Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [60]
After building a little stack of food in front of Lewis, Libby turned her attention to Joe. “Don’t take that militaristic jerk personally. We’ve run into some real doozies out here, I swear. Once, Lewis and I decided to go fishing at night and a huge family was encamped right along this inlet. Mom, dad, grandparents, fifty million kids, two mean little mutts barking all the time. They had Coleman lanterns, radios, a portable TV playing the ball game. They must’ve had about fifteen lines in the water. Lewis and I were forced way out on the spit”—Libby waved toward the lake—“where we’d never catch anything. After an hour or so, we gave up.
“We’re walking back to our car, trying to sneak past the dogs, when the grandfather calls us over. Do we want some catfish? he asks, only we don’t understand him right away. He has a funny accent, or maybe a speech impediment. ‘Got morn we kin et up,’ he says. ‘Got three freezers full at home.’ Lewis—the cook here—says, sure, we’ll take some catfish.” Libby paused to take a drink of Pepsi.
“We didn’t know what we were in for,” Lewis said.
“No lie,” said Libby. “The old guy takes us to his wife. ‘Mammy,’ he says, ‘give these folks your fish.’ So the old gal hauls a stringer out of the water, hand over hand. Meanwhile, the kids gather around us, close. I keep thinking they’re touching my clothes, but when I turn to look, they shrink back. The dogs are sniffing our ankles. The whole family is, I don’t know, a few bricks short. Big, wide faces. Thin, almost nonexistent lips. Eyes really far apart.
“And the fish! They were the biggest cats I’ve ever seen. Twelve and fourteen pounds. Bigger than the dogs. The woman pulls one fish off the stringer, hugs it around the middle and gathers it to her chest like she’s cuddling a baby. The fish isn’t dead, so it’s writhing all down her chest, slithering out of her arms, down her legs, probably stinging her like crazy. When it finally hits the ground, one of the boys pins it with a sharp stick until Lewis and I can get it on our stringer. We take the other fish too, don’t ask me why. I don’t know what we were thinking.”
“We were thinking,” said Lewis, “about fried catfish with my jalapeño sauce.”
“Yeah, but when we got home, we had to skin the damn things before we could go to bed.” Libby reached over and touched Red’s pant leg. “You ever skinned a catfish?”
“No,” Red croaked. He took a swig of Pepsi. Something had lodged in his upper chest, his gorge. It hurt to swallow.
“Normally,” Libby said, “you nail their heads to a piece of wood and pull the skin off with pliers.”
“Yuck,” said Joe.
“It is yucky,” said Libby. “But it’s the easiest way. Except these fish were so big, I didn’t have a nail long enough to go through their heads and stick in the wood.”
“You’d need a railroad spike,” said Lewis.
“Oh, God, it was five in the morning before we finally got to bed, and then neither one of us could sleep.”
Libby stopped talking and looked at Red. “You okay?”
Red found that by sitting perfectly still, he could ignore the sensation in his chest. He gave what he thought would pass for a confident nod, although even that quick tilt of the neck shot needlelike sprays of pain through his chest.
Libby frowned, but went on with her story. “So anyway, we’re lying in bed and Lewis starts talking. And it’s like he’s saying exactly the same things that were running through my mind. ‘All I can think about are fish,’ he says. ‘I feel like I’m swimming in a school of fish. I feel like I am a fish. Where did those people come from? Why were their eyes were so far apart?’ And then, Lewis sits bolt upright in bed and yells, ‘They weren’t people, they were catfish!’ ”
Red tried to laugh, but the obstruction in his chest was too big and too painful. It felt, he had to admit, exactly like his heart. In fact, there was no doubt: his heart was swelling, about to burst.