Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

That summer, Daddy went from telephoning and dynamiting fish to poisoning them with green walnuts. The dynamite was messy, and a couple years before he’d somehow got two fingers blown off, and the side of his face had a burn spot that at first glance looked like a lipstick kiss and at second glance looked like some kind of rash.

Telephoning for fish worked all right, though not as good as dynamite, but Daddy didn’t like cranking that telephone to hot up the wire that went into the water to ’lectrocute the fish. He said he was always afraid one of the little colored boys that lived up from us might be out there swimming and get a dose of ’lectricity that would kill him deader than a cypress stump, or at best do something to his brain and make him retarded as his cousin Ronnie, who didn’t have enough sense to get in out of the rain and might hesitate in a hailstorm.

My grandma, the nasty old bag, who, fortunately, is dead now, claimed Daddy has what she called the Sight. She said he was gifted and could see the future some. I reckon if that was so, he’d have thought ahead enough not to get drunk when he was handling explosives and got his fingers blown off.

And I hadn’t ever seen that much sympathy from him concerning colored folk, so I didn’t buy his excuse for not cranking the phone. He didn’t like my friend Jinx Smith, who was colored, and he tried to make out we was better than her and her family, even though they had a small but clean house, and we had a large dirty house with a sagging porch and the chimney propped up on one side with a two-by-four and there were a couple of hogs wallowing out holes in the yard. As for his cousin Ronnie, I don’t think Daddy cared for him one way or the other, and he often made fun of him and imitated him by pretending to bang into walls and slobber about. Of course, when he was good and drunk, this wasn’t an imitation, just a similarity.

Then again, maybe Daddy could see the future, but was just too stupid to do anything about it.

Anyway, Daddy had these tow sacks-about ten of them-and he and Uncle Gene had them full of green walnuts and some rocks to heavy them up, and they had them fastened on ropes and thrown out in the water, the ropes tied off to roots and trees on the shore.

Me and my friend Terry Thomas had gone down there to watch and help, because we didn’t have nothing else we wanted to do. Terry didn’t want to go when I told him what I wanted to do and where we were going and that I wanted him there with me, but he broke down finally and went and helped me toss bags and pull up fish. He was real nervous about the whole thing because he didn’t like either my daddy or my uncle. I didn’t like them, either, but I liked being outside and doing things that men do, though I think I would have been more happy with a line and a hook than bags of walnut poison. Still, I liked the river and the outdoors better than I liked being at the house with a mop in my hand.

My grandma on Daddy’s side always said I didn’t act like a girl at all, and I ought to stay home learning how to keep a garden and shell peas and do women’s work. Grandma would lean forward in her rocker, look at me with no love in her gooey eyes, and say, “Sue Ellen, how you gonna get a husband you can’t cook or clean worth a flip and don’t never do your hair up?”

Course, she wasn’t being fair. I’d already been doing woman’s work for long as I could remember. I just wasn’t no good at it. And if you’ve ever done any of it, you know it ain’t any fun at all. I liked doing what the boys and men did. What my daddy did. Which, when you got right down to it, didn’t seem like all that much, just fishing and trapping for skins to sell, shooting squirrels out of trees, and bragging about it like he’d done killed tigers. Most of that bragging took place after he got liquored up good. I’d had me a taste of liquor once, and I didn’t like it. I can say the same for chewing tobacco and cigarettes and anything that’s got lettuce in it.

As for putting my hair up, she was really talking about certain religious ways, and I couldn’t figure that God, with all he had to worry about, would be all that concerned with hairdos.

This day I’m telling you about, Daddy and Uncle Gene was drinking a little and tossing those sacks, and the water was turning dark brown where the walnuts went in. After a while, sure enough, a bunch of brim and sun perch come floating belly up.

Me and Terry stood on the shore and watched while Daddy and Uncle Gene got in the rowboat and pushed off and went out there with nets and gathered them fish like pecans that had fell on the ground. There was so many I knew we’d be eating fried fish not only tonight, but tomorrow night, and after that we’d be eating dried fish, which is another thing I forgot to put on my list of stuff I don’t like. Jinx says dried fish tastes like stained shorts smell, and she won’t get an argument from me. If they were smoked proper, that was all right, but dried fish are a lot like trying to chew on a dead dog’s tit.

Walnuts didn’t really poison the fish to death, but it stunned them up a mite and made them float to the surface, white bellies showing, working their gills. Daddy and Gene gathered them up with nets on a stick and put them in a wet tow sack for gutting and cleaning.

The sacks was tied to the shore with ropes, and me and Terry went down there to start pulling them in. The walnuts still had enough green in them they could be used downriver to stun more fish, so we was supposed to save them. We got hold of a rope and started pulling, but it was real heavy and we couldn’t do it.

“We’ll be there d’rectly to help out,” Daddy called from the boat.

“I think we should cut this one loose,” Terry said to me. “No use straining our guts out.”

“I don’t quit that easy,” I said, and looked up to see what was going on with the boat. It had a hole in the bottom, so Daddy and Uncle Gene couldn’t stay out long. Uncle Gene had to bail it out with a coffee can while Daddy paddled the boat back to the bank. When they had it pulled out of the water, they came over to help us.

“Damn,” Daddy said, “either them walnuts has got heavy as a Ford or I’ve gotten weak.”

“You’ve gotten weak,” Uncle Gene said. “You ain’t the man you once was. You ain’t the strapping example of prime manhood I am.”

Daddy grinned at him. “Hell, you’re older than me.”

“Yeah,” said Uncle Gene, “but I’ve took care of myself.”

Daddy let out with a hooting sound, said, “Ha!”

Uncle Gene was fat as a hog, but without the personality. Still, he was a big man in height and had broad shoulders and arms about the size of a horse’s neck. Daddy didn’t even look kin to him. He was a skinny peckerwood with a potbelly, and if you ever saw him without a cap it was cause it had rotted off his head. He and Uncle Gene had about eighteen teeth between them, and Daddy had most of them. Mama said it was because they didn’t brush their teeth enough and they chewed tobacco. There were times when I looked at their sunken faces and was reminded of an old pumpkin rotting in the field. I know it’s a sad thing to be so repulsed by your own kin, but there you have it, straight out and in the open.

We all pulled on the rope, and finally, just about the time I thought I was going to strain my guts out, up come that bag. Only it wasn’t just the bag. There was something caught up in it, all swole up and white, and dangling long strands of wet grass.