She looked at him hard.
“A couple of beers will be all right,” he said.
She went into the back of the house and returned with two bottles.
“That’s one dollar,” she said.
He gave it to her. J.P. looked at the women on the sofa. Two of them looked old and a little used. The third, a big blond woman, sat at one end. She wore white shorts and a silk blouse, and she had good thighs and her breasts were heavy and loose, and he could see that she wore no underwear. He put his beer down on the table and went in back with her.
Her room was near the back porch, and he could hear the rain falling against the side of the house. She turned on a table lamp and tilted the shade so that most of the light would fall in the corner away from the bed. She undressed without looking at him or speaking. Her breasts were very large. She lay down on the bed and put a pillow under her.
It had stopped raining the next morning, and the sun was bright outside the hotel window when he awoke. He thought about the prostitute from the night before, and for a moment he wanted her again. There was a bad taste of whiskey in his mouth. He went into the bath and brushed his teeth. He had gone back to the billiard hall with Clois after they left the brothel, and both of them had gotten drunk on a bottle of cheap bourbon, and now he was thirsty and dry inside. He drank too much water from the tap and it made him dizzy again. He went back to bed and lay on the cool sheets under the ceiling fan and put the prostitute out of his mind and didn’t think of anything except the coolness around him. He slept for a while and awoke and the fan was turning over him, its long flat wood blades making a flicking circle of shadow and light on the ceiling. The breeze felt very good and he went to sleep again. By noon he was feeling much better, and he showered with cold water and went out to eat.
Later, he returned to the hotel and picked up his fishing tackle. He felt pleasant after eating, the day was fairly cool from last night’s rain, and the whiskey taste was gone from his mouth. He walked the two miles along the farm road to the river, with the fields of cotton and corn and watermelon and the red dirt land on each side and the Negro shacks and the big cotton gin made from tin and the pine and oak trees that grew back from the river bank in the distance. He walked through the trees to the river, and the ground felt soft under his feet. He saw an armadillo move through the grass looking for insects; its hard armored shell was hunched on its back, and it had a spike tail and a small head with little ears and shrunken black eyes. He remembered when he used to hunt them with a .22 after the rains.
He came out of the trees by the sawmill. The river was higher than it had been yesterday, and it swirled around the door of the logging chute that hung open in the water. He looked along the bank for grasshoppers, but the grass was too wet for them to be jumping. A Negro boy of about fourteen came down the bank on the other side of the river and got into the pirogue tied to a willow tree. He wore a ragged wash-faded shirt and short pants that hung to his knees. He sat in the stern of the pirogue and pushed it out in the current from the bank with the paddle. J.P. called to him.
The boy stroked across the river and held the boat steady in the back current along the bank by sticking the paddle in the soft clay at the water’s edge.
“You want to make fifty cents?” J.P. said.
“What I got to do?”
“Let me use your boat for a while.”
“My daddy don’t let nobody else use it.”
“Then I’ll give you the fifty cents to row me down to the ponds.”
The boy looked at him, unsure.
“You want the fifty cents, don’t you?” J.P. said.
“Yes, sir. I wants it, but I don’t want no whipping when I get home.”
“Come up here and help me dig some worms.”
“Yes, sir.”
The boy got out of t
he boat into the shallows and dragged the bow onto the bank. He took the bailing can from under the seat and squatted on his haunches by J.P. and helped him dig in the ground. They filled the can with worms, and the boy got into the pirogue’s stern and took up the paddle while J.P. slid them off the mud back into the water and jumped in. The boy swung them into the current and headed downstream towards the ponds. There were oaks and cypress on each side of the river leaning out over the water. It was cool in the shade of the trees, and when they went around a bend close to the bank the overhanging moss swept across the bow of the boat. J.P. put his pole together and fixed his line as they neared the place where the river widened and cut back into the ponds. The water was dark from the rain. He could see the gars breaking the surface with their backs. He hoped there were none around the ponds. The fishing was never any good when the gars were near, since they preyed on smaller fish. The boy paddled them into a cove that was fairly large and shaded by the trees. The water was covered with lily pads along the bank, and they rose and swelled in the waves from the boat. The boy grabbed a willow limb and pulled them close to the bank and tied the painter to the trunk of the tree. J.P. threw his line near the lily pads. Bass always stayed in the shady places in hot weather. The boy touched him on the back and pointed to the bailing can with the worms. He had a throw line in his hand with three hooks and a lead washer for a weight. J.P. handed him the can. The boy baited only one of his hooks and let the line hang over the side down in the mud. He waited a few minutes and pulled his hook out of the water and spit on the bait and put it back in again. It was a Negro superstition. They believed that fish would bite if you spit on the hook, even a bare one.
They fished for an hour and a half. J.P. caught one sun perch and one smallmouth black bass. It had rained too much for the fishing to be any good The boy caught a gar. The line was wrapped around his wrist, and it cut his skin when the gar hit and started to run. The boy pulled with both hands, the veins standing up hard in his wrist, as the gar thrashed the water with his tail and tangled himself in the line. The boy got him against the side of the boat and held him partly out of the water and got his pocketknife open with one hand and worked the point into the weak spot in the back of the gar’s neck where the armored skin joined the head. He pushed the knife to its hilt and pulled it free and then plunged it in again. The gar snapped his long pointed jaws at the line, and then his body went weak when the vertebra was cut and his tail stopped ginning the water. The boy pulled the gar into the boat by the gill and laid him in the bottom. He smiled at J.P. His face and neck were beaded with sweat, and a thin rivulet of blood ran down from his wrist over the back of his hand. He took the knife off the board seat and cut down the back of the gar and pulled the hard skin away, then he slit open the belly and scooped out the entrails and threw them onto the bank. He let the head remain. The gar was a big one even after he had been dressed. The eyes looked like glass now and the jaws were open, exposing the long rows of teeth. The boy would take him home and his family would barbecue the meat over an open fire on a spit. J.P. had never tasted gar; only Negroes would eat it (along with mullet and cottonfish and coon and possum), but they said it was good. The boy was quite happy. He rowed them back down the river and talked about the fish. He asked J.P. if he had ever seen one that large. J.P. said he hadn’t. The boy was very pleased and he wanted to give J.P. part of the meat.
He paid the boy and gave him his tackle since the fishing would not be any good until a few days from now when the water went down, and he would have to return to the show before then. He went back to the hotel and read the newspapers in the lobby for a while. He ate dinner at the café and walked down the street as the glow of the late afternoon sun lessened to twilight and the faint evening wind blew through the trees on the courthouse lawn. He had nothing to do except shoot pool with Clois and the others or get drunk or go whoring, and he didn’t feel like doing any of it.
He caught the night train to the city. As he rode through the dark fields, he realized that his hometown held nothing for him anymore. Time had removed him and it would not allow him to go back. The fishing had taken him back for a short while to the way things had been two years ago, but he knew now that he existed only in the present moment of the wheels clicking over the tracks, and time would carry him farther away from the world of small towns and Saturday night whorehouses and the red clay cotton fields and the nigger funeral marches and fishing for bass in the ponds during the early fall.
He was hopped when he arrived back in the city. He had opened one of the white packets from his suitcase on the train, and he stayed high on cocaine and whiskey for the next two days. He slept little, and he lost any sense of night and day. Later, he could not remember how much he had taken or drank. He walked the streets all one night, and was asked to leave a bar after he became involved in an argument with another man. He picked up a prostitute, although he didn’t recall it afterwards, and she rolled him for his watch and wallet. On Saturday he was with April in their room, and he hadn’t changed clothes or shaved since he had gotten off the train. His shirt was soiled and there was a thick feeling in his head.
“You’ve got the show tonight,” she said. “Don’t you understand what I’m saying? Listen to me.”
He wanted to get out of the room. He didn’t know how he had gotten there, anyway.
“Don’t give a goddamn,” he said.
“You let those hicks know what you are and you’re finished.”