Free The Bottom Feeders and Other Stories by Aaron Polson Page B

Springdale Saints’ district championship squad.
He was even the frontrunner for class valedictorian, but the name
held on, as stubborn things will in small towns. His brother,
Barry, had been one of the finest scholar-athletes to graduate from
Springdale High School.
    “ Where’s the fish?” Barry
asked.
    The four young men stood around the stained
cooler in Allen’s garage. The grayish fish-thing thrashed about,
splashing a little water over the edge each time someone disturbed
its temporary home, but otherwise floated motionless in the
muck.
    Joel picked mud from under his fingernails
with a pocketknife. “So, channel cat or not.”
    “ If it is, it sure isn’t
healthy,” Barry said, squatting next to the cooler. “This
color…isn’t right. Those eyes…I think it might be dead.”
    “ Dead?” Allen asked. His
voice shot up an extra octave.
    “ Well, it looks dead.
Smell’s dead, too. I don’t know what’s keeping it
going.”
    “ So what do we do? Filet
the thing, have a fry up with some beers?” Joel chuckled and then
shook his head.
    “ I’m not eating that shit,”
Allen squeaked.
    “ No,” Barry said as he
stood. “We aren’t going to fucking eat it. Are you really as dumb
as Gavin says?”
    Allen frowned.
    “ I’m going to call one of
my professors.”
    “ Your professor?” Joel
flicked the knife shut on his pant leg. “What the hell
for?”
    Barry shook his head slowly and scratched
his chin. “I don’t know. But something’s not right.” He glanced at
his brother who was leaning against the side of the garage. “Look,
I better get Gavin home”

    “ You sure we should be
doing this?” Allen asked as Joel steered his truck over the rough
gravel roads in Greenwillow Cemetery.
    Joel shrugged. “Look, do you want to keep
that freak-o-fish at your place this weekend?”
    Allen squirmed in his seat. “Hell no. But
what if Barry wants to see it again—”
    “ I don’t give a shit. The
college-boy can fish it out of the pond.” Joel squinted into the
gathering twilight ahead of the truck. “’sides, if it is a good
sized channel—even a mutant one, it can take out some of the nasty
little bullhead up there in Potter’s Pond. Maybe make the fishing
worthwhile.”
    “ Yeah, I ‘spose so. But
what if it is sick. Diseased or whatever Barry said?”
    Joel smiled. “Well, it’ll clear up Potter’s
Pond either way.”
    Just beyond the city limit of Springdale,
Kansas, in the woods beyond the boundary fence of Greenwillow
Cemetery rested an abandoned farm pond. Years of disuse allowed the
trees and brush—mostly crooked spruce trees, sickly cottonwoods,
and gnarled redbuds—to encroach on the shores of Potter’s Pond. The
name spun from the pauper’s graves, Potter’s Fields, of old. The
boys understood little of the Potter’s Pond legend, only vague
myths about the poor of Springdale being tossed to its green depths
when they couldn’t pay for a decent funeral. That’s what the old
men at Jenson’s Hardware joked about every time the boys bought a
few dozen worms for bait so they could spend a Sunday afternoon
catching tiny bullhead when they were younger. The pond teemed with
those small members of the catfish family.
    Joel brought the truck to a rough stop on
the road nearest the barbed-wire fence marking the edge of the
cemetery. “Look, you coming? Or do I have to lug that damn cooler
all by myself?”
    Allen glanced out the window, noting the
heavy outline of trees like black fingers lunging toward the
darkening sky. The trees around Potter’s Pond always lost their
leaves earlier than the rest of town. He closed his eyes for a
moment and tried to swallow the deafening thud of his heart. “I’m
coming. But let’s hurry up, all right?”

    Scab missed school on Monday, and both Allen
and Joel were a little concerned.
    When he was gone Tuesday, Allen was
worried.
    “ Do you think we should
call him?” He asked Joel after PE.
    Joel shook extra water from his