A Miracle of Catfish (12 page)

That's what she said. She said a lot of shit. He was glad he wasn't having to listen to any of it right now. He was about tired of listening to all her shit. He'd like to
socialize
with that big-tittied heifer down on the line was who he'd like to socialize with. Socialize with her knockers. Damn, she had a set. Every man in the whole plant was damn near drooling. All of them chickenshit to even talk to her. He was gonna say something to her. He didn't know what yet. But he was going to. Hell, she might not even talk to him.

Jimmy's daddy had the windows down, listening to his tapes. He had a bunch of good ones. Narvel Felts, Lefty Frizzell, David Frizzell, Ferlin Husky, Roy Drusky, Roy Clark, Guy Clark, Petula Clark, the Dave Clark Five. He wished he knew how to play a guitar. He ought to buy one's what he ought to do. Somebody was selling one on TV the other night for $39.95 or maybe it was three payments of $39.95, which wasn't bad if you thought about it, if the guitar was any good. Be something else Johnette could raise hell about. Playing a guitar. Making some more noise. He guessed he could play it outside. He could play it out on the back porch if he ever got around to building one. Shit. He ought to at least build some steps sometime. What if they had a fire by the front door and they couldn't go out that way? They'd have to jump down from the back door. He wondered if Rusty knew how to build steps. He might. He could build anything. He was damn good on deer stands. He was
building a little boat right now. Damn, that's what he needed, was a little boat. Once that old fellow's pond got filled up, and if he put some catfish in it, and if Jimmy's daddy had a little boat, he could drag it through the woods at night and catch the shit out of them while the old man was asleep. Drag it back before daylight. Sneak in, sneak out.

He took another drink of his beer. It was good to get out of the house for a while. Get away from them kids. Drive you batty all that yelling and hollering and raising hell and throwing shit everywhere and arguing over what they were going to watch on the TV and making a mess in the kitchen and tracking up the carpet with their muddy feet whenever it rained and just generally being loud all the time. It was mighty fine to ride around in a '55 Chevy with not just a shitload of Bondo in it after a good rain and listen to those throaty pipes. He'd gone ahead and gotten his inspection sticker with regular mufflers out at Gateway one Saturday and then almost immediately changed to glasspacks in the parking lot of AutoZone on Rusty's lunch hour with Rusty helping him and eating a sandwich at the same time, sometimes holding the entire sandwich in his mouth while he reached for tools, put it up on some jack stands and it only took about seventeen minutes to change both of them out, and now it was pretty throaty. It just kind of lugged a little going from second to fourth. It was aggravating not to have third gear. You had to get up some speed going up hills. He needed to see about that transmission down at Bruce. It might even have a Hurst shifter with it. He wondered how much a complete rolled-and-pleated interior would cost him. No telling. How fine would that be, though? Say blue and white. With those little speckles of glitter in it? Have some matching floor mats. Get some of those big foam dice to hang from the rearview. He knew Jimmy needed to get his teeth fixed. He didn't know how much that was going to cost. Or if they could even afford it. They probably couldn't. He shouldn't eat all that candy. Little shit.

He finished the beer in his hand and threw the empty out the window, then reached to the cooler in the floorboard for a fresh one. Popped the top. Took a drink. Set it between his legs. Reached into the pack in his pocket for a fresh cigarette. Lit it. Turned his parking lamps on and the dash lights didn't come on. What the hell. Son of a bitch. He bumped the dash with his hand and they flickered. Then they came on.
Then they went off. He hit it again. They came on. They went off. Son of a bitch. He hit it again and they flickered. He hit it twice and they came on and then went back off. Piece of
shit!
He heard a horn blaring right in front of him and looked up and saw that he was about to be hit by a big pickup head-on and swerved widely, almost going into the ditch, veering, almost sinking into the soft shoulder, then straightening and fishtailing back out of the ditch, mud on the tires making it slide in the road squealing until he got it back under control, and the pickup, real big, jacked way up, lots of lights, rolled on up the hill past him, red lights fading and climbing. Some damn kid probably. The road was full of them and some of them were barely big enough to see over the steering wheel. Where the hell did they come from? He'd be damned if Jimmy was going to run up and down the road like that burning gas. All these kids had it too soft these days, their parents buying them pickups left and right. If Jimmy wanted a pickup he'd have to work for it. Just like Jimmy's daddy did. In the sawmill with Halter Wellums. Digging five or six splinters out of his hands every day. Walking through the woods to work, walking through the woods back home. You probably couldn't find a kid who would do that now.

Damn that was close. Too close. Like to had a head-on collision. With some kid. He needed to get some insurance on this son of a gun. Get some collision anyway. Comprehensive would be a lot better, but that shit was high. He couldn't really afford it. But he sure needed it. Just in case something happened. Damn that was close. Little bastard like to smeared him all over the road.

Jimmy's daddy calmed back down and drank some more beer and cruised by a turf field and some woods and a place in the road where there was a big pipe that ran under the road. Through the big pipe an endless stream of cold spring water poured, and there was a deep pool off to the left of the road that everybody called the Cold Hole, and he'd seen kids swimming there, and he thought what he ought to do was bring Jimmy down here sometime, get a few of his buddies, maybe Rusty and Seaborn, ice down some beer, ride around a little, then bring Jimmy down here and throw him in. Let him sink or swim. That's the way his old man did him. And he nearly drowned, yeah, but he learned how to swim, didn't he? Jimmy could do the same thing. Kids were kids.
People were people. He wondered how deep that old guy's pond had wound up being. He might walk over there one day and see. That old man was probably senile. Probably went to bed with the chickens. Probably slept like a dead man. Probably be easy to sneak in.

He drank some more beer and listened to some more music and stopped and took a piss in the middle of the road and then rode through a little creek bottom and up a hill and around a curve. He wondered if there were any wild hogs running loose down on the levee tonight. He thought he'd ride down there and see. He'd already seen two big ones, one a huge and hairy black tusker with a ridge down his back, and last summer he'd found three dead wild baby piglets in the road somebody had run over, one of them cut half in two by a tire, the head and two front legs and part of the chest and some guts on one side of the road and the back legs and some guts and the little bitty curly tail on the other, and he'd stopped and picked them up and looked at them, the two whole ones, anyway, and wondered if they were fresh enough to maybe eat, but he figured that with roadkill pork you didn't want to take any chances, because it might have already turned bad, and then somebody had come along while he was standing there holding one of them by the leg and had given him a weird look, and he'd only taken one of them home, just to show Jimmy, and then Jimmy had turned out to be in town getting some tennis shoes and a swimsuit with his mother, so then he'd thrown it off the bridge down below the trailer and didn't even get to show it to Jimmy. Buzzards ate it probably. […]

He wondered what was the matter with Johnette's ass. Ill as a damn hornet here lately. Hell, she wasn't going through menopause, was she? She was too young for that, wasn't she? Hell, she wasn't but thirty-five. But his cousin had to have that hysterectomy when she was thirty. Was all messed up inside, the doctor said. He didn't want any more kids anyway. It was hell to keep them fed, the ones he had. Damn they could eat some stuff. Ate something all the time. Chips and dip, couldn't keep that around. Cokes, couldn't keep them around. Hot dogs, couldn't keep them around. Ice cream, couldn't keep that around. They wouldn't eat vegetables very much, so you could keep them around. Asparagus? Naw. Squash? Wouldn't touch it. Now Jimmy liked a homegrown tomato sandwich. Jimmy's daddy had taught him that, how to make one, showed
him how to peel the tomatoes, slice them up, put a little salt on them, spread the mayonnaise on the bread, fixed two one day, gave Jimmy one, poured him a glass of cold milk, sat down in the living room with him and ate and watched wrestling on TV. He didn't get enough times like that with Jimmy, and he didn't mean to stay so damn busy, or be gone riding around like this, drinking either by himself or with Rusty, but it just seemed like too much to stand being cooped up in that trailer with them all the time. It was nice to get out. A man who worked had to get out some.
Deserved
to get out some. This beer was cold as hell. Jimmy's daddy's daddy loved him a cold beer, too. He guessed he needed to go see the old fucker sometime. Old hardass. Still smoking them damned old Camels. Drinking that damned old Heaven Hill. He needed to take Jimmy when he went, he guessed. Let him see the old fucker. Shit. Jimmy hardly knew him. And whose fault was that? It wasn't Jimmy's daddy's. It was Jimmy's daddy's daddy's. He didn't have to sit over there in the woods by himself all the time like a hermit. Walk up and down the road picking up cans.

He rode over a few ridges and then around a few more curves and he saw a pair of green eyes up in a tree and slowed down and looked and saw a raccoon up in a persimmon tree eating green persimmons. He burped. He didn't want any green persimmons. Jimmy's daddy's daddy had talked Jimmy's daddy into biting into one one day and he still remembered how it puckered his mouth and how the awful, bitter taste wouldn't go away for a long time. He never had understood why his daddy had done that to him. And then laughed like hell. He went around another curve and crossed a narrow bridge and went up a hill where some young oaks were growing on each side and the road was so lumpy with repair patches that the '55 bumped even with its new shocks all the way around.

Okay, he shouldn't have married her. Big mistake. Now what? Keep on staying with her or get the fuck out? What did they ever do together? Went over to Algoma, that was about it. And that cost the shit out of money. Spend money. Spend money. That was all she thought about. Working at the bank she ought to make some money since they had all the money. He didn't even like to go in there. Hardly ever did. He didn't like to write checks or have to screw around with an account. He didn't
like to be around people who dressed better than he did and probably thought they were better than him.

He wondered what the hell she was doing. Evelyn said she'd gone out with some people from the bank. Some thing she had to go to. Probably a meeting. She had to go to things sometimes, things the bank had. Meetings. Dinners. He didn't know what all. He knew they went out and had drinks sometimes, and that always chapped his ass. She needed to be home with the kids. Yep. That was her job.

He'd tried to call Rusty earlier but he hadn't been home. Probably out at Applebee's eating supper and drinking beer. Rusty went out there a good bit and he knew the bartender out there. Jimmy's daddy had been out there before but it cost money to go out there, too. Married people who worked for a living couldn't eat out like that all the time. Johnette was always bitching that they didn't go out enough to eat. Or at least she used to. She didn't bitch about much anymore. Not like she used to. She seemed sometimes like she'd calmed down a little bit, but that probably wasn't too hard to figure out. She was probably smoking the hell out of that damn shit again. He'd tried to talk to Rusty about it a few times and tell him about all the problems he had with her, but Rusty didn't seem to know what to say about all of it. He'd never been married. He had it made. He could take his paycheck and spend it on whatever he wanted to, wood for a boat or a new 7 mm Mag or a four-wheeler — damn, Jimmy would like one of those, wouldn't he? — and he didn't have to put up with all the shit that Jimmy's daddy had to put up with. Rusty was a bachelor. And Jimmy's daddy remembered when he used to be a bachelor. He had it made back then. Could go out with all the women he wanted to and spend his paycheck on whatever he wanted to. And then he met Johnette with Rusty and Seaborn over at Tupelo at the Gun and Knife Show.

They were hunting for a Henry Golden Boy .17 caliber rifle and she was looking for a pistol because she was a single mother. A divorced mother, actually. They'd helped her pick out a good pistol and then they'd all gone out for beers at the Rib Cage. Turned out her family was from down at Bruce. And yeah, she had two kids. He remembered when he saw them for the first time a long time ago. Both of them cute as hell. Hard to keep from hugging them. He remembered when he used to go
over to Johnette's trailer when she was still living down on Old 6, all the nights he'd spent there, back in her bedroom after she'd put the kids to sleep, and then she'd gotten pregnant. Just because he hadn't used a rubber one night. Just because they'd started messing around and she'd gotten hot and before he knew it he had it in her and she'd had her hot thighs wrapped around him and it felt so good he didn't want to stop, and he had gone ahead, and now look where he was. Married to a fatass bitch who wouldn't even stay home and take care of her kids. But he had Jimmy. He had him. He shouldn't have whipped him so hard. Just because he got into his tools. But he wouldn't have whipped him so hard if he hadn't accidentally crushed John Wayne Payne. But he did. Mashed the living shit out of him. […]

He wondered where her fat ass really was.