Texas Summer Read Free Page A

big number-2 hook, and Harold did the same, though with somewhat less conviction.
    He finished baiting his hook and looked at C.K. “An’ I suppose he ain’t gonna notice these worms got hooks in ’em.”
    C.K. didn’t reply, concentrating instead on his own handiwork, intent and fastidious, as if preparing an exquisite trout-fly for a fisherman-king. And finally, with equal deliberateness, and a show of vague reverence, he carefully spat on it, before swinging it out to an exact place in the water, about a foot from the cottonwood log. Only then did he inspect Harold’s baited hook, fingering it gingerly. “He gonna notice this one got hook in it,” he said. “Fack is, he may steal this bait, the way you got it on all lopside. Then he be onto us, an’ we say, ‘good-bye, Mistuh Bullhead!’ Lemme fix it, you keep eye on my line.”
    And while C.K. rearranged his bait, Harold watched the bobber on C.K.’s line — an ordinary bottle-cork split up the side — how it lay on the still water, absolutely without movement, while the line, visible just below the surface, trailed off and disappeared into the depths beneath the great log itself.
    “Don’t try an’ snag ’im,” C.K. cautioned, “till the cork go all the way under.”
    Harold scoffed. “Are you crazy? Don’t you think I know how to fish? I probably fished as much as you have — maybe more.”
    C.K. nodded. “Uh-huh. But you ain’t study it. Like with this bullhead...Now you see the way ah put that worm right down to the end of the hook?...Well, bullhead got to take that hook-point ’fore he get any you worm. That way you set you hook, when you jerk up, you snag his jaw — that call ‘set the hook’ — you know what ah say?”
    “Well, everybody knows that, dang it,” said Harold. “What’s wrong with you?”
    Although its existence was a matter of common knowledge, neither Harold nor C.K. had actually ever gotten a good look at the giant catfish — except that once when Harold and his friend Big Lawrence had been fooling around at the pond, taking a fruit-jar crammed with fireflies (or “ligh’nin’-bugs” as they called them) and had pushed the sealed jar as far under the water as they could to see what would happen. (“Them bugs are all full of phosphrus, ” Lawrence had explained. “The pressure will make ’em blow up!”) Harold was gazing down past the jar of pulsating light, and he had seen it — not recognizable at first — resting on the dark bottom: something so big and so still that he thought it was an unfamiliar rock, or a sunken log, like a heavy three-foot piece of firewood. But one part of him must have guessed what it really was, because he continued to stare...beyond the magic lantern of fireflies, mesmerized by the thing that lay beneath it — motionless (or was it?) — in the eerie strobelike swatch of hypnotic light. And then the rock, log, whatever it was, had slowly begun to drift along the bottom, toward the shadowy depths beyond, and finally into them, as though to be obscured forever. (“ God dang..., ” Harold had whispered, realizing what it was, with a gradual shock that had made the back of his neck tingle.) And when he told Big Lawrence that he had just seen the legendary monster-fish, Lawrence seemed to believe him, but said he thought he was “lyin’ ’bout how dang big it was” — so they had gotten into a fight about that, and Big Lawrence had won, but not before getting a front tooth knocked into his upper lip, which had bled with undue profusion so that one sleeve of his shirt was covered with blood from his wiping his mouth on it. But then, instead of trying to wash it out in the pond, he’d let the blood dry on his sleeve and made up a story about how he and Harold had “got jumped by some Mex’cans, an’ one of ’em pulled a knife on us.” In telling this to Tommy Sellers and Ralph Newgate, Big Lawrence added: “Reckon he won’t be pullin’ a knife on nobody else right