A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  “We may have to sell your go-kart,” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  Sell it? What did he mean? Was he kidding? Surely he was kidding, wasn’t he?

  “Just temporarily,” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  “Temporarily?” Jimmy said. That sounded like bullshit.

  Jimmy’s daddy let out a sigh. He had a beer in his hand. He’d sneaked it out of the hidden cooler in the trunk just before they left Ripley and had poured it into a red plastic cup so that he could drink it going down the road, undetected. Actually he’d sneaked out three. The other two were lying wrapped in an Ole Miss Rebels towel between Jimmy and his daddy on the seat.

  “I need the money to fix my car,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “I wouldn’t do it at all if I didn’t have to.”

  Well, he’d already said that, so he was just repeating himself. It was like some kind of real bad dream coming true. Jimmy wanted to cry, but he didn’t. He was trying to be a big boy. That’s what his mama always told him to do, be a big boy about this or that. But it was going to be pretty hard to be a big boy about losing his go-kart. Especially now that it was running so good since Mister Cortez had fixed it. The chain hadn’t come off a single time since he’d fixed it. And Jimmy had been planning on taking the five dollars he’d gotten from Evelyn and buying some red spray paint to give it a new paint job and restore it to its former glory. Cover up all those rock pecks. What about his plans? What about going fishing in Mister Cortez’s pond on it and running up and down the road at night with his flashlight headlight? What did he mean sell it? Sell it to who?

  “Who you gonna sell it to?” Jimmy said, as if asking might somehow make it untrue. He felt like he had the right to ask that. At least that.

  “I know a guy at work who wants it,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “He made me an offer on it unseen. I told him how good it was running.”

  Jimmy nodded, even though he felt unspeakable bitterness. So his daddy had already been talking to somebody about it, without even asking Jimmy about it. That wasn’t fair worth a shit. It was his go-kart. His daddy had given it to him. Didn’t that make it his? And what had happened to his spear point anyway? Had his daddy sold it? To somebody at work?

  “I don’t want you to sell my go-kart, Daddy,” Jimmy said, surprising even himself. But this was life and death. “Please don’t sell my go-kart!”

  “You want me to walk to work?” Jimmy’s daddy said sharply. “The transmission is gonna fall out of the son of a bitch one morning on the way to work unless me and Rusty put another one in it.”

  Jimmy’s daddy looked like he was starting to get a little mad. Jimmy’s daddy lifted his cup and sipped from it. He licked beer from his upper lip and reached into his pocket for a smoke. He shook one from the pack and nabbed it with his lips, then restashed the pack and pushed the cigarette lighter in on the dash. He’d gotten it working. He held his finger on it until it popped out, then brought the glowing red coil to the tip of his smoke and lit it. He shoved the lighter back into the hole in the dash.

  “Like I said, it would just be temporary,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “I found that transmission I told you about and the guy wants three hundred dollars and if you try to order one out of AutoZone, I mean one like I need, a four-speed, it’s over five hundred bucks. Even with Rusty’s discount.”

  “I don’t want to sell my go-kart.”

  “Hell, you can’t drive it in the winter.”

  “Sometimes it’s warm enough to drive it in the winter. Like in February? Sometimes it’s warm then.”

  “Yeah, but most times it ain’t. I’ll buy you another one by next spring when it warms up. I promise.”

  “I don’t want another one, Daddy,” Jimmy said. “I want mine.”

  They rode for a while in silence. Jimmy knew this was a losing situation, because when it came down to it, his daddy could do whatever he wanted. But Jimmy had a burning question: why? He thought about asking him if he wanted his rod and reel, too. Nah. He’d get slapped for that. But he had to keep talking. He had to know something. There had to be some scrap of reason to hang to.

  “Is it cause of my teeth costing so much to get fixed?” Jimmy said.

  “No, it ain’t that.”

  “Is it cause of the high cost of living?”

  Jimmy’s daddy turned his head and looked at him.

  “Now what in the shit would you know about the high cost of living?”

  “I just know it’s high,” Jimmy said.

  “Well. It’s a lot of things,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “It’s insurance and groceries and the light bill and the gas bill and the phone bill and the goddamn water bill and the damn satellite dish bill and the trailer payment and the whole shitting shooting match. Drives me up the god-damn wall.”

  Jimmy’s daddy was getting a little worked up now and was sipping his beer hard and Jimmy didn’t say anything else. He hadn’t meant to get him stirred up and he didn’t want to get him stirred up but it wasn’t fair and he didn’t want to get rid of his go-kart and he wondered if his mama could do any good for him. Could he whine his side of it into her ear?

  “Have you and Mama talked about it?” Jimmy said.

  “I mentioned it to her.”

  “What’d she say?” Jimmy said.

  “She said she could borrow some more money from the bank and I told her we’d done borrowed enough from them already. Now they ain’t no need in us talking about it no more, you just gonna have to get used to the idea. And like I said, I’ll buy you another one in the spring.”

  It was over and lost and Jimmy felt the hot wetness of tears starting up anyway in the corners of his eyes, but he blinked them back. As bad as things had been sometimes, they’d never been this bad. The world hadn’t crumbled in this particular way until just now. He wasn’t going to cry, no matter how much he felt like crying. It was already a done deal. And he didn’t have any say.

  “Spring’ll be here fore you know it,” Jimmy’s daddy said.

  […]

  And as unbelievable as it was, the man came for the go-kart that afternoon, just before dark, which was coming pretty early now. Jimmy’s daddy made a phone call from the kitchen and Jimmy’s mama came into the living room and it was easy to tell that she’d been crying and she sat down beside Jimmy and put her arm around him and held him. She even said something to Jimmy’s daddy, in front of Jimmy. She said it wasn’t right and Jimmy’s daddy got mad and slammed the trailer door open and then slammed it shut and went outside and stayed out there until about twenty minutes later when they heard somebody pull up in front of the trailer. Jimmy got up to go to the window.

  “Don’t, Jimmy,” his mama said.

  “I want to see who it is,” Jimmy said. “I want to see who’s getting my go-kart.”

  “What good’s that gonna do, honey?” she said.

  Jimmy pushed the curtains aside and peeked out, and his daddy was standing there talking to some man in blue jeans and a jean jacket with shiny brown boots who was counting some money into Jimmy’s daddy’s hands. There was a shiny pickup parked behind the man, and he had backed it into their driveway. Jimmy watched his daddy put the money in his pocket and then both of them walked out of sight, and Jimmy could hear them going around the corner of the trailer where his gokart always stayed parked. Then he heard his go-kart crank up. Then it shot out in front of the trailer, with the man driving it. It went down the dirt road out of sight, and Jimmy knew the man was going to get mud all over him. He hoped he did. He hoped he ruined his clothes. Got his eye knocked out by a flying piece of gravel. Ran off the bridge, flipped, and broke his neck. Was run over by a car or truck. Was run over by a big green tractor.

  After a while it came back, and the man had some mud spattered on him, but he didn’t seem to be upset about it. He pulled the go-kart up close to his truck and then he shut it off. He got off the go-kart and was laughing and telling Jimmy’s daddy something. Jimmy pulled back from the curtain and let it fall back in front of the window. He didn’t want to
watch them load it up. He didn’t think he could take that.

  64

  Cortez paddled out in his boat one day and paddled around for a while. The sun was out and it was warm for February. There was even some green grass here and there in patches.

  The water was calm and dark and the winter rains had finally raised the pond to the level of the spillway, which proved to work just fine. Another good thing Newell knew how to build. Cortez wondered what he was doing these days. He wondered if he knew anybody who could build a boat dock. He’d decided already that he definitely needed one of those, because he’d envisioned himself sitting in a comfortable lawn chair and tossing the feed to the fish from some kind of platform that would get him closer to the fish. Shoot. Maybe later he’d get some bream. The fish man had said something about that. Jimmy might like to catch some of those. The only thing was that the fish man wouldn’t be coming back. But there were other fish men. The Co-op would have to find somebody else to sell fish from their parking lot.

  But he wasn’t fishing today. He was just paddling around on his pond on a warm February afternoon. He’d been working in his barn, with wood and saws and nails and a rasp and a block plane. Making something. He didn’t know how it would look. It was hard making the letters backward, and he wasn’t done yet. Maybe he never would be. Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do. But who was going to see it? Who would know anything if they did see it?

  He wondered how big the fish were now. Surely some of those eight-inch ones had grown big enough to eat. In about three more months he’d find out. He was hoping Jimmy would come up pretty often and fish. It would be kind of nice to have a kid to talk to sometimes. Kids were pretty easygoing. And they had big imaginations. And they didn’t need a whole lot to keep them happy. He remembered his. He remembered that time his wife had been hanging out clothes and had turned her back on Raif for just a few moments, long enough for him to crawl under the bottom board of the hog pen and into the pen with that big red sow and how he saw her going for him and got over the top board and in between them, just barely scooping him up in time before she got to him. Lord God. That still scared him to think about even though the boy was dead. Just what all can happen to you. To the ones close to you. Take that retard. Hell, he wasn’t so bad. He just didn’t like rabbits because they brought on those spells he had. When he wasn’t having a spell he was a right smart young fellow with a pretty good sense of humor. Lucinda was sure crazy about him. He wished she’d move back home. Or somewhere at least close to home. Hell, she could bring him with her. Young people these days didn’t think nothing about living together. Times changed and the way people acted changed with them. Look how much change you saw in a lifetime.

  The sun was warm on Cortez’s hands and on his neck. The paddle splashed gently in the water. He wished now that he’d brought his fishing rod, and had turned a few logs over and found some night crawlers. You could find them in this warm weather. Even if it was February. Cortez thought the weather in the world was changing. It didn’t seem to get as cold as it used to. He remembered how cold the winters were when he was a boy. Or maybe it was just because they lived in houses with cracks in the plank walls and didn’t have any insulation and nothing but an old woodstove to keep them warm.

  LARRY BROWN’S NOTES FOR THE FINAL CHAPTERS OF A Miracle of Catfish

  Feb. Cortez chapters, maybe a sex scene with Carol combined with him making a mold for a concrete stone that would say Queen

  March Trouble at the pond somehow

  April I’m Her Brother, You Redneck Mother

  May Seretha’s baby born and baptized in the Rock Hill M. B. Church

  June Jimmy and Cortez fishing on the river, find Montrel’s bones. At roadblock that evening, cops get Jimmy’s daddy. That needs to be the end of the action.

  And finish, somehow, epilogue with Tommy and Lucinda seven years down the road with little boy with Tourette’s cussing and spitting, silent man painting in backyard under shade of pecans, she’ll tell Tommy that her daddy passed away a few years ago. But do I have a scene where she finds the locket in the barn? I think I need that.

  We hope you enjoy this special preview of Larry Brown’s Joe, now a motion picture starring Nicholas Cage, available in print and e-book formats wherever books are sold.

  THE ROAD LAY LONG and black ahead of them and the heat was coming now through the thin soles of their shoes. There were young beans pushing up from the dry brown fields, tiny rows of green sprigs that stretched away in the distance. They trudged on beneath the burning sun, but anyone watching could have seen that they were almost beaten. They passed over a bridge spanning a creek that held no water as their feet sounded weak drumbeats, erratic and small in the silence that surrounded them. No cars passed these potential hitchhikers. The few rotting houses perched on the hillsides of snarled vegetation were broken-backed and listing, discarded dwellings where dwelled only field mice and owls. It was as if no one lived in this land or ever would again, but they could see a red tractor toiling in a field far off, silently, a small dust cloud following.

  The two girls and the woman had weakened in the heat. Sweat beaded the black down on their upper lips. They each carried paper sacks containing their possessions, all except the old man, who was known as Wade, and who carried nothing but the ragged red bandanna that he mopped against his neck and head to staunch the flow of sweat that had turned his light blue shirt a darker hue. Half of his right shoe sole was off, and it flopped and folded beneath his foot so that he managed a sliding, shuffling movement with that leg, picking it up high in a queer manner before the sole flopped again.

  The boy’s name was Gary. He was small but he carried the most. His arms were laden with shapeless clothes, rusted cooking utensils, mildewed quilts and blankets. He had to look over the top of them as he walked, just to be able to see where he was going.

  The old man faltered momentarily, did a drunken two-step, and collapsed slowly on the melted tar with a small grunt, easing down so as not to hurt himself. He lay with one forearm shielding his face from the eye of the sun. His family went on without him. He watched them growing smaller in the distance, advancing through the mirrored heat waves that shimmied in the road, unfocused wavering shapes with long legs and little heads.

  “Hold up,” he called. Silence answered. “Boy,” he said. No head turned to hear him. If his cries fell on their ears they seemed not to care. Their heads were bent with purpose and their steps grew softer as they went on down the road.

  He cursed them all viciously for a few moments and then he pushed himself up off the road and went after them, his shoe sole keeping a weird time. He hurried enough to catch up with them and they marched on through the stifling afternoon without speaking, as if they all knew where they were heading, as if there was no need for conversation. The road before them wound up into dark green hills. Maybe some hope of deep shade and cool water beckoned. They passed through a crossroads with fields and woods and cattle and a swamp, and they eyed the countryside with expressions bleak and harried. The sun had started its slow burning run down the sky.

  The old man could see beer cans lying in the ditches, where a thin green scum nourished the tan sagegrass that grew there. He was very thirsty, but there was no prospect of any kind of drink within sight. He who rarely drank water was almost ready to cry out for some now.

  He had his head down, plodding along like a mule in harness, and he walked very slowly into the back of his wife where she had stopped in the middle of the road.

  “Why, yonder’s some beer,” she said, pointing.

  He started to raise some curse against her without even looking, but then he looked. She was still pointing.

  “Where?” he said. His eyes moved wildly in his head.

  “Right yonder.”

  He looked where she was pointing and saw three or four bright red-and-white cans nestled among the grasses like Easter eggs. He stepped carefully down into the ditch, watchful for snakes. He stepped closer and s
topped.

  “Why, good God,” he said. He bent and picked up a full can of Budweiser that was slathered with mud and slightly dented, unopened and still drinkable. A little joyous smile briefly creased his face. He put the beer in a pocket of his overalls and turned slowly in the weeds. He picked up two more, both full, and stood there for a while, searching for more, but three were all this wonderful ditch would yield. He climbed back out and put one of the beers in another pocket.

  “Somebody done throwed this beer away,” he said, looking at it. His family watched him.

  “I guess you going to drink it,” the woman said.

  “Finders keepers. They ain’t a fuckin thing wrong with it.”

  “How come em to throw it away then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well,” she said. “Just don’t you give him none of it.”

  “I ain’t about to give him none of it.”

  The woman turned and started walking away. The boy waited. He stood mute and patient with his armload of things. His father opened the can and foam exploded from it. It ran down over the sides and over his hand and he sucked at the thick white suds with a delicate slobbering noise and trembling pursed lips. He tilted the can and poured the hot beer down his throat, leaning his head back with his eyes closed and one rough red hand hanging loose by his side. A lump of gristle in his neck pumped up and down until he trailed the can away from his mouth with his face still turned up, one drop of beer falling away from the can before it was flung, spinning, backward into the ditch. He started walking again.