A Miracle of Catfish (65 page)

“Tell your mama if I ain't here when she gets in that I've gone to look at a transmission a guy's got that's sposed to fit my car. All right?”

“Yes sir,” Jimmy said.

“Yes sir,” Velma said.

Jimmy's daddy started out the door and then he stopped. He looked down. He stepped back. His voice rose in outrage.

“What in the … who in the
hell
tracked all this mud in the house?”

He turned around and looked at Jimmy and Velma. This was real
trouble, and a no-win situation that Jimmy could already see coming. And he'd been so close to just walking on out the door. There was no way Jimmy was going to claim the mud as his just to protect the big boy and keep the five dollars. Oh no. His daddy might whip him for that. And five dollars wasn't worth that. But if he didn't lie and say it
was
his mud, and if Velma said it wasn't her mud, then what was going to happen? Who were they going to blame it on? He might whip
both
of them just for general principles.

“How many times have I told y'all to wipe your feet off fore you come in the damn house?”

Jimmy didn't say anything. He looked over at Velma and she didn't look like she was going to say anything. She looked like she was wanting to get her mouth around that mayonnaise sandwich.

“Looks like a dog took a shit in here,” Jimmy's daddy said. Then he bent over a little bit, looking at the mud. “Damn,” he said. “This one's got some pine needles in it. And this one's got some gravel in it.”

“I didn't do it,” Jimmy said, self-preservation leaping in.

“Well, whoever did it, clean the shit up fore your mama gets home. Bye.”

Jimmy's daddy put the coat on and went out the door as relief welled in. It had been a close call. Jimmy heard the '55 crank up, and then it backed out of the driveway and went down toward the cotton fields and the wooden bridge and the old rotted house until it went out of hearing. Jimmy hadn't heard the dead black lady crying in a while. He thought maybe she'd gone on vacation. And then Evelyn stuck just her head out the door and called softly for Velma. Velma was in the process of trying to start eating her sandwich, but she stopped what she was doing and went back there. Evelyn let her in and then the door shut. Then Jimmy heard it lock. Then silence. He turned the TV down. He could hear them talking, but he couldn't tell what they were saying. So he got up and walked very softly across the carpet to the door of the girls' bedroom and put his ear against the door and listened. It sounded like Evelyn was crying. She
was
crying. Then he heard the door start to open and went quick and soft back across the carpet and was in the process of sitting down when the door opened and Velma came out and the door closed and locked again. Jimmy looked at her, but she didn't look at him. She
went back to the utility room down the hall and it sounded like she either opened the lid on the washing machine or opened the door on the dryer. Something was going on. He started to get up and go back there to see what she was doing, but instead he waited. His mama would be home in about another hour. And somebody was going to have to clean that mud up before she got in. Jimmy was naturally in favor of Evelyn doing it since she was the one who caused it to be there.

But Velma came out of the utility room and stopped in the bathroom and came out with a towel and went back to the bedroom door and knocked on it. The door opened and Velma went in, then the door closed and locked again. Something had happened and Jimmy knew it had something to do with the big boy from the school bus who had just barely made it out of here before Jimmy's daddy came home. And that was another close call. There was no telling what Jimmy's daddy would have done if he'd come home and found some boy off the school bus in the bedroom with Evelyn. Jimmy knew that somebody would have gotten their ass kicked, and it wouldn't have been Jimmy's daddy. He kind of hated that the big boy had made it out on time. He would have really enjoyed seeing his daddy kick the big boy's ass, because Jimmy thought he was the same one who used to hit him on the ears with those wadded-up pieces of paper.

He sat there and listened. After a few minutes, the door to the bedroom opened and Velma came out, carrying a wadded-up bunch of bed-sheets. She went down the hall with them and Jimmy got up softly and followed her. When she went back into the utility room, she closed the door behind her. But it didn't have a lock on it, and Jimmy waited about five seconds and then opened it. Velma looked up. She was stuffing the sheets into the washing machine and the sheets had blood on them. Oh my God! It looked like Evelyn was having a baby!

“What's that?” Jimmy said. It was only then that he saw Velma crying. She stopped what she was doing and fell to her knees, and Jimmy knelt next to her and put his arm around her shoulder. She leaned into him with her hands up against her face, and then she started sobbing. He just stayed there and held her. She wasn't really his sister. But in another way she was. She was older than him but it didn't matter. He just held her. But she didn't cry long. She wiped her sniffles and got back up.

“We got to get these sheets clean and dry and back on the bed before Mama gets home,” she said. “If we don't, Evelyn's gonna be in a whole lot of trouble.” And she turned around and again started stuffing the sheets into the washing machine. Jimmy helped her. He found the scoop and scooped up some washing powders and dumped them in and Velma set the timer for the shortest cycle on the machine and closed the lid and started it. Jimmy heard the water running into it.

“Did she hurt herself?” he said. Velma shook her head.

“Did she have a baby?” Jimmy said.

“No, she didn't have no baby! Are you crazy?”

“Well, where'd all that blood come from, then?” Jimmy said.

“I can't tell you,” Velma said. “But please don't say nothing to Mama. Please? Please, Jimmy.”

From the way she was looking at him, Jimmy knew this was something pretty bad. So he just nodded.

“Help me fold these clothes and put em away,” Velma said, so Jimmy did. They folded towels and bath cloths and some underwear and put it all away and then Velma said she had to go back in there with Evelyn, so she did. This time she stayed for about ten minutes, except for coming out one time and going back to the bathroom and running the water and then coming out with a wadded-up wet bath cloth. She went back into the bedroom with it and the door locked again. Jimmy went back to watching television. It was about to get dark outside and Jimmy wondered if they were going to make it on time. He could hear the washing machine still going on the sheets, and the dryer was really slow about drying things. Something was wrong with it. An element or something was burned out. His mama cussed about it pretty often. And what if the washing machine didn't take the blood out of the sheets? Wasn't blood supposed to be hard to get out of something? And where had the blood come from anyway if Evelyn hadn't hurt herself or had a baby?

He kept sitting there, trying to listen to the TV and still hear what was going on in the bedroom. After a while the washing machine stopped. Velma must have been listening, too, because she came out right away and went back there. It sounded like she was taking the sheets out of the washing machine and putting them in the dryer. Then Evelyn came out of the bedroom. She was wearing only a bra that even Jimmy could see
was way too small for her, and a towel was wrapped around her bottom half. She was holding on to the wall as she walked down the hall toward the bathroom, taking baby steps. She looked over at Jimmy for a moment, tears coming down her cheeks, and she gave him a grim smile, as if she suffered willingly. Velma came out of the utility room and helped her into the bathroom. Then that door closed and locked. Then silence. Then there was nothing to hear but the dryer running. Running and running and running.

Jimmy kept sitting there watching TV. It was getting closer and closer to time for his mama to get home. But sometimes she stopped in town and bought groceries. Sometimes she'd call on her cell phone and say she was going to be late, but sometimes she wouldn't.

After a while, Velma and Evelyn came out of the bathroom. Evelyn had put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and she walked slowly over to the couch and stood there. Jimmy looked up at her. She looked a lot better than she had when she'd first come down the hall.

“Can I sit down?” she said.

“Sure,” Jimmy said. “I can move if you want to lay down.”

“That's okay,” Evelyn said. He saw that she was trying to bend down carefully and he got up and helped her ease onto the couch.

“Whew,” she said, when she'd leaned back against the cushions. “That's better. Thanks.”

Velma came in and sat down nearby […] with her sandwich and took a bite of it. She chewed, her small mouth working, one dab of mayonnaise on the corner of her lips. She licked it off with the tip of her tongue.

Evelyn did something that surprised Jimmy. She leaned up and reached beneath the couch cushion and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights and a lighter and opened the cigarettes and took one out and lit up. There was an ashtray on the coffee table and she slid it closer. Jimmy was almost shocked.

“When'd you start smoking?” he said.

“A few weeks ago,” Evelyn said. “Herbert got me started.”

“Who's Herbert?” Jimmy said.

“That was Herbert in here a while ago.”

She took a drag and leaned back again and crossed one leg over the other very slowly, like somebody in slow motion. Jimmy could tell that
she didn't really know how to smoke yet, that she was just practicing. Plus she coughed a few times.

“Now we've got to talk, Jimmy,” she said. And she looked at him. All serious. He never had seen her like this before. A different Evelyn. Maybe she was fixing to run off and get married to Herbert.

“What you want to talk about?” Jimmy said. “The weather?” She was making him nervous, acting this way and sitting all close to him like this. She smelled kind of good. She smelled the same way his mama smelled sometimes.

“You know how easy your daddy gets upset. Right?”

“Right,” Jimmy said.

Evelyn leaned forward and thumped the ashes off the end of her cigarette, then pulled the ashtray over in her lap and leaned back.

“Then let me ask you a question,” Evelyn said. Velma kept sitting there taking small bites from her sandwich, her nubby ears poking through the long strands of her black hair.

“Okay,” Jimmy said.

“Would you or would you not agree that things go a lot smoother around here when your daddy's not upset about something?”

Jimmy thought it over.

“I would agree,” he said.

“That's what I thought,” Evelyn said. “Now Jimmy . . .” Here she paused to stroke her chin, and to painfully shift one of her legs. The dryer binged and Velma jumped up, leaving her sandwich on the coffee table while she rushed back to the utility room.

“What did Herbert do to you?” Jimmy said.

“You're too little to understand,” Evelyn said.

“Try me,” Jimmy said.

He could tell that Evelyn was starting to get a little pissed off. Her face had this little sour expression it could make when she was starting to get pissed off. It was starting to make it now.

“Just let me talk, okay, Jimmy?”

“Okay,” Jimmy said, and started flipping through the channels again with the remote. CMT. MTV. CNN. ESPN2. TBS. PBS. CBS.

“Can you put that down and let me talk to you for a minute?” Evelyn said. “Goddamn it?”

“Ain't no need to cuss about it,” Jimmy said, and left it on CMT and dropped the remote on the couch between them. She picked it up and lowered the volume on it, then dropped it back on the couch.

“It's just that you need to understand how important it is for you not to say anything about Herbert being over here today,” she said. “Can I trust you not to?”

“That's what you paid me the five bucks for, wasn't it?” Jimmy said.

Evelyn smiled then. And she did something she'd never done before. She leaned over and put her arm around Jimmy's shoulder. He thought maybe she was fixing to kiss him, but she didn't.

“Look, Jimmy,” she said. “I like you. I may not always show it, but I do like you. And I want us to be better brothers and sisters to each other. Is that okay with you?”

“What's in it for me?” Jimmy said.

“Well, I'll tell you, Jimmy,” she said. “There might be a lot for you in it one of these old days.”

“Like what?” Jimmy said.

That flustered Evelyn. She kept smoking her cigarette, taking quick little fake puffs off it. That seemed to keep her from coughing.

“Well, for one thing,” she said. “I'll be getting my license before long and when I get a car you might want to go places.”

“You ain't got no car,” Jimmy said.

“I know that. Mama's gonna buy me one.”

“Shit,” Jimmy said. “Daddy ain't gonna let Mama buy you no car. You know how much a car costs? About six hundred thousand dollars.”

“I know how much a car costs, Jimmy,” she said.

“I thought your daddy was gonna buy you a Corvette,” Jimmy said.

“My daddy's still incarcerated,” Evelyn said.

Jimmy didn't know what the hell that was so he didn't even ask. He already had it figured out. Evelyn was wanting him to keep his mouth shut about the blood on the sheets and she was willing to bribe him to do it. So he put a quick end to it, just so he could get back to CMT and see if they had any Merle videos on.

“I'll keep my mouth shut if you give me twenty bucks,” Jimmy said. And the only reason he said twenty bucks was because he'd never had twenty bucks before and had always wanted twenty.

“I don't have twenty bucks right now,” Evelyn said.

“Tell Herbert to cough it up,” Jimmy said. “Or I'll tell. And if you send him over here to beat the crap out of me, it'll leave bruises, and when I show em to Daddy he'll kill Herbert. Then you won't have a boyfriend. Plus, you got to clean up all that mud he left before Mama gets home.”