A Miracle of Catfish by Larry Brown

Author:Larry Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2007-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

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Another thing that wasn’t fair among all the things that weren’t fair as far as school went was all the homework they gave you to do as soon as school started. It was like maybe the teachers had worked on all this stuff all summer long while they were off so that they’d be ready to load you down with enough arithmetic and Mississippi history and science and English and social studies homework to make sure you didn’t have time to go out and ride your go-kart any before dark if you had a go-kart. Jimmy couldn’t believe how much homework he had the very first night and how long it took to do it, sitting on the living-room couch with his books and his tablets, trying to get it done while the girls talked on the portable phone and watched TV and his mama fixed herself sandwiches and leaned over into the refrigerator for a container of french onion dip and took it and a big bag of potato chips back to her room and lay down on the bed and flipped through the channels looking for something to watch. She was also tugging on those funny-looking cigarettes she smoked sometimes that smelled odd. Tangy. Sweet. He’d noticed that she never did this when his daddy was around, but she apparently didn’t mind doing it while Jimmy and the girls were around. He’d asked Evelyn one time what was that stuff Mama was smoking and Evelyn said it was weed. Jimmy asked her what weed was and she said it was boo. He asked her what boo was and she said it was shit. He asked her what shit was and she said it was tea. He asked her what tea was and she said, Don’t ask so many questions, you little rotten-tooth son of a bitch, she’s getting stoned. When Jimmy told her she was calling her own mother a bitch, that shut her up for a while.

Jimmy in his homework had been reading about all the Indians who used to live in Mississippi, mainly Choctaws and Chickasaws. He wished they still did. He liked anything about Indians. Arrowheads, for instance. He had a couple of real good dark red ones he hadn’t shown his daddy that he’d found in the fields below the old rotted house where he’d seen the dead black lady, before he’d seen the dead black lady. Some kid at school, a boy named Herschel Horowitz with big glasses, had told Jimmy during a conversation they were having about arrowheads that his daddy, Herman Horowitz, was pretty crazy about going out and hunting arrowheads and often took Herschel along with him and that the best time and place to find arrowheads was in a field that had just been broken up in the spring, right after a rain. Herschel said what happened was a natural thing, that the rain washed the dirt away from the arrowheads and made it easier to find them. And it turned out that Herschel had been right.

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