked through wildflowers that were fading in the heat and opened the door of his truck and reached under the seat for his pistol. He stuck it in his back pocket and then he turned back toward the river. He stood there on the bank and gazed down on what he was about to do. How it would look from there.

When he got back down to the river, Montrel had quit fishing and was just sitting under a tree with his eyes red. He was holding what was left of the whisky in his hand. Cleve didn't speak to him. He just rolled up the rod and reel and gathered up the bait can and picked up the other rod and reel and took it all back up to the truck. Then he went back down and got the cooler. He carried it over to the bottom of the cut in the bank and then he turned back toward Montrel. Montrel was sitting there looking at him, weaving. He looked like he was trying to figure out what was going on. And he didn't really understand until Cleve pulled the pistol from his back pocket and walked over to stand in front of him, looking down on him, and whatever Montrel saw in that
sweat-shiny black face must have been the worst thing ever, because he started to scream just before Cleve shot him in the mouth. And again. And again. And again.

The smoke from the pistol drifted out over the river in a little cloud that soon was gone. And there was nothing to hear but the water moving against the bank, going slowly on its way down to the mouth of Enid. He, too, remembered when the white men from town had killed all the fish. Assholes.

He dragged Montrel up under a stand of river birches and kicked some leaves and sand over him. He drank the rest of the whisky and pitched the bottle into the river and left him there. He took the cooler back up to the truck and then he drove home. Seretha was asleep. That was good.

The September weeds were hot and dusty where Jimmy's daddy sat on an upturned five-gallon bucket, holding his shotgun and trying to hide behind a few browned cornstalks. The bucket had a padded plastic camo seat. He'd gone out to Wal-Mart one afternoon after work and had gotten a few things for today, the opening day of dove season. He'd bought a camo game vest with shell loops, and a folding camo stool he hadn't used yet. Plenty of bird shot, number 8s. But he wasn't getting to use the shells much. He'd only shot at three birds so far and he hadn't hit any of them.

He could hear Rusty and Seaborn shooting across the field fairly often and then yelling at each other. The guy who owned the field had Bush Hogged down some long strips through the corn so that there were shooting lanes, and it sounded like Rusty and Seaborn had the better spots. He didn't know why they'd stuck him over here by this fence. And the parked pickups. Hell, a bird probably wasn't going to fly over a damn pickup.

It was hard to concentrate on hunting when so many other things were on his mind, but he was doing his best. He didn't even know the man who owned this piece of land, but Seaborn did. It was a baited field, with a couple of hundred pounds of shelled corn scattered over the just-disked land, and it wasn't legal, was actually illegal as hell, but Seaborn had told him that if the game wardens came down and checked it, they could just run off into the woods and hide for a while and let Rusty pay the ticket since they were riding with him. It had taken Jimmy's daddy two days to get his '55 back from the Union County Sheriff's Office, and now it was sitting at home with an unexpected flat he hadn't wanted to change this morning.

Damn it was hot. It was probably just as well that he hadn't brought Jimmy. By now he would have probably been fidgeting and wanting to ask questions and getting on his nerves. Maybe next year he could take him. Buy him a gun. That little .410. Maybe they'd find one at the Gun
and Knife Show in November. If they got to go. If he was still married in November. And could even see Jimmy.

Out across the field two doves winged over the broken cornstalks, and shotguns barked at them. One flew on and one tumbled, wings shattered and feathers trailing, in an almost graceful arc to the ground. He heard Rusty yell something at Seaborn. He wished he was over there with them. They were sitting right in the middle of where the corn hadn't been cut down, and they were much better camouflaged by it. On the other hand, Jimmy's daddy had a better view of the whole field where he was. And he had all the beer. Both coolers were sitting next to him. He was having his fourth or fifth, he didn't know which. He'd had to temporarily abandon his drinking-less-beer idea for a while because there was too much going on. Too much he had to deal with. Like the trouble with the cop at the wreck. It had been pretty embarrassing, having to call Johnette on her cell phone from the jail in New Albany and tell her to come get him and Jimmy at the jail because they'd temporarily impounded his car. It had also been pretty embarrassing for Jimmy's daddy to have to see Jimmy riding in the back of a patrol car for the trip over to the jail, even though Jimmy had seemed to enjoy it a pretty good bit. The trooper who'd arrested him hadn't been real nice to Jimmy's daddy, but he'd treated Jimmy kindly, let him play with his gun after he'd unloaded it, even let him up into the front seat and let him run the siren on a deserted stretch of road on the way to jail.