Richard Ford - A Piece of My Heart

“But what the hell is it?” he said, hauling up another annoying bolus of blue smoking gunk and slapping it back in the water stoutly.

“What?” the old man said, frowning, having forgotten the conversation entirely and become reengrossed in stealthing up on the jugs.

“The box,” he said, raising his voice. “The hinge box at Landrieu’s house.”

“That thing,” the old man said, as if it were a perennial joke. “That’s his worm farm and his cricket farm and his roach farm, and his everywhateverelse kind of farm.” He snorted. “That’s one reason Landroo never cared much for John Carter, that and all the Cain Johnny raised over there in Stovall at their baseball. John was always getting Landroo’s crickets and throwing them in the fire, and Landroo didn’t like that cause he bought them crickets in Helena and paid money for the buggers, then old Johnny would come along and toss a bunch in the fire and sit there and listen at them pop, and that’d be old Landroo’s money poppin. And it made Landroo mad as hell, don’t think it didn’t.” The old man began tampering with the box as if he were planning to spring it into action momentarily and wanted to have it in a state of absolute readiness. The boat was making a way imperiously, closer in to the bank now than to the jugs or the beaver lodge. “Anyway,” Mr. Lamb said, distracted momentarily by his box, to which he administered a tentative crank with the wooden handle on its side. “Anyway, anyway, Landroo likes to fish with all his worms and roaches and doodads, except he don’t like to spend all day out in the hot sun. So he went out and got him a regular lath peach crate and filled it up with sweet hay and tied it up with baling wire, and took it all and tied him some sash weights to it and hauled it out here and dropped it where that middlest boy is, and rigged him up floats out of them Prestone jugs, and glommed a bunch of worms and roaches and crickets on a treble hook and knotted one to each of them jugs and set ’em out beside his hay bale, and them fish can’t hardly wait to get hooked up. And he’ll come out here every two or three days and paddle over here and check his ‘trotlines’—that’s what he calls them, though they ain’t true trotlines in any sense.”

He began to think that if there were already fish hooked and waiting to be pulled up on Landrieu’s fish trap, why was it necessary to do anything more than get them out and go home, and forget about doing any telephoning, whatever that was. He looked at the back of the old man’s head for a long moment.

“Why can’t we just borrow a couple of Landrieu’s fish?” he said, frowning up at the floating jugs.

“Cause they ain’t ours,” the old man snapped, and bent his head around and looked at him in surprise. “I’ll tell you, though,” he said, smiling strangely, “Landroo’s a comical old coon. When he comes out here, he won’t go right to where them jugs are at. He’ll rig him up a cane pole and take a bunch of whatever he likes that day, worms or roaches or whatever’s he got in his ‘farm,’ and start down there in them dead falls and nigger all the way up to here.” The old man grinned at him in amazement as if Landrieu were a living mystery to match all mysteries, never divining Landrieu might take some considerable pleasure in the leisurely divertissement of fishing, before he got down to the actual business of taking in the fish. “He likes to go down there and just sit a long time, watching them spatterdocks,” the old man said, grinning to prove he faithfully liked Landrieu, but was entitled to exercise his private jurisdiction as Landrieu’s chief critic and adviser. He got himself almost completely turned around, his eyes big and round and his face turned red. “And he says to me, ‘And all at onct then, Mr. Mark, them crappies commences to hist straight up in the air snatching them little skeeters off them pads and making all kinds of noise, ah-sha-sha-sha-ah-sha-sha-sha, boiling that water like two hogs on a mudhole.’ And I said to him, ‘Well, what did you do then, Landroo?’ And he said, real sheepish, ’Oh, Mr. Mark, I just eased on in there real sweet with my boat and laid my little gob of worms on top of one of them pads and one of them big suckers snatched that hook off there like God snatching back a palsied baby.’”The old man was thoroughly regaled by his own story. “But I’ll tell you,” he wheezed, “Landroo might be a real fisherman, but I had to carry him to Helena one evening with a treble hook in his forehead, bout stuck clear to his brain. One of them big crappies took a swipe at his worm on one of them lily pads, and Landroo got excited and jerked the thing back too quick and it hit him in the head like a roofing nail. And the son-of-a-bitch wouldn’t let me touch it. I said, ’Landroo, I’ll get a pair of needle-nose pliers and have it out in two shakes.’ And he said, ’No, suh, take me to the emergency room.’”Mr. Lamb looked at him, gravely questioning Landrieu’s far-reaching concept of an emergency. The old man turned and eyed the beaver house as it slid by the boat.

As soon as the boat slipped past the beaver house, Mr. Lamb held his finger to his lips and waved his other hand to signify he ought to quit paddling now and let the boat propel itself toward the jugs.

He watched the beaver house ease by, wondering if there were beavers sitting around inside or if they had heard the howling and shouting and made a fast exit. He scanned up the vestige of submerged bank, thinking he’d see a big beaver hurrying off into the denser woods, but he saw only a fat sparrow twitting and sputtering in a jungle of dead boxberries, creating a racket with his wings as though he had gotten inside the bush by misadventure and now frantically couldn’t figure how to get out.

Mr. Lamb gave the sparrow a grieved look and swiveled on his seat and drew the black box closer between his legs, holding both lead wires in one hand, and deliberately began cranking the handle. The boat began to sidle slightly, taking more of a broadside approach to the jugs than a nose-first approach. All the turtles lined along the limb of the deadfall began craning their necks to find out what was going on, though none of them seemed to think enough of the commotion to move from where they were. One finally became uneasy and wobbled to the opposite end of the log, but Mr. Lamb didn’t notice and none of the turtles seemed to want to leave for the bottom just yet. He stayed as still as he could in the back of the boat, the sun shining on the crown of his head, and let the paddle lie across his thighs so that it dripped back into the slough

Mr. Lamb gave the box several more rigorous cranks, then separated the twin wires to each hand, holding each by its rubber sleeve that had been stripped ten inches from the tip.

When the boat finally drifted by the first of the encircling jugs and sliced into the middle water, Mr. Lamb turned and gave an inflamed look and in a loud stage whisper that made the one nervous turtle dive for the bottom, said, “I’m just going to make a local call.” The old man’s eyes squeezed together as if he could barely keep back the heaves, and he promptly jammed both wire ends over the side and into the water like an old picador administering the pic to a motionless bull.

And the total effect was nothing.

Both of them peered at the water, anticipating something unforeseen to happen, but nothing did. He expected the current traversing the plus-to-minus terminals to get shorted through the boat and deal them both a sound shock. But instead he felt nothing, though he experienced a strange thrill when he saw the old man’s eyes and had tightened his ass in case the box was wound up a lot tighter than he thought.

Mr. Lamb, however, had clearly reckoned on something formidable. He glared at the water, the two discharged wires dangling from his hands, searching the surface fiercely as if he expected the surface to get suddenly thick with stunned fish. But the water stayed the same. The turtle came climbing slowly out and strained along the spine of the log and found itself a suitable location and began to take in whatever else was going on.