What Things Are Made Of

Catfish

71 Catfish In tight, bright shorts and halter tops, the girls look good enough to eat. The flashy red-yellowand -blue ball they’re bopping back and forth looks better still, to the cruising flathead cat. When the ball plops in the lake, the flathead strikes, jamming the ball tight in its craw. No matter how the big fish fights, it’s buoyed up. No matter how onlookers hoot, how hard they hurl their sticks and stones, the giant can’t dive to its hide-hole in the muck. Picnickers slosh to the attack in boats and tubes. Life is pain. Give it, and get used to it, they sneer, like Romans praising the old ways. God Himself drops down from a Peterbilt truck to poke the fish with a ski-pole, gleeful as when He tortured Job like a stinkbug. Then a pale man in a straw hat flops onto a tube and thrashes toward the fish. It has stopped circling, and floats: gills blood-red, quivering. God sees the pale man’s pocketknife, and sneers, “Stick’im.” The pale man lifts his blade. Dodging slime-slick fins that could spindle his hand and sink his tube, he stabs. The ball shrinks with a hiss. The pale man— 72 frightened, all his life, of fish—still slides his hand into the whiskered mouth, and plucks out the ball. The flathead dives. God and the beach crowd sigh and turn away, taking no notice when the pale man parts a flap in the June air and slips through, back to his alien land. ...