A Miracle of Catfish (19 page)

There was a pair of pink jogging pants on a hanger and she slipped into them, and found her house shoes on the floor of the closet, and wriggled her feet into them. Then she went back to the kitchen. Her cigarette had burned down almost to the filter and she stubbed it out and almost immediately lit another one. She picked up her drink and sipped it. The whisky was starting to build a warm place inside her and she could sleep as late as she wanted to in the morning.

The radio went off back there. She heard the light click off, and then the padded walking of Albert's feet back into the bedroom. She didn't hear the door shut.

“You going to bed?” Lucinda called from the kitchen.

“Yeah,” came the dim answer from Albert. A square of light in the hall went dark. It was like he had flicked a switch on her happiness for the evening. But she knew that he was just feeling bad, and needed to lie
awake in the dark for a while and look up at the ceiling, and run through whatever was running through his sweet fucked-up brain.

[…] Lucinda wound up getting her pot out of a drawer in the living room and putting some in her pipe and mixing a fresh drink and settling down in front of the television and getting stoned and drunk while watching movies and documentaries about World War II and biographies of minor television stars until about midnight when she went to sleep on the couch.

She dreamed of something she could never remember whenever she was awake. A thing buried, a thing not quite permanently put away. A thing that got dimmer as the years went on but was always there. A memory from maybe a child's fever dream. An enormous silent growing ball that was coming to crash against the earth, taking eternity to get here, she standing between them on a mountaintop pile of rocks, watching in silent space the enormity of what was coming. Not just her death but the death of everything. The death of the world. Of all worlds.

The movie started at 8:20 in Tupelo and Johnette dropped the girls off in front of the doors at 8:10 with enough money for admission and Cokes and candy and popcorn. They had her cell phone number if something happened. She was parked near the curb and she watched them walk into the lobby of the Malco from the driver's seat of her Toyota. By 8:29 she was sitting on a bar stool at the Rib Cage downtown, sipping a margarita on the rocks and looking for her date. She didn't have long since she had to be back at the theater by 10:30 to pick up the girls.

He came in after she'd been there only a few minutes and sat down next to her. She turned around and smiled at him because she was very glad to see him. And horny? My God.

“Hey, baby,” he said. “How much time we got?”

“A little less than two hours,” she said. “I wish it was longer.”

“It's long enough on short notice,” he said. “You ready to go?”

“Sure,” she said, and she picked up the rest of her drink and drained it. He left some money on the bar and took her arm as they went out the door. She'd slipped her wedding ring off. She always did.

The Trace Inn was just up the road and by 8:55 they were in the room and he was mixing himself a drink. She took her pot and her one-hitter from her purse and slipped into the bathroom and changed into a black negligee in between taking tokes off the one-hitter. It was good weed and she needed to get some more of it.

He was already under the covers when she came back in, his clothes hanging neatly folded over a chair. They tried to get together about once a month, but it didn't always work out. Other shit sometimes interfered.

The TV was going, but they didn't watch much of it since it was only showing the war. After a while he turned over and set his drink on the table and reached for her. She pulled him on top of her.

They went at it hard for about an hour and did a little of everything, made her come three times and scream. After that they rested. He'd been trying to talk her into taking a trip with him, but she'd already told
him that she couldn't pull that off, that it was hard enough just to meet him in Tupelo or Oxford once in a while.

She got up and went to the bathroom while he fixed himself another drink. When she came back in and started putting on her clothes he was already dressed and standing there sipping from his blue Solo cup.

“I got to run,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I do, too.”

He put the room key and the money on the bedside table and then walked over to her and kissed her.

“Call me when you can,” he said.

“I will,” she said, and he went out the door.

She sat on the bed and looked at the money. Then she reached out and picked it up. Six fifties. Always the same. Always pinned together neatly with a regular paper clip. He always said it was just some money to help her out. She'd gotten used to taking it. And God knows she needed it. She stuck it down in her purse.

[…]

Cortez Sharp slept with his dead wife that night. Not in a literal sense. Not in a figurative sense. In an actual sense. He cut off the lights and curled up on the daybed without his supper, beside her where she had stiffened in her wheelchair, and took off his brogans, drew his knees not quite up to his chest, pulled the little worn bedspread over him, and tried to sleep. But it didn't work. There were too many things going through his mind. One was, what if a doctor looked at her and said she'd been dead longer than what Cortez was going to say when he called them in the morning and what would happen if he did? Another thing was, when was he going to call Lucinda and tell her she was dead? He couldn't call her tonight. It was late. She was probably already asleep. He didn't want to wake her up with bad news. He knew what she'd have to do. She'd have to get up and call in and take a day off work and pack and drive over to that airport she lived close to and stand in line and buy a ticket and fly to Memphis and rent a car, buy some gas, get out of Memphis, drive all the way down here, bring some clothes for a funeral or enough to stay a day or two, and she'd probably bring that retarded guy with her. He was probably one big mess when you had to take him somewhere. Cussing and all. And they'd have luggage. Shitloads of luggage. He didn't know why they needed so much luggage. Most of it looked like it was made out of brown alligators. And they'd probably have to sleep in there in Raif's room again like they did the last time they were here. And he didn't have any idea how long it had been since the sheets had been changed on that bed. He guessed the last time they were here. And when was that? Was it last Christmas? He couldn't remember. It seemed like she'd been here since Christmas. But when was it? Had she been here this year? Yes. Had she been here since it got hot? No. Had she been here when it was cold? Yes. Had it been raining? Yes. Was it March? No. Was it February? Maybe. It might have been. But what would she have been doing here in February? She didn't come for Valentine's, did she? Maybe she did. She usually only came at Christmas. She used to come at Thanksgiving. But it had been three or four years since she'd done that, come for Thanksgiving.

He couldn't remember when she'd been here. It had been a long time since the sheets had been changed anyway. Maybe he needed to go in there and do that. But not right now. Hell no. He wasn't going to get up in the middle of the night just to make up a bed. No way. He had to lie here and figure out what in the hell he was going to do.

And what the hell was he going to say to Lucinda about when she'd died? What if the doctor looked at her and then Lucinda talked to the doctor? Well, he'd just say he didn't know she'd been dead that long, that he'd been out in the garden that afternoon working and that he'd gone in a few times for a drink of water and heard the TV running, which told him that she was still alive, and he hadn't actually checked on her, had just figured she was all right, and that later on he'd been out in the barn piddling around — he wouldn't say anything about the machine gun because he didn't want her to know about it or the Klan robes — and that he just hadn't known she was dead and had gone on to bed. Would she believe that? What if she didn't? What if she asked him point-blank if her mama was dead when she was talking to him that night on the phone, what would he say then, would he lie, would he tell the truth, what would he do? He probably couldn't tell the truth, hell, no. That wouldn't work. She'd have a screaming damn fit if he told her that shit. He'd just have to think of something before then.

But that was really nothing new. He'd had to think of things before. Sometimes pretty fast. Like a long time ago when he'd screwed that woman down the road in the barn one afternoon in hot weather and another woman had come walking by and heard them and walked over and looked through a crack in the barn and had gasped and gone on up the road to probably blab it up at the store. He'd gotten rid of the first woman in a hurry and had gone over to the house and gotten his wife and carried her over to the barn and laid her down on some bales of freshly baled fescue hay and screwed her, too, right away, so that later on, if the woman who had been walking down the road and had peeked through the cracks told Cortez's wife that she'd seen him screwing somebody in his barn, his wife could just cackle and flap her hand and say, “Oh, silly goose, that was me, Cortez wanted him some in the middle of the day and we did it in the barn, hee hee!” Cortez didn't have
STUPID
written on his forehead.

He was going to have to go to the funeral home and pick out a casket,
make arrangements; the grave would have to be dug. He'd have to do all that tomorrow. People would start finding out about it. They'd start calling over here. All her old biddy friends. He'd have to talk to all them. They'd be crying and stuff. It wouldn't be any fun. It'd be pretty unfun. He dreaded all that shit.

Then there would be people over here at the house. They'd bring food. They'd put the food on the kitchen table and the whole house would fill up with people and they'd sit and talk and eat and cry and tell fishing stories and stories about his wife and they'd sit on the furniture and leave napkins on the floor and chicken bones on plates in the kitchen and he'd have to clean all that shit up and take out a couple of bags of garbage and maybe sweep the chicken crumbs off the floor.

He wondered how much the funeral was going to cost. Probably a pretty good bit. It seemed like he had a funeral policy, but he didn't know where in the hell it was. He'd have to start looking through the drawers and try to find it. He didn't know how much it was worth. Probably not much.

He lay there and looked at her. He could remember when her hair was brown. Her remembered one time when they'd gone swimming at night, naked, down on the shoals of the river. They were very young then. They hadn't been married long. She wasn't pregnant with Raif yet. He remembered how she had wandered naked along the banks of the river, getting mud on her feet and laughing, and then how they had lain down on a quilt they'd packed, and had screwed right there on the clean white sand of the river with the frogs calling and the crickets screaming, so loud it almost hurt your ears. That was a long time ago. Everything now for him was a long time ago.

He was awful hungry. He wasn't used to going to bed without his supper. He hadn't done that since he was a little boy, one time when there wasn't any supper, and he still knew what that felt like. It was a scary feeling. His daddy had been gone to the lumber camp working and he hadn't come home with any money and his mother hadn't been able to find anything to fix for their supper. She'd gone out with the rifle that evening and tried to kill some squirrels, but she came back empty handed and said they were too wild, that she hadn't been able to slip up on any of them, and had cried for a while in front of the hearth, with the
old man sitting there supperless, too, with his empty sleeve pinned up, and then they'd just gone to bed. When he woke up the next morning it was to the smell of fresh pork tenderloin frying on the woodstove and his daddy had been there and there was coffee brewing and everything had been okay. He'd gotten up and eaten the brown eggs his daddy had bought on the way home, that his mother had fried in lard in a black iron skillet. The man his daddy had been riding with had gotten the wagon stuck in a mud hole because he was drunk and his daddy had gotten down from the wagon and walked the rest of the way home. He had started walking at midnight and he had walked for the rest of the night and had come out the woods down the hill just as day was breaking, carrying the food, his heavy leather boots wet from the dew. That was in the log house, the one his daddy had built from pine logs he'd dropped in the forest with an ax and hauled out with mules and a log chain and a pair of snaking tongs and had set them up in what would become the front yard and had hewed them flat on their sides with an adze and had notched them and laid them together on the corners and had raised the walls with a block and tackle and the mules, and other men, bit by bit, and Cortez could remember how the woods almost steamed on summer mornings with the dew melting off the leaves and the birds calling and the squirrels jumping from limb to limb. The smoke from cooking fires, washing fires.

Back then when people died the women fixed up the bodies and they took down a door and laid the body on it and everybody came over that night and hung around and ate and then the next day the preacher came over and they brought a plank coffin and put the person in it and loaded the person into a wagon and hauled the person over to the graveyard and they had a simple service and then went home.

But it wasn't like that now. Now you had to mess with all these people. You had to make all these decisions. And should he wait for Lucinda to get here before he made all those decisions? What if he went ahead and made all the decisions and then she got here and didn't like any of them? He didn't want to have to fuss with her on top of everything else.

Thinking about all that made his head hurt, so he stopped thinking about it. He just lay there in the dark beside her, looking at her, not knowing what else to do. He didn't want to be doing this but he didn't
know what else he could do. So he just lay there. Waiting. For what he did not know. Enlightenment, maybe. The hand of God. A tomato sandwich. But it seemed too dark to venture toward the kitchen. So he just stayed where he was. Curled up on the daybed.