A Miracle of Catfish (8 page)

Cortez got to going down the road some afternoons in his pickup to see if he could see some places where it had rained. He thought maybe it might have rained down near Serepta, so he rode down there to see. But it was dry down there, didn't look like it had rained. He rode over toward Bruce to see if it had rained down there, but it hadn't, so he turned and rode through Water Valley to see if it had rained there. It hadn't. It hadn't rained in Banner. Or Pine Flat. Or DeLay. Or Paris. Or Potlockney. Or Spring Hill. Or Toccopola. Or Dogtown. All the roads and trees and grasses and yards and pastures were dry. There weren't any mud puddles out in the cotton fields. He stopped his truck on the bridge over Yocona River to see how low the water was and it was low. Bad low. The banks were about fifty or sixty feet high. He didn't see any people fishing. A long time ago the river was full of people fishing. A long time ago people would regularly burn the brush along the banks so they could get down there and put out set hooks. There weren't as many ticks in the woods then, either. A long time ago the river was so full of bass that people drove down into Halter Wellums's pasture on Sunday afternoons and he charged them fifty cents a car to park, just at the bluffs. He could remember seeing people climbing up some steep trails that went down the bluffs back then, coming up with stringers of bass long as your leg. And it went on like that for years. Then two businessmen who lived up in Oxford, one of them a drugstore owner, came down to get some fish quick and poured some Red Panther cotton poison in the river, just intending to kill a few fish, enough for a fish fry, maybe, with some cold beer and cards, but what they didn't know, being a couple of businessmen from town who didn't know anything about Red Panther cotton poison, was that the stuff was very concentrated, kind of like frozen orange juice, and once they poured a couple of gallons of it in the river,
it washed on down and diluted and diluted and diluted some more and then it started killing fish for miles and miles downstream, truckloads of fish, tractor trailers of fish, down through the whole length of the Yocona River, all the way to the mouth of Enid Reservoir, and even killed some down there in the actual lake. Which was a federal impoundment. Paid for and built by U.S. taxpayer dollars. Anybody could fish in it who had a valid fishing license. It didn't matter where you were from. You could be from Zanzibar and if you had a valid fishing license, you could fish down there. You just couldn't pour cotton poison in it. But somebody had. And those guys down there didn't think it was too funny. They didn't crack too many dead-fish jokes about it. They took it pretty damn seriously. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was in tight control of everything down there, and some members of their units went out in their boats and stood around in them after they got them stopped and started counting dead fish floated up all over the place, bream, crappie, buffalo, carp, flathead catfish, blue catfish, White River catfish, channel catfish, willow catfish, largemouth bass, white bass, paddlefish, alligator gar, too, and got up to a couple of thousand and lost count, got really pissed, even outraged, started counting again and then said to hell with it, did an investigation instead and sent investigators around asking questions to neighbors who lived near the river around Yocona and then owing to their deductions and snooping around and asking more questions and even
paying
some people to talk, leaned hard on Halter Wellums, with the full backing of the U.S. government, and he had to give the businessmen from Oxford up and the corps of engineers put those two guys' asses in a sling. They hung their heads before a judge is what they did, and said they were sorry and that they wouldn't ever do it again, and paid a huge fine. He seemed to remember it was about twenty thousand dollars, and that was a long time ago, when twenty thousand dollars was a lot of money. But Cortez remembered easily what it looked like. It was a terrible thing to see, all those rotting fish on the surface of the river, […] large and small, some flathead catfish that were sixty- and seventy-pounders, their pale rounded bellies turned up, too, flies walking on their bellies, maggots working them over in the water. He saw buzzards walk from one side of the river to the other across the backs of dead ones where there was a fishjam up against a logjam. That
ruined the fishing in the river for a long time. Just because a couple of assholes wanted some fish without fishing.

It didn't rain for so long that Cortez Sharp got sick of waiting. But there was nothing to do but just wait some more. So that's what he did. […]

The two-man press was the largest one in northern Mississippi at that time, imported from Germany, a green monolithic monster that rose twenty-two feet above the grime-encrusted, fourteen-inch-thick concrete floor of the loudly slamming, wheel-whirring stove factory:
wham! bang! pow! blang!
all day long. All night long when they were running the third shift. It was the kind of press some company like GM could use to make car fenders. Or say if GE needed a bunch of washing-machine panels, or cooktops, it could make them as well. With the proper dies. The press was driven down and back up by a pair of big round gears on top. They were eight feet in diameter and a foot thick with teeth the size of steam irons. Beneath the press was a concrete pit six feet deep and fourteen feet wide and ten feet long where the slugs of round or rectangular or oblong or oval metal that were punched out by the various dies used in the press fell and stuck together with white lithium grease, which dripped down like melting candle wax from the machine. Somebody had to go down in there with a snow shovel and some five-gallon buckets once in a while and clean all that shit out, but Jimmy's daddy's job was to take the left gear off the press and fix a bad crack in it before it killed somebody. He didn't really know what the hell he was doing, had just transferred to Maintenance from Spot-Welding a few months ago, was just doing what they told him to do: take a big gear off. John Wayne Payne, the guy he accidentally crushed, had evolved over the years into a nonpareil forklift driver who still lived with his mother in Water Valley and was smooth and efficient and deadly quiet, his Towmotor muffler noise muffled way down by good mufflers that were put on at the Towmotor factory. He was so good that he could drive his lift up to a railroad car full of dishwashers, stacked in their soft cardboard cartons four high, cross the dockboard without looking down, and squinch his eyes up behind his glasses and peer through the greasy yellow mast and insert the hand-grinder-sharpened tips of his forks between the first and second dishwasher and lift out three without tearing a carton.
He could take that same quiet propane-swigging machine and go down the dim and lonely aisles between the tall, rusted steel die racks, next to the Press Department, where hundreds of dies that sometimes weighed thousands of pounds were stacked on dark oily shelves, and pluck one from its resting place thirty-three feet high as nimbly as an osprey grabs a mullet from a marsh. […] One day they'd staged an in-plant forklift-driving contest, no contest. If anybody in the plant had a flat tire by lunchtime, he'd drive his lift out on the parking lot while he ate his sandwich with one hand and raise the car with it to keep anybody from having to jack it up. He'd eaten unfried baloney on white with mayonnaise and two or three drops of Louisiana Red Hot Sauce every single work day on his lunch break for the last nineteen years. Only two sick days, and was actually sick both times, the flu once, and then the heartbreak of salmonella poisoning from some bad chicken his mother fried one Sunday. Didn't make her sick. Didn't like chicken.

But in order to get this gear down off this crucial machine, which was dangerous as hell, since they were way up there in the air messing around with very heavy stuff, which could kill or amputate somebody or maybe even several somebodies real easy if something happened, say something gave, or broke, or slipped, as something sometimes does, what they'd done through an outside contractor in Dallas was set up near the big monster press a huge yellow Mitsubishi bridge-building crane they'd brought in through the tall back doors of the factory and amid all the workers and the other presses and the moving forklifts like the one John Wayne Payne drove and the slamming and the whirring, and Jimmy's daddy had gone up on a wooden pallet on another forklift, one they called Big Mama, to attach a chain on the crane to the gear and knock out the retaining pin and catch it before it fell and then force the gear off its spline with a hydraulic press so that they could lower it to the floor and fix the crack, weld the crack, and that was taking a while, a couple of days, and slowing down everything in the Press Department, because people who were supposed to be working in the middle of all the bedlam were always standing around rubbernecking and watching them take the big press apart, because it was pretty amazing, what they were doing, up in the air like that, and now Jimmy's daddy was pausing for a smoke break twenty feet off the floor, standing on the pallet, looking
out over everything, the Spot-Welding Department and the Tool-and-Die Department and the Porcelain Department and even down to the edge of the line where they were putting the stoves together, and he could just barely catch a glimpse of that new girl with the God-awful tit-ties who worked down there, unbelievable, like half-grown watermelons, the same woman everybody in the break room snuck looks at while they were eating their baloney sandwiches. Everybody was chickenshit to say anything to her. Jimmy's daddy wanted to say something to her, something like
Hey, baby, you want to come over here and sit on my face?
Who knew? Hell, she might say yes. Fuck her damn brains out maybe. In the parking lot? At lunch? Was that too much to hope for? Reckon what she ate for lunch? Probably not baloney.

[…]

“You gonna stand there all day with your thumb up your ass or you gonna get that gear off that spline?”

Jimmy's daddy looked down. Collums's face was still looking up. Collums. Chief of the Maintenance Department. Hardly ever said anything. Big guy, gray haired. No teeth on top. Kept his hands on his hips a lot. Mysterious background. Maybe from up north. Had kind of a nasal voice. Always wore neat blue coveralls and a neat blue cap. You never saw any grease on him. It was almost like grease wouldn't stick to him, and he practically lived in grease. Had the habit of staring at something he was going to fix for a very long time before fixing it. Like he was thinking about how he was going to fix it. Could fix anything mechanical. Could fix any machine in the entire plant, didn't matter what it was: sheet metal brake, computer, forklift, cherry picker, spot-weld machine, glue gun, press, Mr. Coffee, time clock, Towmotor. Could fix any machine on the entire parking lot: Ford, Chevy, GMC, Dodge, Mitsubishi, Honda, Toyota, Buick. Could weld anything. Could weld aluminum. Most people couldn't even think about welding aluminum. Drank a half pint of whisky every afternoon. Stopped at C&M liquor store down on South Lamar every afternoon and got one. Jimmy's daddy didn't know how many he drank on the weekends because he didn't see him on the weekends. He didn't
want
to see him on the weekends. He saw enough of him five days a week. Jimmy's daddy dropped his cigarette on the pallet and was going to step on it, but it fell through a crack and landed on
top of somebody's head down on the floor and the somebody looked up and said something. Fuck him if he didn't like it.

“Yeah, just had a smoke, Collums, I'm about to get it,” he said.

“Don't let that pin jump out,” Collums said.

“You done already told me twice.”

Then he picked up his hammer and started hitting on the retaining pin again. It was about four inches in diameter, about twenty-four inches long, and it was hard to drive out, even with the locking collar off, but he was making progress, hitting it with some steady long swings, only thing, the small sledgehammer gave your arms and shoulders out after a while, and you had to stop and rest, you couldn't just keep swinging it forever. But he was making progress. It was moving out a little, not much. It was a very tight fit. He guessed it was supposed to be that way.

Jimmy's daddy kept hitting it. Where in hell could those people be going on those four-wheelers? How'd they keep from getting caught by the cops since four-wheelers weren't legal on roads, just off-roads? He'd seen some deputies loading some four-wheelers up on a car hauler one night on the road down below his trailer, where he'd almost wrecked the go-kart. He kept hitting it. He needed to get an inspection sticker on the '55 before he ran through a roadblock one afternoon. He kept hitting it. Suddenly it jumped out and before he could grab it or try to it fell and bounced off the edge of the press and turned in midair, a flying cylindrical metal projectile, and catapulted into the gray block wall of the Grinding Department and knocked a big chunk out of it about a foot above some guy grinding something with sparks showering his face and dark goggles. Cement dust rained down on the guy's head and he looked up. It bounced off that wall without killing him, but then bounced across the floor tumbling like a runaway bowling pin. It hit a good-looking secretary from the front office wearing safety glasses who was walking back to the front office through the Press Department in the leg and, since it weighed nearly eighty pounds, broke it. She screamed and fell and kept screaming. A shard of bloody bone was sticking out of her leg and there was grease on her red dress and Jimmy's daddy could see that she was wearing black bikini panties. John Wayne Payne quietly passed beneath Jimmy's daddy on his lift at almost the same moment. That was when
the crack in the gear, which must have been much worse than they'd thought, gave way close to the chain, and the enormous gear broke into two halves, one to crash thunderously straight down to the floor twenty-two feet beneath, shattering concrete, knocking workers off their feet, raising a big cloud of dust, narrowly missing two running workers, the other to fall directly on the yellow steel cage over John Wayne Payne's Towmotor, which was not built to adequately protect the driver from something that weighed as much as half the big gear. It made a horrible sound. Like a bomb. Dust flew out.