A Miracle of Catfish Read Online Free Page B

them unless you had lily pad problems and you wouldn’t think to eat them unless you were Chinese.
    It was built on a Ford chassis and it had banks of compartments down two sides with the tanks inside them, so that there was a walkway up the middle of the back of the truck, and it was a very heavy truck because a truck like that had to be built very heavy because of all the water on it that weighed so much, about eight pounds per gallon, which adds up pretty fast, hundred gallons, eight hundred pounds, so it had a big axle and dual wheels on the back for that same reason as well, and it was redlike a new wagon at Christmas. Or a fire truck. It was probably the closest thing there was to a fire truck.
    […]
    It also had counters that were made of wood, and unfortunately it was some kind of wood that splintered easily, and some of Tommy’s boys and even Tommy himself sometimes got a splinter in his hand and that was the only thing that wasn’t cool about the truck, because if it went in deep enough, then you had to get a straight pin and dip it in a bottle of alcohol that was in another compartment of the truck or strike a cigarette lighter and hold the pin over the flame for a few seconds in order to sterilize it and then stick it in the hole in whoever’s finger and make it come out by poking it around in the hole and it was enough to make the boys on the fish truck dance around beside the compartments whenever it happened. They’d be talking while it was happening but they wouldn’t be talking normally. They’d have their eyes closed while Tommy dug around in there with a straight pin and a bunch of people who were lined up to buy some fish off the truck watched. There was a lot of pain to be had in just a finger. Which was usually where they got finned, too. By those eleven-inch catfish. That were just aching to get into somebody’s pond. And eat. And grow. And be free. Unlike Ursula.

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    She lay undulant in her dark Arkansas barn, in the cool and highly oxygenated water of her round and almost musically bubbling tank, her dorsal and tail fins trembling slightly, waving gently. Her whiskers stuck out about a foot in front of her massive maw. A long time ago when she was a virtual baby she had lived in a river and there were different things to eat that washed in from rainwater, things like grubs and red worms and night crawlers and lightning bugs and praying mantises and fire ants and army ants and carpenter ants and ground puppies or newts and stink bugs and skinks and aphids and caterpillars and weevils and carpet beetles and those little bitty bright green tree frogs you see sometimes, the ones with suction pads on their toes. Climb right up a window. Sit there watching you eat supper with big round eyes. Holler like hell in the summertime.
Mbeeeeeeeeeeeee!
    Now all she got was floating chunks of fish feed, and all it was was dog food anyway, except that it was made in smaller pellets, like BBs, and they put it in a different bag, one with a picture of a catfish on it, but not a catfish as big as she was since she was bigger than the bag.
    She was not a behemoth. She was a beauty. She was the nightmare fish of small boys and she came from the depths of sweaty dreams to suck them and their feeble cane poles from the bank or the boat dock to a soggy grave.
    There was nothing for her to do but swim endlessly, be a fish factory. A maw-jawed mamaw. Endlessly turning in her tank like a soul sentenced to purgatory forever. She’d stopped bumping the walls long since.
    The last time Tommy had put her on the table she’d about flopped her big ass off it onto the bloody and slick concrete floor, it being bloody and slick from him dressing a mess of small ones for a fish fry later that night, back when things had been going really good, for him anyway, not for her, since she was still just swimming around in the same place she’d been in for so long, the mother lode of his fish