Three Legged Frog

Raisin' Up Catfish: Twenty-four

Last night was just what I needed. As the sun lit up the clouds in shades of orange and the moon shone brightly from it all, my heart sighed deeply. Such beauty here on Earth. What can heaven or the Earth made new be like?
As I sat watching the cirrus clouds turn orange, then pink, then grey, my soul felt very near God’s. As I sat there thinking, I thought how neat it was that such a thing as the moon’s rising, with all its simple beauty, never makes a sound as it rises and tiptoes gracefully across the starry heavens. Then I thumbed through my Bible and God showed me his promises of throwing a load of care on Him. Oh, what a precious promise...

Actual Journal entry: July 12, 1972

Twenty-four:

Two or three weeks that summer I drew overnight duty at the hatchery. I’m not  exactly sure why, though I’d guess it had something to do with the fact that, day after day, despite an awkward, teenage tendency toward screw-ups I was decidedly earnest …and I was dutiful, trying like hell to get things right. It didn’t hurt, either that night shift wasn’t a high-skills sort of job or that I had no other life beyond work. I had no family and no friendships there in Comfrey.

The old geezer who usually baby sat the hatchery overnight had shown up for work stone drunk and been fired on the spot. I was asked to stay on and cover the shift until midnight with the promise that someone would run to Miss Mae’s store and bring me back a sandwich and snacks for supper to tide me over until Bone could return to the hatchery and run it until sunrise. Eager to please and happy for the extra hours, I agreed. I knew well enough every monotonous task required to keep that hatchery humming and healthy, and the thought of something totally new felt a little exciting.

Bone did return, as promised, smiling and sleepy-eyed, looking like a teddy-bear around 12:45 am and he and I talked casually for a while as he smoked a Pall Mall and we finished a feeding round together. Then he sent me home in his truck to get some shut-eye, telling me to sleep in, maybe get a good breakfast at the cafe and be back, ready to work about ten.

When I showed up next morning, rested and eager to begin my workday things around the fish farm were already moving at full speed. The air and mood felt sultry and a little frantic. The day had begun to turn mean.

I felt strange and out of sync. Vernon and I were nearly always the first ones at work, more than an hour before anyone else and were well into our morning routines before having to interact with their foggy, sometimes grumpy and not quite awake yet energy. But things began to feel even more uneasy when Bone, who had not yet gone home to get some sleep told me he’d give me a ride back into town in a few minutes, explaining that Vernon would swing by the boarding house on his way home that evening, pick me up, then have me drop him off at his trailer for the night, leaving me his pickup to drive back out to the hatchery for yet another overnight shift.

“I’ll stay on till you get back here this evening.” Bone explained, one smiling eye squinting against the mid-morning sun and the smoke of a half Pall Mall bouncing in the corner of his mouth, “I’ll send Vernon home early so you can get back out here ‘bout five, five-thirty, but be sure you run over to Miss Mae’s first, afore she closes up and git you a sandwich and some fixins, whatever you need, son. And you know, maybe a couple Cokes tuh hep you stay awake. Long about two-thirty, three, you gonna need ‘em. You’ll see. Just have her put in on the account.”

“You bound to be runnin’ low on steam long before I can git back here in the mornin’ ta spell ya, but I’m count’n on ya staying awake, ya hear. You git sleepy splash some water in yuh face, walk around outside, turn the radio up loud. Takes a while to get yuh brain wired right for workin’ night shift.” he smiled, apologetically.

“Things are a bit of a mess right now, Gaylord.” he acknowledged then, reading the confusion on my face and clapping me on the shoulder “And I shore do uh-ppreciate the hell out’a you helpin’ us hold things tuhgethuh ’til we can sort it all out. Might need to keep you on night shift for a week or so, but I promise, soon as we kin find somebody we trust, I’ma get you back ta sleepin’ nights like a regulah person and back tuh workin’ with the rest’a this raggedy crew, seinin’ and such during the day.”

I did my best to smile and show up as a good team player, saying yes, partially because I figured it meant freedom from far worse labors in the heat of the day, and partly as a chance to curry a little favor with the big boss, something in retrospect I may have been a bit too eager to hope for.

Turns out graveyard shift is perfectly named, least-wise for a fifteen-year-old kid wired like me. Hard time; definitely not work for the fainthearted or easily spooked, but of course, no one was ever gonna tell me about all that in advance.

By six-thirty, everyone else had gone home to their families and dinner, and I was left at the hatchery all alone. Just me and a couple of baloney sandwiches Bone had run to get me from Miss Mae’s store before she closed, along with a bag of Fritos and a pack of my infamous Fig Newtons (the reason everyone else playfully called me ‘Fig’), and a couple bottles of pop. This little treasure trove of treats was meant to last the night and help keep me alert.

Strangely, those first few hours of evening after everyone else left were almost reassuring; no one to bug me, no strenuous work, just a list of time-dependent chores, a lengthening of shadows and a subtle cooling of the air.

The young fish needed to be fed each half-hour at this stage of their lives and their poop siphoned from tank bottoms each hour. The egg clusters, babies growing and still waiting to hatch just sat there in their screen baskets, paddles churning the water gently around them. All in all it was simple, mindless work, really, leaving ample time for reading and relaxation in the warm glow of advancing twilight.

Often, between feedings I’d climb the metal rungs up to the flat roof of the feed elevator, carrying a folding lawn chair in one hand so I could relish evening breezes and an unobstructed view. There, atop that rusting ochre stage, the world felt profoundly different: gentler, bigger, easier to love. I could see for a dozen miles, maybe more, over the prone, flood-plain of cotton and soybeans. Man-made lakes dotting the Earth and reflecting the sky, clear to its farthest edge, that great Cyprus swamp in the distance.

Occasionally though, the nauseating stench of rotting feed pellets and cloud of flies drove me back down to the hatchery for a stiff push broom and a bucket of soapy water.

Lewis, that damn Purina Feed driver, a shiftless, half-assed sonuvabitch, stubborn for no good reason, a little mean and abhorrently lazy. He was one of those guys with a punchable face, whose belly protruded way out over his belted work pants, who was always spittin’ tobacco juice near your shoes and endlessly in a hurry to be someplace else. Lewis envisioned himself far too important to bother being polite to shithead grunts like me and far too essential to Purina’s Mid-Delta feed operations (just wait, he’ll tell ya’), to ever be fired. Translated pragmatically, that meant that he regularly granted himself permission to merely approximate where his feed truck’s long auger was pointed when he refilled our metal bins with pelleted catfish food twice a week, his way of saving himself an extra trip or two up and down the ladder, deeming it unnecessary and thus not his problem. This was just one of Lewis’ many gifts to himself over the course of each workday, saving him a bit of effort and time, while costing someone else their sanity and perhaps a half hour of valuable labor.

Those rain soaked piles of fetid, rotting mush were Lewis’ handiwork...or lack of it. Hell, they were practically his signature.

Any decent person would have carried a scoop shovel back to the top of the bin and scooped any spillage in with the rest. The customer was being charged for it, after all, and no matter what, he was always gonna have to climb back up to replace the lid, anyway. Lewis didn’t see things that way. Instead, he’d hurriedly scrape and kick some minor part of his ‘can’t be bothered’ spill over the edge with a dusty work shoe, easing what little there was of his conscience by pretending to be responsible when he was anything, but.

Despite the shovel and push broom he dutifully kept bungied to the side of his truck I never once saw Lewis scoop even one of those many pounds of spilled feed pellets, let alone sweep the thick coating of dusty chaff over the edge to keep things nice. A little scrape, a few pantomimed kicks and then a hurry scurry down that welded ladder before folding his long, hydraulically articulated auger back into place and driving off in a cloud of dust like a bat out of hell, presumably Lewis’ future home.

No one liked Lewis. Not really. NotVernon. Not Bone. Certainly not the grunts like me and Zak and Mose who continually had to clean up behind him, dealing with his messes after they’d gone foul. There’s no other way to put it, bless his undersized, little, pissant heart. Lewis was an asshole!

One night the stinking pile of spilled feed, soggy from thunderstorms a few days before and fetid from baking summer heat, was so crawly with maggots and flies, I abandoned all thoughts of soapy water and push brooms, dousing the whole crawly mess generously with gasoline, instead.

Then I threw a match, POOM!!!

Almost blew myself off the top of the feed bin. Yikes! Oily black smoke boiling up and out, choking me and obscuring the horizon. My ill-advised fire had to be visible for miles, but of course I hadn’t thought about how any of that might go until the fire was already raging. Thankfully, no one came racing down the road to see what the hell I was up to.

Fifteen and clueless as a sack of rocks some days; mine was a complicated road to travel. That intense, rank heat made me so weak and nauseous that it nearly drove me from the top of the bin, but I was much too afraid that the fire I’d started would get out of control, so I stayed put, crouching low on the leeward side to avoid the smoke, ready with a bucket of water.

Once the putrid mass had burned itself out and I began sweeping all those thousands of toasted larvae over the edge, I suddenly felt much better.

"You're flying now!" I gloated sadistically at the swirling dust of a million dead  maggots, never-to-be-realized flies who would now never have the chance to breed.

***

Settled into my rooftop lawn chair one evening, sipping a cold soda and smoking a Marlboro, I let my head rest on the back of the chair and looked longingly upward into the cobalt sky. Jet aircraft miles overhead traced patterns across the deepening blue, transporting my mind along with them into that other world of stewardesses, endless soft drinks and in-flight magazines. Some nights I sat there atop that bin in silence for several minutes, yearning, aching, letting my mind both quiet and race. One of those silvery airplanes streaking across the sky had brought me to this backward place. In time, I prayed, one would help me escape, as well.

In those silent moments, listening to my own heartbeat and breath, seeing for miles in every direction, I felt achey and utterly alone, a fugitive. I knew I was more a part of that world streaking by at thirty thousand feet than the one where I sat, but somehow reveled in the lonely prospect of being exiled at fifteen, as well. Feeling trapped was part of the adventure. Trying to imagine what it would be like to know you'd never escape. Trying to drink in all those feelings of desperation and the uselessness of struggle. How was it these people I worked and lived with could be so content in their day-to-day slavery, I wondered?

During these respites above the Earth, reaching for the sky at dusk, divergent realities from unbending worlds focused hot upon my heart. I knew I didn’t belong here. Not really. I knew it in my core and the men I worked with knew it, too. Weirder yet, I think we all knew just as surely that none of them would ever leave.

The pain was almost unbearable some nights, and yet, oddly sweet; wrestling my solitary heart while pink-tinted jet trails drifted and broke up across the darkening sky. Loneliness had become an uneasy, but acknowledged friend. It made home seem so very unreachable and in turn, so much more dear. Once my sentence in Mississippi had been served, I knew I would rejoin those glamorous few aboard some silver-winged bird headed for somewhere better. Then it would be my turn. I’d be one of those lucky ones sipping cold Pepsi from a plastic cup while some other poor sap stood his desolate piece of ground alone, below, looking up, straining his eyes against our too-bright glare and enduring his own yearning pangs for freedom. Someday, not too far off I would finally feel safe and content again, winging my way back to friends and family, to Walla Walla, the first place, aside from my grandparents cozy, little war box that ever really felt like home.

***

As darkness settled in upon the expanse of fields and waters I’d gather my tattered lawn chair and other belongings in preparation for a final trip back to Earth for the night. Below me, countless musicians in the aquatic night-orchestra would have begun their warm ups, crowding the cooling air, preparing their lonely nocturnes, threatening vocal turf wars, amorous love calls, deep grunts.

Sometimes I felt I would be swallowed up by it all, spirited away …drunk on the magic, the audacity of it all. Maybe I would never find my way home again, I thought.

Isolated there, miles from anyone on Earth or in the sky I could not help but surrender my heart to that intensifying flood of night sounds and the perfect, silent arrival of a yellow-orange moon. A few times I held myself and cried at the beauty of it, my involuntary response to its quietude and splendor. Whispered awakening night; the alighting of Earth's companion orb. Sometimes I felt I would implode, such was the force of night-magic all around me and the utter, barren emptiness within.

But duty always saved me. I had fish to feed, and they were hungry! So I wiped my tears, gulped a final deep breath of thick evening air and began my careful descent into the hours and duties of night.

Inside the hatchery, still warm from the day's accumulated heat, a retinue of purring electric motors and the warm glow of incandescent bulbs which helped chase away whatever lingering waves of heartache remained. I was responsible for the feeding and care of tens of thousands of baby fish. Focusing my attention on them made me suddenly feel less lonely.

Try to imagine that cacophonous flood of sounds; chains turning sprockets spinning dozens of aluminum paddles in shiny curved arcs, dipping and stirring between rows of watery baskets holding clusters of yellow-orange eggs. Spray nozzles sputtering into one end of each tank while overflow tubes snored and choked at the other. Electric motors droning baritone accompaniment to tree frogs and crickets. Dripping water, leaky tanks, hopeless, frustrated flies unable to grasp the dirty reality of glass panes in a darkened window or a spider web woven strategically just above. Disembodied voices from an ancient crackling radio on a nail beside the fridge.

This aural deluge and warmth made me drowsy at times, but sleep was absolutely taboo; too many things to be tended to, too many things to go wrong. In a brief, half-hour snooze, a motor could burn out, the fry miss an essential feeding or too much crap build-up in the water, suffocating thousands of newborns. Worse yet, someone could sneak up on me all alone out there, miles from town and scare or beat the living shit out of me. Who knew what kind of boogie men lived in those woods and shadows at night? Who dared imagine how they might find my mangled body in the morning if I ever fell asleep?

I smile now, remembering how I constantly checked in with a bone-handled hunting knife that had once belonged to my Great-grandpa Cobb. I kept it honed, razor sharp on the hatchery’s worn whetstone and sheathed at my side, intending to be ready if the boogie man ever did show.

Often, I sang along with the radio to keep myself alert, or wrote letters to friends back home. Occasionally I added further notes to my journal (see above), or read a book, but only in short spurts, eyes inevitably growing heavier with the turning of each page.

Feeding all of those hungry troughs of catfish fry took the better part of fifteen minutes when the hatchery was running full. The fine meal we sprinkled onto the water resembled coffee grounds but smelled of blood and dead fish. It stuck to my hands and its smell to the inside of my nose. I dutifully sprinkled small pinches on the surface of each hatched out trough, learning quickly, though to be stingy. Too much was a waste, but it also meant more work later on.

In alternating cycles between feedings, I had to siphon built-up refuse from the bottoms of the troughs, a job far more tedious than feeding, and complicated substantially by the clouds of tiny catfish fry who seemed drawn to my human hand at work. Maybe it was an affinity for another life form, or maybe the current the siphon hose created. Whatever the reason, those little swimmers just couldn’t seem to understand that my plastic siphon would suck them up as easily as it did their shit. And so, despite great care, dozens of babies passed away each evening, gasping their final breaths on the slime coated drains of Hell.

***

One night, during siphoning, a faint green flash caught my eye. When I looked up, nothing. “Weird,” I thought and kept working, but moments later, there it was again.

“What the...?” I muttered to the spiders and ghosts, this time not looking away. When it appeared a third time, I was looking right at it, ready to see it. I dropped my siphon hose to the floor and walked across the room.

Petite, green and utterly helpless, a two-inch tree frog circled round and round on a greasy sprocket, its rear leg mangled by the chain. She just dangled there, paralyzed; her fate changed forever by forces much greater than she could even begin to fathom.

I switched off the motor, and turned the greasy sprocket by hand until her butchered leg was free. It was filthy and useless, completely chewed up below the knee.

Here then was a job for Grandpa Cobb’s knife. I held the little frog still with one hand and made one quick pass right at the joint. Clean. Smooth. Neat. It didn't bleed much, but I broke into the first-aid kit anyway, daubing the wound generously with iodine to kill any germs. Poor thing, she just sat there while I worked, emerald and silent, golden eyes glazed over, unmoving.

I watched her for a while, sitting safely on her paper towel on the desk, her newly amputated stump, brilliant green, glazed in an iodine orange. Cautiously, I began to talk then, trying to comfort her, or maybe myself. I assured her again and again that she would survive that night and that she would still be able to lead a fruitful life, hoping it was true.

During my next round of feeding I paid more careful attention to the many other frogs in the hatchery (dozens appeared nightly in search of dinner and courtship), and within minutes had formulated a plan; since she was now unable to go to them, I would bring the flies and mosquitoes to her.

My first offering was a fat, blue-bodied fly, squished and oozing, perfect for an appetizer, I thought. She never blinked an eye. I held it in front of her, rubbed it against her mouth, held it motionless again. No response.

I set it down in front of her and moved back. Maybe she was shy and didn't want to accept charity with me watching. Still nothing.

I picked it up again and tried to force it into her mouth. Maybe she was still in shock.  Maybe she just didn't know what was good for her; laughable, ‘savior-boy’ thinking. She closed her eyes, made a convulsive face and turned away.

I fretted.

Maybe it was my smell on the food. Yes, that must be it. I retrieved the fly swatter from atop the refrigerator and began another hunt, swinging wildly at a small green fly, knocking it to the ground. When I spotted it buzzing in mad circles on the concrete, too crippled to fly, I used the tip of my knife to push it onto the swatter and delivered it to her like that. It dropped just an inch in front of her, buzzing and flailing in gimpy frustration. Still nothing. Not a movement, not even the slightest hint of interest.

And then, blaaaaatt. A sudden pink flash. A rolling back of her eyes in mimed ecstasy, and the fly was gone. Evidently, we had come to terms.

Feeling much better then about her chances for survival, I began to hunt in earnest, flies, mosquitoes, even small moths. I soon inferred that it was the entree’s motion that triggered her appetite and that my smell actually presented little problem, if any.

And so the two of us became quite a team. She, growing noticeably fatter and more content and I, too busy and entertained to feel sleepy or afraid. 

After the first few, tentative treats, whenever she saw me coming, her posture perked up and as soon as my offering had moved within inches of her nose, that pink, arrow-like little tongue slapped onto my fingertips to claim their latest prize.

By daybreak her belly was round and fat, and her amputated leg was, quite incredibly, already showing signs of healing over. During the five-thirty feeding she disappeared, somehow, along with all the others.

The next evening she reappeared around ten, seemingly from out of nowhere. I found her sitting at her previous night’s post on the desk, content to pick up where we'd left off. Again I caught bug after bug for her, occasionally trying to pawn off a dead one, but she was never once fooled.

Nearly two weeks passed. Each night she reappeared magically at the desk, and each night I fussed over her and talked to her, rambling on and on about my struggles and discoveries, the painful quandaries of my teenage life.

Out of gratitude for her Buddha-like willingness to listen, I repaid her each night with choice, winged treats. Frog candy. Fly feasts. Except for an unseen God that I needed desperately to believe was watching out for me, she was the one friend I had there at night. And she was the one I felt I could talk to.

From what I'd heard, God wasn't the sort of guy you dared tell about all the things I was seeing and feeling. I did, of course still pray sporadically when I felt especially desolate, which was often enough, or when I was terrified by some unexplainable noise, but somehow my wounded friend seemed so much closer to my own state of affairs than some invisible and omnipotent God. 

That said, neither of them actually ever talked back to me that I can remember.

After our first few all night sessions together, it became terribly important to me to keep track of Jade's (I named her Jade), ravenous consumption. She averaged thirty-two to thirty-five flying insects per night, though her record was 47. I can still scarcely imagine where she hid them all in that petite little body, but I know for a fact that I caught them, and she ate every single one from my hand.

Her leg never regenerated, of course, though I secretly entertained fantasies of a miracle and twice, actually prayed for one. Her stump did heal over, and she learned to jump quite respectably with just one complete hopper, which meant she also became a passable hunter in spite of my generous handouts.

After two weeks together, night after night, I was pulled back onto the day shift; time to start seining. My young legs and back were more valuable, once again than my ability to handle responsibility and stay awake.

I never saw little Jade again but the old man who’d cleaned up and begged sufficiently to get his old job back, who worked those last few weeks of night shifts before they shut down the hatchery for the year, did. He told me one early morning at the changing of the guard that my three-legged friend would just appear out of nowhere from time to time and sit there on the desk.

He liked to talk to her, he said. Claimed she was a good listener.

I smiled appreciatively but said nothing. Apparently, the little lady was getting on just fine.

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© David E. Perry. All rights reserved.

When I was fifteen I lived in a boarding house in Mississippi during the summer and worked, seventy and more hours each week …on a catfish farm where I earned just a dollar an hour. The work was honest, if the circumstances surrounding it were not. My mother was dating the fish farm’s married owner. His wife wrote and signed my paychecks every week. He knew I knew. I knew he knew. I was both liability and oddity, a hard worker trying like hell to be worthy of my paycheck rather than the nuisance brat of some fancy piece of tail.

It was complicated.

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