Sticking the pole in the dirt so that the line hung in the water, I took the twine out of my pocket and got the perch and ran the cord through its gills, then took it down to the creek and lowered it in on the twine. I tied the twine off to a root sticking out of the bank and went back to fishing.
By the time the sun was up high, I had four perch. I wanted to catch one more, but by then they had quit biting, and I wasn’t up for walking along the creek and trying to find another spot.
I took the fish and gutted them and cleaned them in the cold spring water. I built a fire and got a frying pan out of the flour sack, along with a can of lard. I scooped some lard into the frying pan with my spoon, and when the lard was melting I put the fish in the pan. There wasn’t any flour and egg to make a batter, but they’d fry up good just the same.
One of Jane’s books was in one of the bags, and I got it out to read. It was a book of poems. I wasn’t much on poems, but I read it anyway. I found it was good to move the words around in my mouth and my mind. It had been a while since I had done that, and I had pretty well forgot the fun of reading. I read and smelled the fish fry, pausing now and then to turn them in the lard with my spoon, since we hadn’t been smart enough to bring forks. The smell was starting to make me hungry, and my stomach was growling like a tiger.
I got some salt and pepper and dosed the fish a little with it, and by the time Jane and Tony were awake and come drifting down the hill to the smell of the perch, they were fried up and ready.
When Jane saw that I had been reading her book, she said, “That isn’t
I didn’t say anything to that. I just put the book back in the sack.
“That smells good,” Tony said.
“It’s for all of us,” I said. “Get your plates and spoons.”
We had the fish for breakfast, and they were good, if I say so myself.
And I do.
10
Just about the time I was thinking things weren’t turning out so bad after all, events took a turn for the worse.
I was driving along, and we’d actually been singing songs together, some Carter Family stuff, and though we weren’t too good as singers on the whole, Jane wasn’t bad by herself at all. I liked hearing her sing. She had a high sweet voice that cut the air like a sharp knife and then came floating down soft as a kitten’s belly.
She had taken off on a solo, and I was enjoying it, when we blew a tire. The car sort of bunny-hopped, then skidded, and I fought that wheel all over the place. Next thing I knew we had the back tire off in a ditch and the car was rocking like it was going to lean over on its side and die a hard death with us inside it.
I turned off the engine and got out, and Jane slid out on my side. Tony climbed out too, and we stood looking at the car like we were watching a great ship sink. The back right tire was blown out, and there was rubber all over the road.
“That one’s gone,” Tony said, like nobody could have figured that out without his help.
I touched the car, and it rocked. If I tried to get the spare tire and tools out of the turtle hull and change the flat, I figured the whole car would just turn over in the ditch. It was a big ditch. Wide and deep.
“Well, what now?” Jane said, as if everything we had done was my idea, and I personally had thrown tacks in the road to blow out the tire.
“I ain’t got no idea,” I said.
We stood there for about fifteen minutes, trying to will the car back on the road so we could fix the tire, but that wasn’t getting anything done. I was thinking on an idea that might work, if I held my mouth just right and the ground didn’t shift. Most likely, it was an idea that would end up with me in the ditch, under the car, with the blown-out tire and wheel lying down on my chest.
In other words, it wasn’t an idea that charmed me much, but I was considering on it. I thought I could drag enough limbs out of a pecan grove across the way, stack them in the ditch tight enough so that the blown tire could rest on it, and then drive the car out. It had about as much chance of working as me bending a tree over and getting on it, letting it go, and shooting myself to the moon.
I was about to suggest we start dragging limbs, when we looked up to the sound of an engine. A brown Buick was coming our way. Smoke was curling up from under the hood and filling the air, and I could smell something burning from where we were.
“Looks like we ain’t the only ones with car trouble,” Tony said.
I could see two men. One behind the wheel, the other sitting over on the passenger side. Even through the windshield, I thought they looked like hard men, and the closer they got, the more I was certain of it.
They stopped the car at the edge of the road next to the ditch. Nobody got out for a while. The car sat there and steamed white smoke from under its hood. Finally a man in a brown suit with blue pinstripes got out of the car. He had a light beige shirt on and a big wide tie that was mostly brown with blue designs on it. The way he stretched his leg to get out of the car, I saw he was wearing some two-tone shoes, brown and white, and brown socks with blue clocks on them.
He came forward about halfway between his car and ours, stopped and stared at us, and grinned. He was a nice-looking fella with a square-jawed face. He wasn’t wearing a hat. His dark brown hair was freshly cut. He had a toothpick in his mouth, and he was moving it back and forth over his teeth with his tongue like it was a dog looking for a place to lie down. He had an expression on his face like he’d heard a joke he liked but he wasn’t going to share it.
The other man got out on the passenger side. He was in his shirtsleeves. The shirt was lilac-colored and the rest of what he wore was black. He didn’t have on a tie. He looked a lot more pleasant than the driver.
Both men came over to us. The one in shirtsleeves said, “You kids seem to be in a fix.”
“From what I can tell,” Jane said, “and understand, I’m not a mechanic, but I’d say you got a busted radiator, and from the way your car sounds you might be just shy of a rocker arm going out.”
The man in the pinstripe suit laughed. He said, “No one can miss that the radiator has blown out, but you don’t know from rocker arms.”
“I guess I don’t know much, but I don’t like you coming up here smirking like you’re about to lay out some real mechanic advice or something, and you can’t even fix your own car.”
“Well now,” said the man in pinstripes. “I was actually thinking along those lines myself. I don’t plan on fixing nothing. I was just thinking how damn lucky we are to come up on you, you with a car that don’t need nothing but a tire, and us with a car that is going to have to be either replaced or jacked up and another car driven under it.”
“How would that work?” Tony said.
The man moved the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “That’s what we call an expression, kid.”
“I know what you mean,” Jane said. “Tony ain’t nothing but a kid. But I know what you mean. I think even Jack might know.”
I thought: Nice.
“Well then,” said the man in the pinstripe suit, “since you know I can’t jack our car up and drive another one under it, then you got to know that what I’m planning on is taking your car away from you. How about that, Little Snooty? Did you know that?”
“This isn’t your car to take,” Jane said, going closer to the man.
I said, “Jane. Don’t.”
“Yeah,” said Pinstripe, reaching out and clutching Jane’s face with his hand. “Don’t, Jane.”
She kicked him right between the legs. It was a good kick too. I figured if she’d kicked a potato she would have knocked it over their car and down the road a bit. It was such a hard kick, it sort of made me feel bad. It made him spit his toothpick out like he was shooting a bullet.
Even Tony went, “Holy moly.”
Pinstripe let out a bellow and his eyes nearly closed, like he was squinting them against a harsh light he hoped would pass. He dropped to his knees.
The man in shirtsleeves let out a laugh, like he’d just seen a circus monkey do something funny.
“Damn, if that wasn’t a good one,” he said.
“I’ll say,” Tony said. “I’ve seen her do it before.”
