A Miracle of Catfish (59 page)

So Jimmy took some extra clothes to school with him that Friday morning in a backpack he borrowed from Velma. His mama gave him two dollars in case he needed any money. His daddy didn't seem to be interested in hearing about all the interesting arrowheads Herschel probably had. His daddy hadn't been in very many good moods lately and he'd snapped at Jimmy a few times, once for leaving his tennis shoes in the floor by the couch, and once for leaving a kitchen cabinet door just slightly open.

Jimmy tried to leave all that behind him, riding the kind-of-bumpy school bus home through the fall sunshine with Herschel that afternoon. Herschel lived out by Harmontown, on the other side of Sardis Lake, which meant the school bus route took an hour and fifteen minutes every morning and every afternoon. But Jimmy didn't mind the ride since he got to see some new things. He got to look at the big muddy Tallahatchie River and the two trestle bridges that spanned it, one for trucks and cars, one for trains, and he got to look at the turnoff to Abbeville, and he got to look at Starnes Catfish Place. There was a sign with a large catfish out front. The catfish had a chef's hat on his head. The school bus kept rolling. The driver had the wheel in both hands and he was singing “Queen of My Double Wide Trailer,” doing a pretty good rendition of Sammy Kershaw for a bus driver without a band.

“Is that a good place to eat?” Jimmy asked Herschel, sitting next to him on the bus seat. Jimmy had the window. There weren't a whole lot of kids on this bus, just the ones who lived in Harmontown, about eight of them.

“Oh yeah,” Herschel said. “They got that all-you-can-eat catfish buffet in there. They got alligator and everything else in there.”

“I got a good catfish pond I can fish in,” Jimmy said.

“Oh yeah?” Herschel said. “Can you take me sometime?”

“I don't know,” Jimmy said. “It ain't mine.”

“Whose is it?”

“This old guy lives up the road.”

Jimmy hadn't told his daddy about the big fish he'd hooked in Mister Cortez's pond. It hadn't been easy keeping it to himself, and he'd thought about telling his mama, but he hadn't told her either, once he'd figured that she probably wouldn't be as interested in hearing about a big fish as his daddy, and he couldn't tell his daddy because he figured his daddy would try to sneak in up there, and he didn't know, maybe Mister Cortez would catch him or something, something might happen, he didn't know what, but he figured it was just better to leave his daddy out of it. What his daddy didn't know wasn't going to hurt him. But the main thing was that Mister Cortez had asked him not to tell anybody. So far he hadn't.

“How big's the biggest fish you ever caught?” Herschel said.

“Aw. I don't know. Not too big,” Jimmy said, thinking of the little eight-inch catfish he'd caught. Just babies, really. He wondered if Herschel knew how to set a drag.

“I caught a nine-pound striper out of the spillway last summer,” Herschel said. “What kind of rod and reel you got?”

“I got a Shakespeare rod and a Abu Garcia reel.”

“Naw you don't,” Herschel said.

“Yes I do,” Jimmy said.

“You sure it's a Abu Garcia?” Herschel said.

“I know it is,” Jimmy said. “It's got Abu Garcia wrote on it.”

“Dang,” Herschel said. He was obviously impressed.

“What kinda rod and reel you got?” Jimmy said.

“I got a Zebco thirty-three and my daddy give me his old Eagle Claw rod,” Herschel said. “It's a good rig.”

“That
is
a good rig,” Jimmy said, feeling good about being able to be so magnanimous to Herschel about his inferior tackle.

The school bus turned off the main highway and went up a blacktop road for a while and then stopped and let off the first kid. It pulled into a driveway and turned around and then it went back down the blacktop road and turned off onto a dirt road.

“This is where I live,” Herschel said.

Jimmy nodded. It was the first time he had ever spent the night away from home. Herschel had told him that his daddy had a whole bunch of old
Playboy
magazines stashed in his closet and that they were going to sneak a few of them out of there and take them out to the tent and look at them after they got finished with their hot dogs because one of them had Anna Nicole Smith in it and she was butt naked and they could beat off. Jimmy didn't know what beating off was, but he said okay anyway. Herschel's daddy was supposed to come out and tell them some ghost stories around the campfire. Jimmy was really looking forward to everything. Things were always so bad around the trailer that he didn't much like staying there most of the time, and he'd been using that as an excuse to get out on the go-kart with his flashlight headlight after dark, in the little bit of time he had when he wasn't doing homework. Which wasn't much.

The road turned to hard-packed sand and it led between walls of pines planted closely together. A sign on a tree said
TREE FARM
.

“My granddaddy planted all these pine trees for me,” Herschel said.

“He did?” Jimmy said.

“Yep. They're for my college education. He planted them eight years ago and in ten more years they'll be ready to cut for pulpwood. You know how much an acre of pine trees is worth?”

“Naw,” Jimmy said. “How much?”

“About six hundred thousand dollars,” Herschel said. “Enough for me to get me a car and go to Duke.”

“What's Duke?” Jimmy said.

“It's up in North Carolina,” Herschel said. “That's where the Blue Devils are.”

The bus pulled to a stop in a clearing in the middle of the trees and the doors opened. Jimmy saw a wood-sided house set back from the driveway,
and he got up with his books and his backpack when Herschel did and went down the aisle and stepped down the steps behind Herschel and they got off and the doors closed. The driver waved and the bus pulled off, back down the driveway.

“Come on in,” Herschel said. “We'll get us something to eat.”

Herschel's house was really nice. It had green shingles and brown wood on the walls and there was a rock chimney coming out the roof. The front porch was made of broken tile laid in mortar and there were big posts that looked like trees holding up the porch roof. A huge pair of deer horns were hanging on the front wall and there were rockers out there. Jimmy followed Herschel inside and there were paintings of ducks on the walls. Some stuffed flying turkeys were on shelves and there was a stone fireplace and leather couches and rugs. It was the nicest house Jimmy had ever been in and he wondered what Herschel's daddy did for a living. Maybe he was some kind of a rocket scientist or something.

“Come on and you can put your stuff in my room,” Herschel said, so Jimmy followed him down the hall. It was unbelievable how big Herschel's room was and how much stuff he had in there. He had a personal computer and a stereo and a big-screen TV and a DVD player and a ham radio and an ant farm and racks of CDs and posters of KISS and
The Dukes of Hazzard
on the walls. He also had a gun rack with several guns, and a fishing rod rack with several fishing rods. Jimmy checked out the Zebco 33 with the Eagle Claw rod. Herschel had a Heddon's Tiny Lucky 13 hung on the end of it.

“You sure got a lot of neat stuff,” Jimmy said. Herschel's room made his look pitiful. He saw right away that he was going to have to get some more stuff for his room, because he was hoping that maybe Herschel could come home and spend the night with him sometime. Ride the go-kart. Take him up there and show him the pond.

Herschel sat down on his bed and started taking off his school shoes. He pulled some tennis shoes from under his bed and started putting them on.

“Yeah,” he said. “That's cause I'm a only child. I can get about anything I want.”

“You can?” Jimmy said.

“Just about,” Herschel said. “They won't let me have a high-powered
rifle yet. I have to wait till I'm twelve. And they won't let me have a four-wheeler because this kid we knew got killed on one last year. Just put your stuff on the desk if you want to.”

Then Herschel took Jimmy back to the kitchen, which had two stoves and several tall stools arranged around a counter. There were shiny copper pots hanging from a thing in the ceiling. Herschel swung the refrigerator door open and asked Jimmy what he wanted to eat. Jimmy took a look in there and saw that it was loaded with food. Good food. Sliced turkey and sliced ham and sliced roast beef and salami and bologna and Jell-O pudding in little plastic packs and fruit cocktail and french onion dip and Cokes and Sprite and orange juice and milk and corn dogs and hot dogs and cold dill pickles, and then Herschel opened the freezer section of the refrigerator and told Jimmy to look in there and he saw that it was loaded with ham and cheese Hot Pockets and half gallons of ice cream and Eskimo Pies and Fudge Bars and Nutty Buddies.

“Can I have a Nutty Buddy?” Jimmy said.

Herschel got one and handed it to him.

“You can have anything you want,” Herschel said. “You're my guest. How about a sandwich, too?”

“Sure,” Jimmy said, and started unwrapping the Nutty Buddy. He pulled back one of the tall stools and sat on it and started contentedly nibbling the cold hard chocolate and chopped nuts off the top of the Nutty Buddy while Herschel hauled out stuff from the refrigerator and got down some plates and a bag of fresh hoagie buns and started making them some sandwiches with salami and bologna and cheese and mayonnaise and sliced tomatoes and lettuce and sliced banana peppers. He put salt and pepper on them and he opened a big bag of Lay's potato chips and then got the french onion dip and a spoon and put a big dollop of dip on each plate.

“What you want to drink?” Herschel said.

“Milk,” Jimmy said, and Herschel poured him a tall glass and got himself a cold Sprite in a green bottle. […]

“Let's go out and eat on the patio,” Herschel said. He went over and opened the door and they carried their plates and drinks outside to the patio, where there was an oval-shaped pool and a table with an umbrella
over it. A dog barked and Jimmy looked out there and saw a German shepherd on a long chain. The dog was sitting on his hindquarters with his tongue hanging out. He'd killed most of the grass around him with the chain.

“Is that your dog?” Jimmy said. He set his milk and his plate on the table and pulled back a chair. The woods were thick behind the house.

“Yeah, that's Rex,” Herschel said, and sat down beside Jimmy. They sat there eating and Jimmy wished he could eat like this all the time. Herschel really knew how to make a sandwich. It was so big that it was hard to get it in your mouth, but
boy
, it was good, all cold and wet and spicy.

“I'll show you all my arrowheads after we get through eating,” Herschel said, after they'd eaten for a while. “Did you ever get your spear point back?”

“Naw,” Jimmy said. “I think maybe my daddy lost it.”

“That's too bad,” Herschel said. “A good spear point is hard to find.” Jimmy nodded and kept chewing. He was looking at the German shepherd, who had unsheathed an inch or two of his penis and was watching Jimmy with his head at a slight angle.

“How come you got him on a chain?” Jimmy said.

“He killed some chickens that belonged to one of our neighbors,” Herschel said. “And he got some other dog pregnant.”

“Oh,” Jimmy said. Herschel had put so many potato chips on Jimmy's plate that Jimmy didn't know if he could eat them all.

“We can have some cookies after this if you want some,” Herschel said.

“I'm pretty full,” Jimmy said.

When they got through eating, they carried their plates back inside and left them in the sink after Herschel ran some water over them. Then he took Jimmy into the living room and showed him all the arrowheads his daddy had put in glass display cases. He had hundreds of them and they were arranged in circles with the tips pointing outward. […]

When they got through looking at the arrowheads, they went out into the carport and Herschel picked up the duffel bag that held the tent and all the stakes and the poles. He got a hammer from the utility room and they took the tent out into the backyard and started setting it up.
Jimmy didn't know anything about setting up a tent, but Herschel knew it all. He showed Jimmy how to lay the floor of the tent out flat and then drive the stakes into the corner loops and the side loops. Then he put together the aluminum poles and ran them through the loops on the walls and top of the tent, and together they raised it. It didn't take over ten minutes.

“Dang, that's neat,” Jimmy said, once the tent was standing.

“Come on in,” Herschel said, and unzipped the door. “We need to sweep it out before we get our blankets and stuff in there.”

The tent smelled like pine needles on the inside. Herschel had already raised the side flaps that covered the screens, so Jimmy could see outside once he got in. The dog was looking at him and wagging his tail.

“I got some air mattresses we'll inflate after a while,” Herschel said. “And we got to get some wood up for the fire.”

“Where we gonna get that?” Jimmy said.

“We'll go down in the woods behind the house,” Herschel said. “There's plenty of wood down there.”

“This is really cool,” Jimmy said. He wondered how much a tent cost. If he had a tent, he could camp out in his own backyard. If he'd had a backyard. It might not be too comfortable setting a tent up on gravel. But then, if you had an air mattress, it would probably be all right.

They went down into the woods and picked up some wood and made three trips altogether, their arms piled high with broken branches and pine knots. Herschel had some rocks at the side of the house and he made a fire ring in the yard with them, not too close to the tent. Then they piled the wood up in the middle of the fire ring and saved some for later. Herschel's mama had already put some coat hangers on a little table for them and Herschel got a pair of pliers from a kitchen drawer and they straightened out four of the coat hangers, two extra just in case Herschel's mama and daddy wanted some hot dogs. By then it was almost dark, but it looked like everything was ready. Jimmy had already seen the hot dogs sitting in the refrigerator, and he'd noticed a pack of fresh buns on the counter.