Surely Bigger Men Have Died For Less...

Rais’n Up Catfish: Twenty-Seven

Comfrey, Mississippi.

Harsh sunlight glinted from powerful machines as shimmery heat pressed them forward at a crawl; between two tractors on opposite levees, four young men raced feverishly through chest deep water, struggling to keep up. Back and forth they labored. Back and forth. Two hundred fifty feet of eight-foot seine per man. A thousand foot arc, submerged net driving unseen fish toward the far shore.

Prophetic yellow corks stretched taut at water’s surface, dipping and bobbing in apparent confusion. Up and down that curved line we watched them, taking our cues, wrestling against what they could only hint at, grunting, kicking, moving; powering tons of choking, fecal mud through an immense, woven sieve. Back and forth we worked our sections of crawling net. Back and forth; pinpoints of sweat and determination beneath an angry white sky.

It took more than a day to drag a fish seine the length of a twelve-acre pond. And though it might have seemed to a casual onlooker that tractors were doing all the work, anyone who’s ever spent an hour dumping mud line for a dollar knows we earned every damned nickel, bitter penny and dime.

“Fig!  Hey, Fig.  Watch that stretch there!” Zak hollered toward me as I jerked my head to see what I was missing.

“Nah!  Nah!  Other side!” he pointed beyond me, toward Mose. “Sumpin happ’nin, man.  There!  See?  Ain’t right, little man. Sumpthin ain’t right.”

“THERE!” he pointed again, emphatic.

“Got it,” I yelped, noticing just then how the curve of the net had changed shape fifty or sixty feet to my right, a stretch of floats that was beginning to lag back in a portentous bow.

“Shit!” I muttered, wondering how I’d missed the signs and how Zak always saw things before me. I picked up my pace, heaving upward and dumping toward the developing problem. As I approached, bottom sediments grew noticeably thicker around my feet.

“Got a mess here, man,” I hollered back toward Zak.  “It’s halfway to my knees and the net’s filling fast. Maybe two feet deep in front, already.”

“Better slow ‘em down.” I hollered, too busy tugging and pulling against the net to make the waving signal myself.

I laid into my task with a vengence, cursing it under my breath, jerking upward, kicking at the net’s web, hiking the heavy mud-line up off the bottom and kicking it forward over as much of the congealed crap as I could manage. But the distant tractor drivers and the tortured arc of net between them continued straining forward without pause and as they did, I fell farther and farther behind.

“Hey!” I yelled as loud as I could. “Gimme a goddamn minute here, will ya!”  I yelled it past Zak, at the tractors themselves, but they were so far away and immersed within their own diesel-scented cacophonies they would never possibly have heard me. Either Zak or Mose was going to need to wave them off, or at least signal them to slow down.

“I SAID WAIT, GODDAMMIT!”  I screamed then.

“Wave ‘em off, Zak!  Shut ‘em down!” I hollered frantically as floats all around me began to disappear below the water.

Arms on both flanks went up in the air in unison, as Zak, Mose and Pudge all motioned the tractors to stop in the same moment.

“FINALLY!” I harangued.

“Hang on man,” Zak countered, dutifully.  “I’m comin’.”  His powerful legs were churning the brown water ahead of him with authority while his left hand steadied him against the float line.

---

In seining, foam floats suspend the net upright in the water while a weighted mudline hugs the bottom, and like a seismograph those floats transmit conditions below with great accuracy. When things are going wrong on the bottom, they often go wrong fast. Over a hundred feet of floats had just disappeared from view in a matter of seconds and the implications were grim. Something was pulling them under.

“Look like you done found they outhouse, Fig.” Mose hollered a little too casually as he spread his arms and lay tenatively back in the brown water, still trying unsuccessfully after years of practice to master the art of floating on his back. “Damn if them fish can’t make some shit!”

“Quit fuckin’ around and get over here!” Zak fired a warning shot at his cousin, rare, frustrated words that flew over me to land, square on floatin’ Mose, who still couldn’t keep his feet from sinking. He bobbed upright then, obediently and began working his way toward me from the opposite direction. Zak talked on as he approached, firing further irritated commentaries into the air.

“Lazy goddam mule!” he said of Mose. “Tired of ‘dis shit, man! Been in this water too damn long now and we ain’t gettin’ nowhere. Five feet, stop. Ten feet, stop.”

“Ought’a drain this damn pond out, scrape it back down to the gumbo and start clean,” he said.  “Never seen so much goddam catfish shit in one place.”

“Vernon been overfeedin’ ‘em again, no doubt.”  Mose observed sheepishly, trying to regain Zak’s graces as he kicked through the muck toward us.

Farmed, hybrid catfish are fed and fattened much like cattle in a feed lot, with similar upsides and downs. Lost in this process are those distinctive, muddy, bottom flavors that make wild-grown catfish flesh so blue-collar distinctive, but gained are a marketable uniformity of size, predictable harvests and a grain-fed blandness that doesn’t offend most palettes and translates into profits. Fat, predictable profits, or so I was told. Unsurprisingly, such factory-like production in the case of both cattle and fish results in a nasty byproduct; copious, quantities of greasy, coagulated, foul-smelling shit. Up to a foot-and-a-half of the stuff might accumulate on a pond’s bottom in some places, while in others it’d never get more than a few inches thick.

As our seine’s weighted mud lines dragged the pond’s clay bottom, they pushed up against and stirred this congealed mixture, sometimes collecting it more rapidly than the net’s three-inch holes could disperse it. I was continually surprised at how localized an event this could be, how accumulating shit could suddenly fill the net in just one place, pulling the floats down and backward as it ballooned out. Long stretches of  float line sometimes just disappeared into the murky water, dragged under in a matter of seconds. It always meant trouble when this happened and was almost never a minor event to undo.

Those of us spread out along the net were stationed there to keep the seine healthy, kicking its belly, pulling violently upward on the heavy mudline, helping strain all that foul, accumulating sediment through those countless three-inch holes. Without us, the bottom third of the net would soon have been pushing tons of viscous muck ahead of it, and with powerful tractors pulling on each end, that quarter mile long seine would merely rupture at its weakest point.

When Zak and Mose got to me we spread out, five to ten feet apart, lifting the mud line in unison and walking it as far forward as we could over the thick, accumulated mush. Then, down the line we moved and repeated the same procedure. Over and over we struggled in coordinated action while Pudge directed the tractors forward, slowly with hand signals, making progress in small increments, taking up each bite of newly gained slack.

After more than a dozen of these strenuous, forward charges when it seemed we might never get past the ‘outhouse’ Mose pitched over the top of the net and began walking forward, feeling his way along the gooey bottom, searching for an end to the mountain of shit. Twenty feet out, it slowly began to taper off and at thirty feet he reported that the sediment was again only six to eight inches deep; normal poo level again, finally.

Ten more arduous minutes of lifting and carrying that shit-weighted net forward, one three-man bite at a time. Full speed, eyes down, backs bowed, arms and legs burning with exhaustion, water churning. This was the fifth or sixth of these gut-it-out efforts so far that morning, giving the term ‘power dump’ a humorless, new context.

Atop this little crisis, the sun kept gaining strength by the minute while our muscles and spirits were beginning to fade. When finally we were able to green-light the drivers on shore, a thick, fifty-foot plateau of congealed fish crap lay settling back in behind us, a problem to be revisited on yet another day.

Slowly then, Zak and Mose drifted back away from me in their opposite directions, dumping and yanking, dumping and yanking, and kicking at the base of the net.

By mid-afternoon our shoulders moaned and hollered, and our hands cramped and bled. Calluses, softened by water had become blisters while beneath the murky surface, external body parts had become grotesque and alien, almost comical.

We pressed ahead.

Step, kick, kick, grunt, tug.

Hauling upward. Pushing forward.

Step, kick, kick, grunt, tug.

Breathe. Breathe.

The far shore approached grudgingly, one resentful, muddy, shit-laden step at a time. And then, somehow the shadows had shifted and that once far shore had become the near shore.

The tractors experienced the change first. One turned the corner where the levees intersected and began crawling south, moving, finally toward the other. The second stopped beside the diesel, well pump and waited, holding the lines taut. Those of us in the water let out a war whoop, knowing we’d finally begun to close the loop. Finally, the home stretch.

On shore, Bull arrived atop the levee towing the immense, rusted, net-reel trailer which he backed into position behind the second tractor where Bone then transferred both float and mud lines, one by one and began slowly reeling in the net.

Shortening the loop was the best part of seining, not only because it meant you were nearing the end of an ordeal but because it meant considerably less work for those of us in the water. Instead of advancing the net forward into and through new, shit-filled territory, head on, much of the seine’s movement now became a sideways slide, slicing more or less along the same narrow line of pond bottom, and roughly parallel to the shore.

Far less sediment stacks up in a net moving sideways because so much less is encountered. It finally felt as if the tractor and the hydraulic net reel were doing their fair share of the work.

---

Late afternoon found the four of us sprawled out on the levee, lungs heaving for air, ignoring red ants, ignoring mosquitoes and chiggers, and utterly immune to even the most minuscule worries about a little more dirt. We were the hard-asses, after all, the can-do water grunts who, after many chill hours wading and kicking our way across an immense, shit-laden pond had become comrades. While cold well water gushed into the staked, fifty foot circle of net-penned catfish we’d load out early the next morning, Pudge and I compared puffy, mineral and shit-stained feet, arguing halfheartedly about whose toes had grown ugliest while Zak and Mose looked on, too tired and disinterested to take sides.

Zak retreived a lukewarm carton of Pepsis from a dilapidated ice chest in the back of the pickup, a container so devoid of ice and any sustained ability to hold it that it was scarcely worthy of the name. He passed each of us a bottle along with his key ring opener and we chugged them down in bold, swift drafts; fiery, sugared pathways scraping and burning through the parched fissures of our throats.

Our buzzing quartet must have made some kind of bucolic scene in the late afternoon glare, waterlogged grunt laborers lounging in red dirt and green weeds, exhausted and pruney, belching fiery, pop fizz through our noses as tests of manliness, laughing, farting emphatically into muddy, wet underwear, feigning offense while swatting mosquitoes, flicking ants and talking quietly amongst ourselves, as warriors often do after a victorious battle.

As my body warmed and relaxed, urgent messages began transmitting from my bladder to my brain, encouraging a quick response. I rose, wobbly because one foot had fallen asleep from sitting on it and stepped gingerly from our humming beehive, beginning preparations for a long, languorous piss in the tall weeds.

While I fumbled inside soggy, mud-caked pants my partners watched, sizing up my situation, so to speak, nodding silently in agreement, then inviting the moment to dance.

I had just coaxed the shy, near-drowned old man in my blistered hand into poking his head out and really peeing when Mose ran up, dropped my pants to the ground and with the others then, surrounded me in an arc that left no room to run, and no private direction for me to turn.

Surely bigger men have died for less. Brazen, stolen glimpses. Taunting, gasping mirth. Roll on the ground and whoop-till-you-can't-breathe, fist pounding. Giggling and finger-pointing. But inevitably those who killed them were armed with weapons more substantial than a shriveled pecker and a swollen bladder, and but for that sad fact I believe I might have killed a few of those damned hyenas that day, myself.

Looking back now, I can see that I really should have pissed on every one of them while I had the chance. God knows I had the ammunition. I just couldn't think clearly when it all happened. So I stood there on the side of that red clay levee, instead, mortified; stupid, stolid eyes pointing straight ahead in feigned denial with my white, wrinkled, bare ass clenching in the wind.

I had no choice then but to wait, to pray for a bolt of lightning, something, anything at least half as goddamned wonderful to strike them all dead; sweet revenge while I kept pissing in their general direction. Eventually their laughing assault on my raisined manhood must surely pass. Eventually my bladder would cease its unceasing flow. But no …no lightning bolts appeared. And those endless, mortifying, passing seconds only swelled and loitered upon that once bucolic scene like a belligerent wino demanding your change.

Ever so slowly then the inner pressure began to slacken and as it did, I too began to see the humor in our scene. Shriveled and white, bare-assed and helpless, the image that my ridiculous situation painted grew on me too, rushing hard into the immense, sucking vacuum of my deflated ego. My aiming hand then, and the little old man within it began shaking and weaving in drunken tempo with my chest. I dribbled the last dregs of warm piss on my chilled feet as crashing waves of laughter flooded over all of us in the same moment.

Struggling through watery eyes to find some piss-free place to double over, stumbling in Mose's direction with my pants around my ankles, he thought sure I was coming to piss on him as well and frantically began to pull his immense, mirth-paralyzed frame toward the water in a strange combination of gasping, pleading terror, which only made the rest of us laugh all the harder.

Several more hilarious minutes passed until my sides ached so bad that I could hardly breathe. In the end it was raw pain and exhaustion that forced each of us to idle our mirth, which really, we were only able to tamp fitfully back into mere outbreaks of  giggles and snorts. At that point any one of us would have gladly given up laughing altogether, but we couldn’t. It simply hurt too much after the day we’d just survived.

Covered with weeds and dirt from rolling on the levee and panting from exhaustion, we stumbled, one by one, backward into the water we had spent most of the day in already, but this time only to rinse off before climbing back up the levee to the pickup, to head homeward.

My companions could scarcely look me in the face those next few days without averting their joyous eyes or breaking up in laughter. And if they still remember me at all, I suspect this is one of the stories they must still tell, for in their macho, sex-driven world with such a limited array of life options ahead, this skinny, fifteen year-old, outsider who might once have posed some limited threat in other, less tangible arenas had now been laughed down to size at his vulnerable, white, raisin-dicked core. Pathetic, cold and shrivelled from a day under water, they had measured me against their own, legendary, fully grown, black standards and in that soggy moment, found me wanting.

Strangely, it may have been one of the best things that could have happened between us that summer, an equalizer of sorts that none of us ever saw coming. Instead of raging or threatening, instead of pouting or imploding somehow in that pregnant moment I was granted a gift, the ability to see and then surrender completely to the hilarity of the scene. They pulled these sorts of antics on one another and on their beloved hero, Sweetback all the time. Finally, fate rolled the dice and it was my turn.

Of course it was mortifying, and yes, maybe even mean. But it was also pretty damn funny. Back in those days, deep in Delta country, way down in the Deep South you didn’t dare prank some white kid whose background and relationship to the big boss was a rather unfathomable mystery. You certainly didn’t tease someone you feared or whom you didn’t trust to be able to take it.

It felt far more like a victory than defeat, that at the end of that arduous day I was finally included as just one of the working gang. Beneath all my red-faced mortification, somewhere in that tumble of shared laughter it actually felt pretty damned wonderful. My companions had not physically harmed me in any way, but after a day of real support and teamwork they had most certainly roasted me, and in the process, trusted me ...to be able to be the butt of the joke, to be big enough to take my turn. Finally, I had been invited to laugh and roll in that red Mississippi dirt right along with them instead of standing, yet again outside their boisterous circle and wishing like hell I knew how to fit in.

How possibly could I have explained the lump in my throat as we rode back to the hatchery, or my gratitude to these humble, simple, joyous, hard working men? I said nothing as we drove but I’m certain they each understood on some level. Surely that lingering grin on my face would have explained it all, after all.

© 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.