HE REACHED DOWN INTO THE BAG OF CATFISH FOOD AND GRABBED a handful and threw it into the pond, the food spreading and floating and before the ripples had died the mouths came up from the bottom wide and eager and slapping at the surface of the water as the food disappeared. Mitchell Gaines watched for a minute with his hands in his pockets and then he sat down in his lawn chair on the pond bank. He opened up the can of crickets and baited his hook and with a flick of the wrist he sent the hook and sinker halfway across the pond. The pine trees on the other side of the pond gave a long shadow across the gentle swaying of the brown water. He leaned back in his chair though he knew this wouldn’t take long with the catfish already stirred by the food. It was cheating but it was his pond and his fish so he was easy on his own rules. He wore a cowboy shirt with its sleeves rolled up over his elbows and he wiped his hands on the already filthy pants that he’d been wearing for the last three days.
He had two more lawn chairs and on the ground next to his chair was a Styrofoam cooler filled with ice and canned Cokes and a halfpint of whiskey on top of the ice. By the afternoon the drinks and whiskey would be gone and the healthiest of the catches would be nestled in the melting ice. He had figured he’d spend the late afternoon skinning and filleting the fish and by tomorrow they would be sitting around the kitchen table with fried fish and hushpuppies and he’d get the woman to make coleslaw and then they could sit on the back porch with coffee and look out across the land that always seemed more vast to him under the night sky. The line hit and he reeled it in and a catfish that needed a few more pounds flapped at the end of the line. He twisted the hook from its lip and walked to the edge of the water and he set the fish into the water gently and the fish squirmed and stirred up the mud and then disappeared. He sat down again and baited another hook with another cricket and let it fly.
It’s finally come on, he thought. It’s finally come on though it didn’t seem like it ever would and I didn’t think I’d be here to see it anyway. He looked at his watch and knew his son should be coming along any time now. If that truck cranked up.
He looked around the place. He spent most of his time sitting now after a lifetime of getting up and doing. Buying small houses nobody else wanted and painting them and replacing rotted floors and gutting kitchens and gutting moldy bathrooms and doing the roofing and tiling the floors and whatever else had to be done. Whatever he could do with his boy. Teaching Russell how to run wire and swap plumbing and how to measure twice so that you made damn sure you cut it right the first time. Making these little houses something he was proud of and then renting them to people who sometimes paid the rent and sometimes disappeared but no matter if it was good people or bad people living in them, there was always something to do. Always something dripping or an outlet not working or a dishwasher not running. Always something to do and if there wasn’t something to do there was always another little rundown house somewhere that nobody wanted that was sitting there like a fallen tree in some forgotten forest and he would buy it and bring it back to life. There was hardly a neighborhood in town that hadn’t been touched by him and Russell. Hardly a day had gone by since he had to give it all up that he didn’t wish with the next sunrise that his back and legs would let him do the things he used to do. And not a day had gone by since his boy had been taken up into the Delta and put behind those walls that he hadn’t prayed at night that God would keep him alive until Russell came back home.