A Miracle of Catfish (11 page)

His wife wanted the air conditioner on all the time now. She wouldn't sit out on the porch and try to catch the breeze. There wasn't a TV out here. She wasn't going to sit somewhere there wasn't a TV. Hell no. Shit no. She might miss some jackoff selling make-your-peter-hard or make-your-peter-longer medicine. He didn't know if she even knew what she was watching or not. She'd watch just about anything. She watched
Bonanza
religiously, every morning Monday through Friday. She watched
The Andy Griffith Show
and
I Dream of Jeannie.
She never missed a single episode of
Leave It to Beaver
, and she always was up for watching
Forensic Files
as well as Lifetime's movies for women. She was a big fan of
The Big Valley.

Most days the flies were pretty bad on the front porch. He kept a flyswatter on the front porch and sometimes went into fits of flyswatting that went on for ten or fifteen minutes, and he'd keep count of how many he killed on the porch posts and the rocking metal chairs they'd had for so long, 27, 35, 52. And it didn't seem to matter how many he killed one day, because there'd always be more back the next day. Even if he killed 100. Or 150. The most he'd ever killed at one session was 236 but that had taken a long time. About two hours. Missed no telling how many. Got the posts all bloody with mashed fly guts because some of them had probably been biting his cows. Damn TV blaring in there ninety to nothing. Made him want to shoot the son of a bitch sometimes. Shoot her, too. Just go ahead and kill her. Put her out of her damn misery. For damn sure put him out of his. She was going to die anyway. One of these
days. She needed a hearing aid, too. Had done about drove them both deaf with the damn TV.

It was hard not to go over and look at the pond, but on the other hand he knew that nothing had changed and that there wasn't any need of going over there and looking at it. But sometimes he went anyway because he liked to stand there in the bottom of it and look at the high walls of dirt around him, still bearing lots of dozer tracks, and visualize what it was going to look like when it got filled up with all that water. Maybe ducks would come in. He'd be fishing. He could get a boat and paddle around. A boat dock to tie the boat to maybe. He wondered how muddy it would be when it first filled up. Probably pretty muddy. It probably took a while for all those dirt particles to settle down. He just wished it would rain. Hell, it had to rain sometime. It couldn't just keep on going like this. This wasn't the Sahara Desert.

[…]

He couldn't get any fish until the pond filled up. He couldn't feed any fish until he got some fish. It was taking too long and it was getting worse than waiting for Christmas when you were a kid. Not that he ever got much for Christmas when he was a kid. An orange, if he was lucky. Maybe a sucker. Times were hard back then. Back in the thirties. He never would have thought he'd have made it this far. He'd figured something would get him before now, a bull, somebody's husband. But nothing had, and he was still going. He didn't know how much longer his wife could keep going. He wouldn't be surprised if he woke up one morning and found her cold beside him. He'd been looking for that, in fact. Another stroke could take her out. He'd seen it. Damn pills didn't do no good if you didn't take them. And she said she didn't care if she lived or died anyway. She'd been that way ever since Raif died. He didn't feel that way. He never had felt that way. No matter how bad he'd felt in other ways. He wanted to keep on going and everybody else could do whatever they wanted to, long as they just left him the hell alone.

He'd been looking around for fresh sign of the trailer kid in the bottom of the pond, in the undisturbed dirt, but there was nothing new, just the old circle of tracks he'd found just before he'd seen the kid. He didn't really feel bad about yelling at the kid to get the hell off his place, but in another way he kind of wished he hadn't done it. Hell, he was just
a kid. He remembered how he was when he was a kid. Into everything. Mean as a yard dog. But it wasn't any wonder, the way he was raised. It was hard coming up back then. They didn't have any of this shit they had now. All this crap on the damn TV. They didn't have time to watch TV. They didn't have no damn TV. And besides that they had to work. You couldn't just sit around on your ass all day and half the night and watch a bunch of jerkoffs in a box. You had to have some food and you had to raise it. Pigs and goats and cows and chickens and peas and corn and beets and sweet potatoes and tomatoes and beans and okra and squash and watermelons and peppers and you had to milk a cow, too, had to churn your butter, kill your hog on a cold morning, scald him in a barrel of hot water, scrape all the hair off with a dull knife, cut him up and cook out the fat, cure the hams and bacon in the smokehouse. Keep your milk cold in the springhouse. These kids now didn't know shit. What they did know they got off the damn TV. Looked like all they cared about was getting almost naked and shaking their ass.

He sat around on the front porch and swatted flies, and picked his tomatoes, and cut his okra every few days, and picked some squash, didn't really need any more, just had it for the hell of it, was really in a routine of growing it whether they needed it not, and they didn't, because she couldn't cook and he wasn't that crazy about squash anyway unless it was fried and he didn't know how to do that. He wound up just throwing it over the fence, then cutting down the rest of the plants. They were drying up from lack of rain anyway.

And then one evening, when he was out in the barn, looking at some old issues of a magazine called
Hustler
that he'd found down the road in a Dumpster, staying away from his wife, he heard it thunder, far off. He went outside and looked south, and dark rain clouds were grouped down there. It had been sunny all day but now within the last thirty minutes while he'd been looking at pictures of naked women simulating sex acts with vegetables, this bad weather had come up good.

He stood there and felt the wind stirring in his thick hair. The leaves on the big pecans were starting to waft up and show their paler undersides, and he saw a bolt of pure white light up the inside of a gray cloud far off. Deep thunder rolled booming out of the sky echoing again and again and the wind picked up as the ceiling blackened and moved his
way. Birds fled before it, scattering in the wind, wavering, dodging in its path. The sky rumbled and Cortez saw the beauty of the world God made.

He looked toward the house. She was scared to death of a storm. Always had been, ever since she was fourteen and a tornado blew her whole house away with two of her sisters in it. They found both of them down in the river bottom, one of them with all her clothes torn off, sitting as if she were only asleep against a giant cypress. The other one was up in the tree, green leaves and splinters of blue painted wood caught all in her golden hair like a garland. And because of all that his wife never got over being scared of a storm. All the time when Raif was growing up, whenever the least little cloud came up, he had to stop what he was doing and go get in the storm house with them. And sit there. Among the canned beets and candles and oil lamps. Old lumpy magazines. Sit there while it rained and listen to the wind blow and the rain hit things. Listen to that sizzling sound when it came down hard, without stopping, straight down, pouring, raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock. He'd gotten plenty from Queen on days like that, in the rain, not out in it but inside the old house that smelled like her. She smelled like dirt, like the ground, but not in a bad way. A good way. No need thinking about that now either. He'd almost lost his head that time. And no telling what would have happened if he had. The world had certainly changed. You couldn't do stuff like that anymore. Just bury somebody out in the woods. You wouldn't be able to get away with it. You'd have to pay. And most days he didn't want to have to pay.

Cortez Sharp walked across his backyard and waited for the first drops to hit him, but when he got to the back porch he was still dry. He went inside and sat down on his mildewed cot and leaned his back against the beadboard wall and watched the wind have its way with the leaves of the chinaberry tree, and then he saw rain as dust swirled up from the first fat drops of water falling at the edge of the yard. The birds were flying across, weaving in the wind, cardinals and bluebirds that hung around and ate from the bird feeders she made him fill up once a week in the summertime.

He heard one of his cows bawl down in the pasture and knew it was calling its calf to its side. Animals knew things. They knew when
a storm was coming. They'd start moving for shelter, get up under a bunch of trees, and wait it out. But sometimes they got struck by lightning that way, too. Worst damn smell you ever smelled. He'd had ten killed under a tree one night. A bull and nine cows. Almost wiped him out. His whole herd at that time. Had Queen gone? For good maybe? He hadn't heard her in a long time. He hoped she'd gone. Went back to wherever dead people went to. He didn't want to hear her anymore. He didn't need any reminding. He couldn't have done anything besides what he had done. Not in the world they had lived in. Mississippi almost forty years ago.

And then it started raining hard. He watched it come down and thicken in intensity and the outline of the barn began to fade behind the wall of rain, and it poured down in the yard and started running off the eaves and puddling next to the house and splashing up against the old red bricks. The sky closed up and became a solid color like steel and more water came down. It thundered and the wind blew and the storm rolled up to his place and then it came down as hard as he'd ever seen it.

He sat there and listened to it and watched it and wondered how much of it was going into the pond. He wondered if it would fill up any, or if it would all soak into the ground the first time. He knew that had to happen. He knew enough water had to come down at once so that it all couldn't soak away, but could pool and start making a pond.

He could imagine what the pea patch looked like, water already beginning to stand in the rows and flood the young plants, and now in a few days the grass would spring up, probably, but that was okay, he could take the tractor down and run the scratchers through the stalks again. He needed to clean his gun, get ready for the deer. They'd be coming. Bastards. They were lying up now, under bushes, waiting for the rain to be over, or maybe not even caring that it was raining. Maybe it didn't bother them. Maybe they liked it.

He knew what was happening on his place. The creek was filling with water that was running down off the banks, and his fine fat cows were standing under trees in the pasture with water smeared on their sleek black hides. The woods were whispering in raindrops and water was rolling fast downhill toward the empty hole where his new pond
sat, and Cortez saw it in his mind's eye, the muddy ground in the bottom pinging up little geysers of mud as the drops plinked down, and the water pooling in the bottom, slowly rising up the sides, gradually filling, becoming what it was intended to be, now with the rain at long last, and the thunder, and the wind blowing and stirring the tops of the trees.

Out at the far edge of the rain he counted seven crows slowly flap-ping, making their way into the big red oaks down by the creek. He'd seen the crows before. He thought they must have a roost around here somewhere. It would be hard to find. A man had to have good eyes to spot a crow's nest and his were old. But Cortez knew crows. His father had owned one for a pet when he was a little boy. It would steal anything shiny that was lying around outside the house. Spoons. Dice. A thimble once. That was in 1937. Everybody from then dead now. Just him and his wife left. And Lucinda. Nobody to carry on his name now with Raif gone. But the storm was fine. He'd been waiting for so long. And now here it was, like a reward for building the pond. He sat there and reveled in it for a long time, an old man, watching it rain, remembering other rains.

Jimmy's daddy was riding around by himself that same evening, drinking a little beer. Almost dark. After the rain. Cool wind. The kids were home alone but that was okay. They'd be all right. Watch TV. Cook hot dogs. He was down on Old Union Road and the road was still wet and the rain had made the air look different. Softer or something. He hated like hell that he'd accidentally crushed the shit out of John Wayne Payne. But he didn't think the whole thing was all his fault either. He hadn't been able to make himself go to the funeral, although he'd been told that a lot of people who worked in the plant had. They'd actually shut the plant down for about three hours to let people off with pay for the funeral since so many people who worked there had known John Wayne Payne and how he'd give you a lift on a lunch flat. Of course some of them he knew took the three hours and went home and watched TV with it. Or shelled some peas. Cut the grass instead of having to do it Saturday.

Boy, the weekends just didn't last long enough. You got up and you went to work and you came home and went to bed and you spent all week fixing Towmotors, fixing spot-weld machines, fixing baloney sandwiches, taking breaks, eating lunch, punching in, punching out, and then Friday rolled around and you got your check and drove happily to the beer store and iced down a case and then you had all Friday evening before dark to ride around or cook out and then on Saturday you could sleep late and work on your car or go fishing or ride around and go get something to eat and drink some beer and then Sunday just came down like a nine-pound hammer. You could go fishing, sure. You could ride around a little, yeah. Drink a few beers. But it was tainted with the closing-in feeling of the loss of freedom. Because after the sun went down, it came back up on Monday morning. And you had to go work
five more days.
And it sucked. The '55 was running pretty good now that he'd put a new battery in it and a voltage regulator and new brushes in the generator and a new Bendix for the starter and an exhaust manifold gasket and a
new race and bearing for the left spindle and a new set of shocks all the way around and a new harmonic balancing wheel and plugs and points and a Rochester four-barrel. Rusty had set the timing on it with a timing light and she was purring like a kitten at its mama's titty nipple. She had a little Bondo in her, sure, but how many were you going to find this old that didn't? This son of a bitch was about fifty years old almost. He was thinking about a cam, maybe an Isky or a Lunati. Maybe a full race or a three-quarter's. Rusty could order him anything he wanted. Just paying for it was the thing. He got tired of arguing with Johnette about what they ought to spend their money on. She said he drank too much beer. Rode around too much. Didn't stay home with the kids enough. And that when he did, all he did was yell at them. She said he didn't socialize with them. Just because he liked to watch his hunting videos and drink a little beer in the evenings. In the bedroom. By himself.