A Miracle of Catfish (67 page)

“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.

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.

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.

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.