A Miracle of Catfish (66 page)

Evelyn thought it over. Velma came down the hall carrying the dried sheets and Evelyn turned her head to speak to her.

“Did it come out?”

“Yeah,” Velma said, and carried the sheets into their bedroom. Evelyn got up and put her cigarette out and shuffled into the bedroom to help Velma make up the bed. Jimmy turned the volume back up on CMT. And there was Kenny Chesney, singing on a stage with Peyton Manning. Jimmy turned the volume up. Maybe they'd put Merle on next.

A First Monday weekend rolled around just before school started back, so Jimmy's daddy got him up early on Saturday again and they dressed while the girls and Jimmy's mama slept on. This time they went through Oxford and hit the Sonic for a steaming-hot pair of sausage-egg-cheese toasters and coffee and orange juice. A girl brought it to them on a tray and handed Jimmy's daddy his change, which he kept. It wasn't much. Thirteen cents. Jimmy's daddy dosed up his coffee while they were still sitting in the parking slot and unwrapped enough of his toaster to get his mouth around a mouthful of it, and with Jimmy eating his breakfast on his lap they went back down University Avenue through sparse traffic and hit the bypass just below Kroger's, headed north toward Highway 30. They turned off on it just south of the power company.

It was cold and it had been raining. Jimmy was ready to go back to school just because going back to school meant that some more time was passing and that in a few more months, the winter would be over and the spring would be coming. And when it got spring, he was going to start fishing in the pond again. He hadn't tried them in a long time now, especially since he'd heard his daddy say one day over the winter that catfish didn't bite too good in the winter. Jimmy still hadn't said a word to anybody about the big red fish truck, or the big something he'd hung in the pond, and now he was glad he'd kept quiet about all that. It was okay to have secrets. It was okay to know things that nobody much
else knew. And it was nice to be trusted with a secret. That's what Mister Cortez had done: he had entrusted Jimmy with a secret. And Jimmy had been worthy of that trust. He would be repaid endless times over for that trust when the wind turned warm and the green things began to grow. And the catfish began to bite. Oh the golden days he'd have, go-kart parked beside him in the shade, cool drink and rod and reel in hand. Nights of ripping up and down the gravel road, guided by the bright yellow beam of the flashlight headlight.

By the time they got to Ripley, a drizzling rain had set in. They could see the flea market grounds from the wet highway, and the parking lots were not full of cars. It looked like a good many of the vendor tents had already closed. But they could also see a few people out there walking around. Some in rain suits. Some with umbrellas. People loading soggy-looking couches onto trucks.

“Well, shit,” Jimmy's daddy said. “We already here. We might as well get out for a while.”

Jimmy's daddy turned into the parking lot and stopped at a red-painted plywood booth where a man with a blue parka sat sipping from a foam cup. A big sign said
PARKING
$2.

“Hey,” Jimmy's daddy said, hauling out his wallet.

“Hey,” the man said. “That's two dollars.”

“Yes sir,” Jimmy's daddy said, handing the money out the open window. They rolled on into the pea gravel parking lot. Some campers were set up and Jimmy could see people cooking under awnings where smoke rose from charcoal fires.

“I guess this is good as any,” Jimmy's daddy said. Jimmy had noticed that his daddy hadn't brought any beer with him inside the car. He didn't know what was in the trunk. But he hadn't opened any beer this morning. Jimmy guessed his daddy was worried about the cops over here now.

They got out and Jimmy zipped up his jacket. The cold wind hit his legs through his jeans and his daddy walked around in front of the car and motioned for Jimmy to follow him.

“Let's go down this way and see what we can see,” he said, and Jimmy followed him through the drizzle down a muddy lane between the tents. There was mud everywhere and there were puddles you had to step
around. Jimmy couldn't smell any food cooking. The whole thing looked like it was about to shut down. He saw some bundled-up older women sitting in steel chairs in an open tent, and they were holding umbrellas over their heads. It looked like they were selling vases. Jimmy knew he didn't want any vases, even though the women looked hopefully at them as they walked past.

Jimmy's daddy stopped at a booth that was still open. There were five or six tables with gray wool blankets spread over them and the tables held piece-of-shit knives and military insignia and fake plastic guns and white ceramic pigs with baby pacifiers in their mouths. Jimmy didn't see anything he wanted. He hadn't gotten a whole lot of good stuff for Christmas, just a few lures to go with his rod and reel and a remote-controlled battery-operated car that Velma had already broken and a bow and arrow set like maybe a first-grader would want and a train set and a pair of socks and some clothes and a pair of gloves and some cowboy boots. And he'd already given up on ever seeing Tupelo Buffalo Park. Or Kenny in concert.

[…]

There was an intersection where a closed hamburger stand was sitting and they walked past it and looked down the lane. Most of the tents down there were closing. Somebody had backed a trailer up to one of the tents and people were loading it with bolts of cloth and guns.

“Well shit,” Jimmy's daddy said. “Let's go this way.”

[…]

On down the lane there was a cattle trailer backed into the lane where another old man was sitting inside it with some crates full of chickens and guineas. He was smoking a homemade cigarette and he nodded to Jimmy and his daddy as they passed. Jimmy thought his face looked like it was made out of leather, so brown and wrinkled it was. He'd wondered a few times what his daddy's daddy had done for Christmas, but there hadn't been any mention of him around the trailer, and Jimmy hadn't asked. Evelyn had talked to her daddy on the telephone after he'd called her from prison, and Velma had cried when her daddy hadn't called her at all. Jimmy had seen their mama rocking her and holding her and cussing Velma's daddy. It seemed strange to Jimmy sometimes that his mama had been married to people he didn't even know.

[…] They walked on down to the end of the lane and stood there
looking suddenly at the ponies. They were standing in the rain and they were wearing saddles and bridles and their tails were wet and drooping. There were four of them, small, some brown, some black-and-white spotted, and their bridles were chained to some kind of a circular rusty metal apparatus with arms that could revolve.

“Hey, you want to ride a pony?” Jimmy's daddy said.

Jimmy never had ridden a pony so he looked at the ponies. They were standing with their heads down, or as low as they could put their heads, since the chains were pretty short.

“I bet them saddles are wet,” Jimmy said.

“I got a towel,” said a man in a poncho who'd been sitting in a lawn chair on the other side of the ponies, a man who got up and went to his pickup nearby and opened the door and pulled a towel out.

“How much is a ride?” Jimmy's daddy said.

The man took the towel over to one of the ponies and started wiping down the saddle. He looked up at them, smiling through gapped yellow teeth.

“Two dollars for two minutes,” he said. “But I'll let you go longer than that. You can ride five minutes if you want to. We ain't just real busy today.”

He finished wiping the saddle dry and Jimmy's daddy pulled two dollars from his billfold and handed it to the man, who folded it and stuck it in his pocket.

“Hop up,” he said. He motioned to the stirrup.

Jimmy walked over to the pony and stood there looking at it.

The pony didn't turn his head to look at him. He couldn't.

“Hop up, Hot Rod,” Jimmy's daddy said. He was grinning.

Jimmy didn't much want to, but he did anyway. He put his foot in the stirrup and pulled himself up with that thing sticking out on the top front of the saddle and swung his leg over and sat there. The saddle creaked under him. He picked up the reins even though he could see there was no need to. The man had moved back to the rear of the thing the ponies were hooked to and he had his hand near a switch.

“You ready?” he said, and Jimmy nodded. The man hit the switch and the thing the ponies were hooked to started turning very slowly. The pony Jimmy was riding started walking very slowly, just like the other three ponies that didn't have riders. The circle they made was about
eight feet in diameter. They walked within that circle and the machine hummed and the ponies' hooves sucked loudly in the mud as they walked. Jimmy just sat there. His daddy started talking to the man. Jimmy didn't listen. He was wishing he could buy one of the ponies. If he had one of the ponies, he could ask Mister Cortez if he could keep it at his place since it looked like he had plenty of hay down there. The pony went round and round. Jimmy went round and round. Very slowly. Jimmy reached out and patted the pony on the neck, but the pony shook his head as if Jimmy's touch was irritating to him, so Jimmy didn't do it again even though he wanted to.

What if the puppies came without warning? What if he had puppies in his pants? What if he was on the school bus? Or right in the middle of the cafeteria in front of all the other kids? What would he do then? They might have to call the school nurse. Or he might have to go to the hospital. There were all kinds of possibilities. Look what happened to Evelyn. She evidently just started bleeding. And he knew that women bled sometimes, but he didn't know why. He'd seen bloody things in the bathroom garbage at the trailer and he'd picked up tidbits of things here and there, but so far he hadn't been able to put the whole thing together. He could have asked Herschel Horowitz to give him the lowdown on everything, but he didn't want to look dumb. He figured he'd find out everything he needed to know one of these days, just by listening, but it seemed to be taking a long time. Just like this puppy thing. And you couldn't ask grown-ups about it because something might happen and it might backfire and get you in trouble somehow.

The pony kept walking in a circle and between his knees Jimmy could feel the little animal shivering. He could feel himself shivering in his wet clothes. And if you were a pony you couldn't take a towel and dry off. He wondered if the man would take a towel and dry the ponies off before he loaded them back into the rusty horse trailer sitting there hooked to the man's pickup. The man and Jimmy's daddy were still talking and the pony kept walking. […] On and on. Shivering. It went on for so long that it was all Jimmy could do to keep from asking somebody to please make it stop.

But that wasn't the worst. On the way home, through rain that was pouring now, Jimmy's daddy turned down the solid country gold on the radio and told Jimmy that he had to talk to him. He told him he had some bad news for him, and tried to beef him up for it at first, telling him it was something he didn't want to have to do and wouldn't do at all no way shape or fashion unless he just absolutely had to, but he felt like he absolutely had to. And instead of beefing Jimmy up, it probably scared him worse than it would have if his daddy hadn't tried to beef him up. What Jimmy figured was that somehow his daddy had found out about Herbert coming over and knew about the blood on Evelyn's bedsheets, and also knew that Jimmy'd been keeping his mouth shut about it for twenty dollars he hadn't even gotten yet, and was maybe going to whip him. Jimmy's daddy hadn't whipped Jimmy since the time he
really
whipped him over the getting-into-his-tools fiasco, and a big reason for that was because Jimmy had been taking pains ever since then to not do
anything
that would make his daddy want to whip him. It was part of the not-asking-a-whole-bunch-of-questions thing. He had that down to perfection almost. He'd gotten to where about 80 percent of the time he could accurately judge his daddy's moods. Or maybe he'd just learned the
times
not to ask him some questions. You absolutely did not want to
ever
ask him a question if he was working on the '55. That might get you screamed at, unless he was whistling. If he was whistling, all bets were off. It was safe to ask him a question then no matter what he was doing unless he was sitting on the commode and you were trying to ask him questions through the door. He didn't go for questions then. He was usually reading if he was sitting on the commode and he kept a fairly current selection of hunting and fishing magazines like
Outdoor Life
and
Field & Stream
in there in a wicker basket just for that purpose. And it was useless to ask him a question if he was reading. If he was reading, he wouldn't get mad or anything, he just wouldn't answer you. You didn't want to ask him questions in the morning because he was getting ready to go to work and he might be in a bad mood since he was frequently in a bad mood before he went to work. If he came in in the afternoon with a beer in his hand, and plopped down beside you on the couch, it was probably safe to ask him a question. He was always in a better mood when he was off from work than he was when he was
going
to work. Weekends were sometimes good times to ask him questions. If he was sharpening his hunting knife in the kitchen, it was okay to ask him questions. You could ask him questions for hours if he was sharpening his hunting knife. Usually, if he was watching TV, it was okay to ask him a question. There were other variables, like weather and temperature and whether or not his daddy had been fussing with his mama, and Jimmy had learned how to operate pretty safely around his daddy, but he didn't know what was coming now. Maybe it was something about the little dogs. They'd all left and they never had come back, just like it had been when they first arrived, which had been about seven or eight months ago. They had come up in a herd out of the woods behind the trailer and Jimmy's mama and the girls thought they were so cute that they'd decided to keep them all, since they were so small, and they had talked Jimmy's daddy into building a dog house that he shoved up under the trailer. But now they were all gone again and nobody knew where. Or maybe he'd found out somehow that it was Herbert who had put the mud on the carpet and was going to question Jimmy about what he knew. If that was what it was, Jimmy was going to tell the truth. After all, he still didn't have the twenty dollars. How did he know that Herbert could even come up with twenty dollars?