Mississippi Cotton (19 page)

But today we would have fun, especially when you had somebody like Mr. Hightower who really knew how to fish. Besides the fishing, we were close to Greenville where the dead guy was found. It was kind of spooky thinking we might hook another body like Ben Samuels and BB had done.

Our school teacher, Miss Ashley, said the Mississippi River had one of the biggest river basins in the world. It was almost as big as the Amazon’s which was the biggest in the world and it was down in South America somewhere. But the Mississippi probably was the longest river in the world, depending on where it started. Nobody was sure of that. Except maybe it started in some lake in Minnesota. And no river in the world caused as many problems when it flooded. Engineers had been trying to control it since way back early in the nineteenth century, she had told us. Robert E. Lee was an Army engineer, and the army got him to try to control some part of it around St. Louis one time. And if the river could beat Robert E. Lee, there was no telling what it could do. It had some of the most dangerous whirlpools and currents that anyone had ever seen. It sure wasn’t some place to go swimming.

We pulled off the highway onto a gravel road that led to a levee. Once we were across the levee, we could see the big, wide, brown river. It always looked bigger than anything else in the world no matter how many times you saw it.

Mr. Hightower greeted his friend, Mr. Smith, and introduced us. I got in the boat with Mr. Hightower and Taylor, and Mr. Smith took Casey. Mr. Hightower told Mr. Smith he could use Casey for bait if what we were using didn’t work. Taylor and I laughed. Casey didn’t. He probably wasn’t sure if Mr. Hightower was kidding or not.

We started about a mile upriver from the bridge. The river looked a mile wide along this stretch. Like a big lake. I had never been on the river and had only crossed it in a car when we had gone to Vicksburg one time.

The time we were in New Orleans, I don’t remember seeing the river up close. Although the city was built up right alongside it and even called the Crescent City, because it was in a moon-shaped crescent of the river.

Our boats remained close to the bank. Once in a while you could see a swirl that looked like water going down the bathtub drain. The whirlpools and eddies looked as harmless as the ones in the bathtub; but below the surface of the river they were fierce, we were told. Occasionally a bit of garbage would float by, a piece of paper or an empty beer bottle bobbing up and down, its neck pointed toward the sky. It was the only way you could tell the river was moving except for the eddies, because it looked like a large, wide, brown roadway. I wondered how much there was on the bottom—how much stuff you couldn’t see. I kept thinking a leg or head would pop up.

We moved within what seemed like a football field distance of the bridge and turned the motors off. We left the anchors up and just floated for a few minutes. Dragon flies bobbed around us. Casey would swing his arm and yell “Git!” as if he were yelling at a yard dog.

Then Taylor got his strike, the first one of the afternoon. “I got something!” Taylor was reeling like a madman. Whatever he had hit, his strike was pulling the rod over in a big bowed arc, almost pulling the tip of the rod into the water.

“Just reel him in slowly, Taylor,” Mr. Hightower said. “Here, a little less drag.” He reached over and slipped the drag down on Taylor’s rod. Taylor and Casey and I were cane pole fishermen. Rods and reels were new to us. “You’ll get him. He’s a nice one, unless it’s a gar. Ya never know.”

Gars were weird fish and had all sorts of wild stories told about them, none of them good. They weren’t good pan fish. They looked like a barracuda. I had never caught one myself, but there were plenty of them around in lakes and bayous, and especially rivers.

I was fishing with my daddy one time when I was six or seven. He hooked an alligator gar, and just as he got it up to the side of the boat it jumped and landed in the boat. It clamped its teeth around daddy’s foot, and it was sure a good thing Daddy had some good boots on. He must’ve smashed that gar in the head with a paddle at least ten times before he killed it. Scavenger fish is what everybody called them. But they could be dangerous, too. There had been stories of them grabbing hold of swimmers and drawing blood.

Taylor was straining, his arms taut, his left hand gripping the rod and his right hand turning the reel, trying to reel more line in than the fish took out. I kept glancing at my own line. What if he pulled a body alongside the boat, a dead man, right next to me?

Then Mr. Smith called out, “Casey’s got one o’er here, a little one anyway.” At the same time Taylor pulled his to the surface right next to the boat. Mr. Hightower reached over, grabbed the huge fish in the mouth and pulled him into the boat. It was no gar; it was the biggest catfish I had ever seen.

“About twelve pounds, I’d guess,” Mr. Hightower said. “’Bout twenty inches long it looks like.”

Casey pulled his in very fast. “About two pounds!” Mr. Smith yelled across the water at us.

Taylor was about as excited as you could be. He acted as though he caught the biggest fish ever caught. I just hoped he didn’t turn the boat over. He pointed at the fish then himself. The fish was flopping around, and Taylor, flopping around more than the fish, was trying to step on it.

“Jake, can you believe the size of that thing. Must be fifty pounds.”

“I think Mr. Hightower just said, ‘about twelve pounds.’”

“Well, twelve or whatever. Still a big fish.”

Mr. Hightower hooked the fish onto the stringer, keeping him alive tied to the boat, swimming back and forth with nowhere to go.

It was about thirty minutes before I caught my first one. Taylor had already caught two more in just a couple of minutes. Neither was as big as the first, but they were a keepable size. He acted like Simon Peter, the Great Fisherman. He kept hollering to throw my line here or there, or fish deeper, or use a roach instead of the catfish blood and mush.

I thought about hitting him in the head with a paddle. He had caught more than me, and although Casey had caught three in the other boat, they were all about the same size as one another.

Once when Mr. Hightower wasn’t looking I gave Taylor the finger. I wasn’t that skilled at it, and it kind of hurt my fingers. I guess as you got older your finger muscles got more developed so you got where you could do it as good as Daddy and Farley. I still wasn’t sure what it meant, but since it had mortified my mother, I knew it wasn’t something I should let a grown-up see me do.

Mr. Hightower and Mr. Smith had caught one each, but they weren’t really fishing much. They were mostly helping us and telling us where to pitch our lines. All of us got backlash a bunch of times, not being used to reels, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Hightower had to untangle our lines. But they didn’t seem to mind.

Our boats were only a few feet apart. I could see Mr. Smith spit brown every now and then, though it blended when it hit the water. When Mr. Smith wasn’t watching, Casey put his hand over his mouth like he was gagging, when some brown slime ran down Mr. Smith’s lower lip.

We had drifted almost under the huge bridge that crossed into Arkansas. I wondered if we were near the spot where the body was found.

“Mr. Hightower, is this where they found that dead man? I heard it was under the bridge.” Taylor turned from his line.

“Well, I s’pose it is. If you believe what the newspaper says.”

“You mean it might not be the spot?” Taylor asked. He had taken his eye off his line.

“No. Oh, no. That’s jus’ an expression of mine. I guess it’s somewhere around here. But this is jus’ where they found him. No tellin’ where he went in. Could be miles from here, far’s I know.”

“Think we might find another one?” I asked.

“No. Now you boys don’t worry about that. To tell you the truth, I’d forgotten about it when I thought about us comin’ over here to fish. I don’t want y’all getting’ upset now.”

“Oh, we were jus’ wonderin’,” Taylor said. “Don’t get many murders around here. Jus’ seemed kind of spooky, him washin’ up in the river and all.”

“Well, one is enough, I can tell you,” Mr. Hightower said. “You boys just keep your minds on fishing.”

By four o’clock we had caught fifteen or sixteen catfish and one gar. Mr. Hightower had caught the gar, but he didn’t keep him. After fighting him for what seemed forever, he pulled him up to the side of the boat, cut the line just above the hook and let him go. He said they weren’t good to eat—tasted like cotton, he had heard. The biggest catfish we had was the first one Taylor caught, although there were a couple others that were pretty close. I had caught four catfish and probably five bream, each of the bream being pretty small and I threw them back. And Casey was about oh for a hundred hitting dragon flies. I don’t know for sure how many fish he caught.

Back upriver we pulled into shore, got out, and left the boats at the edge of the water. Mr. Smith and Mr. Hightower iced down the fish in big wash tubs. He said we could take the smaller ones home to eat if we wanted, but the big ones were too old and tough to eat. We just admired them for a moment then released them to swim away. We really didn’t care; the fun had mostly been being out on the river and just fishing.

We pulled the boats out of the water and helped Mr. Smith load them one on top of the other in his pickup. Then we tied them down.

“Let’s go into town and get something cold to drink,” Mr. Hightower said.

Mr. Hightower followed Mr. Smith’s pickup to a paved road that led to the highway to Greenville. Mr. Smith drove about two miles an hour. It took us about forever to get to the paved road. Taylor said it was because Mr. Smith couldn’t drive fast and spit at the same time or the tobacco juice would blow back into his truck.

Mr. Hightower pulled over at a Pure Oil filling station which had a big blue sign advertising ‘Be Sure with Pure.’ A couple of men came out. One asked Mr. Hightower how much gas he wanted, and the other started wiping the windshield.

Mr. Hightower came around to the bed of the truck. “Okay, you boys go get yourselves a cold drink. And one of you bring me a Dr. Pepper.”

He stayed to watch the man check the oil while we attacked the drink box. It was filled with ice and a bunch of cold drinks. I got an RC—a Royal Crown Cola, about the biggest size there was. We returned to the truck to help watch the dipstick get wiped. It was something they always did after looking at it. They’d wipe it off and stick it back in somewhere in the motor. The man slammed the hood, acknowledging everything under there was okay. Mr. Hightower turned his Dr. Pepper up and almost drained it in one gulp.

“Mr. Hightower, will you drive across the bridge?” Casey asked. “Just so we can see the river and go into Arkansas and look around for a few minutes? I don’t remember ever goin’ to Arkansas.”

Taylor whacked him on the shoulder. It was rude to ask for something you hadn’t been offered.

“It’s okay, Taylor.” Mr. Hightower smiled at Casey. “Oh, I think we got time. It won’t take long. Besides, anybody who wants to see Arkansas that bad oughta get to. But I can’t believe you’ve never been to Arkansas, Casey. A young opportunist like yourself—never been to The Land of Opportunity.” That was a state motto or something; it was on all the car tags.

The sun would still be up for over an hour. We would get a good view of the river and part of Arkansas. The bridge was over two hundred feet high and you could see the big brown, snake-like Mississippi River cutting through trees and cotton fields and pastures. It was kind of like the view at Rock City, but you knew what the states were here.

It was hard to believe something as big and wide as this river started out as just a little clear stream coming out of some lake up in Minnesota. It was a mile wide where we were crossing but only about ten feet wide and two feet deep up where it started. In some places it was a hundred feet deep. It would take a freight train more than a hundred miles long to hold all the dirt that the river carried to the Gulf of Mexico every day.

It only took a couple of minutes to cross the bridge. Looking out from the back of the truck was more fun than just looking out of a car window. Once we were in Arkansas, I looked at their cotton fields. They seemed to be lined up perfectly, and you could see the whiteness spreading out just like ours. But they didn’t seem like Mississippi cotton, maybe because I hadn’t worked in them.

There was no one working on Sunday. Nobody was out, stooped and bent; hoeing, sweating, earning a little bit of money. It made me feel good that nobody was out there working while I was having fun. The nearest town was Lake Village and that was too far to go. Mr. Hightower turned into a short gravel driveway. He stuck his head out of the window and yelled, “Okay, fellows, that enough for you?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

He spun in the gravel, turned around, and headed back across the river. We had just crossed the bridge again when he pulled over. A man walked away from the bridge. A woman was close, but as Mr. Hightower pulled up she moved away. As the man approached the truck, Mr. Hightower got out and walked toward him. “Looty. Heh, Looty. Wanna ride?”

“What’s he doing out here?” said Taylor.

“Beats me,” Casey said. “Remember he said he was coming to Greenville. Just the other day he said it.”

“Yeah, I remember that. But I wonder why he’s out here walking by the bridge.”

Looty had caught up to the truck. Mr. Hightower stood at the back. He glanced at the woman who was now in the distance. “She with you, Looty?”