CATFISH DREAMS
By Jeff S. Martindale
 

“What is it, Papa?” Scottie said.

Furrowing his considerable brow, Dick studied the greasy spoon menu, squinting his 81-year-old eyes, still as dark as loam and radiant as the day he asked her to marry him.

“I don’t know what I want,” he murmured.

Well, he knew what he wanted but knew better than to order it. She’d never let him.

“What about the salad?” she said before taking a long, satisfying drag from a cigarette, now almost a stub. A warbled radio resting atop a dusty jukebox broadcast the twangy sounds of a country music singer lamenting the loss of something, though the patrons didn’t seem to notice.

“No,” Dick said, shaking his head. One side of his mouth was turned down, giving him a slight frowning appearance. “I don’t want a salad.”

“How about a steak?”

“Don’t want that either,” he said after a pause. “What’re you getting?”

“I think I want…the burger,” she said, tentatively. “Yes. The burger. Looks good, don’t you think?”

“Not really,” he muttered under his breath. What he really wanted was the—

“Can I get you folks something to drink?”

The waitress, a tall, middle-aged woman with a heart-shaped face and keen blue eyes, pulled an ink pen from atop her blonde beehive hairdo. She reminded Scottie of Flo, the sassy, gum-chomping waitress from the old “Alice” TV sitcom, but a shiny silver tag pinned to her frumpy brown uniform proclaimed her name to be ‘Margaret.’

“Coke,” Scottie said, pressing out the smoldering butt in an ashtray at her side. And then more sternly she said, “I want Coke, not Pepsi!”

“Yes, ma’am,” Margaret said, scribbling ‘COKE’ in all caps on her pad.

“And you, sir?”

He pondered the question for a moment.

“What do you have on draft?”

He hoped she would say, “Guinness” but they offered only the requisite cheap domestics. He craved a Guinness, but this wasn’t a ‘Guinness’ kind of place.

He ordered a Busch instead.

“I’ll give you a minute to look over the menu,” Margaret said, sticking the pen back in her ‘do. She turned on her heels and walked toward the kitchen, pushing her way through shiny metallic double doors guarding the entrance.

“Still having trouble, Dick?” Scottie mumbled out of a corner of her mouth, flicking a lighter to ignite a fresh cigarette wedged in the other, her gravelly voice the result of seven decades’ of smoking. She tried to stop – once – but missed the buzz of the nicotine and the feel of a cigarette between her fingers. Besides, she was pushing 80 and had smoked for her entire adult life – and most of her youth before that – not once having smoking-related health problems…until she tried to stop. Between the withdrawal symptoms that caused gut-wrenching stomach pain and the prescriptions that failed to reduce the cravings, she decided that a smoke-free life wasn’t worth the trouble. So she gave up quitting. It was what she wanted to do. 

“Mmm hmm,” he replied, laying open the menu on the table.

“Well…what is it you want?”

“You know what I want,” he said, evenly, without looking up.

He had given up eating catfish – and all other things fried – at the behest of his doctor, who had, along with Scottie, nagged him about his poor diet and high cholesterol for longer than he cared to remember. In a reluctant concession, he tried eating catfish baked, broiled, and grilled – every way but fried – yet nothing suited his particular palate. He missed the greasy aftertaste, the breading that crunched between his teeth, and the way a good fillet flaked when you stuck a fork in it. No, he wanted his catfish fried or not at all.

“Yes, I know,” Scottie said, blowing the smoke over her head. “I know.”

Dick sighed. “Why’d you bring me here, anyway?” he said with a look bordering on confusion and disdain. “Everything’s fried.”

A Canadian woman at the K-O-A had suggested it, a restaurant in an out-of-the-way place, located near the town limits on the old state highway, lined now with ramshackle motels and boarded stores. The eatery’s lure, like the route it bordered, had lost its luster long ago. Its booth bench cushions were worn and virtually nonexistent, its silverware chipped, its china faded, and its jukebox music decidedly Nixon-ish. But it remained in business, serving now a local and conspicuously more elderly clientele, surviving despite the automobiles once teeming with families that now bypassed the route in favor of the impersonal interstate, taking their commerce with them.

Scottie wanted to take him somewhere special for their 60th wedding anniversary, and this place was exactly what she had in mind.

“I heard the food was good,” she said.

“Well, maybe, but I—”

“I heard the catfish was good,” she corrected with a twinkle in her eyes.

That seemed to interest him, the way his eyebrows went up.

“Is that so?” he said, cautiously, suspecting she was teasing him.

Scottie grinned, which soon evolved into a wide smile spanning her round face, crinkling the skin around her nose.
“So,” said Margaret, approaching their table, once again retrieving the pen from the penthouse. “Have you decided?”

“I’ll have the burger,” Scottie said, handing over the menu. “Rare.”

“What about you, sir?”

Papa gazed into the sky blue eyes of his bride of sixty years, absorbing the reassuring warmth of her smile, relishing the familiar shape of her face, changed so much yet so little since the night he escorted her, then a freshman coed, home from a fraternity dance the first week of school his senior year, the two of them rushing through the quad to make curfew, even though he wasn’t her date—

The waitress was talking.

“Sir?”

“Oh…yes…of course,” Papa said, clearing his throat. He lifted the menu, using a free forefinger to push his bifocals onto the bridge of his nose. “I’ll have the catfish fillets…with fries.”

Margaret, smiling, took the menu from his liver-spotted hands, turned and walked away, toward a long, narrow window behind the counter where she called out their order to the cooks, whose fishnet-covered heads bobbed in and out of view.

The setting sun cast prolonged, bending shadows on the dining room, airy and bright, naturally illuminated by the generous windows that overlooked the old highway. The clinking sounds of silverware against china rang in the air. A bus boy, wearing a blue Braves cap turned backwards atop a mop of auburn curls and a dingy white apron draped over faded blue jeans, trudged about, depositing dirty dishes and silverware into a gray plastic tub perched precariously on his hip. A smattering of patrons, casually engaged in muted conversations, lingered at tables, though no one seemed to notice the octogenarian couple sitting in the booth by the old jukebox, the gentle luminescence of the twilight glow basking them in brilliant red and orange hues. They held hands across the table, not because it was their 60th anniversary, but because it was what they wanted to do.