The Brass Bed

“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.