A Miracle of Catfish (29 page)

And too he had to figure out what he was going to tell Johnette about where he'd been last night for all that time. Missed supper again. He could say he was out with Seaborn, he guessed. Or he could just say he'd been riding around. For about seven and a half hours. Was that believable? Or would she call bullshit on him? Hell. He could say he'd been down to the VFW in Calhoun County drinking beer. Since she didn't know anybody down there, there was no way she could check to see if he was lying. Or hell. Maybe she didn't give a shit where he'd been.

[…]

Then Jimmy's daddy heard some feet on the metal stairs and he turned around to see who it was, hoping it wasn't Lacey. It was Lacey. Her head rose vertically as she climbed the last step and she was already grinning. He figured she'd seen him walk by.

Jimmy's daddy flicked the ashes off the end of his cigarette and leaned against the rail. She walked up next to him and stopped.

“Well hey,” she said. She looked like she had more than a little makeup on. A different color lipstick. She was wearing a pretty nice blouse and pants outfit, too. He wondered if she had done this for him.

“Hey,” he said. “How you?”

“Pretty good.” She looked out over the line and then looked back at him. Then she lowered her voice as if someone were listening. “I sure did enjoy last night. Damn, baby.”

“Me too,” Jimmy's daddy said. He glanced around. Nervous.

“When you coming back?” she said. She was looking up at him and he could remember what she'd done with that mouth. […]

“I don't know,” he said. “I didn't get in till one.”

“You didn't get in no trouble, did you?” she said.

“I don't know,” he said. “I didn't talk to her yet.”

“What you gonna tell her?” she said.

“I don't know. I'll figure it out before I get home, I guess.”

She was looking up at him with some kind of shine in her eyes. She looked damn near delirious with happiness.

“What you doing?” she said. “I seen you walk by.”

“I got to go in here and fix the toilet,” Jimmy's daddy said. “I been waiting on somebody to come by. How bout going in and see if they's any women in there for me?”

“Okay. How you gonna fix it?” she said, still smiling.

He lifted his plunger.

“I'm gonna plunge it,” he said. “That's what I usually do. I done fixed this son of a bitch eight times.”

“They's one in there that's always stopped up.”

“That's the one I'm gonna fix.”

Jimmy's daddy took a last pull on his cigarette and then dropped it on the concrete and stepped on it. Then he looked up at her. She was still watching him and smiling, and it began to dawn on Jimmy's daddy to
wonder if she was going goofy over him. He hoped to God she wasn't going to ask him to eat lunch with her. In front of everybody.

“You want to eat lunch with me?” she said.

And Jimmy's daddy just lied right off the top of his head because he didn't want to. He didn't even know if he wanted to go back to Water Valley anymore if he had to put up with this shit at work.

“Aw well, naw, I got to run to town on my lunch break.”

He didn't know why he said that. He
never
went to town on his lunch break, even though they were very close to town. They were down on Old Taylor Road, which wasn't far from the bypass that went around Oxford. You could be on the square in five minutes if the traffic wasn't bad. But it was hard to get something to eat in town and then have time to eat it in only thirty minutes. And if the traffic
was
bad, you might be screwed. You might be late punching back in. And you didn't want to do that. They frowned on that big-time. They might even say something to you. Shit. They probably
would
say something to you.

“Oh yeah?” she said. She looked a little defeated, and nodded a few times, but then she looked at him again with a brave smile.

“What you got to go to town for?”

“Parts,” he said, not thinking, just any bullshit he could feed her.

“I like that fifty-five,” she said. “My brother had a fifty-six and people always thought it was a fifty-five. I don't know how many times he had to tell somebody it was a fifty-six instead of a fifty-five cause you know they look almost exactly alike cept for the tail fins and the taillights.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy's daddy said, and then looked around again to see if anybody was watching them. A few people down on the line were. One of them was the big-tittied heifer. He looked back at Lacey. “Well, look here, I got to get in here and fix this thing and then get on back to Maintenance fore Collums comes looking for me. Can you go in there and see if they's anybody in there for me so I can put this sign up?”

“I'd be glad to,” she said, and turned and pushed open the door. She stayed gone for a few seconds and then she came back to the door. Stuck just her head out.

“Did you know you can't see this door from the line?” she said.

“Naw. I don't guess I ever noticed.”

She kept standing there with just her head stuck out. She was doing
something with her hand and he couldn't tell what it was. And then she pulled the door open and backed up and held on to it and lifted the front of her blouse and showed him her big tits. She was smiling. Then she ran her tongue around her lips very slowly. Then she smooched a kiss toward him, dropped the front of her blouse, and disappeared behind the door. He stood there waiting. He heard steps and then another woman came up the stairs. It was that Jones woman who had that plant romance going. She was smiling, too. He coughed and reached for another cigarette.

By lunchtime, Jimmy's daddy was really pissed. Since he'd told Lacey that he had to run to town on his lunch hour, he actually had to leave the plant. And he really didn't want to go. For one thing, he didn't know what he was going to eat for lunch or how he was going to get it and get back with it in thirty minutes and still eat it. Since he was going to have to leave the plant, he wasn't going to be able to get a can of chili, probably, not unless he just left the plant for ten minutes or something and then came back … hell, that wouldn't work. She'd know he couldn't go to the parts store and back in ten minutes. And what if she asked him again tomorrow about eating lunch? He could see a problem growing already. But he'd just have to deal with it later. Right now it was 11:58 and he was washing some of the black grease off his hands with some Go-Jo they kept beside the sink in the men's bathroom. He washed his hands good and then dried them on some paper towels and dropped them in the trash and went out the door. He looked at his watch: 11:59. What the hell did he tell her he was going to town for? What else could he have told her to avoid eating lunch with her, though? That he usually ate with Seaborn? That would have worked. That he didn't want everybody in the whole plant to know he had a plant romance going? That would have worked, too. If she couldn't deal with it, tough titty. She knew he was married. She knew he had to be careful. And now he was going to have to leave the damn plant because of her.

The buzzer rang and Jimmy's daddy rushed over to the rack of time cards and grabbed his from its slot. He could see the plant manager watching him through the glass in the window of his office, which was planted squarely across from the time clock so that he could watch
everybody punching in in the morning and punching out at lunch and then back in after lunch and then out at three thirty. He didn't miss a thing, and he'd probably noticed how fast Jimmy's daddy had made it over to the time clock. Fuck him. He was just the plant manager.

Jimmy's daddy punched his card and stuck it into the rack on the other side of the time clock just as a whole herd of people started filling up the aisles, all headed toward the time clock. He walked fast out the front door and dug his keys from his pocket, hoping like hell she wasn't going to follow him out to the parking lot. […]

A Tommy's Big Red Fish Truck sat in front of the fancy double-wide, whose neat deck and shady porch held thick leafy ferns in pots and a variety of tropical plants. All the flower beds were mulched and free of grass, and the big red truck was dusty from the road. The left front tire was almost halfway down.

There was some kind of notice on a flimsy piece of pink paper tucked beneath one of the windshield wipers, but it had been rained on and the ink had smeared and there were rain spots in the dust on the truck.

On a hill behind the trailer, five well-manicured ponds were scattered down its length, each of them connected to the other by pipes and pumps. The big hatchery barn down below them stood quiet under the sun. A lot of white fluffy clouds were drifting very slowly in the sky.

Inside the double-wide, muffled by the walls, the phone rang. It was shrill and insistent, and it sat there ringing, maybe twenty times. It stopped. In the front lawn were some ten-year-old pecan trees, mere babies compared with the leafy giants standing down behind the trailer.

The phone started ringing again and it kept ringing constantly until it had been ringing for ten minutes. It finally stopped and then there was nothing to hear again but the something-like-whispering noise green leaves made from breeze in the trees.

Up in the sky above all this a bald eagle soared in the blue void, its wide brown wings white tipped and flared for the thermal updraft he was surfing. He circled as he soared, ever lifting, so small he became not much more than a speck. And then he leveled off and began a gradual glide that curved and came back over the land behind the trailer. He was coming fast and he was getting lower all the time. He untucked his talons just before he touched the top of the bream pond, making a thin splash, and without actually slowing down much he flapped his wings and pulled back up, droplets of shiny water falling from the fat
and still-flopping bluegill, little diamonds of just a wink of light as the eagle climbed with him, the long feathers gliding them through the air, until they became smaller and smaller and then flew away into the solid blue above the green line of trees that overlooked that part of Arkansas.

Cortez sat there and listened to the phone ring. After it rang four times, somebody picked up and said hello. A man.

“Uh, yeah,” Cortez said. “This is Cortez Sharp over here in Oxford, Mississippi, and I wanted to talk to the fish man if I could.”

The man on the other end laughed just a little.

“This is him,” he said. “Or what's left of him. I'm Tommy Bright, but I'm just about out of business.”

Cortez was alarmed to hear that. He'd been calling for a couple of days, trying to get somebody to answer the phone number Toby Tubby had given him, and this was the first time somebody had.

“Well dang, I hate to hear that,” Cortez said. “I got your number from a friend of mine who works at the Co-op in town. They said they didn't know when you's gonna come back.”

Cortez heard some kind of noise on the other end of the phone. It sounded like a door slamming.

“Yes sir, well, I've had some trouble and it looks like the bank's gonna foreclose on me next week. I've done let most of my help go. All I've got on hand is some small catfish right now. Are you interested in some of them?”

“Some little catfish is exactly what I need,” Cortez said, and some hope began to rise in his heart. He didn't want to ask the man why he was going out of business because that wasn't any of his business. All he wanted was some fish. He didn't give a shit about the rest of it.

“How many you got?” Cortez said.

The man paused for a moment as he thought.

“I think I got two thousand four inch and a thousand eight inch left. I got em in some tanks in my barn. How many catfish were you wanting, Mr. Sharp?”

“I don't rightly know,” Cortez said. “My friend said you can put a thousand to an acre. Is that right?”

“Yes sir, that's how we figure it when we custom stock a large pond. How many acres is yours?”

“It's about a acre and a half,” Cortez said. “But it ain't filled all the way up yet. It's a new pond.”

“How deep's your water?”

“It's nine foot or better in the middle.”

“Aw, why, you're okay,” Tommy Bright said. “Let me figure just a minute. You sure called at a good time cause I need to get rid of these last fish. Let me … just a second.”

“Okay,” Cortez said, and just listened. There wasn't much to hear. There was a radio or a TV playing. Some music. Shitfire. He might wind up with some fish after all. He was going to have to get the guy to bring them, though. He wondered what a custom pond was. Maybe he customized the fish to fit the pond. He wondered how soon he could come and bring the fish. It'd be nice if he could do it today. But he probably couldn't do it today.

“You need any bream, Mr. Sharp? I got some in one of my ponds and I need to get rid of them. They're hybrid, grow to a pound and a half in about a year or two. They're great fish for grandkids.”

“I ain't got no grandkids,” Cortez said, wishing like hell he did.

“I see,” Tommy Bright said. “I'll tell you what I'll do, Mr. Sharp. Uh. I hate to ask you this, but can you pay me in cash?”

“Shit yeah,” Cortez said, thinking of the barn dough, stashed.

“Okay. I get twenty-nine dollars a hundred for my four-inch catfish. That'd be … five eighty if you want all those four-inchers. On the big ones, the eight inch, I get seventy-nine dollars a hundred on them. That'd … be … seven ninety on them…say eight hundred and six hundred. These eight inch, now, if you'll get you some feed and feed em regular, you'll have some big enough to eat before long. I got to charge you a little something to deliver from Arkansas. It's six hours. But I'll do you right. So let's see. Mr. Sharp, I'll bring these fish right to your pond and put em in for fifteen hundred dollars cash. That's two thousand four-inch, one thousand eight-inch channel catfish. If your pond's going to be eighteen feet deep it won't hurt to put that many in there. What do you say?”