A Miracle of Catfish

  After a few more miles he started slowing down. He was going to try and turn in on DeLay Road without going to a lower gear, and he thought he could do it if he kept his momentum going. There was a restaurant in Yocona and he often saw well-dressed people standing out beside it, drinking wine, waiting their turns to go inside, but he never had been in there. He knew he wouldn’t be able to afford it. It was a place for rich people who came out from town to eat and drink wine in the country. It was dark and closed down when he went by it.

  He turned in on DeLay Road and didn’t downshift, and the transmission didn’t protest. […] He crossed over the river bridge and looked out there into the open space beside it. It was dark, the tall banks covered with tall grass. There hadn’t been a frost yet, but it probably wouldn’t be long. Already you could feel the nip in the air in the mornings. The leaves were starting to turn. Bow season was opening next weekend. He wished he had a bow. He’d seen in some magazine where Fred Bear had once killed an elephant with a bow.

  He started pulling the Hartsfield hill and he had to stomp on the gas to make the ’55 take it. But he’d waited a little too long. It lugged. He didn’t want to have to downshift on this hill but it looked like he didn’t have any choice. The transmission made a terrible grinding sound when he pulled it down into second, and then he had to just keep it in second and get up the hill, and it went on and on, onto another hill, and then another hill, and he was only doing about 20 mph by then, but there wasn’t any choice. When he finally crested the very top and looked left down into the river bottom, he could see the white cows that lived on that farm sitting like white dots among the grass, and he dropped it down into fourth. There were bulls in a pasture. There was a bobcat that walked across the road in front of him. […]

  Two days later he was standing in front of the Coke machine in the break room when the big-tittied heifer walked up. He was putting some money into the machine and he glanced at her.

  “Hey,” he said. “How you?”

  “You piece a shit,” she said in a very low voice.

  “You talking to me?” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  And then she was up in his face. Leaning over him. He hadn’t realized she was so tall.

  “I don’t see anybody else standing here,” she said.

  And then he saw Lacey sitting at a table in the back with some other women. They were all looking at him and he figured they had been talking about him. That made him feel kind of small.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” she said quietly.

  “I don’t know what the hell you talking about,” Jimmy’s daddy said, speaking quietly, too, and pushed the button for a Coke. Nothing happened. Piece of shit! He almost slammed it with his fist.

  “I’m talking about Lacey,” she said. “And how you’re treating her.”

  He looked over at Lacey. She was eating her lunch and she wasn’t looking at him now. And now that he was up close to the big-tittied heifer, he could see that she wasn’t as young as he’d thought. Originally he’d thought that she was in her early twenties, but now that he was up close to her, he could see that she was no spring chicken after all. She had some wrinkles around her eyes. She even looked a little used. She wasn’t a college student unless she was an older college student.

  “I don’t see how that’s any of your business, lady,” he said, and flipped the lever on the coin return. Nothing happened. No money came down. No Coke appeared. His chili was getting cold again.

  “I’ve met men like you before,” she said. “You just want to have your fun and you don’t care who you hurt.”

  Jimmy’s daddy flipped the coin return lever again. He looked over at her. She was still standing there and over her shoulder Jimmy’s daddy could see people looking at them. Enjoying the show?

  “Why don’t you just get out of my damn face?” he said.

  “Because Lacey’s a friend of mine, that’s why,” she said. “Are you not going to take any responsibility at all?”

  Jimmy’s daddy was about to get pissed. He considered slapping the piss out of her. But they’d probably fire him if he did that. On the other hand, would it be a disaster if they did? The sons of bitches didn’t pay him nothing. He’d had only a fifteen-cent raise in the last year. What did that translate to? A dollar and twenty cents a day? Six dollars a week? And the income tax got most of that anyway. Bastards.

  “Look,” he said.

  “No, you look,” she said, still speaking quietly, and she leaned closer. “Lacey’s in love with you. Do you know that?”

  “Naw, I don’t know that,” he said. He glanced over at Seaborn sitting with the Tool-and-Die guys and he saw that Seaborn was watching them. He was chewing slowly on what looked like an egg salad sandwich.

  “Well, she is,” the big-tittied heifer said. “I don’t know why she is, but she is, and she’s going to have your baby. I think you ought to be a man about it.”

  Now what the fuck did that mean? Be a man about it? Be a man about it how?

  “You don’t know a goddamn thing about me,” he said.

  “Oh yes I do,” she said. “I know what kind of man you are.”

  “You don’t know shit about me,” Jimmy’s daddy said. He hit the coin return lever again, but nothing happened. He just wanted her to get away from him. Leave him alone. Let him eat his chili and have a few cigarettes before he had to get back to work. The goddamn toilet in the ladies’ bathroom was stopped up again and he was going to have to go up there and unplug that son of a bitch again.

  “And what kind of man am I?” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  She didn’t even bother to answer that.

  “I wouldn’t let my dog piss on you if you’s on fire,” she said, and walked away. She went back to the table with Lacey and the other women and she sat down and then leaned over and said something to Lacey. And Lacey laughed! He was afraid she was going to tell them about him shitting in his britches.

  52

  Now that the go-kart was running again, Velma and Evelyn were being a lot nicer to Jimmy in order to secure go-kart rides up and down the dirt road. He took turns with them, and even carried one or the other one of them up to the pond sometimes, which he figured was okay since Mister Cortez had told him that he could fish in there any time he wanted to. He’d been kind of nervous about actually going fishing, because he didn’t really know how, and had spent a lot of time just practicing with his casting plug, usually in the afternoons after school. He’d gotten good enough that he could drop it into the tire in the driveway four out of five times, from roughly fifty feet. But now he was in a dilemma. He was ready to fish. He had a good place to fish. He had all the gear. But how could he get his daddy to show him how to fish? He didn’t want to have to wait around for three or four years until his daddy got in the mood. And what if Jimmy went fishing in Mister Cortez’s pond, and caught a bunch of fish? How could he bring them back home to get his daddy to dress them without telling his daddy where he’d caught them? He guessed he could lie, and say he’d caught them out of the creek down the road, but he hated to lie to his daddy. On the other hand, Mister Cortez had asked Jimmy not to tell anybody about the fish. Jimmy wished now that he’d gone ahead and asked Mister Cortez if it was all right for him to tell his daddy about the fish, but he’d known that wouldn’t be a good idea, because he’d also sort of known that the only reason Mister Cortez had told him he could fish was because of what Jimmy had done for him down at the pond that afternoon. He hadn’t seen Mister Cortez since the day he’d given him the rod and reel, and the tackle box with all the good stuff in it, and he’d stopped watching him with the binoculars since he’d told his daddy that he’d looked under his daddy’s bed and had seen the binoculars under there. His daddy had gotten the binoculars and put them somewhere. But he didn’t need to watch Mister Cortez anymore anyway. What he needed was some red worms. Or some night crawlers. And he didn’t have any idea where to find any. But he thought he’d try. He’d figured all this stuff out at s
chool when he was supposed to be listening to the teacher talking about personal hygiene. He went out to the shed one afternoon after school while Evelyn was talking on the phone and Velma was watching TV, and he found a shovel and an empty paint bucket. Armed with these, he headed down into the woods behind the trailer and walked through the carpets of brown leaves. The leaves on the trees were still green. There were logs lying here and there and he rolled some of them over. Fat worms that lay beneath the rotted wood squirmed in abundance and he didn’t even have to dig. He didn’t know they were night crawlers. He thought they were red worms. He grabbed them and started putting them in the bucket. He turned over five logs and by then he had over thirty worms. More than enough, he figured. But how did you fish? That was the thing. Maybe he needed to go ask Mister Cortez. Surely he knew how to fish.

  When he got back up to the trailer, he put the shovel back in the shed in the same exact place he’d found it. When he got through fishing, he would put the paint bucket back, too. […]

  His mama had done something nice for him. And stuff like that was why he loved his mama so much. She’d gone somewhere uptown on her lunch break one day and had bought Jimmy a red three-gallon fuel container, and she’d gone down to the store on the other side of Yocona, had taken Jimmy with her, and she’d bought him three gallons of gas just for his go-kart. Jimmy didn’t get to go to the store much, so he’d gone inside and looked around while his mama was pumping his gas into the fuel container that was sitting in the trunk of her Toyota. He didn’t know they made pizzas at the store. He watched a girl making a pizza. Some young men who weren’t wearing shirts came in and ordered some pizzas and started standing around waiting for them. Some more people came in and stood around, waiting for the girl to finish making those other pizzas so she could take off her gloves and wait on them. Some baby was screaming in a playpen back behind the counter. There were some old men sitting around a table in the back sipping coffee and playing dominoes and smoking cigarettes. They had lots of ice cream in an ice-cream box. The girl who was making the pizzas and waiting on the customers at the counter had tears running down her cheeks. His mama bought him an ice cream on a stick when she came in to pay for the gas, but they had to stand around and wait for a pretty long while before they could pay. They had to wait about ten minutes because some guy came in with a whole stalk of bananas on his back and the girl who was making the pizzas and taking the gloves off and putting them back on and rushing between the counter and ringing things up for people and then going back and putting the gloves back on and making more pizzas had to stop everything she was doing and pay the man for the bananas. But Jimmy was sure glad his mama had bought him some gas. And he still had about two gallons left.

  He gassed up his go-kart carefully, not spilling any since it was so precious. It would run for a couple of hours on a tankful. When he had it almost full he took the spout out and put the cap back on the tank. Then he checked his oil. It was okay. Then he went in the trailer and went back to his room and got his rod and reel and his tackle box. The girls didn’t pay him any attention when he went back through the living room. He didn’t tell them he was leaving because he didn’t want them to ask him where he was going. He had his go-kart back. He was a free bird.

  He cranked up the go-kart and put his tackle box on the seat beside him. It was a good thing it was a two-seater. Then he stuck the rod upright in the seat beside him. He could steer with one hand and hold the rod and reel with the other. Then he sat down in the seat and mashed the gas and rolled out of the driveway, up the road. Then he stopped and got off and went back for his paint bucket full of worms. He set them on the seat, too.

  The nights were getting cooler now. It was a lot cooler in the mornings when Evelyn and Jimmy and Velma were standing out by the road waiting on the school bus. Jimmy had heard his daddy talking about going deer hunting, and once he’d seen him sharpening his hunting knife. He always did that before deer season, sharpened his knife. Went out and sighted in his rifle. Put his hunting clothes in a bag and hung them outside for a couple of days. Went out in the woods and looked for deer sign. Put up tree stands. Watched lots of deer-hunting videos. Maybe he’d be able to kill something this year. Maybe that would put him in a better mood. Jimmy hoped so.

  He went on up the road to Mister Cortez’s driveway and drove past it to the new pond road and there he stopped. He’d thought maybe Mister Cortez’s pickup would be parked there, but he didn’t see it anywhere. He turned down the road and when he got halfway down it he could see Mister Cortez’s house and his pickup parked beside it. But he drove on down to the pond and stopped beside it, the go-kart idling smoothly, the chain still nice and tight. He looked out across the water. He could still see the gouge marks the tires had made in the bank from when Mister Cortez had turned it over. That Bush Hog thing was sitting on the bank.

  He looked down the hill, across the pasture where some of Mister Cortez’s cows were grazing, and looked at the house. He never had been down there before, and he didn’t know if he should go down there or not, but surely it wouldn’t hurt anything. Shoot. Maybe he’d better not. He might be taking a nap or something.

  So he just got off the go-kart and cut it off. Dang it, he wished he’d thought to bring a cold Coke out of the refrigerator with him. A cold Coke would be good while he was fishing. But he could always run back down there later if he wanted one. The go-kart made life easier.

  Okay now, where did you fish? […]

  He thought he could figure it out, so he sat down next to the go-kart and picked up his rod and reel. He pressed the thumb button on the reel and threw the casting plug out there about ten feet, and then he turned the crank handle to make the thumb button pop back out and lock the line. Then he opened his tackle box. What was he going to use to cut the line? Ah. The new fillet knife. It was packaged in some stiff plastic, and it would have been handy if he’d had another knife to cut the plastic from around the first knife, but he just had to gnaw a hole in it and then rip it open. The fillet knife fell out on the ground, and Jimmy put the ripped plastic on the seat of the go-kart to take back home with him when he was done. He wasn’t about to trash up Mister Cortez’s pond bank after he’d been nice enough to let him fish.

  Okay now. He knew you needed a bobber, a weight, and a hook because he’d looked at his daddy’s rods and reels before and that was what they all had on them. What size hook? What size bobber? What size weight? It looked like he had a little of everything, so he tore open a package of the red-and-white bobbers. He picked out one the size of a Ping-Pong ball. It had a little button on top and a little button on the bottom. Jimmy squeezed the button on top, and saw that a little brass hook sticking out on the bottom was what you used to hook the line to it. Okay. So far so good. He picked up the rod and swung the practice plug back to him, and then he took the fillet knife from its leather holster and cut off the practice plug. He put it back in the tackle box so that he could practice cast some more this winter if he wanted to, just to keep his hand in. Then he looked at hooks for a minute. He had small ones with long shanks, big ones with short shanks, and everything in between. He found some he thought would work, and he opened the hook package and took one out. Then he picked up the lead weights. They were all different sizes, too, in a round plastic box with a lid that rotated to allow you to get out whatever size you wanted. He got one. Then he got another one. They were small […]. They had little jaws on them that you squeezed onto the line, pretty self-explanatory.

  It took him a few minutes to tie a hook on, snap on the bobber, and put the lead on. Okay. He looked at it. He swung it in the air in a practice move. He thought he was ready. He knew you had to put the worm on the hook. That was just common sense.

  Wait a minute, though. Shouldn’t he throw it out there to make sure he didn’t have too much lead on it, first? He thought he probably should. He made a good cast out into the water and the bobber immediately sank. He didn’t think that was going to work. If you had a bobber, i
t had to bob, right? So he reeled it back in and looked at it. It looked okay. But he was pretty sure he had too much lead on it, so he took one of the weights off. Then he threw it out into the water again. The bobber floated perfectly. So he reeled it back in. He was now ready for bait, and finally, at long last, actual fishing. Jimmy didn’t know how he’d managed to get so lucky. He started humming “Mama Tried.”

  He got the paint bucket of worms from the go-kart and reached into the rotted leaf mold he’d added to the worm bucket to give them something natural to crawl around on instead of just dried-up paint, and he came up with one squirming. He took a good look at it. It was about four or five inches long and thicker than the pencils he used for homework. And which end did the hook go in? Did it matter? He didn’t figure it did, so he stuck the hook into the worm and threaded the worm on. That caused some slimy stuff to get on his fingers. But after he got the hook completely filled up with worm, he still had about three or four inches of worm hanging off. Just let it hang, he thought, and he stood up to make his first baited cast. It went out there about fifty feet and landed with a splash. Some small ripples went out from the bobber and then the bobber sat there. Only for a moment. In the next moment it dove beneath the water and went out of sight. Oh shit! He had a fish! His first fish! Jimmy started reeling. And something reeled back. The line got tight and it was tugging and Jimmy instinctively held the tip up and kept turning the crank, his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth. The fish was pulling, but Jimmy didn’t think it was a very big one. That was okay. He didn’t mind catching some small ones at first. Mister Cortez had said they would grow.