A Miracle of Catfish Read online

  5

  She lay undulant in her dark Arkansas barn, in the cool and highly oxygenated water of her round and almost musically bubbling tank, her dorsal and tail fins trembling slightly, waving gently. Her whiskers stuck out about a foot in front of her massive maw. A long time ago when she was a virtual baby she had lived in a river and there were different things to eat that washed in from rainwater, things like grubs and red worms and night crawlers and lightning bugs and praying mantises and fire ants and army ants and carpenter ants and ground puppies or newts and stink bugs and skinks and aphids and caterpillars and weevils and carpet beetles and those little bitty bright green tree frogs you see sometimes, the ones with suction pads on their toes. Climb right up a window. Sit there watching you eat supper with big round eyes. Holler like hell in the summertime. Mbeeeeeeeeeeeee!

  Now all she got was floating chunks of fish feed, and all it was was dog food anyway, except that it was made in smaller pellets, like BBs, and they put it in a different bag, one with a picture of a catfish on it, but not a catfish as big as she was since she was bigger than the bag.

  She was not a behemoth. She was a beauty. She was the nightmare fish of small boys and she came from the depths of sweaty dreams to suck them and their feeble cane poles from the bank or the boat dock to a soggy grave.

  There was nothing for her to do but swim endlessly, be a fish factory. A maw-jawed mamaw. Endlessly turning in her tank like a soul sentenced to purgatory forever. She’d stopped bumping the walls long since.

  The last time Tommy had put her on the table she’d about flopped her big ass off it onto the bloody and slick concrete floor, it being bloody and slick from him dressing a mess of small ones for a fish fry later that night, back when things had been going really good, for him anyway, not for her, since she was still just swimming around in the same place she’d been in for so long, the mother lode of his fish factory, but now she was almost too big for him to handle by himself. She could still turn around in the tank. Barely. She was a fish factory that kept working, eating and swimming, laying her eggs, having those eggs collected, laying some more, having them collected, over and over, all done in a dimly lit barn that smelled of straw and horses except where she lay in the cool black water, where machines with dim red lights hissed and kept her alive, and eating and laying her eggs, and once in a while a handful of feed sprinkled across the top of her dark tank like midnight raindrops.

  […]

  6

  After the dozer dude had been working for a couple of days in the woods, Cortez called the Co-op in town, wanting to talk to Toby Tubby, an old fellow who worked there and who Cortez had known since first grade in Potlockney. They’d done some things they probably shouldn’t have. Buried a boy alive one time, for about an hour, when they were kids. Just for the fun of it. Just to scare the shit out of him. Went and ate lunch and then came back. When they dug him back up he was almost dead. Cortez had done some other things after he got grown. A long time ago. Back during the early sixties. Things that involved wearing long white robes. And carrying guns. And keeping your head covered up with a hood. And listening to speeches at rallies where crosses were burning. And throwing bricks at U.S. marshals on the campus of the University of Mississippi in 1962 when they admitted Meredith. He had quit all that shit when he saw that it was useless and might get him in jail. After Robert Kennedy stuck his nose into it. Little squirrel-headed bastard.

  But whoever answered the phone, some kid, sounded like, said that Toby wasn’t there, that he was off since it was Wednesday afternoon. And Cortez knew that. He knew Toby was off on Wednesdays. He knew that as well as he knew Lucinda was screwing a damn retard in Atlanta. An artist. Artist, my ass. How could he be an artist if he wasn’t smart enough to get through the third grade? It was probably on Lucinda to pay most of the bills. Buy their groceries. Pay the light bill. Phone bill, garbage bill, water bill. But she seemed to make pretty good money modeling that large ladies’ underwear. He didn’t know why he hadn’t just called Toby at home. He’d know just as much about the fish at home as he would at work. And Cortez didn’t really want to talk to anybody else about the fish. He wanted to talk to somebody he knew who wouldn’t go blab it to everybody he knew. He wondered if Gunsmoke was there.

  “Is Gunsmoke there?” he said.

  “No sir, he ain’t here,” the person who sounded like a kid said.

  “Is this Gunsmoke’s boy?” Cortez said.

  “No sir, this is Jeff.”

  “Is Gunsmoke’s boy’s name not Jeff?” Cortez said.

  “No sir, that’s Jim, people gets us confused, happens all the time, it ain’t just you, God knows I wished it was. Maybe I could be happier.”

  “Is Jim there?” Cortez said, ignoring whatever bullshit the kid was talking about about being happier.

  “No sir, he ain’t here neither. And not likely to be here no time soon since he’s in St. Louis, Missouri, watching a ballgame. I believe it’s a doubleheader, but he said it wasn’t on TV. Now is they something I could help you with? Hi, I’m Jeff.”

  Cortez thought about it over the phone. He didn’t want to talk to just anybody about these fish. He didn’t want the whole world to know he was building a pond and was going to stock it with catfish. He didn’t want to talk to somebody who might go blab it. He might as well go put it in the newspaper if he was going to do that. Hell, take out an ad. Shit, rent a billboard. But he wanted to find out something about it as soon as he could just because he was so excited about it. Like how big they were now, how much they cost at what size, when you fed them, how often you fed them, how much weight they’d gain, how long it would take, all that stuff. Did you have to get some stuff to pour in your pond? He knew some people poured stuff in their ponds. But one guy he knew of, he poured some stuff in his pond and it turned the water kind of a sickly-looking green. Like a Jell-O fruit pond. He didn’t guess you just had to pour stuff in your pond. Maybe he needed some brochures. They probably had some from the big red fish truck. He’d seen it down there in the parking lot before, people lined up, getting fish. They always put an ad in the paper before they came. He needed to look for that ad because he’d be standing in that line one day before long. He’d get there early. Before the crowd rushed in and bought up all the fish. He wondered if they delivered. That might be something else he needed to ask Toby about.

  “I’ll just call back when Toby’s there,” he said, and hung up abruptly, as he always did, with anybody. […]

  7

  My name is Newell Naramore and I live over close to Schooner Bottom. I used to live over close to Muckaloon Bottom but I moved. Used to be Muckaloon was all growed up, but I’ve took my dozer to a good bit of it. It ain’t near as rough as it used to be. But you can’t cat hunt in there like you used to could no more neither. I used to have some cat dogs. I had one named Venus of Byhalia one time was a hellacious cat dog.

  I like fried chicken for my lunch. My wife knows that and she gets up ever morning five days a week and fixes it for me. I mean lessen it’s a holiday. That’s the first thing I smell ever morning when I get up: chicken frying. My wife’s good to cook me fried quail that I’ve shot for breakfast, too, with some cat-head biscuits and milk gravy and a couple of brown eggs over easy. We don’t have chickens no more but she knows I like them brown eggs and gets em at Kroger. I think a man does a better day’s work when he’s had him a good breakfast. And I think he sleeps a lot better if he’ll take him just one straight shot of whisky right fore he lays his head down on the pillow.

  This here pond, now, what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna — well, you can see what I’m doing — I’m pushing all these trees out a here and I don’t know why that old man didn’t let somebody cut them good white oaks for him and get the money, shit, I know for a fact them big ones right there is worth eight hundred dollars apiece for cabinet-grade plywood in Memphis, but it’s his wood and ever body says he don’t like nobody on his place.

  It ain’t nothing to me what he
does. I told him over the phone it’s fifty bucks a hour to unload this dozer and he never blinked. But what I’m gonna do — I might ask him if he cares for me coming back over here and cutting them white oaks up for firewood — I could sell it and make me some money — I got my eye on a new rifle I been thinking about buying — Remington Model 700 bolt action — I seen one in Pontotoc for three hundred dollars — them’s some damn nice trees I got piled up there. It’s a shame for em to just rot. Long as it took to grow em. If he’d let me have em, I could spread em out on the ground with this dozer right here and saw em up to where I could get my brother-in-law’s truck up next to em. He’s got a side loader on it. He could drive right up in here long as it ain’t wet.

  And when I get all this cleaned out then I’m gonna build me some lanes and I’m gonna start pushing dirt down yonder to the end of them two ridges and start building up a levee. You got to know what you’re doing to do it. See, you got to level your levee. You’d think ever body would know that — level, levee — but they don’t. Some of these buttholes’ll build a levee that ain’t level. But I’ve done shot this one here with a transit. I know how much dirt I got to move. I got to move approximately 267 cubic yards. That’s a shitload of dirt, mister. I’ll have a borrow pit right there in front of where the levee’s gonna be, and that’ll be the deepest part of the pond. It’ll be almost as deep as the back side of the levee. I’d say it’s gonna be about eighteen or nineteen feet. It’ll be plenty deep enough to drown in if you don’t know how to swim. If I had kids after this thing fills up with water I wouldn’t let em down here at all unless they could swim. Course I ain’t got none yet. You can see I ain’t that old.

  8

  Sometimes Cortez in the summertime afternoons had dreams that weren’t really dreams but things his mind made up by itself. Not real. But they looked real to the inside part of his brain that made them up in the first place. They had color and light and texture and dialogue. And mood. Lots of mood. Sometimes it was blue lights and a smoky bar. Sometimes it was wood smoke and a campfire.

  Another thing they had was sex. Sometimes in the afternoons, just before a nap took hold, somewhere between sleep and REM, before it officially became a nap, especially if he was on his old army cot on his back porch, screened in with a few flowers that needed watering in pots and a water-blistered coffee table, damp enough with mildew so that spiders were not a concern, some rags of raw cotton stuffed in a few holes in the screens, a slight breeze working its way through the leaves of the big pecans out back, he’d somehow wind up in a place that was about six feet above his body, on his back, and he would hover in the air there and would lift right through the roof and then roll over and start flying around. He could go way high, super fast. He could get to going so fast that he knew in some part of his brain that wasn’t totally awake that he was breaking some kind of speed barriers. Sometimes he was wrapped in sadness. Sometimes he was enveloped in elation. One time he saw that blue-and-white clouds were hurtling toward him, and they began to part and peel off to the side and swallow him, and he traveled through splotches of vivid orange blinking colors for what looked to be millions of miles at supersonic speeds to the center of a place where naked dancing-girl angels waited panting and ready on the mossy banks of a clean river, where the shade beneath the trees was deep and strong, and the lips of the young women who were pulling at his clothes sweet as the juice of a freshly picked peach.

  But those were just half dreams. They didn’t have anything to do with his real life, which didn’t have any sex in it at all. None. Zero. Not even a hand job. Mostly his life was taking care of his wife and his cows and raising a garden in the summertime and shooting the deer when they came to get his peas and working on his tractor when it broke and mowing his grass with his little John Deere mower that he’d been using for nineteen years without any trouble except a new battery four times and two tires on the back, a cable, a carburetor, and watching each season pass and wondering which one would finally get him. He didn’t want to go in the spring because the fish were biting and the weather was too pretty. He didn’t want to go in the summer because of homegrown tomato sandwiches every day. He didn’t want to go in the fall because the leaves were turning and wood smoke was in the air and you could kill some squirrels. And in the winter, somebody had to feed these damn cows or they’d starve. As far as he could see, there wasn’t going to be any really convenient time to go. So he was hoping just to keep going.

  But he wasn’t having a dream today. Today he wasn’t even going to sleep. He was lying on his cot and he could hear her TV programs going in there like always. They had more shit on TV than you could believe now. They had one of those satellite dishes on the roof now. They’d try to sell you anything. You could send off for videotapes of college girls pulling their shirts up and showing their bosoms, and he wanted one of those, but they didn’t have a VCR and he would have been scared to order it anyway because of his wife. She was in a wheelchair and was up all night, and the TV hardly ever went off, and he just kept his hearing aid turned down, and if she wanted something she just rapped on the floor with her cane that she never used anymore since she couldn’t get up anymore, and when he felt the vibration of the cane on the floor, he turned his hearing aid up and asked her what the hell she wanted now.

  She was a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble. She was a lot more trouble now than what she used to be, before she’d had the stroke. About the only way for him to get away out of her reach was to go outside and do something, and not look back toward the house, because if he was outside doing something and she decided she wanted something, she could pick up this police bullhorn she’d ordered from somewhere, probably the damn TV, and call him with that, and about the only way not to hear that was to be on the tractor with its loud muffler, and it helped to be some distance away from the house, too, like down by the creek where the pea patch was, where he had hell keeping the deer out of there, and had shot as many as six or seven a night. Probably have to do it again this summer, too. Always did. Every year. Never failed. Good thing the ammo was still easy to get.

  Cortez Sharp lay there a while longer and tried to go to sleep, but he kept wondering how the dozer guy was going on the pond. He’d already been out there this morning to see how it was going and it looked like it was going pretty good, but he didn’t want to stop the dozer guy to ask him how it was going since he was getting fifty dollars an hour. Cortez preferred to go over during the dozer guy’s lunch break and ask him how it was going then. That way he figured it didn’t cost him anything. It was going to be a pretty big pond. The dozer guy had told him two days ago that he was moving over two hundred cubic yards of dirt, which didn’t mean anything to Cortez since he wasn’t a dirt man or a construction man. The dozer man had said that it was a shitload of dirt, but then, after he finished eating his fried chicken and what looked like a really well-made fried apple pie, he told Cortez that he usually took a nap after lunch, so Cortez left.

  He raised his wrist and looked at his watch. It was almost three o’clock. The dozer guy was probably back at work now. If the damn TV hadn’t been so loud in the living room, he could have turned his hearing aid up and would have probably been able to hear the diesel engine on the dozer running over there on the hill. Cortez could hardly stand to sit in the house while he knew the dozer guy was on the dozer moving dirt for the pond, kind of like the way people who are having a house built will come over every afternoon when the carpenters leave, for months, but, too, some people were funny about you watching them work, even if you were paying them, so Cortez didn’t want to just drive up and sit there in his pickup and watch the man work. But he could hardly stand not to.

  So he sat up. He laced on his boots. Maybe he could walk over and sit down behind a tree and peek out from behind it once in a while.

  He went into the living room where his wife was sitting in her wheel-chair watching the television. The volume was way up as usual. And it always seemed like it got louder during the
commercials. His wife turned her head for a moment but she didn’t say anything. After another moment she turned it back. He wondered how long it was going to take her to die. She wasn’t able to cook anything. She wasn’t able to clean house either, but he had a woman come in a few days a week for that. She fixed things that could be kept in the refrigerator for a few days, or frozen, and taken out and thawed out, or microwaved. They had one of them now. Lucinda gave it to them two years ago. It would heat up dayold biscuits pretty good.

  “What you doing?” he said. He thought he might cut the grass later.

  “I ain’t doing nothing,” she said. “Watching TV.”

  “Hmh,” he said. He didn’t know how she could watch so much TV. There didn’t seem like there was ever anything on it but bad news. Or some kind of sex stuff on those talk shows. Some woman almost as old as his wife had a show where folks called in and asked questions about sex problems they were having and she’d tell them about digital stimulation, and she talked about using jelly sometimes. One night he saw her tell the audience how to give somebody a blow job, using a rubber dick as a teaching aid. Rubbing her fingers all up and down it. He got pretty excited. His wife was asleep when he watched that one. He thought.

  “I’m gonna go over and see how he’s doing,” he said.

  “I don’t see why you don’t just let him alone and let him work.”

  It wasn’t the first time she’d said that. It was about the seventh or maybe eighth or ninth or tenth time she’d said that. He was getting about tired of her saying that. She wasn’t excited about the pond the way he was. She never had liked to fish anyway. Never had wanted Lucinda around any water very much. Always afraid she’d fall in and drown. In a foot of water. Even after she was over five years old. Even after she was ten years old. Like she wouldn’t be able to put her hands down on the bottom and push her head out of the water. She always stayed on her. She was the one who ran her off. Always telling her, Don’t do this, don’t do that. Don’t wade in up past your knees! Sit up straight! Keep your legs crossed, them boys’ll look up your dress! Stop picking your nose. Why don’t you go to the bathroom? Mash that zit! And now look where she was. Didn’t know how to swim and lived in Atlanta with a retard. Sleeping in the same bed with one. Acted like she just hated to have to come home for Christmas. Like coming home for Christmas was just too much shit to have to put up with. Cortez couldn’t understand why Lucinda didn’t have a regular boyfriend. Somebody who could do something besides make art. Oh, he paints, Lucinda said. Right. He’d seen some pictures of it, what he painted. Looked like what a chimpanzee could do with a brush and his own shit if he could shit in different colors. It didn’t seem right that she didn’t have somebody smart enough to make it through grammar school.