Jimmy woke up that same morning and his tooth was hurting really bad. Worse than bad. It was the worst thing he’d ever felt. It had been hurting pretty bad when he’d gone to bed the night before, but he hadn’t wanted to tell anybody because he still didn’t want to have to go see the dentist, so he’d just slipped a couple of aspirin out of the medicine cabinet and taken them with a glass of water, and then gotten into bed. It was Thursday. A school day. But the pain had caused Jimmy to wake up early, and now he was standing in the dark hall with his hand pressed against the side of his mouth, with bolts of pain shooting through his whole head. His mama and daddy were both still asleep. His daddy didn’t usually get up until six, and sometimes his mama got up and fixed breakfast for Jimmy and Evelyn and Velma, but it was often only cereal, which of course beat nothing. Bacon and eggs would have been a lot better, maybe with some pancakes, but Jimmy didn’t get that too much on school mornings. His mama had been staying up later and later, even during the week, and sometimes it caused her to sleep past the time for Jimmy and his half sisters to get outside and wait for the school bus. But Jimmy didn’t know how he could get on the school bus today. He was afraid he was going to have to go to the dentist. And he was going to have to wake his mama and his daddy up. He didn’t want to, because he knew he wasn’t supposed to go into his parents’ room if the door was closed, but he had to. His tooth was hurting so bad that tears were squeezing from his eyes.
He put it off for a long time. He walked up and down the hall, putting it off. He went into the living room and sat down for a while, putting it off. But finally he couldn’t wait any longer. He opened the door quietly and walked in there.
It was still dark in there, too. His mama and daddy were lying in the bed, his mama on her side facing the outer edge of the bed, and his daddy rolled toward his edge of the bed. Jimmy walked over to him and stood there, holding his hand against the side of his mouth.
“Daddy,” he said. His daddy mumbled something in his sleep that sounded like “Put that sumbitch over the top of Mister Richard’s Coke machine,” and then he snored lightly.
Jimmy was afraid he’d be in a bad mood again. He’d been in a bunch of bad moods lately. Jimmy didn’t know why and his mama didn’t either. There’d been some kind of fuss with Evelyn and now she would hardly talk to him. He was afraid that his daddy had told his mama what Jimmy had told him about Evelyn and the boys on the school bus, and he was afraid that Evelyn had figured out who’d told on her. Which was him. Evelyn had been punished, he knew that. She’d been grounded and she hadn’t been able to talk on the phone for a few weeks. She’d been staying mostly in her room, but she’d pushed Jimmy hard a few times without saying anything, and once when nobody was around, she’d leaned over to him and whispered viciously, “You little pussy redneck, I’m gonna get you.”
So that was something else to worry about. He’d also seen Evelyn talking to one of the big boys on the school bus and pointing toward him. And that was something else to worry about. But right now he could hardly think of anything but the pain in his mouth. It was getting worse all the time. The tooth had started throbbing inside his head and he didn’t know what he was going to do. He wasn’t worried about going to the dentist anymore if the dentist could just make it stop hurting. He thought it might help his case if he was crying when he woke his daddy up, so he started again. It didn’t take much. He was already over the brink. The pain was […] pounding a big drum to the beat of his rushing blood. Shawoom. Shawoom. Shawoom.
“Daddy,” he said again, voice kind of shaky this time, and this time he reached out and touched his daddy’s shoulder. “Daddy, wake up.”
Jimmy’s daddy didn’t wake with a jolt. He just opened his eyes, lying on his side, and saw Jimmy standing there. And he smiled at him. Until he saw that Jimmy was crying. And then he did something he rarely did. He sat up under the covers and swung his feet to the floor and reached out and hugged Jimmy. Put his big warm arms around him.
“What’s wrong, Sport?” he said softly. His breath was awful.
“My tooth,” Jimmy said, and let his daddy fold him in to his arms and hold him for a few seconds. “It’s hurting really bad, Daddy.” And he cried some more. It was easy to cry some more, with his daddy holding him.
“Okay,” his daddy said, and he got up and reached for his pants, which were lying on the floor. He pulled them on and fastened them shut and zipped them and buckled his belt. “Let’s go in here and look at it.”
Jimmy followed his daddy down the hall to the bathroom. A small light was burning in there but Jimmy’s daddy flipped on the overhead light and put the lid down on the toilet and sat on it.
“Let me look at it,” he said. “Which one is it? Open your mouth.”
Jimmy walked up next to him and opened his mouth.
“Lean your head back.”
Jimmy leaned his head back. He felt his daddy stick his finger into his mouth and he pointed to where it was hurting.
“Ish … ova hah,” he said.
His daddy was looking. Probing with his finger. Gently.
“Damn,” he said. “Shit. You got more’n one. I can’t believe your teeth have got in this bad a shape. How long’s it been since you’ve been to the dentist?”
“I ain’t never been,” Jimmy said. His daddy took his finger out of his mouth and Jimmy closed it.
“Well, you’re gonna have to go today,” his daddy said. “How bad’s it hurt?”
“Pretty bad, Daddy. It hurts awful bad.”
“Let me wake your mama up,” his daddy said, and Jimmy followed him back to the bedroom and watched. Jimmy’s daddy leaned over Jimmy’s mama and shook her shoulder. He saw her raise up, and then Jimmy’s daddy said something to her. She raised up higher and rubbed one hand over her face and then she got up in her nightgown and came over to him. She bent down to him.
“What’s the matter, babe?” she said.
“My tooth hurts,” Jimmy said.
“He’s got a big cavity in there,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “I guess I might as well go ahead and get dressed.”
“Let me go get some Orajel,” his mama said, and she went out the hall. Jimmy heard her footsteps going toward the bathroom.
“What’s the dentist gonna do to me, Daddy?” Jimmy said.
Jimmy’s daddy had turned on the light in the closet and he was pulling a work shirt off a hanger and putting it on.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Is he gonna hurt me?” Jimmy said, while more tears came down his cheeks. […]
“I doubt it,” Jimmy’s daddy said. “I think they’ve got a lot better dentists now than what they had when I was a kid. They was one up here at Oxford, that son of a bitch ought to be killed today for what he done to me when I was a kid.”
Jimmy didn’t ask what. He didn’t want to know. He wondered what Orajel was. Maybe they could use that and he could go on to school and forget about going to the dentist today. Or maybe just take a whole bottle of aspirin with him.
His daddy got some socks from a drawer and sat down on the bed and started putting them on. Looked like his toenails needed cutting pretty bad.
“She’ll have to take you,” he said. “They won’t let me off from work for nothing like that.”
Jimmy stood there. He had told his daddy and his mama the whole story of Mister Sharp and his tractor turnover and how he had stayed in the water with him. […] He still hadn’t told his daddy about the big red fish truck, or about Mister Sharp throwing something out into the water, or of how he had been watching him through the binoculars when he’d turned the tractor over. He’d put the binoculars back where he’d found them after carefully wiping them clean with some Windex he found in a kitchen cabinet and some Kleenex. They’d gotten a little wet in the pond. He hoped they were okay.
His mama walked back in the room with a small tube and stopped in front of him. She knelt.
“Let me put some of this on it, honey,” she said. “Show me which one.”
Jimmy opened his mouth, leaned his head back, pointed, said, “Ang ish ung.”
She squeezed some reddish jelly-looking substance onto the tip of her finger and then put her finger inside his mouth and rubbed it over the tooth. Then she took her finger out and squeezed another dab from the tube and by the time she got her finger back inside his mouth, Jimmy could feel his gum getting numb. Oh yeah. A numb gum. She rubbed some more. An even number gum. The pain started getting smaller. It didn’t go completely away, but it got better.
She had been watching him intently. Jimmy looked at her and thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world with her brown hair and brown eyes. Nobody could be prettier than his mother. Why didn’t his daddy like her more than what he did?
“Is that better?” she said.
Jimmy nodded. “It’s not as bad,” he said.
“You still got to go to the dentist today,” she said. “I should have already sent you up there for a checkup. It’s my own fault.” And then she muttered something about money.
“You gonna take him?” Jimmy’s daddy said from the bed, where he was pulling his boots on.
“I guess I’ll have to,” she said. “I’ll have to call Mister Carpenter and tell him I’ll be late. Unless I can get Jimmy in before nine. But I’ll have to go back and pick him up. And get him home somehow. “
“Have I got to go back to school after I get back from the dentist?” Jimmy said, hoping like heck he wouldn’t have to.
“I don’t know,” his mama said, and she reached into the closet and pulled out a bathrobe and put it on. Jimmy looked at his daddy. He was buttoning his shirt. Then he bent over and picked up his cap from the floor and put it on his head.
“Hell, just let him skip the rest of the day,” he said. “One day ain’t gonna make no difference.”
Suddenly everything was looking a lot better to Jimmy. The tooth wasn’t hurting nearly as bad and it was starting to look like he might get a whole day off from school. He wished his go-kart’s chain was fixed. He could ride it when he got back from the dentist. If there was any gas.
“Let me go find the phone book and see when they open up,” his mama said, and went out of the room, up the hall toward the living room. Jimmy’s daddy stood up and started putting his shirttail in.
“I think I got time to make me some coffee,” he said, and he went on out the door, too.
Jimmy sat down on their bed. It felt lumpy. The girls weren’t even up yet. His gum was getting number and number. Orajel was a good thing. His mama came back in, looking at an opened phone book. She sat down beside Jimmy and turned on the lamp beside the bed and kissed him on top of the head. Jimmy hugged her and turned her loose.
“Okay, let’s see,” she said. She had her finger on the page, looking at it. “Here’s a family dentist. I bet they don’t open till at least eight, though.” She looked up at Jimmy. “I can’t call for an appointment for two more hours. You may have to go to work with me for a while if I can’t get you in before nine. How’s it feel now?”
“It’s a lot better,” he said.
“You feel like eating something?” she said.
“Yes’m,” Jimmy said.
Couple of hours later, Jimmy’s in the dentist’s chair. He didn’t know what to expect, but so far everybody had been kind. A nice girl named Margie had brought him back here and put him in the chair and had clipped around his neck some kind of napkin that hung down on his chest. She had taken some X-rays of his teeth after putting a heavy vest across his chest. He was looking out the window at some boy mowing some grass. It felt strange not to be in school on a weekday. All his classmates were in class, listening to the teacher, waiting for lunch. What good was school anyway? It sucked. […]
There was a TV he could watch, up on the wall, but the sound was turned down and it was some kind of a news show anyway. Jimmy never watched the news because they were always showing something about the war and there were always burned-out cars and tanks on fire and people lying bloody and shot dead in the streets. Smoke rising from buildings, helicopters flying overhead. He already knew he didn’t want to be a soldier. He kept sitting there. He could hear people talking in some other rooms. Somebody was laughing and talking about Hank Williams Jr. And then a young clean-cut man wearing a tie came into the room and held up his hand and smacked hands with Jimmy. He sat down on a stool.
“Hi, Jimmy,” he said. “I’m Tony. You can just call me Doctor Tony if you want to. I hear you’ve got a toothache.”
“Yes sir,” Jimmy said.
“Well, let’s take a look at it,” the dentist said, and he pushed a button on the chair that started raising Jimmy higher. He turned on a bright light above Jimmy and told him to open his mouth. Jimmy did.
The dentist spent some time looking around inside Jimmy’s mouth. He poked some with a small hooked instrument. He didn’t say anything and Jimmy didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one. Finally he pulled back and looked at Jimmy.
“How often you brush your teeth, Jimmy?” he said.
“I’m supposed to brush em every night,” Jimmy said.
“You really need to brush them after every meal, Jimmy,” the dentist said. “You’ve got five cavities and they all need fixing, but I’m just going to fix the one that’s hurting today and one more, okay? But then you need to come back and get the other ones taken care of before they start hurting. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jimmy said.
The dentist looked at the wall for a moment and then he looked back at Jimmy. There was a picture of a little baby on the wall behind him.
“How do I get ahold of your mama?” he said.
“She works at the bank,” Jimmy said.
“Which one?”
“The one up on the square.”
Doctor Tony smiled and laughed.
“There’s about four of them up on the square, Jimmy. Do you know the name of the one where she works?”
“No sir,” Jimmy said.
Doctor Tony sat there some more. Then he got up.
“I’ll be back,” he said, and he patted Jimmy on the shoulder before he left. It was kind of reassuring. He was hoping desperately that they weren’t going to hurt him. But he was afraid they were.
Doctor Tony stayed gone a few minutes. Jimmy heard him laughing and talking about going to a steak house that had some good single-malt scotch. Then he came back and sat down again. Another girl in a smock walked in and she smiled at Jimmy. She had big white teeth. No cavities there. Jimmy thought maybe he’d better start brushing his teeth.
“Good morning, Jimmy,” she said.
“How’d you know my name?” Jimmy said.
“A little birdy told me,” she said. She had something in her hand. “Now open wide.”
Jimmy could feel his palms sweating, but he opened wide. He was about as scared as he’d ever been. But on the other hand, it wasn’t as scary as your daddy almost drowning you.
He was back home before lunch. His mouth was still kind of numb from where Doctor Tony had filled his two front teeth, and they’d told him not to eat anything until the feeling came back, because if he ate something then he might start chewing on his cheek and not know he was chewing on it and maybe chew a hole in it. But his mama had stopped at the Sonic and bought him a chocolate milkshake, which he’d sucked through a straw. He’d looked at his new teeth in the makeup mirror on the way home.
She pulled up in front of the trailer and stopped. She looked kind of upset. Jimmy had watched her write a check to the dentist’s office and she’d seemed to be kind of worried, but she didn’t seem that way now. Jimmy worried about his mama a lot. She didn’t seem to be happy. Not most times anyway. She could be reading a magazine and she’d just sigh. But if you looked at her, she’d look up and smile.
“I’ve got to go back to work,” she said. “I’m running late. I hate to leave you here by yourself, but I don’t know what else to do.”
“I’ll be all right,” he said.
She reached over and touched his hair. Then she bent toward him and kissed him on the cheek. Gave him one last lingering touch with her hand.
“I know you will. Just watch some TV or something,” she said. “The girls’ll be in at three thirty.”
“Okay,” Jimmy said. He already knew that. And that meant he’d be alone with Evelyn and Velma until his daddy came in. He hoped his daddy would come in before Evelyn could do something nasty to him.
“You can fix you a sandwich or something when the feeling comes back. Not before, okay?”
“Okay,” Jimmy said, and got out.
“Bye, babe,” she said, and Jimmy said bye and closed the door. He watched her back out of the driveway and then she turned her car toward the county road and took off. Jimmy watched the dust roll out behind her and he waved to her. She waved back and then was gone.
The little dogs were all gone somewhere. Sometimes they did that, just left. Jimmy figured they were probably out hunting rabbits. He didn’t know why his daddy didn’t take them hunting with him.
He went on inside the trailer and it was absolutely quiet. It was different. It wasn’t like being alone in it at night, as he sometimes was. It was daytime now, and the quietness made it feel like a strange place. […] He wondered if it would be okay for him to have a Coke. Surely he wouldn’t chew a hole in his cheek with a Coke. So he got one from the icebox, and then he set it down and got a glass and filled it with ice cubes and poured some of the Coke over it, then took it into the living room and set it down and grabbed the remote and turned the TV on.
He was still pretty numb, and the Coke tasted kind of funny when he took a sip from it. But the toothache part was over. He was fixed. And he knew he had to go back, but he wasn’t scared anymore, just because the dentist had been so kind. And also because the dentist had stuck a small mask over his face and let him breathe through it for about ten minutes before he gave him the first shot in his gum to deaden his tooth. By then, from breathing whatever it was through the mask, Jimmy wouldn’t have cared if the dentist had pulled out an old deer horn to work on him. He’d had all kinds of pleasant daydreams about arrowheads and Indians while the drill turned inside his mouth and tooth dust flew out. It was like every bone in his body had turned to Jell-O. He had actually almost enjoyed it. So much for being scared of a dentist. Jimmy thought Doctor Tony was probably the kindest man in town.
[…]
Jimmy thought he’d sit here and watch a little TV, sip his Coke, and he knew he had some M&M’s somewhere. He’d sit here and let the feeling come back into his mouth and then he’d fix himself a nice sandwich and get some potato chips and some dip and just lounge around until the girls came home from school. And then he thought he’d walk up the road and look across at the pond and see if he could see Mister Cortez anywhere. He knew he’d gone to the hospital, because he’d still been down at the pond when the ambulance came for him, and had watched them take him away. So he was wondering if he was still in the hospital. Jimmy had changed his mind about Mister Cortez. He’d decided that he wasn’t a mean old man after all. Jimmy knew he shouldn’t have been on his land.
It was hard to find much good on the TV in the daytime. They had all those daytime shows and none of it was very interesting, just people sitting around talking. He watched part of a western and then he flipped it around and found a show about bank robbers and watched that. Bonnie and Clyde. John Dillinger. Baby Face Nelson. He sipped his Coke. He could tell that the feeling was slowly coming back. And he was getting a little hungry.
He got up and went over to the icebox and opened the door to see what was in there. His mama had gone to the grocery store yesterday, so he was hoping there was something good to eat in there. But it looked like the girls had already been in there because the pickings were pretty slim. Hot dogs. Some old dried-up pizza still in the box from Pizza Hut. He opened it and looked at it anyway. Old nasty curled-up pepperoni and dry-looking cheese. It didn’t look like anything you’d want to eat, although Velma seemed to prefer cold pizza for breakfast over everything else. He closed the box and stuck it back in there. She could have it. He opened one of the bins and looked in there. There was some baloney, but it was old and curled up, turning color. […] So he looked in the cabinets to see what was in there. Spaghetti noodles. Flour and meal. Soup. Did he want soup? There was tomato and chicken noodle. Be hard to chew a hole in your cheek with soup. Nah. He didn’t want soup. There were a few cans of tuna fish, but he didn’t know how to make tuna salad. There were plenty of vegetables in cans, but he didn’t want vegetables for lunch. He needed some meat. There were several cans of pork and beans. Some cake mix in boxes. More noodles. And then he saw some Vienna sausages and got down a can of them. He found some crackers. He got a plate. And then he happened to think to look in the freezer section of the refrigerator to see what was in there, and he found a brand-new unopened half gallon of Rocky Road. He put the plate back and found a bowl instead. And a spoon.
He was lying on the couch watching The Real World with his empty bowl on the coffee table and eating M&M’s when he heard some gravel crunching out in front of the trailer. He put his candy down and turned the TV down and heard a door slam, so he went to the trailer door and opened it. He was kind of surprised to see Mister Cortez walking toward him. He had his arm in a cast, but his fingers were sticking out the end.
“Hey,” Jimmy said, holding the door wide open.
“Hey there yourself,” Mister Cortez said. “What you doing home from school today? You playing hooky?”
“Naw sir. I had to go to the dentist,” Jimmy said. “I got my teeth fixed. See?” He opened his mouth so that Mister Cortez could look in there. Mister Cortez stood at the bottom of the steps trying to see up inside Jimmy’s mouth which was mostly full of melted M&M’s.
“I see,” he said. “That looks pretty good.”
“You all right?” Jimmy said.
“Aw yeah. I’m fine,” Mister Cortez said. He held up his cast. “I just got to wear this thing for a while.”
He stood there and looked around.
“Where’s all them little dogs at?” he said.
“They took off,” Jimmy said. “They’ll be back later. I think they go out and run rabbits. But they don’t never bring none home. You want to come in? I’m watching TV, but they ain’t nothing much good on.”
“I was wanting to speak to your mama or your daddy, one,” Mister Cortez said. “Is one of them home?”
“No sir,” Jimmy said. “They both at work.”
“I see,” Mister Cortez said, and nodded. “Well. I just wanted to ask em something. I can come back some other time. What time they get in?”
“Mama don’t never get in till after five but Daddy gets in sometimes at four. But sometimes he don’t come in till later.” Jimmy didn’t want to tell Mister Cortez that lots of times it was dark when Daddy came home.
And then Mister Cortez looked over there by the pine tree and saw Jimmy’s go-kart. He nodded at it.
“What’s wrong with your go-kart?” he said. “I ain’t seen you on it in a while.”
“Chain won’t stay on,” Jimmy said. “It’s done got too loose.”
“Will it run?”
“Oh, yes sir,” Jimmy said, and came on down the steps. He walked over to the go-kart and flipped the toggle switch marked Off/On and choked it, then pulled the starter cord a few times, and it sputtered to life. He mashed the gas pedal with his fingers and revved it up, then pushed the choke off. It sat there running smoothly and the clutch was turning, but the chain was draped over the driving gear like a loose necklace. He shut it off.
Mister Cortez squatted down next to the go-kart and looked at it. He looked up at Jimmy.
“Can your daddy not fix it?” he said.
“I don’t reckon so,” Jimmy said.
Mister Cortez was looking closely at the chain by then. He slipped it off the driving gear and looked at the gear. Then he looked at the mounting plate beneath the motor. He looked back up.
“That’s all that’s wrong with it?” he said.
“Far as I know,” Jimmy said. “Daddy tightened it one time and then he said the chain had got stretched and he didn’t know how to fix it.”
“It just needs a link took out of it,” Mister Cortez said. He held it up. It was greasy and it was getting black grease on his fingers, but he didn’t seem to care. Maybe he’d been around greasy things before.
“How you do that?” Jimmy said.
“I’ll show you,” Mister Cortez said, and he got up and walked over to his truck and lifted what looked like a pretty heavy metal box from the back end with his good arm. He brought it over and set it on the ground, and when he opened it, Jimmy saw more tools than he’d ever seen in one place at a time. Mister Cortez had a lot more tools than Jimmy’s daddy, and his weren’t rusty, they were shiny and clean. He had wrenches, screwdrivers, sockets, all kinds of stuff. He picked up a pair of pliers that had long slim tips. He looked up again.
“Will your daddy care for me fixing it for you?”
“I don’t guess,” Jimmy said, and then he started to get excited. Oh boy! If Mister Cortez could fix it, he could start back driving it all the time, as long as he had some gas. He could drive it at night, with his flashlight headlight. He wondered if Mister Cortez had ever seen the dead black lady who walked the road crying. But he didn’t ask him. He just sat down in the gravel next to Mister Cortez and watched him as he started fixing the go-kart.
“See this little thing right here?” Mister Cortez said, holding up the chain. Jimmy saw a tiny plate in the links.
“Yes sir?”
“That comes off. It’s just like a chain on a hay baler. All we got to do is take it off and cut one link out, then put it back together, and it’ll be good as new. Then we’ll take them bolts off underneath the motor and put the chain on and add some washers to them bolts, raise that motor until it’s tight. I got some washers. Won’t take long.”
“Boy,” Jimmy said. It was all he could think of to say.
“You ain’t got a brick around here nowhere, do you?” Mister Cortez said.
“Yes sir, I sure do,” Jimmy told him, and walked around behind the trailer and found a couple and brought them back.
“Here’s two,” he said, and Mister Cortez took one of them and set it down in front of him. He was being careful with his bad arm.
“One may be enough,” he said.
Jimmy squatted close to Mister Cortez and watched him closely. He laid the chain on its side on top of the brick and then he rummaged around in his tool box and came up with a small hammer with a rounded head on one side and a flat side on the other. And he found a small punch. He put the punch on top of the link in the chain and tapped it gently with the hammer. Then he stopped.
“Let me see that other brick,” he said, and Jimmy handed it to him. He set the second brick down so that there was a gap of about an inch between them, and he put the link in the chain over that empty space. Then he set the punch carefully on top of the tiny plate, and tapped it with the hammer. The tiny plate popped off and fell to the ground. Mister Cortez picked it up and handed it to Jimmy.
“Don’t lose that,” he said.
Jimmy took it and looked at it. It was just a little piece of metal that resembled a figure eight, with two small holes in it. Then Mister Cortez put his tools down and worked the chain apart, and he came up with another little piece of metal like the first one, only this one had two pins in it. Mister Cortez handed it to him.
“Don’t lose that neither,” he said. “That’s your master link.”
Jimmy looked at it. Master link? Mister Cortez was rummaging around in his tool box again and he came out with what looked like a brand-new file in a plastic sleeve. He pulled the file from the sleeve and laid the sleeve aside.
“If I had this in my vise I could do it quicker,” he said. “But this’ll work. It may take me a little bit. You know how to check your oil?”
Not even an hour later Jimmy was running up and down the road. He was power sliding, cutting donuts, pressing the gas as hard as he could, and the chain didn’t come off. He roared down the road and roared back up it, and Mister Cortez stood in front of the trailer and watched him as he put his tools away. Jimmy knew he didn’t have much gas, because he’d already pulled the cap off the gas tank and looked inside. And there wasn’t any way to get any more until his daddy came home, and even then he might not get any, if his daddy didn’t want to go to the store. So he pulled back in front of the trailer and shut it off. Mister Cortez was leaning on the fender of his truck.
“Running pretty good, ain’t it?” he said.
Jimmy got off his go-kart and looked down at it, then up at Mister Cortez.
“It sure is,” he said. “I sure thank you for fixing it for me.”
“You welcome,” Mister Cortez said. He stood there looking at Jimmy for a few moments. “I been wanting to ask you something,” he said.
“Okay,” Jimmy said. He already knew what he was going to ask him.
“How come you to see me when I rolled my tractor over?” he said. “Did you just happen to be walking by?”
“Well,” Jimmy said, and looked down. He hated to tell him that he’d been watching him through the binoculars, but he hated to lie, too, even though he had to lie sometimes merely for self-preservation purposes. Like if Evelyn wanted to know what little fucker ate all the Twinkies, he’d say, Not me. He looked back up. “I was watching you,” he said.
“How come?”
“Well,” Jimmy said. “That man come by here other day, and his truck said ‘Tommy’s Big Red Fish Truck,’ and I was wondering if you put some fish in your pond.”
Mister Cortez was smiling just a little.
“So you was kind of spying on me, huh?” he said.
“Yes sir,” Jimmy said. “I guess I was.”
Mister Cortez nodded.
“I’m glad you was,” he said. “Nobody would have found me till I was dead.”
“Can I ask you something?” Jimmy said.
“Sure.”
“What’s that stuff you throwing out in the water?”
“It’s catfish feed,” Mister Cortez said. “I got three thousand of em in there. I feed em at night.”
“Golly,” Jimmy said. “How big are they?”
“Oh, they’re just little bitty things right now,” Mister Sharp said. “But I’m gonna keep feeding em and by next year they’ll be big enough to eat. You like to fish?”
“I never have been,” Jimmy said. “My daddy keeps saying he’s gonna take me, but he ain’t never took me yet.”
Mister Cortrez looked like he was really surprised by that.
“How old are you?” he said.
“Almost ten,” Jimmy said.
“You almost ten and you ain’t never been fishing?”
“Yes sir.”
“Does your daddy fish?”
“Yes sir. He goes with Mister Rusty and Mister Seaborn.”
“He just don’t never take you?”
“No sir. He don’t never have time to, I don’t reckon”.
“Hmm,” Mister Cortez said, and he turned toward his truck. He reached over into the bed and brought out a beautiful red reel on a shiny black rod, and the rod had SHAKESPEARE written on it. The reel was already strung with line that stretched out through the ferrules and the rod had a little yellow rubber practice-casting plug on the end of it. He handed the rod and reel to Jimmy. And then he reached back into the truck for a new Plano tackle box and handed that to him as well. When Jimmy set the rod down long enough to open the tackle box and look in, he saw that it was loaded with fishing gear: crappie hooks, bream hooks, bass hooks, catfish hooks, red-and-white plastic bobbers, supersensitive porcupine-quill bobbers, lures and jigs, packets of lead weights, some nylon stringers, a fish scale, a fish scaler, a Fiskars fillet knife in a leather holster, even a hook disgorger for getting hooks out of fish that had swallowed hooks deep. “Well, now you’ve got something to fish with whenever he takes you,” Mister Cortez said. “And you can fish in my pond any time you want to. Long as it’s okay with your daddy and your mama. I was gonna wait and ask them if it was okay for me to give you this stuff, but if it ain’t, they can let me know.”
Jimmy looked at the fishing pole. It was the most awesome thing he had ever seen, including his go-kart when it was new. It was sleek. It looked expensive. And somehow, it was his. Along with what looked like everything a boy would need to fish. He looked up at Mister Cortez. The world had suddenly changed on him again. And for once, not in some chickenshit way.
“What does catfish eat?” Jimmy said.
“Your fingers if you stick em in their mouth,” Mister Cortez said. “Get you some red worms and try them. Or night crawlers.”
Then he bent over toward Jimmy and lowered his voice a little.
“Just don’t tell nobody about the catfish, okay?”
“Okay,” Jimmy said immediately, and then wondered immediately if it would be okay to tell his daddy about the catfish. But he didn’t ask. Everything was going way too good that day to mess it up with a bunch of stupid questions.