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Mad Mechanics: A Pisces With Blue Eyes
Written by: Emmitt Owens
As narrated by: Waylon
(Index #05282026)

Waylon, Intro: “Well now, folks, gather close, because this here is the story of how a man who hadn’t caught anything meaningful in six years went down to a creek on a Tuesday morning in April with a pole, a half-eaten pack of crackers, and absolutely zero expectation of anything… and came home engaged to a woman from Marion County. Now I’ve told you stories about these boys doing things that defied physics, logic, good judgment, and several municipal ordinances. But what you’re about to hear defies all of those things plus the entire sequential nature of time itself. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Reedus works in ways that make the Lord take notes. Settle in. Benjamin Todd’s ‘Big River Ballad’ is already playing on the shop radio, the spring is running cold and clear, and somewhere along a limestone creek shelf in Buzzard Roost, Alabama, a man is about to catch the only thing that was ever going to matter.”

   It was the eleventh of April, which is a Saturday, which is a day nobody ever expects anything from.
     The shop was running normal… Chester under a F-350 that had developed a knock that sounded like somebody was living inside the engine block and knocking to get out.
   Gary was on his third cigarette and his second carburetor, in that order.
     Professor Thibodaux was in the office doing something with a notebook that looked important but could also have been a grocery list drawn in very careful handwriting.
   Gutglor wasn’t technically there yet but his mason jar was, which counted.
     Reedus had taken the morning off.
   This was notable because Reedus taking time off was roughly as common as a sensible decision being made at Mad Mechanics, which is to say it happened occasionally but never without commentary.
     “Where’s Reedus?” Gary asked, not looking up from the carburetor.
   “Creek,” Chester said, from under the truck.
     “Which part?”
   “The limestone shelf part. Down past where the spring comes in.”
     Gary blew ash off his cigarette. “He ever catch anything down there?”
   Chester slid out from under the F-350, squinting upward at Gary. “Not once. Goes every other month or so anyway. Says it’s beautiful.”
     Gary considered that. “Man fishing a creek that don’t produce fish because it’s beautiful.” He lit cigarette number four. “That’s either poetry or a waste of bait.”
   “Both,” Chester said, and went back under the truck.

   Down at the creek, Reedus Jones was sitting on a limestone shelf with his boots off, feet dangling two inches above water so clear you could count the individual pebbles on the bottom. His pole was in the water. His tackle box was open next to him with the organized like a man who’d given up on organization but hadn’t given up on having a lot of things. There was a peanut butter cracker balanced on his knee and Benjamin Todd was coming through his phone speaker, quiet as a conversation — “Terrified to Try” drifting up into the green canopy like smoke.
     He wasn’t expecting fish. He’d never caught a single fish in this particular stretch of Quarter Creek in eleven years of trying. The creek was too clear, too cold, too limestone-perfect. Fish around here had standards.
   “I never caught a fish in this part of the creek,” he said to no one in particular, because Reedus had a habit of narrating his own life when nobody else was available to hear it. “Still fish it though. Because it’s beautiful out here.”
     A blue heron standing seventeen feet upstream did not respond.
   That’s when he heard voices.
     Not alarming voices. Family voices… the layered noise of children arguing about something inconsequential, a cooler being dragged across rocks, a woman saying “leave that crawdad alone, Jaybird, I mean it” with the tone of a person who had said this exact sentence many times before and fully expected to say it many times again.
   Reedus turned his head.
     And that was the end of the chapter of his life that hadn’t included Leisa Marie Holcomb.
   She came around the bend of the creek with the unhurried ease of a woman who had been to this particular creek before, probably as a child, and was now bringing her own children to it the way you return something borrowed to its rightful place. Auburn hair. Blue eyes that did something to the light around them that the Professor would later attempt to describe in arithmetic and fail. She was wearing cutoff shorts and creek shoes and a faded t-shirt from the Brilliant Volunteer Fire Department, and she had the look of a woman who had zero interest in impressing anybody and had therefore accidentally become the most impressive person in the immediate area.
     Behind her came what appeared to be three children of various heights and one deeply suspicious beagle on a rope leash.
   Reedus stood up.
     He was not entirely sure why he stood up. There was no formal reason to stand. He was sitting at a creek. Nobody had called order. But some part of his nervous system had apparently decided that standing was the correct response and had communicated this to his legs before consulting the rest of him.
   He also, in the process of standing, stepped sideways off the limestone shelf and put his right foot directly into six inches of cold creek water.
     “Oh—Dagggg” he said.
   Leisa looked over at the sound of a grown man making the noise of a person who has just stepped somewhere cold and unexpected.
     She did not laugh.
   She did smile, which was considerably more dangerous.
     “Cold?” she asked.
   “Not… no,” Reedus said, which was objectively false, because the spring-fed creek in April was cold enough to make a man reconsider his relationship with nature. “I meant to do that.”
     “Did you.”
   “Thermoregulation,” Reedus said, because when he was nervous he produced words that sounded like explanations. “Hot day. Strategic foot cooling. I’m actually a mechanic so I know about… thermal… it’s a whole thing.”
     Leisa Marie Holcomb looked at this man standing one-footed in a creek, wet boot in hand, explaining thermoregulation to a woman he had never met, and made a decision that would alter both their lives entirely.
   She sat down on the limestone shelf next to his tackle box.
     “Mind if we fish here?” she asked. “We drove up from Brilliant. Family used to camp this whole stretch when I was little.”
   “Marion County?” Reedus said.
     “Born and raised.”
   Reedus sat back down, wet sock and all, and redeployed his pole into the water with the air of a guy who has just been handed an assignment from a fishing partner.
     “I’m Reedus,” he said.
   “Leisa.”
     “You fish?”
   “Since I was four.”
     “Ever catch anything on this creek?”
   She squinted at the water. “Not once. Too cold. Too clear.”
     “Beautiful though,” Reedus said.
   “Beautiful though,” she agreed.
     And from his phone speaker, as if the playlist had been curated by someone with theological intentions, Benjamin Todd began singing “A Heart of Gold Is Hard to Find.”
   The beagle sat down and looked at both of them with the facial expressions of an animal who had seen this coming from the parking lot.

Waylon Intermission: “Now folks, I want to pause here and draw your attention to something important. Reedus Jones had not seriously considered the possibility of a relationship in six years. Six years is a long time. Six years is long enough to convince yourself that the chapter is closed, that you’ve made your peace with it, that you’re fine eating crackers alone on a limestone shelf telling a blue heron about how the water temperature is changing in the beaming sunlight. And then you step in cold water and a woman from Marion County sits down next to your tackle box and the whole architecture of your solitude collapses like a tent in a thunderstorm. The Lord, the universe, or whatever you prefer to call the force that arranges these things, has a sense of humor. Reedus Jones, who could pun his way through a funeral and once convinced a mannequin to become a research assistant, was completely and entirely without words for exactly four minutes. Four minutes. That’s a record. That’s practically geological time. The beagle, for his part, was unimpressed by the whole thing but willing to observe.”

   They fished until four o’clock.
     Nobody caught anything. The creek maintained its standards.
   Leisa’s youngest… a boy of about six who went by Jaybird for unknown reasons… fell in twice, once accidentally and once on purpose, and the beagle, whose name turned out to be Raymond, ate half of Reedus’s remaining crackers while everyone was watching Jaybird’s second fall.
     They talked about Marion County and Colbert County and the differences between creeks that produced fish and creeks that produced something harder to name. They talked about the way spring water smells different from well water. They talked about the heron, who had relocated upstream forty feet and was pretending to be a statue.
   Reedus did not make a single pun.
     This was unprecedented.
   He asked about her people. She told him about the Holcombs of Brilliant, who had farmed and fished and occasionally done things that didn’t get written down in the official version of events. He told her about the shop. About Chester and the Professor and Gutglor’s pickled possum toes and Gary’s ongoing war with carburetors and his own personal history with things that shouldn’t work but did.
     “You eat possum toes?” she said.
   “Gutglor does. He keeps them in a mason jar in vinegar. Offered me some once.”
     “What’d you say?”
   “I said no thank you, I’m trying to cut back.”
     Leisa laughed. Not a polite laugh. A real one, the kind that involves the eyes and doesn’t care what it looks like.
   Reedus registered this the way a seismograph registers a 7.2 earthquake.
     By the time her sister arrived to collect the kids at four-fifteen… hollering from the gravel lot above the creek bank that they were going to miss dinner… Reedus had Leisa’s phone number written on the back of a receipt from the Marty’s Quikmart in Buzzard Roost that had been living in his tackle box for nine months. He’d written his own number below it in case she lost the receipt, then realized that was backward and wrote it again above it.
   She took the receipt, looked at both numbers, and looked at him.
     “You put your number twice,” she said.
   “For emphasis,” he said. “It’s a whole thing. I’m a mechanic.”
     She folded it and put it in her pocket.
   Raymond the beagle ate the other half of the crackers on the way out, undetected and unrepentant.

   He drove back to the shop at five o’clock with a wet boot, an empty cracker sleeve, and the looks of a man who has seen something he’s not going to be able to un-see.
     Chester was sitting outside on the tailgate with a cigarette, watching the road the way men in small Alabama towns watch roads… not for anything specific, just keeping track.
   He looked at Reedus.
     He looked at the wet boot.
   He looked at the expression on Reedus’s face.
     “Catch anything?” Chester said.
   Reedus stopped walking.
     “I never caught a fish in that peice of creek in eleven years,” he said. “Not once.”
   Chester took a long drag. “But?”
     “I caught a Pisces,” Reedus said. “With… blue eyes and auburn hair.”
   Chester held his cigarette very still.
     “Reedus.”
   “She’s from Marion County.”
     “How old?”
   “My age give or take.”
     “Kids?”
   “Three. And a beagle named Raymond who is a criminal.”
     Chester smoked for a moment.
   “She know about you yet?”
     “I told her about the possum toes.”
   “Your own possum toes or Gutglor’s?”
     “Gutglor’s.”
   Chester seemed to weigh this. “Good start. What else?”
     “That was mostly it. We fished for about three hours and talked.”
   Chester flicked ash. “You pun her?”
     Reedus paused. “…No.”
   Chester turned and looked at him with an expression that had not been seen on Chester’s face in recent memory. It was something in the neighborhood of surprise and something else in the neighborhood of quiet respect.
     “Not once?” Chester said.
   “Not once,” Reedus said.
     Chester smoked.
   “Reckon you might be in trouble,” Chester said, which at Mad Mechanics was the highest possible endorsement.

   Three days later.
     Reedus called her Monday. She answered on the second ring. They talked for two hours and forty minutes, which Gary clocked on his phone purely out of scientific interest and then reported to the group, which Professor Thibodaux wrote in his notebook under the heading “Notable Behavioral Divergences.”
   Tuesday she drove up from Brilliant and they ate at Whitt’s Barbecue in Florence and then drove down to the river and sat on the tailgate of Reedus’s truck and watched the water until nine o’clock, which is what people in Colbert County do when they want to say something important but haven’t found the right words yet.
   Wednesday she called him first.
     Thursday morning, Reedus arrived at the shop at seven forty-five, set his coffee mug down on the workbench with unusual deliberateness, and looked at Chester.
   “Chester,” he said.
     Chester was already looking at him. You could always tell with Chester..  he registered things before you said them, the way you hear thunder before you know what to call it.
   “Talk,” Chester said.
     “I’m thinking about marrying her,” Reedus said.
   The shop was quiet except for the compressor cycling and the radio playing Benjamin Todd’s “Still Search For You” at low volume, which was either coincidence or the universe working overtime.
     Gary set down his carburetor.
   Professor Thibodaux took off his glasses and cleaned them, which was what he did when he needed a moment.
     Gutglor was eating a tomato and continued eating his tomato, which was his version of respectful attention.
   “You’ve known her,” Chester said carefully, “three days.”
     “Yes sir.”
   “Three days.”
     “Correct.”
   “And you want to—”
     “Marry her. Yes.”
   Chester smoked. “Professor.”
     “Statistically,” Professor Thibodaux began, replacing his glasses, “the probability of a lasting union predicted on a seventy-two hour acquaintance is—”
   “Thank you Professor,” Reedus said.
     “Historically, marriages contracted in haste—”
   “I appreciate that.”
     “Jacob labored fourteen years for Rachel,” the Professor said, which was unexpected enough that everyone looked at him. He adjusted his spectacles. “I’m simply saying the biblical record on fast courtship is mixed.”
   “Didn’t say fast,” Reedus said. “Said certain.”
     The shop went quiet again.
   Chester stubbed out his cigarette with careful attention.
     “What’s she say?” he asked.
   Reedus almost smiled. “Told her Wednesday night. She said”… he paused… “she said she’d been praying for something she couldn’t describe for two years and when I stepped in that creek she thought, well, that’s probably him.”
     Gutglor set down his tomato.
   Even Gary put down his cigarette.
     “The beagle like you?” Chester asked, because Chester had his own theology about animals as character references and it was consistent.
   “Raymond ate all my crackers and slept on my feet.”
     Chester looked at the ceiling, then at the floor, then at Reedus.
   “Well,” he said. “Alright then.”

   The twenty-fourth of April.
     This was the date they had agreed upon, which was a Friday, which was reasonable, and which was thirteen days after Reedus had gone fishing with no intention of catching anything. The plan was simple, which at Mad Mechanics was the first sign of trouble.
   The plan: drive to the courthouse in Russellville, print the marriage certificate at the public library… because Reedus’s printer at home was out of ink and the shop printer had been producing documents with an inexplicable diagonal yellow stripe across everything since February… sign the paperwork and proceed accordingly.
     The plan met reality at eleven forty-seven in the afternoon.
   The library was closed.
     Not temporarily closed. Not closed for lunch. Closed closed. Third Friday of every month, April through September. A laminated sign on the door said so in the cheerful font of a place that had no idea it was destroying anyone’s plans.
   Reedus stood on the library steps and read the sign.
     He read it again.
   He called Leisa.
     “The library’s closed,” he said.
   A pause on her end. “On a Friday?”
     “Third Friday every month, April through September.”
   Another pause. “Is there another library?”
     “Red Bay’s got one. Fifty minutes.”
   “Is it open?”
     Reedus googled it. “Closed for a roof repair. Indefinitely.”
   Silence.
     “Reedus,” Leisa said.
   “Yes ma’am.”
     “The Lord is testing us.”
   Reedus considered this. “Book of Ruth,” he said. “Naomi tried to send Ruth away three times before she’d let her stay.”
     “Exactly,” Leisa said. “Closed library is basically the same thing.”
   “In principle,” Reedus agreed.
     “So we wait,” she said. “And we try again when the Lord opens the library.”
   Reedus looked at the laminated sign. He looked at the sky, which was unremarkable and offered no opinion.
     “May first,” he said, checking his phone. “That’s the next open Friday.”
   “May first,” she said.
     “That’s seven days.”
   “Then we’ll know each other seven more days by the time we get married.”
     Reedus was quiet for a moment.
   “Leisa,” he said.
     “Yeah.”
   “I’m gonna be real good to you,” he said, which was not a pun and was not a joke and was the plainest thing he had said out loud in six years.
     She was quiet on her end for long enough that he wondered if the call had dropped.
   “I know,” she said. “Raymond already told me.”

Waylon, Intermission: “Now folks, let me just acknowledge what happened at that library. Because a lesser man… a man who hadn’t read the Word, hadn’t sat on a limestone shelf and talked to a woman for three hours without making a single pun, hadn’t had his crackers eaten by a beagle who approved of him… a lesser man might have seen a closed library and said, well, that’s a sign. And he’d have been right. It was a sign. It just wasn’t the sign he thought it was. In the Book of Ruth, Naomi tried three times to turn Ruth away. In the Book of Genesis, Jacob worked seven years, got the wrong sister, and worked seven more. In the Gospel According to Mad Mechanics, the public library in Franklin County is closed the third Friday of every month from April through September, and that is simply the Lord’s way of saying: not yet, son. I’m building something. Go on home and let it finish.”

   May the first.
     The library opened at nine a.m.
   Reedus was there at eight forty-seven with Leisa, her sister Linda Carol who had agreed to witness, and Raymond the beagle, who was not technically permitted inside the library but came anyway because the Holcomb family had a flexible relationship with posted rules and Raymond had no relationship with them whatsoever.
     The certificate printed clean. No yellow stripe. No diagonal issues.
   “Printer’s working perfect,” the librarian said.
     “Ma’am,” Reedus said, “you have no idea what this means.”
   The librarian did not have any idea what this meant but she appreciated his sincerity.
     The preacher was Brother Cecil Funderburk of the Mount Harmony Church of Christ outside Hamilton, Alabama, who had known Leisa’s grandmother and had presided over seventeen weddings in the last four years and had a standing policy of marrying couples with less than two weeks of preparation because, as he put it, “if the Lord’s writing it, I’m just the notary.”
   Brother Cecil performed the ceremony in his church parking lot at eleven-fifteen in the morning because the sanctuary was being re-carpeted and smelled strongly of adhesive, which Cecil felt was not the aroma of holy matrimony.
     The parking lot was warm. The redbuds along the fence line were still holding their color. Benjamin Todd was playing from someone’s phone propped against the church sign — “Lazy Moonshiner” rolling out into the May morning like something that had been waiting there a while.
   Chester was there. Gary was there, cigarette behind his ear for the occasion. Professor Thibodaux wore his bow tie. Gutglor brought a mason jar of something clear and a bag of fresh mater-weeds, which he considered appropriate for any gathering. Axl wore his collar and sat beside Gutglor with the dignity of a dog attending a formal function.
     Raymond the beagle wore his regular collar and sat beside Leisa and ate a piece of wedding cake before it was served because it was on the bumper of Linda Carol’s Tahoe at beagle height and opportunity is opportunity.
   Brother Cecil opened his worn Bible and looked at the assembled company.
     “I’m going to use Ruth,” he said. “Chapter one, verse sixteen. ‘Whither thou goest, I will go. Whither thou lodgest, I will lodge.’ Because”… he looked at Reedus and Leisa… “I understand you two met at a creek.”
   “Yes sir,” Reedus said.
     “And that the library was closed.”
   “Third Friday, April through September,” Reedus confirmed.
     Cecil nodded slowly. “So y’all were appointed to each other and then the Lord made sure the paperwork couldn’t happen until He was ready for it to happen. That’s not unusual. That’s just how He works. He’s been doing it since Genesis.” He closed the Bible on his thumb. “Reedus, you got anything to say before we begin?”
   Reedus looked at Leisa. Her blue eyes. Her auburn hair. The way she was standing in a church parking lot in May like she’d been placed there by someone who knew what they were doing.
     “I fished that creek for eleven years,” he said. “Never caught a thing. Kept going because it was beautiful.” He paused. “I told Chester I caught a Pisces with blue eyes and auburn hair and he said I might be in trouble.” He paused again. “He was right. I’m in the best trouble I’ve ever been in.”
   Leisa looked at him.
     “Reedus,” she said quietly.
   “Yes ma’am.”
     “Don’t make me cry in a church parking lot.”
   “We’re technically outside the church.”
     “Reedus.”
   “Yes ma’am. Sorry.”
     Brother Cecil smiled the smile of a man who has presided over seventeen weddings and recognizes the specific texture of the real ones.
   “Alright then,” he said. “Let’s proceed.”
     From the phone speaker against the church sign, as if the playlist had received instructions, Benjamin Todd went quiet for exactly the length of time it took Brother Cecil to say the words, and then, just as it was done and the morning went still and everybody stood in a parking lot in Colbert County in May with maters and moonshine and a beagle who had eaten the cake… “A Heart of Gold Is Hard to Find” started playing again, from the beginning, like it wanted to hear it again from the start.
   Gutglor raised his mason jar.
     Gary lit his cigarette.
   Chester looked at the sky for a long moment and then looked at Reedus and gave him the small nod that was the full extent of Chester’s emotional vocabulary on important occasions, which was worth more than a speech from anyone else.
     The Professor wrote something in his notebook, closed it, and put it in his jacket pocket.
   Axl put his head on Gutglor’s knee.
     Raymond ate a second piece of cake.

Waylon, Outro: “Well now, folks. I’ve told you about men who built impossible engines and women who made impossible diagnoses and inspectors who got moonshine’d into model compliance and a nitrous-assisted turkey that violated several laws of physics. But I want to tell you about what happened to Reedus Coburn after six years of a life that was full and good and honest but quietly, in one particular room, empty.
   He went fishing on a Saturday. He wasn’t looking for anything. He went because the creek was beautiful and he’d always believed that beautiful things were worth returning to even if they didn’t give you what you came for. And the creek, having waited eleven patient years, finally gave him something it had been keeping.
   That’s not coincidence. That’s not luck. That’s the math of a life lived with enough faith to keep going back to places that haven’t paid off yet, because you understand in your bones that beautiful things have their own timing and arguing with it never helped anyone.
   The library was closed. That’s not a setback. That’s God buying Reedus and Leisa seven more days to be sure. And they used every one of them.
   Ruth said, whither thou goest, I will go. She didn’t say, whither thou goest after a proper courtship period and library access. She just said she was going. That’s the whole thing. That’s all it ever is.
   Reedus Coburn stepped in a cold creek in April and came home in May with a wife from Marion County, a beagle who ate his cake, and the best thing he’d had in six years… which wasn’t a thing at all but a person, which is always the better catch.
   May your closed libraries be redirections. May your cold creeks surprise you. May you fish the beautiful places even when they don’t produce, because you never know what the creek is keeping.
   And if a beagle named Raymond eats your crackers and sleeps on your feet… friend, that’s an endorsement. That’s as good as it gets. Amen.”

   Dedicated to everyone who kept going back to the beautiful places.
     And to Kayleigh… who knew first.

Mad Mechanics™ — Where we fix trucks, perform parking lot weddings in full compliance with the Church of Christ tradition, drink alco-haullic beverages at receptions that also feature fresh maters, and believe without reservation that the Lord closes libraries for a reason.