Billy Ray's Farm Read online

  They were the longest two miles I ever drove. I kept looking and looking, and the store never showed up, and I kept driving, and it was brutal, and my feet were as hot as panting puppies in the boots. I had some flip-flops in the back for whenever I finally got them off my feet. I drove some more, and the landscape was hilly and dry and hot and baked and barren, and there was warm wind blowing through the truck, and the two Vivarin I’d taken a long time before then had completely stopped doing their thing. There wasn’t anybody I knew back over there, and the smart thing to do was just turn around and go home, and fix something to eat there, and then turn on the air in my dark bedroom and get into the bed and sleep until whenever I was ready to get up and resume my life. But greediness had raised its whiskered head in me. If they gave some more fish away and I had plenty of ice, they might let me take all I wanted. They might get that crane to working and send people down in there to put the fish in barrels and bring them up. That pump was down there for a reason. Somebody had spent some time and had maybe risked danger and had certainly gone to a hell of a lot of trouble getting that thing down in there, and that could only mean that they were going to pump it totally dry to do the spillway inspection, and that meant all the fish would have to come out. That was the way I saw it. That was probably one of the main reasons that crane was sitting there, to put that pump down in there, and then lift the rest of the remaining fish out once the General Public had made their grab, and then lift the pump out. So it made sense to me that if I stuck around, I might still get some fish out of the deal. There wouldn’t be any question about dressing them before sleep, but I could probably get enough ice on them to make sure they’d be okay until after I got some rest.

  The road went over hills and more hills and some more hills and then one flattened out and there was a long low building on the left, some signs out front, gas pumps that were old. I made sure a truck with my number on it wasn’t coming toward me or up behind me and pulled safely off over there and parked. It looked like a good place in that it looked like it had been there for a while. It was made of brown wood, and it had a tin roof, and it advertised fishing gear for sale, and there were cane poles in stands, and bread signs, and it must have been in Grenada County because they had cold beer signs. Out front were also some empty wooden stalls like they might sell vegetables when vegetables are in season.

  Somebody came out and waved and got into his pickup and cranked it and pulled away. I went in. It was like a lot of country stores these days. It had suffered the same sad fate. It had tried to go deli. Some guy was behind the counter, but he was partially hidden by a bunch of racks of potato chips and cardboard displays of different things, air fresheners for your car, nail clippers, hair nets, packs of snelled hooks, all kinds of things. Near the back I spied the minnow tank and dip nets and lures and corks and other accouterments of the fisherman’s life, and there was a big meat case with the now-familiar rounds of meat and cheese they can slice slices from, so my eyes went to a sandwich board and saw a straight-up bologna sandwich for a buck fifty. They had little snack cakes, all that, short rows of canned food but not as much as the place I’d just left. The guy might have put on an apron but I’m not sure. But he came back there and asked if he could help me and I took a good look at the guy and ordered a plain bologna on white with mustard, and then thought about it and got him to add a piece of cheese.

  RIFF: It was kind of strange, me ordering that

  sandwich made that way, because usually

  when I eat a bologna sandwich I don’t put

  cheese on it unless I’m going to microwave

  it, and I used to do that when I worked in a

  stove factory, about ten times a week for

  about a year, but it’s probably been two or

  three years now since I’ve fixed one that

  way. It melts the cheese good, all right, but

  sticking it in that microwave does

  something to it and makes the bread tough

  and, if you can believe this, the sandwich

  unsatisfying to eat.

  All I can remember about the guy is that he was kind of reddish: reddish hair, kind of a reddish shirt, reddish fur on his arms. His hair was greased back with Vitalis or something equally slick, and he resembled David Caruso vaguely. I said something about the big fish grab and needing some more ice, and I asked him if he had any. I wanted plenty for all the fish I was going to get after the park ranger people came back from lunch. Sometime soon after entering the store and realizing that I was going to get some food, I’d probably made a then-unconscious decision to just tough it on out to the bitter end, knowing that I could always eventually sleep whenever all this was over.

  It amused him to no end that I’d been down to the big fish grab.

  “Boy, a shitload of folks show up for that!” he shouted. “Every time it’s the same thing! A shitload of folks shows up! Those park guys try to keep it quiet, but they can’t keep it quiet!” he shouted. He worked on my sandwich for a few seconds and then shouted, “Hah! I didn’t even know myself they was doing it again! They musta kept it good and quiet this time!”

  I told him I’d heard about it in Oxford, which was thirty miles away. He went on making my sandwich. Taped to the meat case were Polaroid pictures of people holding monster catfish, monster bass, monster bream, monster crappie. You could have fished every day for the rest of your life with all the fishing gear they had in that store and still willed some to your grandsons.

  My new friend kept a running line of giggling and babbling going back there about past fish grabs he’d witnessed. I spied some pickled eggs and big dill pickles on top of the meat case and told him I needed two eggs and one pickle. He wrapped my sandwich in waxed paper and slid a toothpick through the center of it and with tongs reached out my pickle and eggs, put them on waxed paper, too. I paid up front for the food and five more bags of ice and some smokes and at the last second I snagged a bag of Lay’s barbecued potato chips.

  I ate going down the road, back through the dusty hills, and it was even worse almost except it didn’t seem to take as long to get back. All my stuff was in the seat, the torn-open bag of potato chips, the sandwich on its waxed paper, the eggs and pickle on theirs, and some open packs of pepper and salt I’d used, and some napkins he’d put in the sack, and the sack, and all the tapes that I can never keep straight as to where a particular one is at any given time, whether Alejandro Escovedo is in the truck or Marlana Antonia’s car or Louisa Latigo’s car or the coolpad or the dining room or the bedroom or over at the shack. And there was some other junk on the floor, my cutting heads for my Stihl cutter, and a chain saw wrench, and some extra blades for a grass head, and some empty coffee cups, and finally, a bunch of Coke cans. I felt like a man who was about to be hanged. An uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach along with a feeling of abandon that was not quite reckless. Some funky radio station was on out of Memphis, fading in and out, playing lousy songs and doing too many commercials, talking about the heat, so I put on a tape that somebody had made for me and sent to me, one that had various artists. I’d listened to it so much I was about sick of it, you know how you get. Something that starts out so wonderful doesn’t stand the test of time and miles on the road, and you have to find something new, but I was sick of everything I had in the truck, I thought, and it was a dangerous thing to be doing, to be looking through all your tapes and lunch waxed papers when you’re already driving and eating at the same time and half-crazed with sleep deprivation.

  I turned again at the faux country store and went back across I-55 again, munching my bologna and taking brief pity on those driving so fast below, rushing to wherever they were going. The eggs were way too bitter from having been in the jar so long, and the pickle was about as crunchy as a hot noodle. The bread stuck to the top of my dry mouth.

  Some of the construction folks were back, along with the park ranger folks, but it was plain that some sort of tide had been turned. There were hardl
y any vestiges left of the throbbing mass of humanity that had been there a mere two hours before. A few hopefuls hung in the fence still, and I took another bite of my sandwich as I drove around the curve of the road to park near the pavilion thing. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got out the flip-flops and left my lunch in the truck, hobbled into the shade and sat down to take the boots off and just breathe a big long sigh of relief when those dogs hit that cooler air. I think I actually said aloud, “Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwyeah.”

  I beat feet back to the truck for the rest of my food and spread everything out on a park table to finish it. I knew that Paddy Chayovsky and Lorna were fast asleep, heads probably tousled with slumber under the quiet roar of a BTU blast of frigid air. And even if I left now I would never understand what the hell I had done or why I had done it.

  Oh boy. How these things happen. You get involved and the time just gets away. I could have at least been home sleeping in preparation for work, it wasn’t like I hadn’t done any work, I had, quite a bit of it, for unbroken months at a time, some of it in bedrooms, some of it in dining rooms, some of it in cold-water-only motels at Sardis where they don’t have any coffee in the lobby and you can forget about buying any food in town after ten P.M., oh no, not in Sardis. You have to go down darkened I-55 South into darkened North Batesville, where it looks like you’d stand a good chance of getting mugged, to get old chicken that’s been in the warmer too long, all day, probably, so it wasn’t like I’d just been enjoying a festive picnic all summer.

  Nobody knew anything solid on our side of the fence, but the air was rife with rumors. I talked to some people who were hanging around one of the fish-dressing stations, and somebody had told some of them that the park ranger dudes had told them that they were going to put some people down in the hole when the water got pumped out some more, and then send barrels down on a platform with the crane, and then haul the fish in the barrels up when the people down in the hole got through loading them. But that rumor had a double edge: They also said that they weren’t going to give any more of the fish away, that they were going to put them in a dump truck and take them to some farmers’ fields and dump them on the ground for fertilizer. This seemed a pretty stunning revelation to me. I knew there were at least a couple of hundred good eating-size catfish in that pool. And there were plenty of people like me standing around, people who would eat them, given half a chance to go after them. But a man must not beg for his fish.

  I didn’t know how much longer I could stand up. My food hadn’t settled on my stomach very well and I was having some gas from it already and a morbid rising gaseous bubble had lodged in my throat just somewhere south of my esophagus, felt like, and it wouldn’t come loose.

  I don’t know how much longer I stood there, hoping against hope. I saw steel garbage cans loaded onto a flat skid and hoisted into the air, then lowered out past the fence and into the bottom of the pool. They’d told people to stay back now. The time for close viewing of what was going on down within those concrete walls was over. The clamps of government had clamped down. Messing with these people was messing with the U.S. Army. One park ranger dude in helmet and crisp uniform came by on the inside of the fence, the hangers-on like me assailing him with hands palm up for free fish like blind folks panhandling alms, but he never stopped walking long enough to hold a conversation with anybody, only saying to the crowd in general as he went along that we all knew that if he wasn’t going to get any, then none of us were.

  It was bitter news to take. That was when I began to feel that the vise was closing, and that decisions had already been made, and that some official function was taking place, and that we weren’t all just good sharing neighbors anymore, and that there were two sides to this thing now, them on that side of the fence, us on this one.

  But surely there were children connected with all these people who could eat some of the fish, and probably some old people, too, and I just couldn’t understand the logic of dumping perfectly good food on the ground that somebody could take home, and clean, and cook, and eat, and enjoy. Even if I couldn’t get any, I who already had some fish in the freezer, and could always go catch some more, why not give the rest of the edible ones to somebody who could use them? What the hell did our tax dollars go for if they couldn’t at least feed some people who would be glad of it? Was this America or was it not?

  I stood around awhile longer, until I saw the guy who’d been smoking cigarettes in the cab of the crane turn back around in his seat and start operating the levers again. The cables tightened and they moved out there and the skid full of barrels came back up, and a lone worker went over there once the crane operator had set it down, and he hooked some more cables to it and then got on it, and stood on it with the barrels as a dirty white dump truck came rolling in and stopped in a tiny cloud of dust. The worker and the fish went up, and hovered over the dump truck, and the worker took hold of the barrels one at a time and emptied them into the truck. The fish slid out, the slick with the scaly, mostly the fabled whisker kitten. Each barrel had about fifty gallons of fish and there were six of them. Three hundred gallons of fish going to hell without a handbasket.

  Hope died there then among us. You could feel it seep out and float away somewhere. Even in shock I witnessed a weird dog, a retired greyhound, I think, very strangely shaped and with assorted hair. The catfish were slapping wetly down into the dump truck. The worker finished what he was doing, and gave a signal to the crane operator, who set him down, where he got off. The skid with the barrels rose into the air again, and descended into the concrete chasm again, and I imagined a hot Yalobusha or Grenada County soybean field late that afternoon, and the piles of fish starting to pale in the sun, and of how the flies would come, and then the crows, and the buzzards, and the possums, and then the coons, and I knew that the owls would watch silently from the trees that night while it became a thing a person wouldn’t want to look at.

  The last of us started to drift apart. We gave little waves, no names known, none needed. A few warriors had been bloodied, not all who had sought it, but a great sack had been made. All over Yalobusha and Grenada Counties there would be fish frying on stoves that night. It would be a thing a child would remember as an old grayed woman, the radio going in the kitchen and the black-iron skillets, the crispness of a perfect hush puppy, the delicate crunch of a meal-coated fin.

  My old truck was sitting there in the hot sun, itself a badly beaten but still able warrior. I knew it would gladly take me back home, to rest in the shade of the house Howard made. I got my tired ass into it and it cheerfully cranked. I pulled out, knowing those Mitsubishi airplanes probably ran like a son of a bitch. Like a wild-ass ape. The road was windy and hot and sunny, and the red Chows had all sought the succor of shade from the day. A little later, when I passed by Lorna and Paddy Chayovsky’s, I beeped the little tinny horn, just to let them know, if they were awake and looking out the window, where I was at that moment in the world.

  The Whore in Me

  AFTER WHAT SEEMS like a few minutes, the phone rings in your darkened room. You answer it. It’s Craig. He works for your publisher. He wants you to meet him in the lobby in ten minutes.

  There’s no time to shower, no time to do anything but brush your teeth and pull on the clothes you took off last night. As you dress in groaning misery you remember walking around looking for your room after you left the lounge, thinking you were in room 116, when actually you are in 216, but that didn’t stop you from trying to get in 116 with your little card, over and over. You might have terrified some innocent person. Finally you went back to the front desk and got the night manager to take you to your room personally. You hated to do it, but that’s what they get paid for. She found it for you, and got you in there, and then you slept the sleep of the long dead. There were no dreams of any kind.

  You know you probably present a very sorry spectacle walking up to Craig and Janet. You know your eyes are red and you’ve lost your Visine somewhere on the road. The road eats
up a lot of things but that is the nature of the road. Craig and Janet are nice and they get you into the car and you’re glad somebody is there to take care of you since it seems you aren’t capable of taking care of yourself.

  At the convention center you get coffee, a few cigarettes, and begin to wake up. The breakfast doesn’t start until eight so you wander next door to the gun show and check out some 1850 flintlock rifles, some black-powder pistols even older than that. They’ve got some really cool shit. Old knives. Swords. You think about hiding out there for a while, posing as somebody else. But after a while you have to go back to the book business and get your scrambled rubbery eggs, some juice, a biscuit, more coffee. You eat quickly, then go back to the lobby for that last cigarette. You are barely able to move, yet you have to give a reading. It feels like the beginning of a very bad day.

  You read. You talk to people. You sign books. You hang out in the booth. About noon, Janet, an angel of mercy, gives you the keys to her car and you go out there in the hot parking lot, roll the windows down, take off your murderous boots and your wool coat and try to sleep in the backseat, but it’s cramped and small and impossible. After a while you get back up.

  In another hour or so they take you back to the airport. You stand outside and smoke a cigarette. You won’t get another one until you leave the Los Angeles airport some six hours from now. But you’ll be in Mark’s Cadillac at that point, and everything should be an extremity of cool.

  You fly and you fly and you fly and you fly. Before flying you waited and you waited and you waited and you waited some more. There was no food, not because it wasn’t available, but because you didn’t want any. You didn’t drink anything. You didn’t feel very good. As a matter of fact you felt pretty fucking rotten.

  Coming into L.A. you can’t believe again how big it is. You think you may have to have a cheeseburger.

  Mark is waiting in baggage claim with his back to you but you recognize his black cap, his black hair, his black coat, and he gives you that big crooked grin you know so well, and then you’ve got your luggage and are in his large car and moving down the road.