It was a bad stretch of road between Oklahoma and home, but Tommy didn’t stop to rest. He was way behind, pushing hard, trying to get back before daylight. So much work to do. So little time to do it. Shouldn’t have lost all that money. Shouldn’t have done it again. Not again. Now he was going to have to work even harder, maybe get mad over nothing at the barn and fire a few people. He could sell the new pickup. He’d have to. And what the hell was Audrey going to say? She’d probably leave him for sure now. After all his promises. And all her begging and crying for him not to let them go under. Now that they’d come so far. And had done so good. All the work he’d done would be shot in the ass. All the work she’d done, too. She’d been out there in the brood ponds with him day after day back in the old days, gathering the little fish in chest waders, holding her end of the seine, when they were still hopeful for things to get better. And they had. He still remembered the day she’d come up with the idea of painting all the trucks a shiny bright red, like a fire truck, and getting them fixed with gold letters like a fire truck, only all theirs said TOMMY’S BIG RED FISH TRUCK. And it had worked. His big red fish trucks were rolling everywhere, hauling catfish and bass and crappie as far as Iowa City and Minneapolis. There were lakes all over the place and they always needed more fish. And he’d taken it to them for years, in little towns all over the Midwest and the south, dipping out fish for long lines of customers who had arrived early to meet him and his truck, all day long, different towns, more highways, more stops, until he’d sold everything he had on the truck. The fact that they were all happy to see him and eager to buy his fish and talk to him had always made his job a lot more pleasant, so that it was easy to get up and go to work in the mornings, and it made him feel like he was doing a good thing for his fellow man. He saw a lot of old guys, and lots of times they told him they were stocking ponds for their grandchildren, little girls and boys who would hold rods and reels or cane poles in their hands and sit on the shady bank of some farm pond with the old guy, close to him, watching their bobbers, talking quietly as they waited for the fish to bite. He envied them spending time with children. That had to be precious. Sometimes they even brought the kids to see his truck.
He pulled in for burnt coffee at Stillwater, a college town. He had to take the big truck by a service station and gas it up anyway, and he stood out there in the new concrete parking lot under a bright overhead light at a BP just like all the others around the country and watched laughing kids lounging around their cars and playing their music loud. Kids these days, they were troubled. They were lost. That was why so many of them ended up in prison. All because nobody cared about them. Or they didn’t have a daddy around. Or got mistreated when they were little. Some people didn’t even need to have kids. He didn’t know how people could do the stuff they did. But look at him. Standing on the concrete in Stillwater, needing sleep, putting more gas on a card that was already almost overdrawn. He should have walked out when he was up eighty-seven thousand dollars. Three months ago. He could have walked out the door with the money and paid almost everything off. Instead of being how he was now. One hundred fifty-three thousand dollars down. It was scary. He was going to have to make that payment to the bank. And it was nineteen thousand dollars. Where was it going to come from? Hell. If he sold the fish farm he might as well just go ahead and die. He didn’t want to go back to working for somebody else’s fish farm.
You could have held it together, he told himself. But no. Not you. […]
He finished and went inside and paid for the gas and the coffee and some gum. He climbed back up into the seat and started it and pulled out. He could feel the water sloshing in the tanks. He knew that all the fish back there were already dead, black crappie, redear bream, channel catfish, bass. The aerators had been off too long while he was in the Indian casino. He’d have to dump them somewhere before long or he’d have a rotted clotted mess to clean up back there when he got home. Oklahoma’s roads were lonely and black and strung with rusted barbed wire. The radio played songs by homeboys. Toby Keith. Vince Gill. Garth Brooks. The radio sang their songs and the tires sang theirs through the night toward Crowley’s Ridge, the geological phenomenon where he lived. Lots of hawks there, too. Almost one for every fence post. Redtails mostly. They were there because of all the updrafts around Crowley’s Ridge that made it easy to sail and lift without having to flap their wings very much. It was the same reason fish liked water. It was easy for them to live in.
And what would he do about Ursula?
Oh shit. What would he do about Ursula?