A Miracle of Catfish (60 page)

“Now all we got to do is get some blankets and pillows and the air mattresses,” Herschel said. “Then we got to get them
Playboy
magazines out of Daddy's closet fore he gets home.” Then Herschel said, “Oh crap!”

“What is it?” Jimmy said.

“I gotta go to the bathroom,” Herschel said, already moving rapidly toward the house.

“Okay,” Jimmy said.

“You can play with Rex while I'm in there,” Herschel said, and hurried toward the house and went inside. The door slammed behind him.

Jimmy looked at the dog. It was sitting there watching him, and it held up one paw, obviously inviting him to come over and shake hands. Jimmy went over, bent down on one knee, and reached for the paw.

“Hey, Rex,” he said. The German shepherd was a big dog, a heavy dog, and he knocked Jimmy over and somehow turned him around and then started hunching enthusiastically against his butt and groaning. Jimmy was on all fours and horrified and he tried to pull away, but the dog growled in his ear and then locked his front legs around Jimmy's neck, pounding at him. And making this terrible groaning. And scratching the hell out of Jimmy's neck with his claws. Jimmy tried to pull away again, and the dog let loose a ferocious growl against Jimmy's ear, and Jimmy was too scared to move. But he didn't really want to stay where he was either, so he started trying to crawl away very slowly. The dog went with him, steadily humping against Jimmy's butt. Jimmy wondered if he should scream for help. But who was there to hear him? Herschel was in there sitting on the commode. Jimmy didn't have any idea what was going on, but he thought he might be getting pregnant. Would it make him have puppies? It might. He thought about hitting the dog, but he was afraid the dog would bite him if he did that or maybe even tear his throat out. He kept trying to get away and the dog kept humping him and they went across the yard like that, until Jimmy got to the end of the chain, and then he made a big jerk and pulled away from Rex. Finally. His neck felt scratched.

He got up and dusted his hands off and looked at the dog. His red rubber rod was way out.
Oh my God
, Jimmy thought.
I'm pregnant.
He tried to look around and see the seat of his pants, but he couldn't see anything. He didn't know if anything had gone up inside him or not. It kind of felt like maybe something had.

[…] Herschel's daddy, Herman, came home before Herschel could get out of the bathroom, and Herman came out in the backyard and introduced himself to Jimmy and petted Rex, and then Herschel came back out and they lit the fire with some old newspapers. They didn't get to get the
Playboy
magazines from the closet. It wasn't actually cold enough for a fire, […] and the smoke kept shifting and getting in their faces, and then Jimmy kept burning his hot dogs because the coat hangers kept drooping down way too low over the fire, so that they were burned totally black on one end, and raw on the other end […].

And then the ghost stories that Herschel's daddy told after dark around the campfire weren't very scary, and Jimmy had a pretty good suspicion that Herschel's daddy was just making them up as he went along, because he kept pausing to think of what came next, and even when he finished one it wasn't very good. They went into the house for some ice cream and cookies at one point, and Rex kept whining on his chain, and later Jimmy could hear him through the thin walls of the tent while they were trying to get to sleep. Probably wanting another go at him. Sometime during the night he saw dimly Herschel doing something to himself, down there, with his hand, and figured he was probably beating off. Whatever that was.

The next day they got up and messed around with Herschel's daddy's metal detectors, but one of them had a low battery, and the other one was according to Herschel a real piece of shit and would go off for something like an old ink pen, so they spent most of the day messing around the foundation of a bait shop up the road that had been torn down about ten years ago, just some cinder blocks sitting in the weeds, and they didn't find anything but bottle caps and a key and a few rusty nails and a hair barrette and nuts and bolts.

[…]

They went out to eat that night at Applebee's, but it was pretty crowded, and they had to wait in line for about forty-five minutes until they even got to put their name on the waiting list, because Ole Miss had played football with Alabama that day and had lost, so all the Alabama people were still in town and gloating over the win and wanting to eat and drink and gloat some more before they went home, so it took a while to get inside. And after they got seated, the manager had some
kind of screaming shouting match with one of the waitresses and fired her, right in front of a bunch of people, and Jimmy sat in a padded booth and watched all that and wondered if he was pregnant with a bunch of puppies. And if he was, where would they come out? Would they come out his butthole? And how long did it take? Because he was pretty sure something had gone up inside him. Sitting there looking at the menu, trying to decide between chicken fried steak and fried chicken, he wondered about it. He wondered what beating off was. Had he missed anything by not joining Herschel in beating off? Was he going to have some puppies? He sure hoped not. Wouldn't they drown in the toilet bowl water when they came out?

Jimmy's daddy was freezing his ass off. His feet were so cold that he couldn't feel them anymore, and the sun wasn't even up yet. He was perched shivering on a metal deer stand that he and Rusty had hauled into the cutover in Old Dallas a few weeks back, and raised up and chained to a pine tree. Jimmy's daddy didn't much like sitting in a pine tree. It didn't seem natural. He would have preferred to be sitting in some thick woods in something like a big white oak, but there weren't any of those left anywhere close around him, since cutover was just what it sounded like. All the big trees were gone except for some dead snags still standing here and there, nothing but roosts for buzzards. And there was nothing out there in front of Jimmy's daddy but hundreds of acres of small pines about four or five feet tall, and he knew already that he wasn't going to see anything mainly because it was a shitty place to hunt. He wasn't in a very good mood, and part of that was still because of Lacey. She wouldn't even look at him at work now, like she'd already written him off completely, and she was starting to show. She also seemed to be pretty happy. Whenever he saw her in the break room, she was laughing and joking with her friends. The big-tittied heifer had quit, but since he wasn't on speaking terms with Lacey anymore, he couldn't ask her where the big-tittied heifer had gone. He didn't care anyway. She wasn't nothing but a bitch. Sticking her damn nose in places where it didn't belong.

Jimmy's daddy had been sitting here since before daylight, and there was a hard white frost on, and he could see it everywhere on the grass in front of him. The temperature had gone way down last night, close to twenty, and he was shaking inside his clothes. His breath was fogging in front of his face. His nose was running. He wished he had better hunting clothes. He wished he had some Gore-Tex long underwear, and maybe some heated hunting socks with batteries that strapped around your ankle to keep your feet warm. They used two AA batteries. He'd seen some in a Cabela's catalog. About fifty bucks. Same price as a nice
spear point. He hadn't smoked a cigarette yet, but he was sure wanting one. He knew he wasn't supposed to smoke while he was hunting, because the deer could smell the cigarette smoke, but he didn't know if he could wait much longer or not.

He tried to be still, but it was hard when it was this cold. His ass had already gone to sleep and his rifle was cold in his hands because he'd forgotten to get some gloves. That was another thing he needed: gloves. Maybe he could drop a hint to Johnette and get some for Christmas. Which was right around the corner. No telling how much Christmas was going to cost. He didn't have any idea what to get anybody. He'd probably have to go shopping with Johnette and he hated having to do that almost worse than anything else. And he wished he had a sleeping bag. That's what Rusty hunted from, a sleeping bag. Rusty hauled his rolled-up sleeping bag up into the tree stand with him, and unrolled it, and he took off his boots, and slipped down inside the sleeping bag and pushed the top down so that he could see over it, and then he sat down in his chair that he had bolted up there and picked up his rifle. He said his feet never got cold in the sleeping bag. He said you could be out there on the coldest morning there was, and if you had that sleeping bag pulled up around you, you didn't even have to wear a coat. But Jimmy's daddy wasn't sitting inside a sleeping bag, and he was cold. He thought he was colder than he'd ever been in his life, and that included a coon-hunting trip with his daddy a long time ago when he was just a boy. They'd been down in a river bottom somewhere, with a bunch of blue-ticks and redbones and treeing walkers, with ice crackling underfoot everywhere, and they'd gotten lost and had been forced to wade a couple of sloughs to find their way back to the truck, breaking ice as they went, and the water had gone up past his thighs, and then he'd had to keep walking in his slowly freezing wet pants for almost an hour. And it had been unbearable. When he'd started to cry from the cold and the pain, his daddy had called him a sissy and told him he'd never take him hunting again. And he had kept his word.
Old hardass son of a bitch. Sit your ass over there in the damn woods by yourself if you want to. See if I care.

[…]

Jimmy's daddy began to wish that he'd brought a Thermos of hot coffee with him. He knew he had a Thermos somewhere because Johnette
had given him one for Christmas a few years ago. How good would that be right now? A steaming cup, the vapors drifting up to his nose, in the middle of all this cold. Why didn't he ever plan for stuff like that? Why didn't he start looking for a good place to hunt about six months before hunting season instead of depending on Rusty to find him a place and then being disappointed? It was always like this. He was always sitting in the wrong place, whether it was a dove field or a deer stand.

He heard a rifle fire somewhere far off, a faint
pow
, he couldn't even tell in which direction. Just one shot. It wasn't close enough to be Rusty because Rusty was only a few ridges over, out of sight of Jimmy's daddy.

Jimmy's daddy sat there, thinking about lighting a cigarette. He hadn't had one now in over thirty minutes, because he hadn't wanted to smoke walking in to the stand. Right now he thought maybe a cigarette might make him warmer somehow. But he held off. You never knew. There might be a big buck out there just about to step from behind one of those pine trees. You had to remain alert. You had to be still. You didn't need to smoke. Scratch your ass. Sneeze. Cough. He'd never seen anybody smoking in any of his hunting videos. That didn't mean that they didn't do it off-camera. Jimmy's daddy knew they could edit stuff out. The videos didn't show them eating meals or going to the bathroom or blowing their noses either, but he knew they did.

He kept sitting there and thinking about it. What was one cigarette going to hurt? Hell, he was almost twenty feet off the ground. That smoke was going to drift off. And if a deer never had smelled cigarette smoke, how did it know to be scared of it? He didn't think it would hurt anything to smoke just one. Since he wasn't going to see anything anyway. But he held off a while longer. It was important to remain strong as long as you could.

He took one hand off his rifle and stuck it just inside the zipper of his coat to try and warm it up a little because it was so stiff from the cold. That was the hand that held his trigger finger. Hell, he
had
to keep it warm. That big monster buck might be right out there in front of him, only hidden.

He kept sitting there. Sitting there and sitting there and sitting there. Nothing was moving. Not even a bird. Then he saw one bird. A cardinal.
The sun still wasn't up. It was kind of cloudy, so maybe it wasn't going to come up. When his hand warmed up a little, he took it out of his coat and stuck the other one in. If a big buck jumped up he'd have to switch hands. But no big buck jumped up. He kept sitting there. He tried to wriggle his toes but they were so dead to him that he couldn't feel them wriggling. And then he saw a deer. Two deer. A doe and her baby. Just stepping from the edge of the pines. Not over a hundred feet away.

Jimmy's daddy immediately started shaking from excitement. It was just a doe and her baby, true, but they were deer. If there were two deer here, there might be more. There might be a big buck following them, wanting to breed the doe. The rut might have already started. The baby had already lost its spots, but it wasn't very big. It might have weighed thirty pounds. Jimmy's daddy knew that it wasn't a legal deer. But the doe was. You could take a doe. Rusty might cut his shirttail off if he shot a doe, but hey, it was still fresh deer meat. But what about this? If he shot the doe, what would happen to the baby? Would it starve? Nah. It wouldn't starve. Hell. It lived in the woods. It could find something to eat. All it had to do was walk over there into the edge of those hard-woods and start picking up some acorns. So Jimmy's daddy started positioning himself for a shot. Very slowly. Moving in little increments of movement. He had to get his trigger-finger hand around the grip and start raising the rifle, which he'd already sighted in about three months ago. He had bumped the scope getting out of the truck with Rusty this morning, in the dark, but Rusty had said that it probably hadn't hurt anything. And Jimmy's daddy sure hoped that it hadn't.

The doe lowered her head and nibbled at something on the ground. The fawn flicked its tail and walked forward and stuck its head between its mother's back legs and started nursing. Aw shit. It wasn't even weaned yet. Jimmy's daddy had been in the process of raising the rifle, but now he stopped. Maybe it wasn't big enough to eat acorns. Maybe it would starve. And then, as he sometimes did, like when he first kissed Lacey, he had a revelation. Maybe he ought to shoot both of them and gut them and then come back tonight and sneak them out of the woods. If you got caught with two and one of them was illegal, no telling what the fine would be. Much more than for having wet beer in a dry county probably.