The Brass Bed

5

Harvey got around a little before five-thirty with a flat-bottom boat on a trailer behind his car, and we got on out to the river about an hour later. The river was called the Newawah, and it wasn’t much of a river, as rivers go, but at this place we went it ran deep in its banks, and the trees grew thick and tall on the banks along it, and it was as fine and comforting a river for fishing as a reasonable person could want. The old cabin sat high on the bank in a clearing among the trees, and in front of it a path went down to a wide gravel bar, and right there the river was narrow and shallow and quite swift between the bar and the bank opposite, and with a rod you could take out of it sometimes those sleek and shining channel catfish which are as good as bass for fighting and better for eating. Below the bar, the river widened and deepened and darkened, and that was where we stretched our trot line across from bank to bank and caught with dough balls the fat and sluggish bullheads. The bullhead is also a catfish, not sleek and shining and full of fire like the channel cat, but he makes a very satisfying weight on a hook and line, and he is very satisfactory, too, wrapped in cornmeal in a skillet.

Harvey and I unloaded the boat from the trailer and carried it down the bank and across the gravel bar to the water on the deepening side below the shallow channel. We left it there and returned for the oars and the dough balls and trot lines, and then we came back once more to the boat and got in and rowed down the river a way. Harvey handled the oars, and I sat in the stern of the boat with the lines and dough balls. The water was cool and dark green, almost black in the long shadows of the trees, and it was pleasant to hear it lapping against the boat and the banks, and to hear above the soft sound of its lapping the many, unidentifiable sounds of small life in and around it. The best book I know about a river is Huckleberry Finn, which is actually a book about a river and a boy, and one of the best things about this best book is the way the author makes you feel the river the way the boy must have felt it, but this river in the book was a great river, a river of historical dimensions, and I have often thought there is also much to be said for the small river, the Newawah type river, and I wish I could say it here, but I can’t.

Pretty soon Harvey stopped rowing and rested on his oars and said, “This is a good place. We caught a lot of good bullheads here the last time.”

“I remember,” I said. “It’s as good a place as any.”

He swung the boat around and rowed across current to the bank, and I grabbed the drooping branch of a willow and pulled us in close. There was a stout root of a tree projecting from the bank just above the waterline, and I tied one end of the trot line to this root, and then Harvey rowed across the river to the other bank, bearing slightly downstream at an angle, and I let the trot line out into the water behind the boat and tied the remaining end to another root on the other side when we got there. After it was tied, we started back again more slowly along the line while I baited all the hooks with dough balls. Every couple of feet along the line, there was a drop line with a hook on it, and I put a dough ball on each hook. Three of the drop lines, spaced along the trot line, had weights on them instead of hooks. This was to keep the entire line well down in the water so the bullheads could get to the dough balls without too much trouble.

“Shall we set another line?” Harvey asked.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Well, let’s see how the luck runs. If the luck runs good, one’s enough, and if the luck runs bad, we can set another tomorrow.”

“That’s a good idea. We’ll see how the luck runs tonight.”

He rowed back to the gravel bar, and we pulled the boat up out of the water and went on up the path to the old cabin. We got the ice chest out of the back of the car and broke open the two cases of beer and put the cans into the chest on the ice, and it was by then getting pretty dark, so we gathered up some wood and made a fire. Sitting on the ground near the fire, we watched the darkness grow thick beyond the perimeter of light, and listened to the small river go by below us between its high banks.

“Are you hungry?” Harvey said.

“I’m pretty hungry,” I said, “but what I’m hungry for is a nice bullhead fried crisp in a skillet.”

“Do you want to wait and see if we get something? Maybe we’ll have something in an hour or so.”

“We’ll go run the line in an hour, and if we don’t have something then, we’ll eat something else.”

“All right. That sounds like a good idea. I wish the beer was cold, though. We should have put it on ice when we had the chest filled. If we’d done that, it would be good and cold now.”

“That’s true. I don’t know why we didn’t do it.”

“How about some coffee? We could have some coffee while we’re waiting for the beer to get cold.”

“All right. I’ll make some coffee.”

“No. Let me make it. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, old boy, but I must say that my coffee is superior to yours.”

“You make it, then.”

“I haven’t hurt your feelings, have I?”

“Of course not. I take practically no pride at all in my coffee. You are quite welcome to whatever glory accrues from superior coffee-making.”

“That’s a sensible attitude, old boy. It’s understood that these little gifts are passed around among us. I have a superior gift for making coffee, and you no doubt have superior gifts in other lines. If so, you are more than welcome to the fruits of them.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He got up and got some coffee and a pot from the back of the car and began to measure coffee into the pot. There was no water around, except the river water, but he had brought three gallons from town in a can, and he measured some of this into the pot with the coffee and set the pot on some coals that he raked out of the fire.

“Now I’ll have to watch this very carefully,” he said. “It is important to let the water boil only for the proper length of time. I have an idea that this may be where you go wrong on your own coffee-making, old boy. I think it’s quite likely that you let it boil too long.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes, I do. I think it’s quite likely.”

“I’ll have to be careful about that in the future.”

He squatted by the pot and watched it, and I lay back on the ground and folded my arms up under my head and watched the stars in the sky above the trees beyond the river, and there were a hell of a lot of them up there. After a while I started thinking about Jolly and me, and wondering if we were ever going anywhere, which didn’t seem likely, and the coffee started smelling very good. It was quite saddening to lie there looking at the stars and hearing the river and smelling the coffee and thinking of Jolly, and I wished there was something to be done to simplify things, but there didn’t seem to be anything. Then I thought of Jolly’s wistful death-wish, which was something that could not be thought of with serenity, and so I sat up and tried to quit.

When the coffee had boiled the right length of time by Harvey’s standards, he got up and went into the old cabin and came back with two tin cups. We kept a few things like that in there so that we wouldn’t have to bring them out from town every time, tin cups and plates and things like that, and now Harvey poured coffee into the cups and handed one of them to me. I drank some of it, and it was good and strong and very hot in the throat.

“Is it good?” he said anxiously.

“Yes, it’s very good.”

“Do you think it’s strong enough?”

“It’s exactly right. You certainly have a gift for coffee-making.”

“It’s damn decent of you to say so, old boy.”

“Not at all. I’m only acknowledging a truth.”

“I know, but a lot of people wouldn’t say it, just the same. You know how it is. Some people simply won’t admit that someone else has a gift that they lack themselves.”

“I’m perfectly happy to concede that your gift for coffee-making is superior to mine.”

“Thanks, old boy. I appreciate it.”

We finished the cups of coffee, but there was an emptiness in my stomach that the coffee didn’t fill.

“Are you hungry?” I said.

“Yes, I am. I’m damn hungry.”

“Has it been an hour since we set the line?”

“I think so. Just about an hour.”

“What do you say to running it?”

“All right. Let’s go.”

I got a flashlight, and we went down the path onto the bar and across the bar behind a thin yellow projection of light that somehow made the objects it touched seem strange and different from the way they seemed in the day. In the boat, we rode down at an angle to the starting of the line, and I was hoping we’d have a couple of good bullheads hooked, and I could tell by the feel of the line, the weight and the resistance of it when I lifted, that there was certainly something on it somewhere between the banks. We moved along the line checking the hooks, and the turtles had already been at some of them, and they had to be rebaited, but pretty soon, about the middle of the river, I brought up a big bullhead and got him off the hook into the boat and put the light on him.

“Say,” Harvey said, “he’s a pretty good one, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he is,” I said.

“How much does he weigh, do you think?”

“About three pounds.”

“I’d guess nearer four myself. He’s certainly a good one.”

After rebaiting the hook, we went on along the line and took off another bullhead near the bank, a smaller one, and that was all we got the first run, which was plenty for a meal, so we rowed back to the bar and went up to the cabin. When we got there, Pete the River Rat was sitting by the fire waiting for us, and he had helped himself to a cup of coffee.

His name may have really been Pete, or it may not have. It was just a name we got started calling him by, and after we’d got started it didn’t seem worth while asking him his real one and having to start all over again with something else in case we were wrong. He lived down the river about a half mile in an old cabin set up on high stilts, and he was very dirty and very happy and altogether a first-rate bum. Every so often he would go off to one of the farms in the vicinity and work for a day or two in order to get enough money to buy some cornmeal and beans and stuff like that to eat, plus a few plugs of Horseshoe chewing tobacco for pleasure, but mostly he lived in the cabin and caught fish and watched the river. He was always doing one thing that I’d never do if I never caught another fish in my life, and what he’d do was noodle them. Noodle is a word that may not have common currency, and it means to go along the bank in the water, usually at night, and get down where the big cats lie in the mud and catch them with your bare hands by the gills. Some of the cats get damn big, and noodling them is something I wouldn’t have any part of myself, but Pete did it all the time, and he told Harvey and me that he’d once got on the back of a cat six feet long, but I personally put this down as a tall tale, or a damn lie, whichever you prefer to call it. He was pretty interesting and unusual, however, and that’s the only reason I’m making so much of him, because he doesn’t have a hell of a lot to do with what I’m telling about, and actually nothing at all.

Harvey stopped in front of him and said in a nasty voice, “Have some coffee, Pete.”

I could tell that he was sore at Pete for helping himself, and it was certain that Pete could tell it too, but he didn’t give a damn. He was absolutely impervious to insult. He opened his mouth and made a gusty sort of sound that was the closest he ever came to the sound of laughter.

“I got some,” he said.

“Well, so you have,” Harvey said. “I guess you knew you’d be perfectly welcome to it, so you just went ahead and helped yourself.”

“That’s what I did. I helped myself.”

“Sure. God helps him who helps himself. You and God must get along pretty good, Pete.”

“We get along all right.”

“That’s fine. That’s just mighty damn wonderful. How do you and God like the coffee?”

“We think it’s too weak. We like our coffee stronger.”

Harvey turned to me and lifted his arms and let them fall and slap against his sides.

“Did you hear that? Pete and God don’t like the coffee. Isn’t that a crying shame?”

“I think I’ll go clean the bullheads,” I said.

“All right, old boy. You clean the bullheads, and I’ll get everything ready here. It’s too bad we only have enough for two. If we had enough for three, for instance, we could invite Pete to stay for chow, but I guess it doesn’t really matter, after all, because he probably wouldn’t like our bullheads, anyhow. He doesn’t like our coffee, and I consider it very probable that he wouldn’t like our bullheads, either. Pete, of course, is a man with very particular tastes. He’s a regular God-damn gourmet, as a matter of fact.”

I got some pliers and a hammer and a large nail and took them with the bullheads down to the river bank. After setting the flashlight to shine on a cotton wood tree, I took the bigger of the two bullheads and nailed him to the trunk of the tree, driving the nail through his flat head. With my pocket knife, I cut through the skin all the way around the base of his head and on a perpendicular line down his back. Using the pliers, I peeled the skin off and then took the bullhead down and gutted him and afterward did the same things with the smaller one. When I was finished, I carried the pair of them down across the bar and washed them in the river. The sounds of the river were a kind of music, and it was nice there on the bar in the darkness.