A Miracle of Catfish (51 page)

“Well,” Jimmy said, and looked down. He hated to tell him that he'd been watching him through the binoculars, but he hated to lie, too, even though he had to lie sometimes merely for self-preservation purposes. Like if Evelyn wanted to know what little fucker ate all the Twinkies, he'd say, Not me. He looked back up. “I was watching you,” he said.

“How come?”

“Well,” Jimmy said. “That man come by here other day, and his truck said ‘Tommy's Big Red Fish Truck,' and I was wondering if you put some fish in your pond.”

Mister Cortez was smiling just a little.

“So you was kind of spying on me, huh?” he said.

“Yes sir,” Jimmy said. “I guess I was.”

Mister Cortez nodded.

“I'm glad you was,” he said. “Nobody would have found me till I was dead.”

“Can I ask you something?” Jimmy said.

“Sure.”

“What's that stuff you throwing out in the water?”

“It's catfish feed,” Mister Cortez said. “I got three thousand of em in there. I feed em at night.”

“Gol
ly
,” Jimmy said. “How big are they?”

“Oh, they're just little bitty things right now,” Mister Sharp said. “But I'm gonna keep feeding em and by next year they'll be big enough to eat. You like to fish?”

“I never have been,” Jimmy said. “My daddy keeps saying he's gonna take me, but he ain't never took me yet.”

Mister Cortrez looked like he was really surprised by that.

“How old are you?” he said.

“Almost ten,” Jimmy said.

“You almost ten and you ain't never been fishing?”

“Yes sir.”

“Does your daddy fish?”

“Yes sir. He goes with Mister Rusty and Mister Seaborn.”

“He just don't never take you?”

“No sir. He don't never have time to, I don't reckon”.

“Hmm,” Mister Cortez said, and he turned toward his truck. He reached over into the bed and brought out a beautiful red reel on a shiny black rod, and the rod had
SHAKESPEARE
written on it. The reel was already strung with line that stretched out through the ferrules and the rod had a little yellow rubber practice-casting plug on the end of it. He handed the rod and reel to Jimmy. And then he reached back into the truck for a new Plano tackle box and handed that to him as well. When Jimmy set the rod down long enough to open the tackle box and look in, he saw that it was loaded with fishing gear: crappie hooks, bream hooks, bass hooks, catfish hooks, red-and-white plastic bobbers, supersensitive porcupine-quill bobbers, lures and jigs, packets of lead weights, some
nylon stringers, a fish scale, a fish scaler, a Fiskars fillet knife in a leather holster, even a hook disgorger for getting hooks out of fish that had swallowed hooks deep. “Well, now you've got something to fish with whenever he takes you,” Mister Cortez said. “And you can fish in my pond any time you want to. Long as it's okay with your daddy and your mama. I was gonna wait and ask them if it was okay for me to give you this stuff, but if it ain't, they can let me know.”

Jimmy looked at the fishing pole. It was the most awesome thing he had ever seen, including his go-kart when it was new. It was sleek. It looked expensive. And somehow, it was his. Along with what looked like everything a boy would need to fish. He looked up at Mister Cortez. The world had suddenly changed on him again. And for once, not in some chickenshit way.

“What does catfish eat?” Jimmy said.

“Your fingers if you stick em in their mouth,” Mister Cortez said. “Get you some red worms and try them. Or night crawlers.”

Then he bent over toward Jimmy and lowered his voice a little.

“Just don't tell nobody about the catfish, okay?”

“Okay,” Jimmy said immediately, and then wondered immediately if it would be okay to tell his daddy about the catfish. But he didn't ask. Everything was going way too good that day to mess it up with a bunch of stupid questions.

Seretha cried for three days when she found out Montrel was gone and then she left. Packed up one night while Cleve was asleep, was gone the next morning along with her hair curlers. Some clothes and shoes. A small FM radio. Montrel's car was still sitting beside the house, spotted with tree sap, old dog piss showing yellow on the whitewall tires.

Cleve sat out on the porch with Peter Rabbit sleeping in his lap and figured on what to do with the car. He knew she wouldn't go against him if it came to the law. Best thing would be to just get rid of it. He didn't have the title, so he couldn't sell it. It probably wasn't paid for anyway.

He sat there, rocking. She'd know for sure now, but she probably already did anyway, so he got up and went inside and found the keys on her dresser. He got three Budweiser tallboys from the ancient icebox and shut Peter Rabbit up in his bedroom so that he couldn't follow him.

He slipped on a pair of Playtex Living Gloves that Seretha used to wash dishes and went out and slipped behind the wheel of Montrel's ragged-out '79 deuce and a quarter. It fired right up. Then he got out and found a couple of bricks and put them in the floorboards. He opened the first beer when he pulled it down in Drive.

He stopped out at the mailbox to see if the mail had run. It hadn't, or maybe the mail girl just hadn't brought him anything today. Most of the time it was circulars and stuff from Home Depot anyway. He got back in the car and turned left out of his drive and headed up the dirt road toward Old Dallas. There weren't many people who lived back in there anymore. Most of them were in the graveyard now, under the old cedars.

He kind of wished he had Peter Rabbit with him, but he didn't want to make him walk that far since he was just a puppy. There would be plenty of long walks soon enough. He'd get him a squirrel skin before long. Maybe within the next day or two.

It was as pretty a morning as he'd seen, driving the big Buick, dust rolling out behind him. It needed some shocks bad. And that damn
perfume. He'd be glad when he got out of this son of a bitch. But there was stuff to look at. Some of the leaves were starting to turn and they stood out in little yellow and orange specks in the green walls of trees around him. People didn't fish around here much in the winter. If he was lucky nobody would find him until spring. If he was real lucky nobody would ever find him at all.

He drove slowly, and he didn't meet anybody, but the hot light in the dash came on and flickered and then went back out. That bad head gasket. He didn't care. He'd leave the son of a bitch on the side of the road if he had to.

But it kept on going. Once in a while the hot light would flicker, and then go back off. He finished the first beer and opened the second one. It wasn't nearly as cold as the first one had been, and the third one would surely be worse. It didn't matter. He had some more at home. He lit one of his Swishers and drove to a place high in the hills and stopped the car to see if he could smell it yet. And there it was, unmistakable, just like it was every year, in this one spot, at this time of year: the almost overpowering scent of a vast field of marijuana somewhere out there in the wooded hills beyond the ditch. He figured they had it under a tent. He sat there and breathed it in. It smelled like some good shit. And he sure would have liked to have some of it. But not enough to walk out there in the woods trying to find where it was growing. Oh no. A man could get killed like that.

He turned in on a road where a crazy old white man lived in a trailer, somebody who walked up and down the roads all day picking up aluminum cans. But he didn't go down that far. On a flat piece of land at the top of a hill he left the road and bulldozed the Buick over young pines and oaks that snapped upright again behind him and he stopped the car at the edge of a draw that overlooked a couple of thousand acres of pines. He put it in Park and got out. Sage grass was turning brown around him and he took a piss beside the open door, listening to the motor running. He looked up and saw a couple of red-tailed hawks soaring. He took the last puff off the Swisher and then stomped it into the ground.

She'd get over it. Might take her a while. She'd just have to understand that Pappy knows best.

He finished the second beer and reached in for the third one and set
it in the sage grass behind his feet. He reached into the car and set one of the bricks on top of the gas pedal and the motor revved up. He set the second brick on top of the first one and the motor noise rose to a mild howl. He could tell that it was missing a little.

He'd always been quick and nimble in the same way that small fighters are always the fastest. He reached in for the gearshift and pulled it down into Drive and snatched his arm back. The Buick left with a lurch and careened down the hill, bouncing over fallen logs and smashing sweet gum saplings down, dust rising from the dusty ground. He saw the whole thing rise two feet into the air, and then it launched itself out into open space, and for one brief moment he saw the foam dice hanging from the rearview mirror swaying. Then the car went out of sight, and there was just the sound of the motor racing, until it landed down there somewhere with a thunderous crash, and a plume of dust rose up, and a lone tall pine shook so hard that some of its needles fell.

He turned around and picked up the beer. The hawks were still sailing like ships. He took off the gloves and stuck them into his back pocket, then cut a small tree and went back up to where the tire tracks were, and started brushing them out. He'd seen that in a movie one time.

He took his rifle from behind the door the next morning before daybreak, and shut Peter Rabbit up in the house again. He sprayed some Off! on his arms and face and slipped some cartridges from a box on his dresser into his pants pocket. He went out the back door and told the other dogs to go back when they tried to follow him. They returned to their beds under the house.

He knew the land so well he didn't have to see. The only thing he was worried about was maybe stepping on a snake in the darkness. They were still crawling in these last warm days. He made his way down the hill to the pasture fence where a couple of scrubby orange cows stood with Y-shaped yokes around their necks. The yokes were made from small trees he'd cut and they were the only way to keep them from jumping the fence. All their ribs were showing beneath their ragged hides. Riddled with worms. Not worth eating. Not worth anything. They were almost good enough to be the kind they made potted meat from.

He went around the fence down to the corner and slipped through
the wire and across the rocky pasture and out the other side. The timber out there was big and old, beeches, white oaks and red oaks, the scaly-barked hickories already standing among the hulled fragments of their nuts. He started to stop under one of them, but he knew an even better place and headed on to it. Dawn was almost ready to break, and in the distance he saw the paling light against the trees to the east. He loaded the gun and put the safety on. It was just a single shot, a gun from Sears, Roebuck & Company forty years ago. He'd paid twelve dollars for it new. He had a rubber baby nipple with an X cut into it in his pocket and he slipped the nipple over the muzzle of the rifle, just in front of the sight.

The creek had dropped to a trickle and he crossed it quietly, stepping softly on the shattered little stones. He eased up the hill and treaded on the soft moss that lined the banks like carpet, and he settled to rest against a giant beech that held holes in its massive trunk. Squirrel houses full of squirrels.

Already some of them were walking about on their limbs, shaking droplets of dew to the leaves around him. But it wasn't light enough to shoot. He held his head still and watched them jump and climb. He heard one on the ground. Then another. Others were barking in the distance.

He sat perfectly still and watched one come headfirst down a tree, its tail arched over its back. It barked at him, dim thing in the woods walking on two legs sitting so still now. He never moved.

The mosquitoes flew close to him but he didn't flinch. He hated their whining noise. Lying in the black bunks down on the prison farm he'd hated them then, too. Radios playing in the darkness. Men screaming for God knew why. Out there beyond the fields where thousands of acres of corn and peas and cotton were growing, the twelve-foot fences stood topped with razor wire, and he'd never thought of trying to run. He'd just decided not to get caught again. But it had taken him two trips down there to learn his lesson. Some things were like that. Some things you had to do twice to understand that they wouldn't work. He knew now what did: stay away from the white man unless he had something you needed.

They were starting to move everywhere now. The branches were moving
and the woods were filled with nests and they were barking at each other in the growing light. He slipped the safety off and raised the rifle a little in his arms, waiting for the shot he knew would eventually come. He only wanted one for now, mostly for the skin. But he'd eat it, too. He wouldn't waste it. He didn't waste much of anything.

He saw a couple of them walking a grapevine that ran up into an old post oak and he raised the rifle and sighted on them. But they were too far away. And moving too fast. He heard one up in the tree above him, and then he heard it jump, and by looking up without moving his head much he saw it run out on a limb and stop. It wasn't over twenty feet above him, and the light was still not good, but he raised the rifle and sighted along the barrel. He lined up the little notch in the rear with the thin brass-beaded post on the front and held it on the squirrel's head. It ran forward three feet and stopped. Then it jumped to the off side of the tree and ran up it. He saw its tail in a glimpse here and there. Then it was gone.

Off in the distance he could hear a car or truck coming down the road. He wanted a smoke but knew he had to wait. The light was getting stronger all the time and he wondered how long she'd stay gone. And where would she go? Far as he knew she didn't have any place to go. No place but back home.