A Miracle of Catfish (6 page)

And pretty soon he did. Jimmy came running into the bedroom in his pajama bottoms with a big Band-Aid on his badly burned hand and climbed up on the bed next to his daddy and put his hands on his daddy's chest. He'd had a bath but his fingernails still showed crescents of black.

“Daddy,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah,” Jimmy's daddy said, and leaned his head around him in order to see a guy make a shot he'd already seen him make about forty-three times.

“What am I gonna do about my
gas
?”

“I don't know,” Jimmy's daddy said, and took a sip from his beer. “Get some tomorrow. Get on to bed now.”

And since Jimmy's daddy's kids always minded him, that was the end of that. You dang tootin', Fig Newton.

The next day at work at the stove factory, Jimmy's daddy didn't tell anybody about his near-fatal accident with the go-kart. He'd told some people about seeing a matching pair of pale yellow oblong UFOs one time about fifteen years ago when he was parked with some old girl on a dirt road and had almost gotten laughed out of the break room, even though there was no doubt that those two guys in Pascagoula had been picked up by aliens back in '73, because they'd both passed lie detector tests and told the exact same story over and over, to different police officers in different offices and under hypnosis. He wished he could talk to those guys. See if their experience had any connection to his. He kept his cap on even when he had to crawl up under a Towmotor and fix it.

At lunch he lifted his cap briefly to check his head in the mirror in the bathroom and it looked okay. Damn, that new girl down on the line had some big titties. Whew. He hadn't seen any like that in a while. He didn't see any blood leaking through the Band-Aids. It was sore as a rising, though. He touched it gently with his fingertips. It sure had been fun sliding the go-kart until it tipped over. He bet he could have slid it forever if he'd had it on some smooth concrete, like maybe a slab for a house before they put the house on it. You'd have to watch out for those plumbing pipes stubbed up, though.

That afternoon, when Jimmy's daddy got home with the gas, they'd already been out of gas for over twenty minutes and were almost frantic. Since the motor had cooled down, Jimmy's daddy let Jimmy fill the tank himself, cautioning him sharply about sloshing it and wasting it. Told him to slow down, be careful. Jimmy slowed down, was careful. Then he cranked it, got into the seat, and roared away. Jimmy's daddy walked up the steps into the trailer and got a cold one and sat down on the couch. Damn, he was tired. Crawling around on that hard concrete all day. They were going to have to take that big press apart. What a pain in the ass that was going to be. Take two weeks probably. Slow down production in the Press Department. Front office would raise hell. Well, fuck
them
. He could hear the go-kart going around and around the trailer, and then he didn't. He sat there and listened. He could hear the kids talking. He took another sip of beer. Then the go-kart fired up and took off again. Had they flipped it already?

Jimmy's daddy got up and went to the back door where he'd been meaning to build a back porch. There wasn't any porch, just a drop of about four feet to the ground. Another thing Johnette stayed on his ass about all the time. He opened the door and looked out just in time to see all three of them on the go-kart, the tiny dogs yelping and running alongside, all of them going up the dirt road toward the woods and pastures that belonged to that old man who was building that pond. Jimmy's daddy had already walked over there and looked at it. He wondered again if he was going to put some catfish in it whenever it got filled up with water. That'd be nice. Just walk over there at night and catch a few. He listened. He could hear the motor noise getting smaller and smaller. He knew they'd probably get it stuck in a mud hole. And would want him to stop what he was doing and come get it out. Fat chance of that.

He took a drink and shut the door. If they got it stuck they could just get it out.

Little shits.

Little heathens.

That was what his daddy always used to call him: little heathen. And of course that was where he got all the ass-whipping philosophy, too. You could see it didn't hurt him any. Hell, he turned out fine.

[…]

Jimmy and his two half sisters and the herd of tiny dogs stopped on top of the hill in the shady green woods and looked down into the pool of sunshine below them. The go-kart sat there running, the new muffler keeping it not too loud. Yet. Later it would get louder. Later the chain would get loose. Then it would come off. He'd put it on. It would come back off. He'd put it back on. It would come back off. Back on, back off. It would get to where it would come off all the time. It would get to where it would stay off more than it stayed on. Jimmy would try to fix it. Jimmy wouldn't know how because the go-kart had not been built with any kind of a chain-tightening system to account for normal chain stretching. It would turn out that Jimmy's daddy had bought a cheap go-kart, an off-brand piece-of-shit go-kart probably made by some fly-by-night operation that had already landed somewhere else by now. Jimmy would get desperate. Jimmy would do something he wasn't supposed to do, which was get into his daddy's tools in the shed. He'd take a good whacking for that one. His little pale butt naked that night getting into the tub would wear five or six deep red stripes from that little escapade. But all this was before all the trouble with the pond. Right now the pond wasn't even finished. But there was an enormous hole where the great trees had once stood and it was laddered with tracks and that was what had almost taken the children's breath, sitting in the go-kart, watching the dozer dude work in the clearing he had made in the middle of the woods, a small yellow machine in a large bowl of brown sun-warmed earth. Worms popping up all over. All kinds of birds flying down and getting them with their beaks, stretching them out of their holes until they popped in two, hungry little buddies gobbling those hermaphroditic babies down in the July heat.

The dozer was running backward hard with black smoke pouring from the pipe and the man on the seat was looking over his shoulder. If he saw the children watching him, he didn't let on. He stopped and lowered the blade and pushed it into the earth, making the dirt pile up on
the blade until it almost ran over the back side, and then he pushed the dirt up an incline he was building, digging it out below him, pushing it up, coming back for more, slowly hollowing and hollowing the earth, and the green remaining trees all around held him in partial shade that he kept running in and out of steadily like a shuttle on a loom. Far down the hill sat a redbrick house.

“What's he doing?” Evelyn, the older half sister, said. She was thirteen. Wore a purple evening gown most of the time. Black patent leather shoes with silver buckles and light blue argyle socks. Freckles and red hair and granny glasses. Wanted to be an architect in Ecuador.

“I don't know,” Jimmy said. “Looks like a racetrack, don't it.”

“It's a drive-in movie theater,” his other half sister, Velma, said. She was eleven, only a year and a half older than Jimmy, had black hair, a different daddy from Evelyn's. She wore jeans and tops. Knew how to roller skate. Didn't get to go much. Crazy about Tim McGraw and mayonnaise sandwiches. Would wind up pregnant in Chicago by Navajo progressive country singers by the time she was seventeen.

“Aw shit, it ain't no drive-in movie theater,” Jimmy said.

“It's a parking lot,” Evelyn said. She reached down and picked up one of the little dogs. It sniffed Jimmy's elbow.

“It's a new hamburger joint,” Jimmy said.

“Now, would they put a hamburger joint out in the woods like this?” Evelyn said, and put down the dog. They sat there watching. The dozer man saw them sitting there and waved briefly, then turned his machine and went the other way with it, scraping and moving more dirt. He was down in the bottom of the big hole, with one side going out at a gradual slant into the remaining trees and the other ending abruptly where all the dirt was being pushed up in a sloping wall almost like a small piece of the Great Wall of China.

“Oh shit!” Jimmy said. “It's a fucking catfish pond!”

“Don't say fucking,” Evelyn said. “You don't even know what it is, you little rotten-tooth fucker.”

“I do, too,” Jimmy said.

“Shit. You wouldn't know which arm to look under for it. Would you?”

“I would, too,” Jimmy said.

“Okay, which one, then, if you know so damn much?” Evelyn said.

“Well. I know what a motherfucker is,” Jimmy said uncertainly.

“I'm gonna tell,” Velma said.

“Tell what?” Evelyn said.

“Way y'all talking.”

“How we talking?” Evelyn said.

“Dirty,” Velma said.

“Oh you shut up, you little whore,” Evelyn said, and slapped her.

“I'm gonna tell Mama,” Velma said, and cried. Evelyn kicked her off the go-kart where she rolled in the dirt and cried some more.

“I bet he puts some catfish in there,” Jimmy said. Then he hit the gas and the shiny red go-kart spun in a tight circle in the loose dirt, the chain clattering, the herd of tiny dogs cavorting and somersaulting in the dust, they and the little girl chasing the go-kart bouncing back through the brown leaves on the old log road and the green leaves in the shady woods toward the grassless mobile home that was no longer mobile, merely home.

It looked mighty fine when the dozer dude was done. Great big dry brown hole. A big brown bowl. Not a speck of grass in it. And nary a torn tree root sticking up through the huge levee where it might cause a leak. Nineteen and a half feet deep. Newell knew a nice spillway worked, too. It cost Cortez Sharp six thousand for three weeks of dirt pushing but he felt like it was plenty worth it. Cortez had gobs of money stashed in the First National Bank in Oxford. Last time he'd checked he had about seven hundred thousand. Inherited a lot of it from his daddy. Land. Cows. Timber. Cotton. He didn't really give a shit about the money. It wouldn't do him any good after he was dead. It might do Lucinda some good. Maybe she could build her a house somewhere. Stop paying rent. Throwing money away. But it wasn't any of his business if she wanted to throw her money away. He just wished she'd get rid of
him
.

He paid the dozer dude in cash, counting the remaining hundreds into his muddy hands under one of the last monster white oaks. The dozer dude had left it for shade and he said that he always tried to leave a place better than he'd found it. It looked like he had.

He asked Cortez about coming back and getting the wood one weekend, but got a crisp No with no explanation. Then the dozer dude left. To be seen there only one more time. And years down the road.

Cortez Sharp stood there looking out over the vast expanse of his new but empty pond. It had turned out so much better than he'd dared to hope for that it was like a big bubble of happiness in his heart and it was wide open, open to the sky that would bring the rain to fall. And slowly fill up the pond. Once the rain, then the fish on the fish truck. So he set in to wait. For all of it.

He waited the first day on his front porch in a rocker, watching the sky for any signs of darkness from his old and slightly chipped redbrick house. He had a pretty big yard out there but no flowers this year.

The sun shone bright and the TV droned on in the living room, coming through the wall. All the fools hollering and selling.

He kept going over there to look at it. He'd stand there and look at it and wonder how many rains it would take to fill it up. And how it would look once it was done. He'd have to pick a spot to feed them. Maybe underneath the big white oak that was left. Shady there. Once the pond filled up, the tree would be close to the water.

One day he walked down and stood in the bottom of it, marveling over how deep it was, and how high over his head it was, and looked up at the lip of the levee. A little boy in baggy shorts was standing on top of it watching him. A little boy who grinned through rotten teeth and waved.

“Get the hell off my place!” Cortez yelled, and the little boy dropped from sight like a puppet snatched from a puppeteer's stage.

He'd be back, of course.

It was a bad stretch of road between Oklahoma and home, but Tommy didn't stop to rest. He was way behind, pushing hard, trying to get back before daylight. So much work to do. So little time to do it. Shouldn't have lost all that money. Shouldn't have done it again. Not again. Now he was going to have to work even harder, maybe get mad over nothing at the barn and fire a few people. He could sell the new pickup. He'd have to. And what the hell was Audrey going to say? She'd probably leave him for sure now. After all his promises. And all her begging and crying for him not to let them go under. Now that they'd come so far. And had done so good. All the work he'd done would be shot in the ass. All the work she'd done, too. She'd been out there in the brood ponds with him day after day back in the old days, gathering the little fish in chest waders, holding her end of the seine, when they were still hopeful for things to get better. And they had. He still remembered the day she'd come up with the idea of painting all the trucks a shiny bright red, like a fire truck, and getting them fixed with gold letters like a fire truck, only all theirs said
TOMMY'S BIG RED FISH TRUCK
. And it had worked. His big red fish trucks were rolling everywhere, hauling catfish and bass and crappie as far as Iowa City and Minneapolis. There were lakes all over the place and they always needed more fish. And he'd taken it to them for years, in little towns all over the Midwest and the south, dipping out fish for long lines of customers who had arrived early to meet him and his truck, all day long, different towns, more highways, more stops, until he'd sold everything he had on the truck. The fact that they were all happy to see him and eager to buy his fish and talk to him had always made his job a lot more pleasant, so that it was easy to get up and go to work in the mornings, and it made him feel like he was doing a good thing for his fellow man. He saw a lot of old guys, and lots of times they told him they were stocking ponds for their grandchildren, little girls and boys who would hold rods and reels or cane poles in their hands and sit on the shady bank of some farm pond with the old guy, close to him,
watching their bobbers, talking quietly as they waited for the fish to bite. He envied them spending time with children. That had to be precious. Sometimes they even brought the kids to see his truck.