A Miracle of Catfish Read Online Free

then drink another one in the parking lot, while she sat there and told him to come on and hurry up, that people were looking at him, and that it was a dry county, until he turned it up and finished it, and they got out, and went on in. He knew people could probably smell beer on his breath if they got close to him. Fuck em. If they didn’t like it they could kiss his white ass. It might be a dry county but it was a free country. Long as the cops didn’t catch you. He pulled on it harder. And half the time they saw the Baptist preacher over there, and he knew that son of a bitch had already smelled beer on his breath three or four times, andone time they’d had to sit down and
eat
with the bastard just because of the way it happened, it hadn’t been his suggestion, it had been the preacher’s, and Johnette didn’t have the guts to say No, and went ahead and said Yes, and Jimmy’s daddy hadn’t gone back out to the Bronco for another beer after his first plate from the seafood buffet line like he usually did because he was
so
pissed off. He pulled on it harder. And then when she got up to fix her another plate after she’d finished her first one, which had been totally loaded with fried catfish fillets and fried shrimp and fried green tomatoes, he’d had to sit there and talk to the preacher all by himself, which hadn’t been just real comfortable, and he didn’t have anything
against
the fucking preacher, but she’d stayed gone and stayed gone filling up her damn plate again and the preacher started talking about his mother’s dog they’d had to put to sleep because it was so old — it was like twenty-three years old, maybe, he couldn’t remember exactly how old now — and how terrible all that had been, and how close everybody in his family had been to the dog, because the dog had almost saved his little brother’s life by dragging him out of a pond one time, only not in time, about thirty minutes too late, actually, and the preacher just stopped eating and started letting his food get cold and went into this long very detailed spiel complete with tangents that went nowhere about how everybody in the family which included their kinfolks up in Akron felt like the dog was the last connection they had with his little brother, which made it a lot worse when the dog finally died, because it had been on life support for a while, just because everybody in the family already knew how bad it was going to be when the dog died, and they were trying to put it off as long as they could, and had even chipped in money to the vet hospital to try and keep the dog going, and he’d nodded and agreed and said it was awful and a shame and that he didn’t know why stuff like that had to happen and had kept shoving catfish fillets and french fries and fried shrimp and hush puppies and bites of fried frog legs into his mouth, and wishing he had a cold beer to go along with it instead of this iced tea, and he could see Johnette just taking all the time in the world refilling her plate at the buffet line, talking to people she didn’t even know, laughing, wearing those tight shorts with her fat ass, never even looking back at him to see how he was doing by himself with the preacher. That was the kind of shit she did. Drove him batty. Talkingon the telephone. To who? Who knew? Why’d he want to marry a woman with two kids already? From two different marriages? What had he been thinking? She wasn’t fat when they were going together, hell no, she wanted him to marry her and support her kids. Now look at her. Fat as a fucking hog. And love to fuck when they were going together? Oh my God. She’d damn near break a nail on your zipper trying to get to it. Now it was too much damn trouble. Who wanted to fuck her fat ass anyway? He was feeding both hers, though, wasn’t he? And he was buying Jimmy that go-kart, he didn’t care what she said.