It was hard to see the fish come up for their feed at night, but Cortez was trying to be patient. He remembered the fish man telling him that it took two weeks to train them to come up to eat, and it hadn’t even been a week yet. But he was enjoying feeding them. He was looking forward to the time when he could see all three thousand of them trying to eat at the same time. No telling what that was going to look like. They’d probably churn the water all to hell. He hoped so.
[…] He was getting ready to put the Bush Hog on the 4020 and go up there and mow down that grass that had sprouted up around the pond. He didn’t think it was too muddy. There was one slope on the side that was kind of steep, but he didn’t think it would be any problem. He’d put his safety belt on. He always did. […] It was still pretty hot out there even though it was September, and he knew if he’d wait until a little later on in the afternoon, it would be cooler. So he took his brogans off and turned the TV off and lay down on the daybed and got a pillow and put it under his head and closed his eyes and sighed. Lots of times when he took naps he thought about Queen. He ran images through his head that he’d retained in his brain. They were kind of like movies in that the same things happened over and over. The same words were said. The same things happened. She said this, he said that. They fought, they made up. They rode to town in the snow and they picked peas in the June heat. They screwed in the barn. […]
He rolled over onto his side and faced the window. He wasn’t very sleepy. But maybe if he stayed here a while he could drift off. So he kept thinking about Queen. He thought about her when she was fourteen and he thought about her when she was twenty-four. He thought about the first time he’d seen her naked and he thought about the last time he’d seen her, after he’d poisoned her. She wasn’t naked then. But she was dead. All the light gone from her eyes, and her hands cold and stiff. It had taken him eight hours to dig the grave. In the dark. His wife thinking he was out whoring again, no doubt. He’d come in at daylight after putting the rest of the dirt over her and smoothing it out so that it hadn’t looked any different from the rest of the plowed ground. He’d come in and he’d fixed himself a cup of coffee and sat there at the same kitchen table and drank it, with his hands shaking, and then he’d gone to bed. He’d gotten into bed with his wife and she’d been just waking, and she could probably smell the dirt on him because she’d asked him where he’d been all night, had told him that she’d woken at two and he wasn’t in the bed. He told her he’d been up all night with a sick heifer, and then he’d rolled over and closed his eyes and listened to the bed creak as she’d gotten up and pulled her robe from the closet, and gone out and closed the bedroom door. And he’d never laid a hand on her again. And she’d never asked him to again. He’d told her that Queen had gone back to South Carolina on the train to take care of her aunt and that she wouldn’t be back. His wife had said that she’d miss her corn bread. And that had been the end of it. For his wife, anyway.
Shit. He wasn’t sleepy. […] He wondered if that little boy had told his daddy about the big red fish truck. He probably had. He’d probably told all his friends at school, too. It probably wasn’t a thing he’d have to worry very much about over the winter, people going down to his pond, but next spring, when the dogwoods bloomed and the days started warming, he’d have to keep an eye on it. But he’d have a gate up by then. That would stop anybody from driving down to it, but it wouldn’t stop anybody from just walking in off the road. Maybe he needed to build a fence. But he didn’t really want to. He’d already built so many fences that he didn’t get too excited about the idea of building another one, although he still had to fix that section down by the pea patch sometime. Maybe next month when it cooled off some. It was too hot to mess with a fence right now.
He rolled over the other way. He wasn’t going to be able to go to sleep. He didn’t think. But he kept lying there anyway. He’d been thinking about calling Lucinda, but he hadn’t. He’d been thinking about getting a phone with caller ID, but he hadn’t done that either. Nobody ever called him anyway. Except Toby once in a while. All the old women who used to call his wife never called over here anymore because they didn’t want to talk to him. Bunch of old biddies. He never had been able to understand how his wife and her old biddy friends had found so much to talk about over the telephone. Cortez never had used the phone like that, to just call somebody up and talk. But women were different. They could talk for hours. Queen was the only woman he’d ever been with who was content to just be silent sometimes. And more than sometimes. He’d known sometimes that she felt guilty for doing what they had for so long, right under his wife’s nose. In the barn. Just up the driveway. And then Queen would have to come to the house and do something like help his wife peel and can tomatoes. Put up corn. Blanch peas and pick out the bad ones and bag them up for the freezer. Even eat with them sometimes. Cortez sometimes wished he was already dead along with his wife so that he wouldn’t have to keep on thinking about things. He was tired of thinking about them. He was tired of asking himself if he’d done the right thing or the wrong thing. All he knew was that he missed her so bad. He missed the taste of her mouth. And the weight of her naked breasts in his hands. And if she’d lived he’d have a little half-black bastard running around somewhere. Not little. Thirty-seven years old almost. And you couldn’t have that. Maybe some people could but not him. It would have been too embarrassing to stay here on his farm. He would have had to leave.
And telling his wife that she’d up and packed her clothes and gone back to South Carolina in a taxi cab to the station. He had burned her clothes, her shoes, all the things he found that belonged to her in the old house, and he’d almost burned it, too, just so he wouldn’t have to keep looking at it. The only thing he’d kept was the locket. And he shouldn’t have kept it. But he couldn’t stand to part with the only picture of her he had. That’s why it was hidden in the barn. Maybe one day, after he was dead, somebody would go through all his stuff, even the stuff in the old tack room in the barn, and find everything. The locket. The machine gun. The Klan robe and hood. He just hoped that person wouldn’t be Lucinda. […]
He heard one of the cows bawl up in the pasture. He wasn’t going to start feeding his hay until he had to. There was still plenty of grass out there if they’d move around and find it instead of standing there bawling for him to come feed them.
When he woke up it was past three. He hadn’t meant to sleep that long. He sat up and reached for his brogans and put them on and tied them and got up and went out the door. The sun was bright and he walked across the backyard to the equipment shed and climbed up on the 4020 and took the cap off the fuel tank and peered in. It was halfway full. More than enough to do that little dab of mowing.
He sat down on the seat and made sure it was in neutral and turned the key over to light the ignition lamp in the control panel. He pushed the fuel control in and turned the key on over and the motor kicked over a few times and then chugged as it came to life. Black smoke rattled the rain top upright on the exhaust pipe and he pulled it down into second and eased out on the clutch and drove it out of the equipment shed. The Bush Hog was in the next stall and he moved the tractor in front of it, stopped, and then turned his head and started backing it up. When he got to within two feet of it he pulled up on the little black knob that operated the three-point hitch and then carefully backed it closer. It took him a few minutes to get down off the tractor and hook up the Bush Hog, and then he had to connect the shaft on it to the PTO on the tractor. Then he climbed back up, raised the three-point hitch, and pulled back out of the equipment shed. He started to go back to the house and fix a jug of ice water, but then he decided that it wasn’t going to take him that long to cut that little patch of grass. So he went on up the driveway and turned left and went down the road to the new road and turned in.
The Bush Hog wasn’t over two years old and was still in very good shape. The one he’d used up before this one had lasted almost nine years, and that was a long time for a Bush Hog. He pulled down by the pond and looked at the place he was going to mow and tried to see how wet it was. It didn’t look wet at all. He started to get down and walk over it, just to make sure, but he didn’t. He just lowered the Bush Hog and pushed in the clutch and engaged the lever for the PTO and started mowing. Then he remembered and stopped and put his safety belt on. The tractor had a roll cage built onto it and it was designed to protect the driver in a rollover. Cortez had known a lot of people who’d been killed on tractors, and a lot of them were farmers who’d been using tractors all their lives. But they made one little mistake, or they got old and forgot something, and they had an accident you couldn’t live through. Cortez had had some close calls himself. […]
He made the first pass on level ground. The grass was about three feet high and the Bush Hog sheared it off smoothly, about four inches high. Some of the ground was still a little rough from the dozer dude’s work, and some of it had washed out a little from the recent rain. Shit. He guessed he needed to get the section harrow and bring it up and run over it a couple of times after he got it mowed and smooth it out a little. He’d noticed it back in the summer, but he never had gotten around to doing it. He could do it today if he wanted to. The days were getting shorter, but they hadn’t set the time back yet. He didn’t think they did that until October. Not far off.
He mowed on fairly level ground for a while and clipped off all the grass that surrounded the pond. He ran over some of it a couple of times to get the tufts that were sticking up here and there. Then he mowed alongside both sides of the new road, staying close to the clay gravel. After he got through with that he pulled up beside the pond and eased the tractor off onto the slope near the shallow end. He started mowing and it was a little steeper than he liked, but he made the first pass with no trouble and then pulled back out and turned around to make another, lower pass.
It didn’t happen fast. He went a little deeper down the slope and the ground broke away from one of the back tires and then the other one, too, and the tractor started sliding back end first down the slope at an angle, tearing the thinly rooted grass loose. He hit the brake and saw that he’d run over a wide patch of clay that was still wet and there was nothing he could do to stop the slide of the heavy tractor down toward the water. He was going to slide right into the pond and be crushed and drown both if it rolled over on top of him, and it was probably going to. These things flashed through his mind and it was nothing but the years of experience that sent his foot quick to the clutch and his hand darting to the PTO lever, which took the Bush Hog out of gear but didn’t do anything to stop the big tires from sliding on the slick clay. When he hit the bottom of the bank the waterlogged dirt crumbled away and the tractor tipped right over into the pond on its side. The exhaust pipe hissed as it went under. He took a breath just before his face slammed into the water and his arm hit something very hard and the Bush Hog with its still-whirling blade went into the water and threw up a shower that doused him before it came to a stop. The motor started missing and it ran for a few more seconds before it stopped. Oil started coming up and pooling and spreading out over the water in rainbow-colored hues. He’d played hell now.
His face was splashing water and his hand was trying to unlatch the safety belt, but he couldn’t find it. It had always been a little hard to latch and unlatch and he was holding his breath, knowing if he couldn’t get it undone just pretty quick, then he was done. He raised his face and could just barely get his mouth and nose out of the water, but it was enough. The tractor had stopped moving. He thought. He drew a careful breath. He breathed a couple of times. He had to force himself to calm down. Was it going to slide some more? He didn’t know. He was twisted in the seat and it was hurting his back and he thought maybe he’d broken his right arm. It didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel the way it had felt all his life.
He felt ridiculous, sitting on his tractor seat with just his face sticking out of the water. His body was putting so much pressure on the safety belt that his hand couldn’t get it unlatched. He kept pushing on the button, but he couldn’t feel it move. And his leg was bent under the steel plate where the brake was mounted near the right side of the transmission. He didn’t know how that had happened, but he was stuck. Stuck tight. Lord God. In his own damn pond.
He took a deep breath and lowered his nose and mouth back into the water. That took some of the strain off his back, and he sat there, with the sun-heated water waving in his hair, holding his breath and fumbling with the latch on the safety belt, just his eyes sticking up above the water. Of all the stupid-ass things to do.
He had to do something quick. He wondered if he could get to his knife and cut the safety belt. It was made from a piece of nylon strapping about two or three inches wide, and his knife was sharp, but the belt was tight across his left front pocket where the knife was, and he couldn’t get his hand underneath it easily. He was scared to move too much, afraid the tractor would slide on down in the soft mud in the bottom of the pond. He believed he could feel it creeping that way just a bit at a time, because it was getting harder to hold his head out of the water. He tried again to get his hand in his pocket, but it wouldn’t go. And the belt wouldn’t unlatch. He knew what he was going to have to do. He was going to have to get hold of the rim of the seat with his broken right arm and try to push himself down in the seat enough to take the pressure off the safety belt, and that was going to hurt. But he’d been hurt before. He’d fallen fifteen feet off the roof of his house one time, putting some tar around the flashing on his chimney, and broken his ankle. Took him three months to get over that. He’d been slammed into the side of the barn by a bad bull one day and had broken five ribs. Took him a month to get over that, lying in a bed hurting and taking aspirins. A brindle cow had knocked two of his jaw teeth out with a horn one day. He shot her with something like pleasure even though she was worth about five hundred dollars. A strand of barbed wire he’d been stretching across some posts had snapped once and cut him up something terrible. Blood all over him when he went back to the house, like to scared his wife to death. Took eighty-seven stitches for old Doctor Little uptown to sew him up from that one. But he was going to die right now today if he didn’t get that safety belt unlatched. So he lifted his broken arm and made his hand go to the rim of the seat and he pushed on it. And cried out when he did. He could feel the broken bone ends rubbing together. He could hear them. It hurt about as bad as anything he’d ever had hurt, maybe worse than when he’d passed some kidney stones ten years back and pissed blood, too.
“Lord God!” he said aloud, and hot tears squeezed from his eyes. But his left hand found the button on the safety belt and he felt it release. He grabbed the steering wheel and slid off the seat deeper into the water, but his foot was still hung. His right arm was screaming with fire inside. He was kind of squatting on the right side of the tractor, trying to get his foot loose, but it wouldn’t come. And if the tractor slid any deeper into the water it was going to pull him down with it. He didn’t know why his foot wouldn’t come loose. He couldn’t understand why it was hung. He guessed the jolt had slid him sideways in the seat, even with the belt on, and he was still twisted around, and his face kept going down in the water.
And then he thought to himself, with some kind of detached peace that came upon him without warning: What the hell you struggling so hard for? You had seventy-two years. Which is more than lots of people get. Had children. Had women. Raised cows and cotton. You done what you wanted to all this time. And you known all this time one day you’d have to answer for all that other stuff. For her. For her baby. Everybody dies so what’s wrong with today? It’s a pretty day. Let go, old man.
But he couldn’t let go. He wanted to see Lucinda again. And he wanted to see these fish grow. So he struggled back up out of the water and tried to gain his strength back. He thought the tractor had stopped moving. But his foot was hung and he’d have to stick his whole head underwater to try and get a better angle for pulling it loose. And that was going to be impossible to do with one broken arm. He figured that his foot was between the side of the transmission and the mud. He could feel pressure bearing down on it, but it didn’t hurt. Maybe that meant it was hurt bad. Or maybe the blood was cut off.
And then he realized again that he was surely going to die. He was on the side of the pond that couldn’t be seen from the road, and nobody was going to come along and see him down here. Somebody would have to walk right down here to be able to see him. So that meant nobody was going to come. Or not until it was too late. He couldn’t just lie here in this water for days. He’d finally get so tired he’d have to put his head down and that would be it. He’d strangle to death on water. His own water. The water he had hoped and wished and almost prayed for.
No, nobody was going to come along. He was going to stay right here for a couple of miserable days and then he was going to drown. Hell. They might not even find him until the buzzards started circling. Which they would. They’d spot a dead cow within an hour if she was out in the open. They’d find him soon enough. He remembered again the hordes of them walking the backs of the dead fish in the river all those years ago.
And then that little boy who lived down the road in that trailer, the one with the go-kart, the one he’d yelled at to get the hell off his place, was wading out in the water toward him with a piece of rubber hose in his hand. He had a scared face and what looked like a pair of binoculars around his neck. But he kept on coming.
“Get back!” Cortez said. Then he said: “You know how to swim?”
“No sir,” the little boy said. He’d stopped, standing in almost waist-deep water. Holding that piece of rubber hose. And where had he seen that before? Now he knew. He’d seen two pieces of it. Lying there at the bank on the shallow end, just on the other side of the tractor. He’d thought maybe the dozer guy had broken a hydraulic line on his dozer and had fixed it out there, but then he remembered that he hadn’t seen the pieces of hose until after the fish man had come and gone.
“You can breathe through this,” the little boy said. “I saw it on a movie.”
Cortez was getting tired and he couldn’t help letting some water get into his mouth, and he kept spitting it out. Some went down his throat and he coughed a couple of times.
“I’m gonna climb up on the wheel,” the little boy said.
“Be careful,” Cortez said, and it was all he could think of to say.
The little boy waded on out, almost up to his chest, and then he caught hold of the big black cleats on the huge back tire that was sticking out of the water and he started pulling himself up on it.
“Hold on,” the little boy said. “I’m coming.”
And he was. Like a monkey or a trained acrobat. He clambered up on the side of the wheel and he knelt there with water dripping from his clothes and tried to reach for Cortez’s hand. Cortez put his hand up and he felt the little boy’s fingers, small, soft. Raif’s had felt like that. He held on to them. Deep shame flooded his whole face. The way he’d yelled at him.
“Here,” the little boy said, and handed him the piece of rubber hose. Cortez knew exactly what he meant. Put it in his mouth and breathe through it underwater. But he didn’t think he could do it. Not with one arm broken. He handed it back and held on to the steering wheel again. His arm was killing him.
“I can’t use that. You got to go call for help,” Cortez said.
“Yes sir, I already did,” the little boy said. “I run home and done that soon as I seen you tump over.”
“You did?” Cortez said.
“Yes sir.” Looking down at him from the tractor tire. Not that far away. A few feet. He had freckles and a crew cut. His teeth were real bad. That was a damn shame, to let a kid’s teeth get into that kind of shape. Why in the hell didn’t his daddy take him to the dentist? Or his mama?
“Who’d you call?” Cortez said.
“Nine one one,” the little boy said. “Lafayette County Fire Department. They on the way right now.”
Cortez lay there in the water and looked at him. It was kind of hard to look at him. The little boy even smiled at him.
“What’s your name?” Cortez said.
“Jimmy,” the little boy said.
Cortez nodded at him, water dripping from his nose. He could feel some of it drying from the sun, which was hot on his face.
“I’m sorry about hollering at you,” he said.
“That’s all right,” the little boy said. “You Mister Sharp, ain’t you?”
“Yeah I am,” Cortez said. “You can just call me Mister Cortez if you want to.”
“They’ll be here fore long, Mister Cortez,” the little boy said. “I’m gonna stay right here with you,” he added.
Cortez nodded, and it was hard for him to swallow, but he did.
“I thank you,” he said.
[…]