Texas Summer Read Free

action — that’s what you seed. ’Cause when ah knows they was a chance of you gittin’ hurt by that bull, that’s when ah put my move on — you see what ah mean?”
    “Oh sure,” said Harold, now pretending to have lost all interest.
    “But like ah say,” C.K. prattled on, “ah seen this ole woman who claim she the pro-jay of the Dowsin’ Demon. She a white woman, but she come to the colored-people church, an’ she be touched an’ speak in the unknown tongue...fack be, she claim she in di-rect descent from Willer Wander.”
    As was often the case, Harold found himself half wondering if C.K. might not be making up the whole thing, and from the side he watched his face with suspicion. At times like these, C.K., aware of his listener’s skepticism, might venture a remark to reassure credulity — or, for mischievous reasons of his own, to magnify disbelief.
    “’Course ah never seen her dowse,” he went on, “but they say she mighty good, they say she never miss, eben in red-dirt.”
    “Shoot,” said Harold, and he was about to comment further, but C.K. suddenly gestured caution with his hand, staring intently ahead, face tilted to one side, as in an odd attitude of listening, and his eyes slightly wild. “Let’s jest ease up now,” he said softly. “Ah don’t want that bullhead know we comin’.”
    Harold shot him a quick look. “I reckon you think he can see us. Ha. I guess you really are crazy after all.”
    “That ole bullhead know more than you think he do,” said C.K., moving carefully to his left, still keeping his eyes toward the pond. “How come you think he git to be so old an’ so big? Shoot, that fish know more’n me an’ you put together ’bout some things.”
    “Yeah, like what?” the boy demanded, following C.K., and keeping his voice down, just in case.
    “Like when a grasshopper got a fishhook in it.”
    “Huh?”
    C.K. nodded sagely. “That how smart Mistuh Bullhead be — if they two grasshopper kickin’ roun’ in the water, an’ one of ’em got fishhook in it, ready to snag that bullhead, right away bullhead know which one, an’ he don’t mess with it, he go for the one without no hook.”
    “Sure,” said Harold, more to argue than agree, “that’s because a grasshopper with a fishhook stuck through it ain’t gonna move like a regular grasshopper — it’s gonna be all jerkin’ round. Anybody knows that.”
    C.K. sighed in closed-eyed exasperation. “Ah talkin’ ’bout when you mash the other grasshopper — like twist it in the middle, so it be all jerky and kickin’ round, too, jest like the one with the hook in it — that bullhead still know the difference.”
    Harold stared at him for a moment. “Uh-huh, then how we ever gonna catch ’im?”
    “We outsmart him, that’s how...we sur- prise him. He don’t know we here he won’t ’spect no fishhook.”
    The pond was like an oasis in a desert, a Shangri-la, with an atmosphere, almost a climate, separate from its immediate surroundings. A shimmering oval of crystalline blue, fringed with weeping willows interwoven in a soft-focus double ring because of their reflection in the water, the pond resembled an exotic blue mirror, its frame intricately filigreed. But there was something else — something curiously, classically, of Texas about the scene — a quality of strange hidden contrasts, something of abrupt mystery...a secret celebration of nature at its most darkly persuasive: the diamondback rattler coiled in a field of bluebonnets, the scorpion beneath the yellow rose.
    Quietly now, and at C.K.’s indication, they settled down on the bank near one side of a huge uprooted cottonwood. Its giant trunk jutted up about ten feet out of the water, at an unnatural and challenging angle, sinister in its suggestion of the violence that could have brought it to such a grotesque end.
    “This jest where ole bullhead be ’bout now,” said C.K. softly, as he threaded a large, writhing bloodworm onto a