Free A Miracle of Catfish by Larry Brown Page B

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. Thatruined 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. […]

15
    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