A Miracle of Catfish (7 page)

He pulled in for burnt coffee at Stillwater, a college town. He had to take the big truck by a service station and gas it up anyway, and he stood out there in the new concrete parking lot under a bright overhead light at a BP just like all the others around the country and watched laughing kids lounging around their cars and playing their music loud. Kids these days, they were troubled. They were lost. That was why so many of them ended up in prison. All because nobody cared about them. Or they didn't have a daddy around. Or got mistreated when they were little. Some people didn't even need to have kids. He didn't know how people could do the stuff they did. But look at him. Standing on the concrete in Stillwater, needing sleep, putting more gas on a card that was already almost overdrawn. He should have walked out when he was up eighty-seven thousand dollars. Three months ago. He could have walked out the door with the money and paid almost everything off. Instead of being how he was now. One hundred fifty-three thousand dollars down. It was scary. He was going to have to make that payment to the bank. And it was nineteen thousand dollars. Where was it going to come from? Hell. If he sold the fish farm he might as well just go ahead and die. He didn't want to go back to working for somebody else's fish farm.

You could have held it together
, he told himself.
But no. Not you
. […]

He finished and went inside and paid for the gas and the coffee and some gum. He climbed back up into the seat and started it and pulled out. He could feel the water sloshing in the tanks. He knew that all the fish back there were already dead, black crappie, redear bream, channel catfish, bass. The aerators had been off too long while he was in the Indian casino. He'd have to dump them somewhere before long or he'd have a rotted clotted mess to clean up back there when he got home. Oklahoma's roads were lonely and black and strung with rusted barbed wire. The radio played songs by homeboys. Toby Keith. Vince Gill. Garth Brooks. The radio sang their songs and the tires sang theirs through the night toward Crowley's Ridge, the geological phenomenon where he lived. Lots of hawks there, too. Almost one for every fence post. Redtails mostly. They were there because of all the updrafts around Crowley's
Ridge that made it easy to sail and lift without having to flap their wings very much. It was the same reason fish liked water. It was easy for them to live in.

And what would he do about Ursula?

Oh shit. What
would
he do about Ursula?

They were men and women, boys and girls, some small ones not big enough to drive one yet since they were still in Pampers strapped on their mothers' backs like papooses in knapsacks with holes cut for their chubby legs. The grown people wore caps and T-shirts and blue jeans and dungarees and pants suits and overalls and some of the women who were older had their hair in pink curlers. They were on ATVs, Kawasakis, Yamahas, Suzukis, Polarises, Hondas, Arctic Cats, green and red and blue and black and tan, all slowly churning dust, all headed somewhere in a solid line, like covered wagons crossing a prairie, up the gravel into that slanting evening sun on the road that climbed the hill past Jimmy's daddy's trailer's yard that had no grass.

He stood there transfixed and watched them with a new exhaust manifold gasket for the '55 in his hand. They came from somewhere out of the river bottom, he supposed, and they were always strung out in a line that proceeded with dignity and purpose, their hands firmly locked on the handlebars, their cold beers between their legs, riding in foam-rubber Koozies, riding along with them. Sometimes they lifted one hand and took a drink. Whenever they came by they all waved, even the children. Even the little children. Some of them were holding their own bottles and waved with them. Their coolers were in racks behind them, strapped snugly down with black rubber cargo cords like NAPA sells. A few outriders had nylon-stocked .22 rifles slung across the handlebars as if looking for trouble. Or free meat. What with twenty-pound logger-heads crossing the roads in dry spells looking for water sometimes. The chance feral suckling piglet, trapped squealing in rusted roadside hog wire. The succulent vealish steaks of the apparently orphaned spotted fawn. Jake turkeys too stupid to run from a gun. Sometimes they displayed their captured roadkill, dead bunnies or stiffened squirrels strapped to coolers like coup feathers that danced on a war lance.

They were strung out behind each other in a long line and they raised a thin stream of dust like horses on a trail and they swept uphill in a
caravan of four-wheelers, the fat black rubber tires churning, the little papooses asleep or bawling, the old darkly tanned guys in their retirement years with their John Deere caps sipping beer as they rode, the children bringing up the trail end. Into the wooded hills. Into the sunset. Drinking cold beer. In a caravan. Where did they go? What did they see? The sight of them always put a longing in Jimmy's daddy's heart to go with them, down the road, into the woods, wherever they were going, wherever that was. Maybe one day he would. Maybe one day he could.

It didn't rain. It didn't rain and it didn't rain and it didn't rain. It didn't rain a drop. It would not rain. It refused to rain. It didn't rain in the morning, didn't rain at lunch, and it sure as hell didn't rain in the afternoon or in the evenings or at night. It didn't rain at all. And that was just the first week.

Cortez Sharp sat around on the porch and waited for it to rain. He studied the sky, but the sky didn't need to be studied. The sky was clear. It didn't have any rain clouds in it. There was no thunder in the distance to hear. No crackling lightning walked blasting down from the line of the dim watershed in the distance to stab the nights jagged in white electric fire.

He watched the weather report. This was not something new. Being a farmer, he'd always watched the weather report, ever since they'd invented TVs and started selling them. The first one he'd owned, back when he was still farming with mules, was a large wood cabinet model, an RCA Victor with a round screen. Had that little label with that dog listening to a gramophone. Back before Victor got out of the picture. That must have been back in the late forties. And it wouldn't pick up much. There wasn't much to pick up. Just the big stations and their few small affiliates around Memphis and Tupelo and Columbus. Later on, on up in the sixties, on Saturday afternoons, you could get
The Porter Wagoner Show
out of Nashville with Dolly Parton before she got famous. But even before he'd gotten a TV, he'd always listened to the weather on the radio. That was back when he used to pick up the Grand Ole Opry live out of Nashville. He'd listened to Hank Williams himself for a couple of years in the very early fifties. He used to listen to him duet with Kitty Wells. That was fifty years ago. Then he died in the backseat of a Cadillac. Where did the time get off to that quick? And why did it go so much faster when you got older? How come you didn't think about it when you were young?

[…]

One day about two o'clock it pissed down a few measly raindrops.
Big deal. […] There was a cloud up there about as big as a box of dog biscuits. A few drops hit the tin roof and splattered off into the dust and soaked away and that was it. Cortez leaned out from the porch and held his hand out. When he pulled it back it was dry. […]

And it didn't rain. Not there. It rained in other places. […] It rained in Texas plenty. It rained in the rain forests all the time. But it didn't rain there. It wouldn't rain there at all, while he was waiting for it. So he decided to stop waiting for it. He just ignored it. He just tried to forget about it. But that didn't do any good because it still didn't rain. One day when it didn't rain fed into another day when it didn't rain like locomotives hooked together on a train and it didn't rain again and it didn't rain again […]. Which actually got to be good. Because that meant that the time had to be drawing nearer when it would actually rain. Because he knew it wouldn't just go forever without raining. Because everything would dry up and die if that happened. The rivers would all run dry. All the crops would fail. All the animals would die of thirst. There'd be a big famine like in the Bible. But that wouldn't happen. Not in Mississippi. It would have to rain sometime. He didn't know for sure what the longest amount of time was that he'd gone through without seeing it rain, but it couldn't be over a couple of months. He'd lost a few corn crops from lack of rain, years and years ago, but never cotton. Cotton could make it without rain if it had to, if you had a good stand up, if it was clean and wasn't full of weevils and cockleburs, and it might not be the biggest cotton in the world, it might not be over knee high, but it would make a crop and a check. […] But watermelons? Which were mostly water? With no rain? Forget about it. Let the coyotes have them. Which reminded him that he needed to shoot a few of them sons of bitches, too. He was getting tired of hearing them at night. They got all those little bitty dogs down the road stirred up. He thought he'd seen a doghouse up under the trailer before. He wondered if those little bitty dogs lived up under there. He wondered where they'd gotten those little bitty dogs. He didn't think he'd ever seen any that small. Lucinda when she was a girl had one of them little Chihuahua dogs and it was a lot bigger than these little dogs down the road. Hell, they weren't much bigger than baby rabbits. Where the hell'd they get them damn dogs at?

[…]

It just stayed dry and hot and the stalks of Clemson okra in Cortez's garden grew tall and clustered their fruit together in curvy green fingers and he walked among them carrying a yellow Tupperware bowl from the kitchen and cut the pods off with a paring knife. His tomatoes ripened slowly, hanging heavily from their vines under the shade of the rough leaves, growing from a solid shiny green at the top to a red that began halfway up, and he set them on the old wooden table in the shade of the chinaberry tree and they were firm and delicious when he made a tomato sandwich for lunch. Sometimes he made his wife one. She didn't have any teeth. He didn't have enough to write home about. She could gum hers enough to swallow it if she had some cold milk to go along with it. He hardly ever talked to her. If he did it was about the pond. She hadn't even seen it. She hadn't said anything about wanting to see it. If she did want to see it, he would have to pick her up out of her wheelchair and carry her out to the truck and then set her down somewhere for a second while he opened the door and put her in. Then he'd have to go back in the house and get her wheelchair and load it into the back end. Then drive her over there. Then get the wheelchair out. Then put her in it. Then try to push her wheelchair down that rough old log road.

But that would be a lot of trouble. He didn't figure she cared anything about seeing the pond. Only thing she cared about seeing was
Oprah Winfrey
. Lucinda liked her, too. So did that dirty-mouthed retard who lived with Lucinda. Whenever they were here, which was usually only at Christmas, all three of them watched
Oprah Winfrey
in the afternoons. Those were good times to try and have a nap in his bedroom where hopefully he'd wind up back on the clean river's mossy banks with the naked angel girls. He'd been trying to have that dream again but it hadn't happened yet. He sure wanted it to.

Meanwhile it didn't rain. He wondered, once his pond got full, if it would get low if it didn't rain for a while. He knew how ponds were. In hot weather they went down when it didn't rain. Evaporated some of that water. Which came back down somewhere as rain. It didn't come back down over the pond, though, he knew that. It might come back down in Finland. Or Argentina. There was no telling where the rain that fell on his place had originally come from. Maybe Mexico. Maybe Massachusetts.

But it didn't rain, so he drove back out to the pond through the old log road and walked down in it again. What he saw were tire tracks. Small ones. Donuts cut in the new dry dirt. And a bunch of little tiny tracks like a horse trail, only they were paw prints. They looked like dog tracks. And there were footprints. One set that was barefooted, another one that had shoes. Not tennis shoes. A plain flat track like maybe a patent leather shoe would leave.

Damn kids at that trailer. Had to be. He'd seen that go-kart come flying by, throwing gravel everywhere. They were down here messing around and they didn't have any business messing around down here. He'd get some
POSTED
signs is what he'd do. Stick them up around the pond. They had some at Sneed's. They were coming in on this old road is where they were coming in. He could get some wire and put up a barrier. Maybe barbed wire. No, not barbed wire. That might hurt one of them. They might come flying along in that go-kart and not see it and it might put one of them's eye out. Or he could just go down to that trailer and tell their daddy to keep them off his place. That might work better than putting up signs and a wire barrier. But he didn't look like he was home very much. He saw him going up and down the road in that junky-ass old car. Looked like a '56.

In a way he guessed he didn't blame them. They were kids. They got excited easily. He knew they'd get excited about a big new hole in the ground and would probably wonder what it was. He knew that little boy he'd seen on the levee was one of them. He didn't know much about the family. He'd seen the man's wife out in the yard a few times hanging clothes on a line she'd strung between a pine tree and a stick somebody had propped up in the ground. He'd noticed that she had a nice big butt. Cortez had always liked a nice big butt. His wife had always had kind of a flat, skinny butt, not really much of a butt, kind of like a partly deflated balloon. He didn't know why in the hell he'd married her. He'd noticed that the back of the trailer didn't have any steps on it. And the back door looked like it was about four feet off the ground. Long way to step down. You'd have to
jump
down. It looked like the guy would have built a back porch by now. A man needed a back porch. He was sure glad he had one. He knew that trailer had been there for over a year. What he'd heard was that they'd bought that piece of land off old Harvey Miller's
boy after Harvey died. And then Harvey's boy had come up there and bulldozed them a piece of a driveway in and put a culvert in and put some gravel down, even around the back, and it looked like they'd want some grass around that trailer instead of just gravel, but it wasn't any of his business how they wanted to live. Just as long as those kids stayed off his land. That was one thing he wasn't going to put up with: somebody coming on his land.