Chapter 4
The great fish—at least in its own mind, it was great—moved silently through the muddy water.
It stopped and pulled something dead and scrumptious-looking out from under a tree root protruding from the underwater bank of the large, dark pond that formed an oak-shaded backwater of Wolfwater Creek. The stream, slow this time of the year, early August, trickled down out of the Stalwart Mountains and traced a course not far from where the tracks of the Brazos, San Antonio & Rio Grande Railroad Line angled up around the range’s eastern bastions from the south.
The fish pulled part of the dead thing out from under the log with a great jerk of its flat head. The dead thing was a half-grown javelina, or wild pig, that had foolishly tried to cross the stream earlier that spring, upstream from the pond. It had been swept away and drowned by the chill spring water, and the haphazard spring currents had sucked it into the pond and lodged it under the root. The pig was a bloated, ugly black mess as the great fish—thirty pounds, if it was an ounce, and as long from stem to stern as a leg of your average-sized man—jerked another part of it out from beneath the root and consumed it greedily. Its dark, crescent eyes half closing dreamily as it chomped, finding the morsel every bit as delicious as it had looked and smelled there in the murky, muddy water further obscured by long, hairlike weeds jutting up from the bottom.
The weeds waved this way and that in the gentle current, as did the great fish’s long whiskers, as the fish swallowed the tender morsel, then started swimming back under the root for more. It was afternoon, judging by the sun’s slant on the water overhead, and the fish was hungry. The last thing it had eaten was the meat out of the shell of a tortoise that had not been dead nearly long enough.
The fish—named Bubba Jones by the one man who both loved and hated him, though mostly saw him as a dozen nice-sized, meaty filets fried in a cast-iron skillet with butter, salt, and pepper over an open fire—spied movement in the corner of his right eye. He turned to see something splash into the stream, sending air bubbles foaming up around it. The thing was a cork, to which string was attached at both bottom and top. A hook was attached to the end of the lower, two-foot stretch of string. It was a sail hook that had been bent to form a U, with one side longer than the other, the end of the short side sharp as a razor’s edge. If you looked closely, you could see the irregular marks in the hook made by the pliers that had bent it.
Bloody guts had been impaled to the sharp end of the hook.
Bubba Jones’s practiced, discriminating sniffer detected chicken guts.
But such a slight snack did not compare to the full meal Bubba had left under the root.
Bubba smiled to himself. He chuckled.
Foolish man with his foolish hook and bobber!
(Bubba felt far superior to the man who both loved and hated him, though he did not know that he’d been named by the man after the man’s fattest cousin, “Bubba” Clarence Jones, of Tivoli, Texas, who’d been so fat he’d once pulled his single-hole privy over just by trying to exit it.)
Bubba Jones turned back to the remaining meal under the root, the edges of torn flesh beckoning, when he spied even more movement out of the corner of his right eye. The water was so murky he couldn’t see the object clearly. But he was curious enough—something even tastier and stinkier than the dead pig?—that he’d decided to hold off on the meal at hand and swim up along the side of the bank to investigate. Bubba was not worried that one of the other, lesser, and unnamed catfish in this neck of the pond would poach his meal.
The other, lesser, unnamed catfish in this neck of the pond, and even the lowly carp, knew who the biggest fish in this neck of the pond was. By now, they all knew whose meal the pig was—they all kept at least one eye skinned on the biggest fish in the pond—and would not be foolish enough to intrude on Bubba’s territory at the risk of becoming the biggest fish in this neck of the pond’s meal.
Finger food for Bubba.
So Bubba swam up a ways, to the left of where the cork and the baited hook lolled in the pond, maybe eight feet out from the bank. This other thing Bubba had detected was much nearer the bank than the cork and hook—maybe only a foot, if that much, out away from the shore.
Bubba swam closer to the object in question until he recognized what he was looking at from only three feet away.
A man’s thick, pale foot with a bulbous big toe.
A bulbous big toe with a nail as thick as a snail shell. In fact, the nail resembled a snail’s shell—a mottled yellow color with tiny corrugations running across it from left to right.
The foot that the toe belonged to hung down two feet beneath the surface of the water, the toes sticking straight out in front of it. The fish-belly white ankle and shin and calf above the foot were matted with fine brown hairs that gently waved, like the grass at the pond’s bottom and the fish’s whiskers in the pond’s current. As Bubba looked up through the water, he could see the man’s other foot and part of his leg, bent inward to rest against the bank just above the water.
The man’s faded red longhandle legs were rolled up to nearly his knees.
Bubba couldn’t see much more of the man above the surface of the pond. But he knew who he was. Just as the man knew who Bubba was. They’d been together out here, day after day, for a long time. The man who both loved and hated Bubba, and who had given Bubba the less than complimentary nickname, appeared to be resting back against the roots of the same tree he usually rested back against, his cane pole held loosely in his right hand on the ground by his side.
Bubba turned to the bated hook lolling in the water to his right.
He looked at the big, swollen toe with the discolored nail. Bubba knew what the man’s feet looked like. This wasn’t its first rodeo with the man. That big toe was oddly swollen, the nail even more discolored than it usually was.
The man, whom Bubba both loved and hated, had injured the toe recently. That toe probably ached like the blazes. Of course, not having toes, Bubba really didn’t know, but Bubba, unlike other catfish, had a good imagination. That had come from so many times studying the man and his methods and outfoxing him. The man had been angling for Bubba, day after day, for a very long time. The man was no doubt resting back against the tree, taking pulls from a large stone jug, as he usually did when he came out here to fish the pond, occasionally pulling up one of the usual, lesser fish whose wits were far too dim to avoid the man’s so-called trickery—the obvious baited hook and the cork that had been pried out of a whiskey jug and smelled so bad that even Bubba wouldn’t take a nibble out of it.
Studying the swollen toe, Bubba smiled. He moved his jaws around, filing his razor-edged white teeth against each other. Then, with a flick of his tail, he swam straight up and over to the foot to which the big, swollen, probably very tender toe protruded. Hovering there in the murky water, Bubba opened his mouth wide, then clamped it over the swollen appendage of topic, chomping down hard.
A bellowing wail rose from outside Bubba’s watery world as the big, tender toe was wrenched out of Bubba’s mouth and shot straight up out of the water. The pole dropped into the water and floated down . . . down . . . down to the bottom of the pond.
* * *
“ A H H H - O O O O O - A H H H H H - O O O O O - AHHHHH!
“OW! OW! OW! OHH! OWWW!
“YOU DEVIL OF A LUNATIC FISH!” cried “Catfish” Charlie Tuttle, jumping up and down on his right foot while holding his left foot with its throbbing toe across his right knee. “CUSSED DEMON SPAWN, BUBBA!” he bellowed at the deceptively placid, sun-glinting surface of the pond reflecting the oaks, cedars, cottonwoods, and mesquites peppering the shoreline around him.
He dropped the painful foot and looked at it.
Little pinpricks of blood bubbled up around the nail.
Oh, how it hurt!
HAD hurt! Now, being trifled at it by a fish—the very SAME fish he’d been stalking for the past two summers—it hurt even WORSE!
“Consarned gilled vermin think it’s funny, eh ?” Catfish bellowed at the placid pond, at the semi-shaded part of it where the assault had been affected. He’d been leaning up against a cottonwood stump standing roughly four feet back from the shore. His jug lay there, his own homemade mustang grape wine still dribbling from the lip, near a large wet patch in the sand and gravel and short grass, where a goodly portion had already spilled. “Ah, no—and I even lost a goodly portion of my special recipe. I cuss you, Bubba! I cuss you and I cuss your entire bloodline!”
Catfish unholstered his bone-gripped Colt Army. 44, clicked the hammer back, and emptied all five chambers into the pool he usually fished, on the east side of the pond, a long stone’s throw from his mud brick cabin sitting back a hundred yards, in a clearing in the creek-side trees. He always kept the one under the .44’s hammer empty, lest he should accidentally shoot something off his person that would have him cussing his watery nemesis in soprano.
Catfish raised the smoking Colt straight up by his shoulder in his right hand as pale smoke slithered from the barrel. The big, swarthy man, in his early sixties, with long, salt-and-pepper hair and matching, dragoon-style mustache and tangled beard, ground his molars as he scowled down at the water with his piercing, frosty gray eyes. “Laughin’ at me—ain’t ya? Sure, sure,” Catfish said, spatting a wad of chaw to one side, then wiping his lips with the left grimy sleeve of his balbriggan top.
He was clad only in wash-worn balbriggans, gun belt and holster on the left side of which was sheathed his bowie knife, and his high-crowned, badly weathered Stetson. “You go ahead an’ laugh. Sure, sure. Laugh. Just know, my blood enemy, you’ll soon be in a salt barrel in my keeper shed, and who’ll be laughin’ then, Bubba Jones? Ha!”
Catfish raised his left knee and slapped it with his left hand.
That only kicked up the throbbing pain in his swollen purple toe—the very one he’d dropped an iron shod wagon wheel on not two days ago, and which had kept him up for the past two nights, trying to dull the agony with his mustang grape wine plucked from the slopes of the nearby Stalwart Mountains, and considering plans to travel to Wolfwater for something a little stronger, though he wasn’t sure that was possible. If ever a wine could rival whiskey in the skull pop category, it would be Catfish Charlie Tuttle’s.
From behind Catfish came a delicate, tentative “Ahem.”
Catfish froze.
He looked down at the Colt in his hand. Empty.
He’d let himself get caught out here, half-naked and with an empty hogleg!
Catfish Charlie, he remonstrated himself silently, don’t you know that with all your years of lawdoggin’ behind you, you got more enemies in Texas than the Great Arsonist himself, William T. Sherman, has in all the Rebel South ?
Not only had he popped off all his ammo, and not only was he standing around out here clad in only wash-worn long-handles, he’d just made a fool out of himself, emptying his trusty Colt at a fish!
He swiveled his head and turned around slowly, stretching his lips back from his teeth, half expecting to find a passel of hollow-eyed human jackals behind him, each one with a bone to pick with former Texas Ranger, as well as Oklahoma and Texas town tamer, Catfish Charlie Tuttle.
Good Lord—it was even worse than he’d thought!
It was so bad that he glanced down at the turned-over jug near his throbbing big toe and wondered if he hadn’t overdone it with the last batch of mustang grape wine. Could he be hallucinating?
Was he actually seeing the two-seater surrey owned by Mayor Derwood Booth sitting on the two-track trail behind him, where the trees parted to accept the trail that jogged the hundred or so yards back to his shack? If not, then the mayor himself—young and small and well-groomed and wearing a three-piece suit and little, round, steel-framed spectacles—was seated on the buggy’s front seat, on the left side, the driver’s side, the reins of the harnessed black Morgan in his hands.
If not, then the Reverend Ezekiel Elmwood, minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Wolfwater, sat beside him, looking as grim as a pallbearer.
If not, then the founding mother and matriarch of the Wolfwater Women’s Sobriety League sat in the back seat directly behind the mayor, while Wolfwater’s primary madam—yes madam, as in a woman in the business of running a brothel and procuring prostitutes—sat beside the Widow Kotzwinkle, looking no less sober than the widow, though a whole lot more ravishing.
Miss Julia Claire, with her emerald-green eyes, flawless skin, ruby-red lips, and chestnut hair flowing down about her shoulders, was a whole lot younger, prettier, and better filled out than not only Mrs. Kotzwinkle but most, if not all, other women not only in Wolfwater, but in all West Texas. The fact was highlighted to best effect by the low-cut bodice of the spruce-green velveteen gown she wore. Like all her gowns, it had been sewn on her exquisite body by Wolfwater’s own master tailor, Ezra Kantor, formerly of somewhere in New Jersey, wherever that was, exactly—the far end of the earth, as far as Catfish knew. He’d rarely left Texas other than to fight against the rabid bluebellies in the Civil War.
The madam’s shoulders were bare beneath a gauzy silk cream shawl, likely also sewn by the fussy Mr. Kantor. On her head was a green picture hat with faux flowers being nudged this way and that in the breeze whispering off the pond in which the granddaddy of all catfish in Wolfwater Creek, Bubba Jones, lolled at the muddy bottom, chuckling with unabashed self-satisfaction.
“Good Lord, man,” said the long-faced, gray-headed, gray-bearded, black-suited pastor, knobby hands clutching the head of the carved cherrywood walking stick before him. “Have you gone mad, Catfish?”
The dapper, young, bearded, bespectacled mayor turned to the pastor, then turned his grave, wide-eyed gaze back to the big, potbellied, longhandle-clad, barefoot man holding the empty six-shooter down beside him. “I certainly hope not. For I do believe. . . we all here believe . . . or did believe . . . that you, Catfish Charlie, are the only thing standing between us and well”—he shrugged his thin shoulders and glanced once more at the reverend before returning his anxious gaze again to Catfish Charlie—“well . . . hell!”
They all said “heck” at the same time.
Then the lovely Julia Claire glanced at the pond behind Charlie and arched one pretty brow. “That said, Catfish, I do believe you’re going to need a bigger gun!”