Corona virus social distancing started soon after Timbeaux told his girlfriend she had to leave because she was getting too bossy. Evidently it was a hasty exit: A beat up U-haul box of her high heeled shoes in various Easter colors, some with rhinestones, laid on the porch. And her chihuahua mix dog still held court inside with Timbeaux scolding, “Shut up Minnie” and putting slices of cold pizza and pepper jack cheese on a styrofoam plate down on the floor for dog food. This treatment might have actually been a little better than the “Shut up you Mother Fucker! You know better than that!” that was reserved for the eight hunting dogs outside in the kennel.
He’s been trying to date again after losing his wife to cancer a few years back. They raised some boys together. She was known for taking wood bees and tying a string of sewing thread on them as a leash and entertaining the children with her pet bee. Timbeuax carries the overlapped belly of middle age. No shirt as he sits in his recliner with his feet tucked under him in a pose more like a Playboy pin up which was the only thing I could see that explained why he smoked the thin women’s cigarettes, “Misty.” It was from this pose that Timbeaux became my instructor in Cajun arts or what he called Coon Ass Training.
What better time to learn how to survive from what the swamp gives then during this COVID torment spurring jittery news on a diving Dow Jones and shortages of beans-n-rice, ventilators, and toilet paper. We set out limb lines up and down the Tickfaw River going for the denizens of the muddy deep: Catfish! We tied over 80 lines to limbs hanging down over the river, baiting the hooks with crawfish we caught in the ditches with a dip net. We’d bait up then motor back up the river to check the lines, take fish off the lines, put them in a live well then eventually clean the fish and have a fish fry. Next day repeat. During and after these fish fries the TV was on a loop of You Tube videos on catfishing and wild hog hunting in the Deep South.
And so our days of quarantine began: We non verbally gave consent that our quarantine would include each other. Timbeaux would teach me how to fish Cajun style and I would help him on ideas of what to write and how to spell his texts correctly to his new girlfriend. Just before we went into self isolation Timbeaux had met a gal while waiting in line at the Burger King. Since she said she couldn’t see him until the virus was over they texted back and forth and talked on the phone late into the night. Eventually it got Timbeaux all tired out and he had to take a day off fishing to catch up on sleep. She worked at the local pharmacy and did allow Timbeaux to come by the drive thru to deliver her some fresh catfish fillets in a ziplock bag. Timbeaux said he wasn’t a dozen roses kind a guy. She said that her daddy was a shrimper down in Buras and that she much prefered a sack of catfish fillets to a dozen roses any day.
One day we were out fishing and I was in my usual spot in the bow of the boat running the trolling motor. Timbeaux pulled up his hoop net to find four spotted catfish: 23, 21 17 and 14 lbs. He struggled to pull the gargantuan fish up out of the net. I just thought they were heavy. I could see the top of his hands were scraped up from grabbing the fish. When he pulled the fish up he had grabbed them with his hand in their mouths. The catfish have tiny teeth that scraped the skin off the top of his hand making it look like a floor burn. The brilliance of his blood ran down from the back of his hand onto the slippery shine of the catfish skin. As the morning sun slanted through the river bank trees I knew this was the Church of Timbeaux and communion was being distributed.
He wouldn’t have told me, but I asked. Timbeaux told me that he couldn’t close the grip on his hand because a circuit breaker box had blown up in his face while working at the plant giving him electrical burns over his hands and face. Four transformers were feeding into the box. The grafted skin over the tops of his hands keeps him from closing his grip. The doctor said he would never be able to shoot a gun again. It’s all the motivation a country boy needed to have. I also asked him about the symmetrical scars on both sides of the bottom of his spine. He said these were from the surgery he got after being tail ended and thrown from his truck on Highway 444. That was the second time he had been tail ended and thrown from his truck.
Sometimes we don’t just watch fishing and hunting videos while we’re eating fish. Timbeaux likes Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR). His back hurts more than he ever would admit. Those Frankenstein suture marks cause him to lean his belly into the kitchen counter to take some weight off his feet. Leaning in he dips the fillets in the hot grease (fee-lays as he calls them). I mention to Timbeaux that it’s kinda funny that CCR sings about bayous and catfish and they’re actually kids from San Francisco that went to Woodstock. He acts a little surprised, “Really?”Later he talks about pro-Trump relatives: “They got flags up and everything. I just can’t go there. That’s all they think and talk about.” His cousin Hollis stopped by one day and rails about Atheists in New York that want to outlaw God fearing Christians. And “Pelosi should have been shot when she was born.”
Meanwhile Timbeaux keeps leaning in frying fish as CCR sings “Proud Mary” : “People on the river just happy to give.” He smiles and turns to me: “Remember when Tina Turner used to sing this song...Man she had some legs! So good lookin she took out an insurance policy on em!”