A Miracle of Catfish (53 page)

“Well, what are you gonna do?” she said.

“Do?” he said. “What the hell you mean, do? What the hell
can
I do?”

This wasn't going at all the way he'd wanted it to. He thought maybe he'd better just get out of here. And then what? See her at work and try to talk there? In front of everybody? It wasn't going to be long before she'd start showing. And then everybody would know. He'd been hoping that maybe she'd quit before then.

“Are you gonna tell your wife about us?” she said.

And that just flat out stunned him. Was she fucking crazy? Tell his wife? Tell her what? That he was fixing to have a kid with another woman? Somebody he met at work?

“Well, are you?” she said.

“I don't much think that's the thing to do,” he said. “I'd have to get divorced if I did that.”

“Are you in love with her?” she said.

He didn't even have to think about that.

“No,” he said. “I ain't no more. I told you about us.”

“Yeah you did,” she said. “And I don't understand why you stay with her if you're so damn unhappy.”

“I told you that, too,” he said.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “You did. You don't want to leave cause of Jimmy.” She turned her back on him and looked inside the refrigerator, he guessed for something else to eat. He guessed she was getting cravings for food already. He wondered if she'd had any morning sickness. He remembered that Johnette had stayed sick as a dog with Jimmy. And not just in the mornings. Where had those years gone to?

She bent over and opened a bin and pulled out a hunk of cheese and closed the refrigerator door and then she went over to a drawer and got a knife. She found some crackers in a cabinet and brought everything over and set it on the table, then sat down again. She took the cheese from its wrapper and sliced off a small piece. She opened the crackers and put the cheese on one and stuck it into her mouth and chewed. Jimmy's daddy saw one cracker crumb fall from her mouth. Then she cut off another piece of cheese.

He sipped his drink. This shit was going from bad to worse. He put out his cigarette and scratched the side of his neck. He sat there, listening to her eat, watching her slice each piece of cheese, wondering if she was wanting to maybe stick that knife in him.

“Look,” he said. She looked up.

“Look what?” she said.

“I'm just trying to talk to you,” he said. “I can't talk to you at work.”

“Why can't you talk to me at work? You talk to ever body else at work. You talk to people all over the plant. I see you. But you can't stop by Porcelain and talk to me, can you?”

“You're always busy,” he said, feebly.

“That's horseshit,” she said. And it was. There were plenty of times
when she was just standing there waiting for her line to start up. Plenty of times when he'd walked by and known she was standing there looking at him walk by.

“Are you ashamed of me?” she said.

“Naw, I ain't ashamed of you,” he said, and took another sip from his drink. He wondered if she'd let him have another one.

“I think you are,” she said. “I know I'm fat. I know I ain't pretty. But I guess I'm good enough to fuck on the weekends, ain't I?”

Jimmy's daddy didn't answer. There was no need to.

“Ain't I?”

“I just don't want people talking about us,” he said.

She laughed and cut off one more enormous piece of cheese and ate it, then put the rest of it back in the wrapper, her cheeks stuffed, chewing.

“What you think's gonna happen in about two more months when my belly's stickin out further'n my tits? You think they ain't gonna talk then? Them tongues are gonna wag all over that plant.”

“You gonna keep working?” he said. He sipped at the drink again.

“I got to,” she said. She glanced up at the ceiling. “I'm helping my little brother through college and I got a house to pay for. I got to have a place to raise it. What? Did you think I was gonna quit?”

“Well, I didn't know,” Jimmy's daddy said. “I thought maybe so.”

She looked at him like he was the stupidest thing she'd ever seen.

“I got to pay my health insurance. Unless you're planning on paying for all the doctor visits and the hospital and everything yourself. Was you planning on that?”

She wasn't just mad now. Now she was getting mean. And that was making him kind of mad, but he didn't want to
get
mad. He didn't feel like he could afford to. He felt like he was going to have to sit here and take whatever she dished out. If he pissed her off she might call Johnette.

“I can't afford that,” he said. “I barely pay my bills as it is.”

“You drink plenty of beer, though,” she said.

“I got a right to drink a beer on the weekends,” he said.

She got up and went back to the refrigerator and pulled out a bag of white grapes and closed the refrigerator and sat down at the table with
the grapes and started pulling one at a time from the bunch and eating them.

“Yeah you do,” she said around some of the grapes. “You also got the responsibility of a child that'll be here fore next summer.”

She sat there eating the grapes and calmly chewing them. He didn't like the way she was fluctuating. He had never seen her fluctuate before. Maybe it had something to do with her being pregnant. Hell. Some guy at the plant had told him one time that when his wife got pregnant,
he
got the morning sickness.

“Are you gonna keep it?” he said. “Are you gonna raise it?”

And that was really the wrong thing to say. She did some thing with her mouth, and she kind of resembled a mad pig in the way she narrowed her eyes at him. She lowered her voice when she leaned toward him, chewing on a grape.

“Well, who in the hell you
think's
gonna raise it? Did you think I was gonna give it up for adoption or something? After I done carried it in me nine months and give it birth? You think I'm gonna give my baby to some stranger?”

“Well, I —,” Jimmy's daddy said.

And then he just shut up.

“Are you gonna help me with it?”

“Help you how?” Jimmy's daddy said. “You mean give you some money?”

And then she didn't look mad anymore. She looked like she pitied him. She shook her head just a little as she studied him. Like he was a piece of shit. He imagined she was thinking that:
You piece a shit
.

“Is that all it's about to you? About money?”

She was starting to cry again now and she was getting really mad, too, looked like he might not be having another drink here if things didn't improve quickly.

“I don't know what you want me to say,” he said.

“You don't give a shit about me or the baby neither one,” she said. “Do you?”

“I do care about you,” he said. Which he knew was a total lie. And she probably knew it, too. And he saw that he couldn't sit here anymore, like this, talking. Since she wasn't going to listen to reason.

“I think maybe I better go,” he said.

“I think that's a fucking good idea right about now,” she said. “Why don't you just get in your junky-ass fifty-five and get on back up to Lafayette County where you belong?”

So there wasn't anything for him to do but get up. He had to go back to her bedroom for his boots and socks and his other shirt and then he had to find his cap. She found it for him. He didn't even get to finish his drink since she was holding the front door open for him. Slammed it behind him. And he heard it lock. But he still had some beer in the car.

On the way home he drove under a moonlit sky that showed the cotton standing white and open in the rows, ready to be picked. The moon wore a glow around it and it had risen high in the sky. Jimmy's daddy was sipping a beer and he had his window rolled down, even though the night air was cool. It wasn't midnight yet, but it would be before long.

He saw some coon hunters loading their dogs at the edge of a corn-field where a picker had already swept the rows, nothing but broken stalks standing there now. He didn't want to go home. And he didn't care anything about riding around anymore tonight. All he wanted was for this mess to get straightened out somehow, but he didn't have a clue on how to do that.

He crossed Highway 7 without running through any roadblocks, something he feared greatly now. He had realized that you could run up on one of them without warning, and if you were drinking, you might be in trouble. And he couldn't afford any more of that. So he really didn't understand why he was driving down the road with a cold beer between his legs.

He turned off onto Old 7 and followed it up the hill and turned onto Fudgetown Road, and the transmission made a horrible sound when he tried to downshift from fourth to second. He had to keep the clutch in and let it roll a little, trying to mesh the gears, and he had to settle for dropping it into fourth after revving it up pretty high. It lugged and bucked, but it went on. He should have already had it fixed. But it was always the same damn thing: money. And this car was almost fifty years old. It was no wonder that nearly everything on it was worn out. He felt
sure that he'd be worn out by the time he got to fifty. If he made it to fifty. His mama didn't.

He passed some more fields and the moon showed houses sitting dark in their yards. There were cotton pickers parked at the edges of fields and a module builder sat in one. They didn't haul it out in trailers anymore. Now they had this new thing with a hydraulic ram that packed the raw cotton into a long tall box and then slid it out all compressed. Then they covered it with a tight-fitting tarp to keep the rain and dew off it until they could back a special truck up to it and slide the whole thing on for the trip to the gin. He thought that might be a good life, being a farmer. At least you'd be working for yourself, out in the fresh air. Instead of standing on concrete all your life and taking orders from some asshole like Collums. He'd thought about quitting. He'd thought about trying to find something else. But when you were stuck in the same place all day long from Monday until Friday, it made it hard to go out during business hours and look for a job. It was easier to just stay where you were.

He picked up the beer from between his legs and sipped on it. He lit a cigarette and coughed. He had plenty of gas. And tomorrow was Sunday. He guessed he could ride down Old Union Road before he went home. Have a few more beers. Maybe see if he could see a few wild hogs.

That sure was a nice rod and reel that old man had given Jimmy. Jimmy's daddy wished he had one that nice. He'd shown Jimmy how to use it, standing out in the gravel in front of the trailer. It threw that casting plug way out there. And Jimmy was getting pretty good with it now. He'd put an old tire out in front of the trailer and had been practicing throwing the casting plug at it, and most times he could drop it into the tire. He was learning how to feather his touch on the reel button, to slow down the plug while it was in flight. And all the good shit he had in that tackle box. That old man had fixed him up. Jimmy's daddy's tackle box didn't have nearly that much good shit in it. Most of it was a snarled mess of old fishing line wrapped around rusty lures and steak knives, and he didn't have a decent collection of corks or hooks, and he'd lost all his stringers. Seaborn was bad about making off with them whenever they caught some fish together. Never would give them back. Butthole.

He had to come to a complete stop at the end of Fudgetown Road, at
Old 6, and he pulled it down into first and looked both ways before he pulled out. He shifted it up into second and wound the hell out of it going toward the curve, and then dropped it down into fourth. It made another horrible grinding sound for a moment, and then it went on. Holy shit. He hoped this son of a bitch wasn't fixing to quit on him.

The New Albany cops had taken his old cooler and hadn't given it back to him, so he'd had to go out to Sky-Mart and buy one of those little cheapo foam models. It wasn't worth a shit. It would keep beer cold, but that was about it. You couldn't bang it around much or you'd knock a hole in the side of it. It was sitting in his front floorboard now on the passenger side, and he tossed out the one he'd just finished and fished another one from it. Most of his ice was melted, so that the beer was just sloshing around in cool water with a few chunks of ice floating in it. He'd have to go to the store and get some more ice tomorrow. Or either raid the ice maker in the trailer's refrigerator. And Johnette raised holy hell whenever he did that, whenever he took all the ice and left none for them. It was always something. Work your ass off and for what? Somebody just bitching at you.

He opened the fresh beer and cruised past Pumpkin Road. It was getting close to time to start going out in the woods and looking for deer sign. He thought he was going to hunt with Rusty and Seaborn over in Old Dallas this year. Rusty had joined a hunting club and he was allowed to bring guests on certain weekends. He said it was mostly cutover but that it still had some deer on it. Jimmy's daddy had thought of going up on the national forest and hunting there, but the only thing about it was that there were already so many people hunting on it. He'd hunted on it a few times and saw more people in orange than deer. Froze his ass off. Saw a glimpse of a deer one time, but couldn't tell what it was. He hoped this place Rusty had was better. […]

He went by a tin-roofed shop where some eighteen-wheelers and partially disassembled bulldozers were parked. A light on a pole shone over them. He went by more houses and trailers and yards. He passed a pasture full of cows, lying on their bellies. The sky was pale and faintly lit.

He sipped his beer and went on down the road toward Yocona. He met a car once but it wasn't a cop. Usually on Saturday nights the roads were full of kids running up and down the roads in big jacked-up pickups. He drove by another big cornfield where some trucks were parked.
He was going to have a child. It seemed scary and not wonderful. What was he supposed to do? Time would pass. One day it would be ten years old. And then twenty. What if it was a boy? That would be Jimmy's half brother. And would Jimmy ever get to know him? Or even know about him? Was he going to tell him some day?