Jimmy’s daddy went to bed by ten that night. The kids were already in their beds since it was a school night. Johnette said she thought she might watch a little TV and Jimmy’s daddy told her he thought he’d try to get a good night’s sleep for a change. She told him she’d be in later and told him again that she appreciated him helping her with supper and cleaning up afterward and he said she was welcome. Jimmy’s daddy kissed her and she kissed him back and rubbed his back some while she was doing it, but he left it at that. Was she losing weight? Maybe they needed to go back to Seafood Junction at Algoma sometime. Maybe they wouldn’t run into the preacher and his stupid dog stories. Maybe he needed to fuck her.
He didn’t take a shower. Jimmy’s daddy didn’t take many showers because showers were a lot of trouble. You had to take your clothes off and get wet and then get dry and then get more clothes on. They took too long. He didn’t stink anyway. At least he couldn’t smell himself. He went back to their bedroom and got undressed and standing there in his shorts and gray fuzzy socks he stuck a hunting video into the VCR and picked up the remote and pulled the covers back and got himself an ashtray and plumped up a few pillows and piled them against the headrest and got into bed and pulled the covers up over him and pushed Play. Then he turned off the bedside lamp so that it was nice and dark except for the TV screen, kind of like being in a movie theater, all he needed was some popcorn. But it seemed like every time he ate popcorn, he wound up getting a hull or two between some of his teeth and would sometimes have to dig at it with his tongue for two or three days, almost drove him apeshit.
He’d seen this one before, but only five or six times. It was a hog-hunting video, too, except this one had been shot in some mountains with snow all over them up in Tennessee somewhere. It was pretty hairy. The hunters were out in the snow, wearing white clothes and tramping around in hog country with Ruger .44 Magnum rifles, and every single time they saw a hog, the hog charged. These were not feral pigs like the ones down in the river bottom on Old Union Road. These were genuine badass Russian boars somebody had imported to Tennessee. They shot about four or five of them. Talk about some big tuskers. One of them ran the cameraman up a tree. Shit. He didn’t want to watch that crap again. He got out of bed and ejected that one and put it on the dresser and got one that showed guys in black wet suits like the one Burt Reynolds had worn in Deliverance wrestling big monster catfish out of logs in some reservoir and shoved it in. […]
He got back into bed and lit a cigarette and pushed Play again and the video started up. Jimmy’s daddy lay there and thought about watching Jimmy through the binoculars this afternoon. When he’d come in from work, Jimmy was gone, and the girls had told him that Jimmy had left on his go-kart, and Jimmy’s daddy had just driven up from the county road, and hadn’t met Jimmy anywhere, which meant that if he was on his go-kart and in the road, he was off in the other direction. So he got his binoculars from where he’d stashed them on the top shelf of the closet in his bedroom and he walked up the road toward the old man’s place. He kind of had an idea that Jimmy might be up there. Since the old man had been so nice to Jimmy, and had given him that nice new rod and reel, and a tackle box, and all that gear, Jimmy’s daddy thought that maybe the old man had told Jimmy that it would be all right for him to go up to the pond.
It only took him a few minutes to walk up there. When he got close to the old man’s barn, he stepped into the woods along the other side and got off the road and when he got up even with the new clay gravel road that he’d already seen, he stopped beside a tree and raised the binoculars and looked through them at the pond. That’s when he saw Jimmy. He was sitting on the ground beside his go-kart doing something, and when Jimmy’s daddy focused the glasses on Jimmy’s hands, he could see that he was rigging up a line. Then he saw him get something from a paint bucket that looked like one that had been in the shed. Worms probably. Maybe some night crawlers. Then Jimmy threw his line out there. Jimmy’s daddy stood there leaning against the tree watching Jimmy fish. It kind of made him feel funny to watch him like that without Jimmy knowing it. He wondered what the fuck he was going to do about Lacey. What if Johnette found out about it somehow and he had to get divorced? He’d lose Jimmy. And he didn’t want to lose Jimmy. And he wasn’t ever going to whip him again as hard as he’d whipped him over the tools. That had been wrong. And standing there watching him and thinking about all that made Jimmy’s daddy feel bad in his heart. But in about two seconds Jimmy’s daddy stopped thinking about all that because by then Jimmy had one hooked. But what had he hooked? Had the old man already put some fish in his pond? Hell, it wasn’t even full of water yet. But he’d hooked something. And he was reeling it in. Doing a pretty good job of it, too. That was when the rod bowed almost double and then suddenly Jimmy was fighting hard with something big. Jimmy’s daddy watched it, his heart kicking a little faster, and he could see how hard Jimmy was trying to fight the fish, and it was easy to see when the line snapped because Jimmy took a step back to regain his balance. And then he just stood there. Damn. What the hell was that?
The guys in the boats on the TV screen were talking to somebody in another boat while they were going out over the water. Then it cut to a scene where the boats were stopped and the men were getting out of them into chest-deep muddy water. But Jimmy’s daddy wasn’t listening to what they were saying. He was wondering what that old man had in that pond.
There was one thing about it. He was damn sure going to find out. He didn’t like it that the old man had fixed Jimmy’s go-kart. It kind of made him feel a little embarrassed that he hadn’t known how to fix it and/or hadn’t taken much time to try and fix it. It wasn’t any of the old man’s business, what went on down here. The way he looked at it, the old man was poking his nose into Jimmy’s daddy’s business. Aw, he knew the old man was grateful to Jimmy for calling the fire department when he was under his tractor in his pond and all that shit. But still. Jimmy was his boy, not the old man’s. In his mind, it gave him a good reason to go on up there sometime and see if he could hook what Jimmy had. Revenge or something like that. At night. In the dark. Maybe with a flashlight.
But how did a fish that big get in there that quick?
Unless somebody had put it in? Nah. Shit. Go your ass to bed.