A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

Genres: Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

Before his untimely death in 2004, Larry Brown was hailed as one of the world's greatest living writers. With A Miracle of Catfish, the unfinished but largely complete novel Brown left behind, readers can once again savor his eloquent and unique style. This tale of fatherhood, alienation, and loneliness introduces readers to another set of Brown's irresistably flawed characters.

Release date: March 20, 2007

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 455

Sample

“Larry Brown has slapped his own fresh tattoo on the big right arm of Southern Lit.” — Washington Post Book World

PRAISE FOR FACING THE MUSIC

“A stunning debut short story collection.”

—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“If his first book … were itself a fire, it would require five alarms. The stories are that strong.” —The Orlando Sentinel

“Larry Brown … is a choir of Southern voices, all by himself.”

—The Dallas Morning News

“Ten raw and strictly 100-proof stories make up one of the more exciting debuts of recent memory—fiction that’s gritty and genuine, and funny in a hard-luck way.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Like his profession, Larry Brown’s stories are not for the delicate or the fainthearted. His characters are limited people who are under siege… . Their stories manage to touch us in surprisingly potent ways.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

PRAISE FOR DIRTY WORK

“There has been no anti-war novel … quite like Dirty Work.”

—The New York Times

“A novel of the first order… . A gem.” —The Washington Post

“Explodes like a land mine… . A marvelous book.”

—The Kansas City Star

“A real knockout.” —New York Newsday

“An unforgettable, unshakable novel.”

—The New York Times Book Review

PRAISE FOR BIG BAD LOVE

“Larry Brown is an American original.” —The Washington Post

“Larry Brown [is] a writer from Faulkner country who has the savvy to sound only like himself. His gift is the ability to capture convincing Southern voices and to allow them to tell their stories in their own words.” —Chicago Tribune

“The images are sharp; the sense of love lost reverberates, hard. Painfully, powerfully elegant.” —Detroit Free Press

“Big, bad and wonderful! … A stunning collection of stories about real people and real life.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A voice as true as a gun rack, unpretentious and uncorrupted. [In] a surprising combination of sharp wit and great sorrow … comes a sure sense of a compassionate writer deeply in touch with the sorrowful rhythms of not just Southern, but human, life.”

—The Philadelphia Inquirer

PRAISE FOR JOE

“Powerful… . In the whiskeyish, rascally Southern tradition of Faulkner.” —Time

“That rare kind of novel that features a full display of a writer’s gifts … Joe achieves the complete transparency and authenticity of great fiction, and ‘great’ is not a word to be used lightly.”

—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A tragic, compelling new novel.” —The Associated Press

“Brown has quietly established himself as among the finest of the new generation of Southern writers. His latest work is absolutely riveting in its rawness. Brown has unleashed all his skills in this story.” —The Denver Post

“Demands to be read, reread, talked about, and relished.” —Booklist

PRAISE FOR ON FIRE

“He left the Oxford, Mississippi, fire department after his first novel was published. It paid off.” —Men’s Journal

“Brown brings to his first work of nonfiction the same no-nonsense style that makes his novels and short stories so powerful and intense.” —Kirkus Reviews

“He is blunt and abrasive about subjects that tend to cause flinching. He tells stories in plain language.” —The New Yorker

“The writing in On Fire is so good and simple that we can appreciate all the effort that went into making it appear so.”

—The Orlando Sentinel

“Larry Brown’s determination to be a writer has certainly paid off. On Fire is a sharp, perceptive, enormously readable autobiography. Never for a minute will a reader doubt the honesty of this clear, pared-down prose.” —The Dallas Morning News

PRAISE FOR FATHER AND SON

“Powerful, suspenseful and moving literary entertainment, the work of an enormously gifted natural writer.”

—The Washington Post

“The model is Faulkner, but his influence has been absorbed and transcended… . The work of a writer absolutely confident of his own voice.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Larry Brown is one of the great unsung heroes of American fiction … His work is a reminder of a reason to read.”

—San Jose Mercury News

“Father and Son is so vividly written it is almost cinematic.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Larry Brown is a master.” —New York Newsday

“Riveting.” —Vanity Fair

PRAISE FOR FAY

“Hard, true, and beautiful.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Larry Brown’s writing is beyond seductive—it’s addictive and nearly narcotic. His spare lines ring clear as single bell notes.”

—The Austin Chronicle

“Brown writes like a boxer—economical, crisp, wounding.”

—Men’s Journal

“Nobody does the seamy, boozy, violent side of the modern South better than Mr. Brown.” —The Cincinnati Enquirer

“Brown is a writer with the eye of a documentarian, his prose aiming for nothing short of ruthlessly capturing the truth of the world in which he has always lived.” —USA Today

PRAISE FOR BILLY RAY’S FARM

“‘Read this book.’ Read it for the clarity of its prose, the vividness of its imagery … its emotional honesty and its humor … its beauty and its wisdom and its grit. Just read it.” —The Roanoke Times

“Sometimes it doesn’t matter what a writer writes. It’s all good. Larry Brown has reached that point in his career.” —The Orlando Sentinel

“Brown’s essays are built out of small, often raw details. His matter-of-fact sentences are simple, even flat; but strung together, flow into rhythms worthy of his favorite blues guitarists.” —USA Today

“Balances pastoral odes with a clear-eyed accounting of the costs of country living… . These humble, personal essays … provide a glimpse at the long apprenticeship of a writer who came up the hard way.” —Publishers Weekly

“Brown is the real thing: a self-taught country boy … whose heart is obviously, and wholly, in the country he loves.”

—The Washington Post

When death comes for
him
it should be
ashamed

—Charles Bukowski

— We both loved Bukowski, the everlasting redundant universal grouch. Fail again, fail better.

— I can’t remember him ever out of cowboy boots.

— When he got famous and went on tour we discussed his wardrobe. He’d just shopped and bought some Dockers.

— In Seattle together at a book thing we sat and ate a plate of small, sweet to larger oysters similar to our Gulf ones. He’d found this restaurant. Tucked his bib in, face lit up like a baby’s, happy as a clam.

— I think we were both drunk at the Wells’ house. In front of my publisher Sam Lawrence, Brown hooted and hunched my leg like a dog. The next day Lawrence offered him a large book contract. There is no story line here. Algonquin, home of Shannon Ravenel, who had helped shape Brown hugely, upped the ante and he stayed. I suppose there is a story line here.

— I never heard him give a negative blast to another writer. I did hear him repeat a truly wretched sentence from a writer, and giggle. Very wryly. Happy in the eyes like a child. Maybe somebody had actually scored somewhere beneath Brown’s early badness.

— When Father and Son came out I got an ecstatic call from Kaye Gibbons, the beautiful Carolina writer, telling me what an act of genius it was. I agreed. I was flat out envious. But he had worked so hard and wrought so much from his beginnings it was impossible not to be happy for Larry, always.

— He visited my class and told them of a negative review he’d received from another writer. He was amazed, again like an incredulous boy, very hurt over what was, he felt, a personal betrayal by a fellow worker. I paid little attention to reviews, and I was refreshed, really, by his direct honest humanity.

— He told me and the class that he was disheartened by teaching at the colleges and summer workshops he was invited to (including our own Ole Miss). He loved talking about stories well enough, but he could not stand working with those who were not given over totally to writing, as he was.

— More happy face of a boy: He told me he had introduced bigger, faster-growing Florida bass minnows into the pond where he let me fish. I fished like God’s expert in the following years and caught exactly one Florida bass one happy afternoon alone. (Rubber bream minnow with spinner.) For that fish I at last say thanks to my gone pal. He is buried beside his infant daughter at this pond on family land. You can imagine the bittersweet emotion from your feet up when I visit this pond and steal from his hospitality again. (White Rooster Tail, yellow or green beetle spin.) Twilight on the writing cabin, solar powered, he never quite finished.

— Not once did a bad word pass between us. There was no time for that. You always felt this with Larry, who considered himself a late bloomer, a late guest at the table.

— You understand the beauty of the town and county libraries and the exponential reach of a fine bookstore where, as far as I know, almost all of Brown’s literary education came from. Lucky creatures here in Oxford. Josephine Haxton (the most excellent broad, nom de plumed Ellen Douglas) gave him multitudes in the single college course he had. Richard Howorth was a kind hand early on. Larry found Conrad, Faulkner, O’Connor, Hemingway, and Carver. Brown knew the biographies of writers much better than anyone I know. The marines, the firehouse, and life gave him the rest. He was an early, avid reader, encouraged by his mother, I believe.

— He was not a saint and we should remember that to their wives all men are garbagemen trying to make a comeback. True also is that in eulogies the worst people try to stand on the shoulders of the dead in order to levitate their own dear egos. God knows, I’m trying not to do this.

— I haven’t been the same since he and my good publisher, Sam Lawrence, passed away. I don’t write as well and I write more slowly. Such is his absence, but Brown would want us to crawl past this mood. He did, hundreds of times. No excuses. Ask his pals Tom Rankin and Jonny Miles, fierce artists themselves. Ask Mark Richard, likewise.

— His Mississippi hill country brogue was so thick I had to translate Brown to our French publisher at Gallimard who spoke perfect English. The man shed tears of exasperation over Brown’s refusal to travel to France, where Brown’s books were big. He begged me to intercede, but it was rough because I wasn’t his mother. I still miss the trip to Paris he and I might have made together.

— In the early eighties he showed me stories that were so bad, I’d duck out the back of the bar when I saw him coming down the walk with the inevitable manila envelope. I couldn’t stand hurting his feelings. I loved his sincerity. I didn’t give him a cold prayer in hell as to a future in literature. When he published in Harley Davidson’s Easy Rider, a story about a galoot, a sheriff, and a marijuana patch, as I recall, I cheered but secretly believed he’d then peaked out.

— Brown was an example of an élan vital, the creative life force about which the philosopher Bergson wrote. Animals get better because they want to, not just to survive. Passion begat brilliance in Larry Brown. I love it. My throat is raw from teaching the life of Brown to students. Work, work. The pleasure deeper than fun. It gets good when you turn pro.

— In Texas last year when Larry Wells called about Larry’s passing, I was having a physical spell and could not fly to his funeral. I’ve never forgiven myself although my wife, Susan, represented us. His absence in Oxford is intolerable to me still. His wife, Mary Annie, actually took time to write me back during the first stunned period of mourning. Her letter and she are dear to me, even though I see her rarely.

— Two nights after his death a great band in San Marcos dedicated the night’s performance to him. Such was the reaction of musicians, an untold amount of whom were his fans.

— At his house I found out his record collection about matched mine. Crazed love going on here.

— He never asked me for a blurb. A small mountain of creeps have never known this courtesy which came naturally to him. The publisher or the agent asks, always with the intro that the author is an almost rabid fan of mine. That is correct form, this is what God says.

— Once, when he was judging NEA fellowship fiction with George Plimpton, he came across a strangely familiar piece. Some arrant dufus had plagiarized a Larry Brown story. Where is this fool? Where is the hooting jail for this pissant? No doubt a rabid fan of Larry’s, but please. Brown enjoyed it. Grinning like a kid.

In November 2004 Larry Brown sent the manuscupt of his all but completed sixth novel, A Miracle of Catfish, to his agent, Liz Darhansoff, of Darhansoff, Verrill, Feldman, in New York. He had made notes for the two or three chapters to end the novel and would start work on them after the Thanksgiving holiday. To the shock and sorrow of his immediate family and the wider family of his readers, Larry Brown died of a massive heart attack on November 24, the day before Thanksgiving, at home in Lafayette County, Mississippi. He was fifty-three years old.

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, publisher of all but one of Larry Brown’s nine previous books, is proud to be the publisher of the novel he was writing when he died. And I am personally honored by the request of his wife, Mary Annie Brown, and her advisers, Tom Rankin and Jonny Miles, that I edit the unfinished manuscript A Miracle of Catfish for publication.

Once Larry Brown had mastered his laconic style, the first-draft manuscripts of his books were nearly always so polished stylistically that my job as editor mostly involved showing him the places I felt the novels would benefit from trimming. He was, as a novelist, likely to write more than he needed. Having honed his skills on the short-story form, he reveled in the wide spaces that novels offer. I rarely found reason to suggest expansion. But I did find places I thought would gain by careful snipping and shaving.

Ever the professional, he almost never argued, though many years after the publication of his first novel, Dirty Work, he liked to remind me that I had asked him to cut the first two hundred pages of the first-draft manuscript — and, he was always careful to add, that he’d done it without any dispute. This was only slight exaggeration on both counts.

Never having edited a manuscript for posthumous publication, I consulted other novelists and critics about the kind of editing I might do and should do under such circumstances. Our conversations led to a consensus that making any changes — substantive or minor — to the plot, the structure, the characterizations, would be inappropriate. No word changes, no syntax changes, and certainly no effort at “ending” the novel should be made. (The author’s notes of his plans for the final chapters, typed in at the end of a rough table of contents, were found among his papers. They follow the last page of the novel as written.)

But what about cuts? The towering 710-page manuscript on my desk reminded me of the first draft manuscripts of two of Larry Brown’s earlier books, Joe and Fay, and I felt strongly that some cutting — to streamline the narrative and lighten some sections that went on past the point — was in order. But I also felt that cuts to the manuscript would be permissible only if the printed book were designed so that the reader would know where these had been made; by the same token, scholars could easily compare the book with the original archived manuscript.

So the unfinished novel you have in your hands is Larry Brown’s first-draft manuscript with editorial cuts (including drafted chapter titles I believe he meant to revise if not omit) that I hope improve the flow and that I believe he would have accepted pretty readily. A Miracle of Catfish is still a very long novel, albeit an unfinished one. If you do have the opportunity to compare it with the manuscript now available to students of Brown’s work in the Department of Archives and Special Collections of the J. D. Williams Library at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and you take issue with the cuts, I am certainly willing to share my reasons for them. I would, in fact, be happy to explain myself, as I would have had to explain myself to Larry Brown had he lived to finish the work.

The experience of working with Larry Brown over the course of his all too short writing career was a high point of my own career in publishing. He was a writer who started from scratch and taught himself not only how to write about what he knew but how to write literature in the process. As he expressed it so clearly in a speech delivered to the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1989, a year after publication of his first book:

It took a long time for me to understand what literature was, and why it was so hard to write, and what it could do to you once you understood it. For me, very simply it meant that I could meet people on the page who were as real as the people I met in my own life . . . Even though they were only words on paper, they were as real to me as my wife and my children. And when I saw that, it was like a curtain fell away from my eyes. I saw that the greatest rewards that could be had from the printed page came from literature and that to be able to write it was the highest form of the art of writing . . . I don’t think it was meant to be easy. I think that from the first it was meant to be hard for the few people who came along and wanted to write it, because the standards are so high and the rewards so great.*

Larry Brown’s determination, his relentless hard work, his unswerving respect for his art, and his honesty in exposing the depth of human emotion paid off. His characters — those real people — live on, just as he intended.

For me, and I hope for you, it doesn’t really matter that A Miracle of Catfish wasn’t quite completed. What he meant it to say is as clear as can be.

Shannon Ravenel
January 2007

* “A Late Start,” a talk given at the Fifth Biennial Conference on Southern Literature, April 8, 1989, Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The blessed shade lived on the ridge. The white oaks stood with their green tops hanging thick under the sun, and a big old man in faded blue overalls walked in the June heat beneath them. He crunched lightly, ankles deep in dry brown leaves, feet wary for copperheads the same color. He was mopping at the sweat on his brow with his forearm, and he was holding his hand out to bash at the webs of spiders that hung in his path. There was a glade carpeted with lush beds of poison ivy, quiet gardens, no place for a nap. A fox squirrel went up a tree and flowed his tail like water over a limb and then lay down on top of it, his legs hanging, his head low to the limb. An unseen little buddy. An old white-faced boar squirrel with a nut sac that laid out behind him like two pecans in a bag. A breeze lifted and blew a cool wind that for a moment stirred his eyelashes. He twitched his parti-colored nose. He probably appreciated the breeze in some squirrel way.

The old man looked around. There were two sloping walls of trees, a natural place to build a pond. Cortez Sharp could see it plain as day. He’d been seeing it for a while. He wondered if Lucinda would want to take that retard fishing after he got the pond built. And some catfish in it. Course it’d take a while to get them up to eating size. Not a year probably. He didn’t think it took them that long to get them up to eating size at the catfish farms down in the Delta. He’d go buy some catfish feed at the Co-op. He’d seen it before, in the stifling heat of the tin-roofed warehouse, stacked in fifty-pound bags on pallets beside fertilizer and seed. Each bag had a picture of a catfish on it. He saw one of those boys who worked in the Co-op’s warehouse kill a big woodchuck in there with a shovel one day and then he stretched it out bloody on a pallet with its stained yellow buck teeth showing and Cortez didn’t think woodchucks even lived in Mississippi. Was a woodchuck a groundhog? What was that thing about if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Probably came in on a load of feed from somewhere up north. Maybe late in the evenings when it was cooling off he could do it. Throw it out there on the water like raindrops. He’d have a special bucket just for that. Or maybe a steel garbage can. Have a lid for it. Keep the fire ants out of it. He wondered if that retard of hers even knew how to fish. He wondered how big the fish would get if he just kept on feeding them instead of catching and eating them. He could catch and eat a few of them. Just not all of them. Leave a few in there to see how big they’d get. What if they got to weighing ten pounds? If he kept feeding them and they kept growing they would. What if they got to weighing twenty? What if they got up to thirty? What would that feel like on a rod and reel? He might have to go get a new one. They might break his old one. Shitfire. They might break a new one. Wouldn’t that be something? What if they got so big they were uncatchable? How fun would that be?

Standing there in the baking woods he looked around again. Why did she want him? What good was he? Cortez just didn’t understand it. He knew they slept together. Hell, lived together. He was tired of worrying over it. There wasn’t anything he could do about it anyway. She evidently saw something in him. He guessed he could show the dumb son of a bitch how to catch a fish. Maybe that wouldn’t be too complicated for him. But that retard sure had him a dirty mouth.

He stood there for a while, […]* and then the old man turned and went away […]. The squirrel lay on his limb and listened to him go, then jumped to another tree, and another, and another, and soon he was just a faint trembling high in the leafy treetops as he gamboled his way into the woods to be unseen again for a while. Maybe. There were hawks in the woods, and when their shadows came sailing by he sought the undersides of branches where perhaps he wouldn’t be taloned to death, then fed in bloody pieces to thinly feathered hawklets with hooked beaks that lived in high nests made from big sticks in trees like these. Meat-eaters that grew and finally flew. On gloomy and rainy winter days they gripped with their talons their high and swaying limbs, as the wind riffled the tiny spotted feathers on the backs of their necks, as they coldly surveyed the naked gray oaks of their range and then spread their wings to cruise the pine-covered ridges that lay before them to the ends of the world.

* Throughout, “[…]” indicates that a passage has been cut by the editor.

Soon a yellow D9 Cat, wrenched and welded together by beer-drinking, polka-dancing union members up north, arrived, and then there was no more silence in the simple woods. This American juggernaut crawled with steel treads churning over a hill jetting black smoke, and its progress could be gauged by the shaking treetops with their rafts of dark green leaves waving and then bending before it, like masts in a wild sea, and then slamming to the ground. In this way, tearing and shoving, the machine made its way into the glade of poison ivy and began to push down white oaks and bulldoze them into a pile. The soft earth that had lain hidden beneath rotted leaf mold for millenniums was torn up and printed with dozer tracks and shown to the unflinching sun, where it lay curled and cracked and began to dry and flake and be clambered upon by red fire ants. The sun was hot and the day went on. Things formerly in the shade now got some light. A box turtle moved away dryly rustling, scaly clawed reptilian feet digging for purchase in the dead leaves, bright fingers of yellow stippling its round brown shell. A clan of local crows flew in and lit and walked around on some limbs and started saying in their crow language, What the hell’s up? Anything to eat?

The dozer dude ate his lunch. Fried chicken, cold biscuits, some olives in a plastic bag. A nicely folded paper towel. A homemade fried apple pie crimped around the delicately crusted edges with a fork as evenly as teeth on a gear. Then a good nap beneath the shade of a giant bur oak with a black Cat cap with the yellow letters over his face. The crows sat and jeered and watched him from their limbs.

You think we ought to sneak in on the ground for them scraps? He ain’t got no gun. Least I don’t see one.

Naw, man, he may be just playing possum. They do that sometimes. That’s how my uncle got killed. My mama told me. Fell for one of them owl decoys and a good mouth caller. Let’s just watch him for a while.

I think he done eat it all anyway. What was it? Fried chicken?

Yeah. Fried chicken. Wing and a leg and a thigh.

That’s another bird, too. I mean if you think about it. Seems kinda cannibalistic if you know what I mean.

I ain’t related to no chicken, but I can see that other biscuit from here.

Well, if you so badass, why don’t you just fly your black ass on in there and get it?

I could if I wanted to. I’m swuft.

In your dreams maybe.

I caught a rat other day. Beat a hawk to it.

A hawk would whip your young ass.

I can dive-bomb like a freight train.

Well, do it, punk. Fly on in there and get that biscuit.

I think I’ll just wait till the time’s right.

That’s what I figured. Set up here in a tree and talk shit like a juvenile.

Later on in the afternoon diesel smoke drifted again through the woods, and deer at their grazing in sun-dappled and beech-shaded hollows stopped and smelled it, and their little spotted ones stopped and smelled it, too. It seemed to alarm them a bit. They were used to smelling honeysuckle, cedar, tender shoots of grass, acorns, somebody’s nice patch of purple hull peas if they could find it. For which they’d often get the hell shot out of them with 00 buckshot. Maybe Brenneke rifled slugs. Depending upon whose place they were on, maybe even machine-gun slugs. They trotted off toward a trail that led into the forest, single file, tails down, not scared, just moving away to somewhere else, picking up a few more ticks. The bucks’ horns were just bulbous branches full of blood at this time of year. They lived there and they weren’t about to move just because somebody was building a pond. A regular drinking hole in the woods was actually a pretty good idea.

Jimmy’s daddy was lying in the hot gravel in front of his trailer with his head beneath a 1955 Chevy two-door sedan with a wrench in his hand, studying the rusty undersides of it. Saturday. Everybody gone. Shopping in Tupelo with the kids. Nice and quiet. The radio was going through the window of the trailer. Mainstream country. Lots of commercials for car lots and mobile homes. The Shania Twain they were still playing was six months old. Like maybe the station couldn’t afford any more records. But he knew better than that. On a busy street where clouds floated across the face of a glass-paneled tower in Nashville, there was some guy sitting in an office drinking good Kentucky bourbon with a pile of demo tapes on his desk, and he was the one who decided who got on the radio and who didn’t. This one was in, that one was out. Rusty had told him all about it. If you wanted to get into country music, the deck was already stacked against you. Unless maybe you were Garth Brooks. Hell. Even if you were Garth Brooks.

This car was special. It was unique as far as cubic inches. Most of the V8-equipped ’55s came out with 283s in them, but this was one of the rare ones with a 265-horsepower 265. You didn’t see a lot of them. You could still get parts for it. Water pumps. Rebuilt generators. Tie-rod ends. He reached his finger out and touched a black spot of oil. He pulled his finger back and looked at it. On it was a black spot of oil.

He wiped it on his jeans and reached up with the wrench for one of the rust-frozen nuts that held what was left of the manifold gasket between the rust-flaked exhaust manifold and the rusted exhaust pipe, a gasket that was ruined with heat, crumbling apart, leaking exhaust, and making a lot of noise but probably increasing his horsepower half a horse or a horse or a horse and a half since putting headers on one everybody said would give it about five. He knew it would come off a lot easier if he had some WD-40 to put on it, painted blue-and-white spray can, take the little red plastic straw off the side where it was taped to the can, stick it in the nozzle where you could pinpoint your spray and spray the threads, watch it foam whitely, inhale that high giddy petroleum aroma and know it would help, let the thin greasy liquid soak deeply into the threads and penetrate the rust and help his wrench to free it. But Johnette had used up his last can trying to get some charcoal going in the grill — stoned again — and he hadn’t thought to run by AutoZone yesterday to see Rusty and get some more. He needed some better tools, too, by God, just for this car. Not this piece of shit off brand stuff from years ago at Otasco he was still using. Something that wouldn’t slip on a nut and bust your knuckles. Johnette was still on his ass over paying eighty-five hundred dollars for the car, just about draining the savings, but most of what had been in savings had been off his settlement on his and Rusty’s wreck from when they ran into all those chicken coops in the road and wrecked his Bronco, so it was his money anyway. What he needed to do was just tell Johnette that he needed the shit, and go on up the