Billy Ray's Farm Read online

  Paddy Chayovsky didn’t exactly have a sinking spell but Paddy Chayovsky got kind of sleepy later on in the night and curled up on Grover’s bed right there beside the front door and pulled a white bedspread over himself and went to sleep. The party went on and on. The party was sucking a lot of things in but it wasn’t spewing many things out. Cigarettes were being consumed, the packs getting thinner, and the beer was dwindling and the consumption of it proportionally so. I saw Melville asleep on the porch and saw Lorna slip a pillow under his head. Salinger had sprawled on the couch, the sheer size of his body staking undeniable claim to it, for all night, if need be. Once in a while he moaned.

  Lorna and I sat on the porch for a while and talked. In the kitchen Mustapha discussed the merits of Slob-berbone. I told Grover that I had a guitar I wasn’t using and that I’d drop it by sometime. He was glad to hear that and assured me that he wouldn’t beat it up against the wall like he’d done the old Silvertone from which I’d found the remnant. He talked some about how difficult it had been to smash it into so many small pieces. It had something to do with Grover playing a piece so perfect on the guitar that he feared he wouldn’t ever be able to recreate it, and the course he took was the only one he saw open. Apparently it had been a pretty methodical guitar-smashing. Apparently there’d been some stomping involved as well. I didn’t ask him if there were any more pieces of it left, or if I might have one of them in case there were.

  But alas the crowd dwindled. Some people have to work in the mornings. Others march to the beat of their own drum and are akin to little lost waifs that scatter down the street like the gingko leaves every fall at the corner of Madison and North 14th, hurried by a colder wind or a harkening toward daybreak. When our friend Frederico’s legs failed him he was taken quickly to a waiting pickup truck, whisked crazy-legged away across the dewy grass, and banished from sight by a dying rumble of pipes in the dark as the pickup pulled him to another place. I stood with Grover and Lorna in the street, eyeing the advent of dawn. It was only something purple over the bypass. But coffee thoughts were getting 3-D: a hot white paper cup, bright lights inside a convenience store, while outside the yawning workers were gassing up and hurrying, dawdling not much, facing another day for more dollars. Salinger stirred on the couch when we said his name but I thought he might have another nap or two left in him.

  The big fish grab looked out of my grasp. I hadn’t been up twenty-four hours yet, but by the time I got done with the bull shit it would be getting pretty close. Would it be possible to go home, get him home, then go down to Enid Spillway, forty-five minutes from our place? It might be. It might not be. What if free fish were in abundance and I missed it and what if, later on, Lorna and Paddy Chayovsky showed me pictures of coolers full of catfish on ice, their whiskered mouths, their dead eyes? Would I wail and grind my teeth then? Oh yeah.

  Lorna mentioned smokes and I mentioned my coffee thoughts and soon we were making an early run. Salinger raised up from the couch and asked if he might get a ride and we invited him to hop in. Grover was a lean figure in the yellow square of light in the door-frame, calling out for cigarettes. Lorna squeezed into the back and Salinger lowered himself into the bucket of our white Pony for the ride home.

  The streets were almost deserted. Only a few cars were beginning to stir. The early morning street workers, you see them. They’re out in their trucks or pushing a handcart around the square to make a city pretty in the rising light.

  Salinger said he’d had a long night and was going to bed. We wished him well and hail fine fellow well met at his step and Lorna got into the bucket he’d vacated.

  We went to a place that used to be a small grocery store, but now it’s a green-and-white BP just like any other BP in the whole similar country. If you were blindfolded and driven there over the course of a few days you might take it off and stand in the parking lot and wonder if maybe you were somewhere off the interstate in Pennsylvania, since they have pine trees, too.

  We got our stuff. Lorna paid for my coffee. I would-n’t let her pay for my cigarettes. It didn’t seem like a thing to let a lady do. And just as we were getting back in the car I got a call on the car phone, an instrument with which I’m not real familiar. Lorna kind of helped me figure out how to answer the thing, and when I did, it was my daughter, Louisa Latigo, wanting to know where I was and when I was bringing the car home. I told her where, asked her how soon she’d need it. It turned out that she needed it in twenty-five minutes so she could get to school, so that was a mandatory book, right out of there into growing traffic.

  On the way back I told Lorna I didn’t know if I’d make it down for the fishgrab or not, that my main priority was getting my bull back on Mamaw’s place. There was no telling how long it might take or how much success I might have or even if he was still in the catch pen. Unless it was real strong he was probably already out of it. If he was in it I’d have to get the heavy cattle trailer hooked up to my very lightweight ancient Asian pickup, a faithful little one that poots a bit of smoke, a machine that never once failed to do anything I asked of it except go forward a few times when there was some mud under the tires. It might be hard-pressed to pull a hefty bull’s big behind.

  I let Lorna out and told her that maybe I’d see her. She walked away toward the house and I drove into the morning, scooting around the edge of town and going right out into the country, driving faster than usual but still under the speed limit. I was home on time and Bobby Ray was getting ready for work. I was pretty much a sleepyhead but couldn’t hit the bed. I sat on the front porch in the swing. I drank my coffee. I played my Martin. I waited for the sun.

  THE MASSEY-FERGUSON is red, has big black tires and horses numbering fifty-three. It’s a bad little mother at fourteen five, cheaper than a lot of pickups. It weighs in at fifty-eight hundred pounds and driving it down the road in fourth gear at twenty mph is like riding a motorcycle without a helmet. It’s not a real stable vehicle and a man needs to be careful driving it. The sun was up and starting to shine bright when I took a towel out to the tractor and wiped the dew off the seat. Omar was right across the fence in the northeast corner of Mamaw’s pasture, behind a line of cedar trees whose low limbs extend out almost twenty feet from the old fence that Marlana Antonia’s daddy built so long ago. Wood rots, wire rusts, trees fall in high winds or ice storms. Out here in Y’Cona there are cows all around and some of us have cows close to each other and everybody has a bull or two and sometimes the bulls get too close to each other and begin a bellowdance and then they can fight their way right through a fence. It can get pretty brutal. They can become bloodied. You wouldn’t see these cowboys trying to ride them if they weren’t tough. Or maybe just one cow will find a broken spot in the fence that separates two landowners and cross over. Omar escaped from our place at Tula the first day we got him and ran loose in the woods with a spotted heifer of mine for almost two weeks before Mr. Leslie got them into his barn and Marlana Antonia helped me hook up Bobby Ray’s cattle trailer and go down there and get them.

  RIFF: Marlana Antonia had an amusing

  conversation that day with a man named

  James who was down there helping. James

  was evidently somewhat nervous around

  the cattle and Mr. Leslie had all kinds,

  bulls, cows, calves, steers, heifers, you

  name it.

  MARLANA ANTONIA: Which one of these cows are

  you scared of, James?

  JAMES: I’m sked a all of em.

  I had on my rubber LaCrosse boots with the fancy camo tops and drawstrings for the wet grass I’d soon be tramping through. The tractor took me up past our own rotten catch pen and down the pasture road and over a hill where an old house once stood that used to hold rabbits and their nests within its walls and across the dry creek carefully because of a treacherous slope, scary to climb when muddy, across the other pasture and up past the pond where pond perch worked their wonky fins and under the cedar trees there he was, just
on the other side of the fence, huge, horned, damn near walleyed, the bulk of him black but wearing a white blaze face and four white stockings, kind of almost like some kind of fancy racehorse except that he’s bovine instead of equine, and he was bawling for our cows still in Mamaw’s pasture, his jilted lovers lowing back at him still steady and indomitable, bereft of his concubines but probably not a depleted potentate, done bred everything of my neighbor’s that was ready to breed, looking as he always had like he might explode at any minute, old Grasshopper, Red Rock, Huey’s Lewis News.

  Sun up and not murderous on the head because of a bad head like so many other mornings but each blade of sagegrass shining with moisture in a field of wet misted grass. I’d seen Lorna rub her goose-pimpled elbows as morning had crept toward completion. Had they gone for the big fish grab, I wondered, or had the lure of the pillow cried too loudly? Surely there was no other fool but me who’d been out all night without sleep and was now messing with a bad bull. I got down off the tractor and approached him. I kept the fence between us.

  Cows are incredibly dumb things. They’ll crap on their food while they’re eating it, will stand on it and eat it and crap on it and eat it some more, yet they make such lovely cheeseburgers. And woe goes to the lowly part-time cattleman who thinks he’ll throw fourteen cows and a bull into a pasture and soon start cashing fat checks from the sale of milk-fed junior beeves. They die having their babies and the babies die, too. They fall into holes and don’t ever get up. They get out in the road and get hit by cars. They have to be caught and held and inoculated, dipped, dusted, palpated, deflated, dehorned, castrated, artificially inseminated, weighed, wormed, fitted with tags, or chased down by the vet when they throw out their uteruses. They don’t have enough sense to get in out of the rain. They’re a large disappointment to a man who wishes a carefree existence in this world.

  I approached him slowly, speaking calm words of encouragement. There was a wire gap somewhere along the fence, and if I could just get it opened and somehow get behind him without spooking him it might be possible to herd him gently back toward where he belonged, without getting too close to him. I be a man who be scared of his own bull.

  But it wasn’t to be. I crossed the fence downwind and made a big circle up past some abandoned farm machinery and crossed another fence that was only two strands high and then I was in the actual pasture with him, no fence between us, him eyeing me carefully through the screening elm branches and scattered privet hedge trees. He was still bawling lustily to the cows and they were still answering him, but it didn’t sound how you might think it did. Ever since I’ve owned this bull I’ve noticed that his bawl is more of a strangled-sounding goat-yodeling than anything else.

  I tried to move cleverly and he moved the other way and got off a little ways from me so that I felt safe enough to walk up to the fence and open the short gap and let it drop to the ground. He had his out now and it didn’t look like there’d be any need for any fencecutting or -mending if he would just look over there where I’d just been and see that open hole and walk through it. But a bovine is so stupid he can’t even look at something like that and figure it out. He went the other way, his dewlap swinging, his horns bobbing, a homesick bawl rising in his throat.

  RIFF: Year before last he lost the tip of his

  tail. Bobby Ray told me either a cow was

  standing on it when he stood up or it

  dropped off from fescue poisoning. I found it

  out in the pasture one day and kept it in a

  drawer in my desk for a while, a dried

  hollow tube of skin with long silky

  yellowed hair. I’d take it out and show it to

  people and they’d marvel over it, but it

  wasn’t really good for anything. I think

  I finally threw it away.

  I circled wide and turned him and waved my arms and he went back up the deep ditch he was in and got to within fifty feet of the open gap and stopped and wouldn’t go anymore and looked back at me like, Okay dude, what up? I stopped where I was too. I knew that if he decided to run over me there wouldn’t be too much I could do about it because after chasing him over the pasture that Saturday morning I knew he could outrun me and I didn’t know if I was still agile enough to get quick like a monkey up a tree. Impasse. The cows were still bawling. Then I got a bright idea. Why not leave the gap down, circle back the way I’d come, get on the other side of the fence where my tractor was still sitting and start hollering “Sooksooksooksooksooksooksook!” like I do when I’m feeding them in the winter, get all the cows stirred up some more, get them to bawling louder and get him even more stirred up and entice him even closer to the gap and just let him walk home?

  It didn’t work exactly that way. I got around there and hollered all that Sook thing and the cows got to bawling louder and running toward me and they crossed the creek and he got more and more agitated and got up close to the fence and started pushing against it and I heard the posts start cracking and then suddenly like the light-footed gazelle he jumped the whole thing flat-footed and never even hung any of his belly hair or his penis sheath and then they were all reunited happily back on Mamaw’s place. I closed the gap, got back on the tractor and started it, then headed for the house, wondering how many coolers I had for fish, how much ice I would need for a king’s ransom of tabby cats.

  YOU CAN KEEP all your crawfish pie and your shrimp and grits. You can give me some of your Blue Point oysters on the half shell and about half your turtle soup, but mainly give me fish, bream or crappie or catfish, even bass, fried, with some taters on the side, a small brown mound of hushpuppies, but mainly—and some ketchup—give me crisp meal-coated flakes of fish, white and steaming under the tines of the fork as it twists the once-swimming flesh from the thin bones. Don’t even hand me any of that coleslaw because I won’t eat it. I’d be needing some lemon wedges. Louisa Latigo is like me in that.

  Then imagine if you will a vast deep hole in a concrete ground, with barely slanting walls, and a big flat parking lot up on top where a gigantic crane sits at rest, and helmeted construction workers and state park employees who scurry or cluster or simply lean on a fence looking down to what is happening below.

  It was hot as hell, about ten o’clock, and the lines of cars and trucks stretched so far back from the spillway that I’d had to park a good ways distant and walk up to where all the action was evolving. I carried in my hands a fish basket, and my rubber boots were still on my feet. But my toes were sweating in the heat, and them boots weren’t made for such walking. I should have been home in the bed.

  It had been an unbelievably long night and it seemed even then a bit hallucinatory, to have gone through so much and still be up for more adventure. I walked by trucks and cars and trucks and cars and even some vans, which made sense: more hauling space if they were getting them out by the bathtubloads.

  What was bugging me out was that I was an hour late. Even on the grass trucks and cars were parked, and they were parked on both sides of the road that led up to the spillway, but all the vehicles were empty, no folks inside them at all. The crane didn’t appear to be in action. What was it for? Who the hell put it there? Were they going to haul fish up with it? I wanted to demand.

  A large bunch of people were all hung in a row on a makeshift fence that bordered the spillway, and I spotted two T-shirted figures among them, matching shirts, white and red letters. I recognized the golden locks of Lorna, and the dark fuzzy head of Paddy Chayovsky. They hadn’t failed to show up but they didn’t seem to be completing their mission. It was way too hot for somebody who hadn’t been to bed in a long time to be staggering around in it. But once I got up beside them, I could see what they saw. And it took my breath away.

  Out yonder beyonder lay an open rock chasm with a wide flat bottom, and shallow pools of water lay in it here and there, and it was sluggishly moving with people and fish.

  They were scooping them up in plastic laundry baskets.

>   They were shoving them nose first into cardboard barrels.

  Some had those big serious garbage cans on wheels.

  Children were shrieking with laughter and their high cries rose on the wind and drifted up to where we stood. I reached out and touched Paddy Chayovsky on the shoulder.

  “Hey, you made it!” he said, and I cut to the chase on my bull story while he nodded grimly and listened. Lorna gave me a hug and smiled gamely, but the toll of a night without sleep was beginning to tell on her face. Paddy Chayovsky, with his impish grin, appeared to be pretty fresh. I was beginning to move pretty slowly, but I thought I could probably bolster up some quick energy if it meant filling the big coolers in the back of my pickup.

  We didn’t talk much. We just watched the people scooping up the fish. I could see a line of sandbags like stairs going down beside the wall of the spillway into the bottom below, and people where hauling up great barrels and containers of fish: buffalo, bream, catfish, bass, carp. There seemed to be generous amounts of fishslime on everything. And something even more exciting: Down near the mouth of the spillway there was a deeper concrete pit, and the water had been drained down to a depth of about three feet. Men and boys with nets were down in it wading, and large fish they had thrown out lay gasping for water on the concrete lip above them. That looked like the place for me. I asked Lorna how long the people had been in there and she said about an hour. She said they were waiting to get some small fish to put in a pond, and then they led me around and introduced me to a guy who worked there, sort of a park ranger guy, I guess, with a helmet and a uniform and patches. He told me pretty quick that if I wanted some fish I’d better get down there in them pretty quick. Below us the people were still moving through the pools of water where the fish splashed and tried to escape, but of course there was no escape. Some construction dude with a helmet on his head walked by me carrying a catfish that had to weigh fif-teen pounds.