Free A Miracle of Catfish by Larry Brown

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