Billy turned and looked at Ralph. He studied him for a long hard moment. He said, “That’s okay. I don’t mind the back.”
“You sit up front,” Ralph said.
“You always ride up front,” Billy said.
“Not today.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You sit in my seat.”
Ralph sat behind Billy in the back, and John drove. They drove out of the trail and out of the woods and onto the main road. It was starting to get dark. John pulled on the lights.
John glanced at Billy. Billy’s face was beaded up with sweat. “I been thinking,” Billy said. “Everything you was talking about was right, Ralph. I was just upset.”
“Yeah,” Ralph said.
“Yeah. I mean, I wasn’t thinking.”
Billy turned halfway around and put his arm on the seat. Ralph was looking right at him. In the early evening he was only slightly better defined than a shadow. He had his hat pulled down tight.
“Turn around, Billy,” Ralph said.
Billy turned. He looked at John. John said, “I done told you.”
Billy said, “He’s my cousin, so of course I was upset. I ain’t gonna say nothing about it to no one. Not even his mama.”
“That’s good,” Ralph said, and reached in his pocket and took Billy’s revolver out of it and rested it on his knee, his hand resting gently on top of it like a man caressing a pet.
“You know we all done done the sins that’s gonna send us to hell,” Ralph said. “It’s just a matter of when now, but we’re all goin’. There ain’t a thing we can do to change things. For some of us when it comes, it’ll come quick and with a pop.”
“Sure we can,” Billy said. “We can all do better.”
“I don’t think so,” Ralph said.
“It’s like you said, I ain’t nothin’ but a kid. I ain’t thinkin’ things through. But I’ll get better. We all thought you wanted that old man done.”
“Leave me out of this,” John said. “I ain’t part of that we.”
Billy was talking fast. “You sayin’ he looked like your daddy, and us knowing what you did.”
“Don’t mention my old man again,” Ralph said. “Ever.”
“Sure,” Billy said. “Sure. But I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve learned a lot.”
“Sure you have,” Ralph said, and then there was a long silence, and then Billy heard the revolver cock.
WHITE MULE, SPOTTED PIG
Frank’s papa, the summer of nineteen hundred and nine, told him right before he died that he had a good chance to win the annual Camp Rapture mule race. He told Frank this ’cause he needed money to keep getting drunk, and he wasn’t about to ride no mule himself, fat as he was. If the old man had known he was about to die, Frank figured he would have saved his breath on the race talk and asked for whisky instead, maybe a chaw. But as it was, he said it, and it planted in Frank’s head the desire to ride and win.
Frank hated that about himself. Once a thing got into his head he couldn’t derail it. He was on the track then, and had to see it to the end. Course, that could be a good trait, but problem was, and Frank knew it, the only things that normally caught up in his head like that and pushed him were bad ideas. Even if he could sense their badness, he couldn’t seem to stop their running forward and dragging him with them. He also thought his mama had been right when she told him once that their family was like shit on shoes, the stink of it followed them wherever they went.
But this idea. Winning a mule race. Well, that had some good sides to it. Mainly money.
He thought about what his papa said, and how he said it, and then how, within a few moments, the old man grabbed the bed sheets, moaned once, dribbled some drool, and was gone to wherever it was he was supposed to go, probably a stool next to the devil at fireside.
He didn’t leave Frank nothing but an old rundown place with a bit of dried-out corn crop, a mule, a horse with one foot in the grave and the other on a slick spot. And his very own shit to clean out of the sheets, ’cause when the old man let go and departed, he left Frank that present, which was the only kind he had ever given. Something dirty. Something painful. Something shitty.
Frank had to burn the mattress and set fire to the bedclothes, so there really wasn’t any real cleaning about it. Then he dug a big hole, and cut roots to do it. Next he had to wrap the old man’s naked body in a dirty canvas and put him down and cover him up. It took some work, ’cause the old man must have weighed three hundred pounds, and he wasn’t one inch taller than five three if he was wearing boots with dried cow shit on the heels and paper tucked inside them to jack his height. Dragging him along on his dead ass from the house had damn near caused one of Frank’s balls to swell up and pop out.
Finished with the burying, Frank leaned against a sickly sweet gum tree and rolled himself a smoke, and thought: Shit, I should have dragged the old man over here on the tarp. Or maybe hitched him up to the mule and dragged his naked ass face down through the dirt. That would have been the way to go, not pulling his guts out.
But, it was done now, and as always, he had used his brain late in the game.
Frank scratched a match on a thumbnail and lit a rolled cigarette and leaned on a sickly sweet gum and smoked and considered. It wasn’t that he was all that fond of his old man, but damn if he still didn’t in some way want to make him proud, or rather be proud to his memory. He thought: Funny, him not being worth a damn, and me still wanting to please him. Funnier yet, considering the old man used to beat him like a Tom-Tom. Frank had seen him knock mama down once and put his foot on the back of her neck and use his belt to beat her ass while he cussed her for having burned the cornbread. It wasn’t the only beating she got, but it was damn sure the champion.
It was shortly after that she decamped with the good horse, a bag of cornmeal, some dried meat and a butcher knife. She also managed, with what Frank thought must have been incredible aim, to piss in one of his old man’s liquor jugs. This was discovered by the old man after he took a good strong bolt of the liquor. Cheap as the stuff was he drank, Frank was surprised he could tell the difference, that he had turned out to be such a fine judge of shit liquor.
Papa had ridden out after her on the mule but hadn’t found her, which wasn’t a surprise, because the only thing Papa had been good at tracking was a whisky bottle or some whore, provided she was practically tied down and didn’t cost much. He probably tracked the whores he messed with by the stench.
Back from the hunt, drunk and pissed and empty-handed, Papa had said it was bad enough Frank’s mama was a horse and meal thief, but at least she hadn’t taken the mule, and frankly, she wasn’t that good a cook anyhow.
The mule’s name was Rupert, and he could run like his tail was on fire. Papa had actually thought about the mule as a contender for a while, and had put out a little money to have him trained by Leroy, who though short in many departments, and known for having been caught fucking a goat by a half dozen hunters, was pretty good with mules and horses. Perhaps, it could be said he had a way with goats as well. One thing was certain, none of Leroy’s stock had testified to the contrary, and only the nanny goats were known to be nervous.
The night after Frank buried his pa, he got in some corn squeezings, and got drunk enough to imagine weasels crawling out from under the floorboards. To clear his head and to relieve his bladder, he went out to do something on his father’s grave that would never pass for flowers. He stood there watering, thinking about the prize money and what he would do with it. He looked at the house and the barn and the lot, out to where he could see the dead corn standing in rows like dehydrated soldiers. The house leaned to the left, and one of the windowsills was near on the ground. When he slept at night, he slept on a bed with one side jacked up with flat rocks so that it was high enough and even enough he wouldn’t roll out of bed. The barn had one side missing and the land was all rutted from runoff, and had never been terraced.
With the exception of the hill wh
ere they grazed their bit of stock, the place was void of grass, and all it brought to mind was brown things and dead things, though there were a few bedraggled chickens who wandered the yard like wild Indians, taking what they could find, even eating one another should one of them keel over dead from starvation or exhaustion. Frank had seen a half dozen chickens go at a weak one lying on the ground, tearing him apart with the chicken still cawing, kicking a leg. It hadn’t lasted long. About like a dozen miners at a free lunch table.
Frank smoked his cigarette and thought if he could win that race, he would move away from this shit pile. Sell it to some fool. Move into town and get a job that would keep him. Never again would he look up a mule’s ass or fit his hands around the handles on a plow. He was thinking on this while looking up the hill at his mule, Rupert.
The hill was surrounded by a rickety rail fence within which the mule resided primarily on the honor system. At the top of the hill was a bunch of oaks and pines and assorted survivor trees. As Frank watched the sun fall down behind the hill, it seemed as if the limbs of the trees wadded together into a crawling shadow, way the wind blew them and mixed them up. Rupert was clearly outlined near a pathetic persimmon tree from which the mule had stripped the persimmons and much of the leaves.
Frank thought Rupert looked quite noble up there, his mule ears standing high in outline against the redness of the sun behind the dark trees. The world seemed strange and beautiful, as if just created. In that moment Frank felt much older than his years and not so fresh as the world seemed, but ancient and worn like the old Indian pottery he had found while plowing through what had once been great Indian mounds. And now, even as he watched, he noted the sun seemed to darken, as if it were a hot wound turning black from infection. The wind cooled and began to whistle. Frank turned his head to the north and watched as clouds pushed across the fading sky. In instants, all the light was gone and there were just shadows, spitting and twisting in the heavens and filling the hard-blowing wind with the aroma of wet dirt.
When Frank turned again to note Rupert, the mule was still there, but was now little more than a peculiar shape next to the ragged persimmon tree. Had Frank not known it was the mule, he might well have mistaken it for a peculiar rise in the terrain, or a fallen tree lying at an odd angle.
The storm was from the north and blowing west. Thunder boomed and lightning cracked in the dirty sky like snap beans, popped and fizzled like a pissed-on campfire. In that moment, the shadow Frank knew to be Rupert lifted its head, and pointed its dark snout toward the sky, as if in defiance. A bolt of lightning, crooked as a dog’s hind leg, and accompanied by a bass-drum blow of thunder, jumped from the heavens and dove for the mule, striking him a perfect white-hot blow on the tip of his nose, making him glow, causing Frank to think that he had in fact seen the inside of the mule light up with all its bones in a row. Then Rupert’s head exploded, his body blazed, the persimmon leaped to flames, and the mule fell over in a swirl of heavenly fire and a cannon shot of flying mule shit. The corpse caught a patch of dried grass ablaze. The flames burned in a perfect circle around the corpse and blinked out, leaving a circle of smoke rising skyward.
“Goddamn,” Frank said. “Shit.”
The cloud split open, let loose of its bladder, pissed all over the hillside and the mule, and not a drop, not one goddamn drop, was thrown away from the hill. The rain just covered that spot, put out the mule and the persimmon tree with a sizzling sound, then passed on, taking darkness, rain, and cool wind with it.
Frank stood there for a long time, looking up the hill, watching his hundred dollars crackle and smoke. Pretty soon the smell from the grilled mule floated down the hill and filled his nostrils.
“Shit,” Frank said. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
Late morning, when Frank could finally drag himself out of bed, he went out and caught up the horse, Dobbin, hitched him to a singletree and some chains, drove him out to where the mule lay. He hooked one of the mule’s hind legs to the rigging, and Dobbin dragged the corpse up the hill, between the trees, to the other side. Frank figured he’d just let the body rot there, and being on the other side of the hill, there was less chance of the wind carrying down the smell.
After that, he moped around for a few days, drank enough to see weasels again, and then had an idea. His idea was to seek out Leroy, who had been used to train Rupert. See if he could work a deal with him.
Frank rode Dobbin over to Leroy’s place, which was as nasty as his own. More so, due to the yard being full not only of chickens and goats, but children. He had five of them, and when Frank rode up, he saw them right away, running about, raising hell in the yard, one of them minus pants, his little johnson flopping about like a grub worm on a hot griddle. He could see Leroy’s old lady on the porch, fat and nasty with her hair tied up. She was yelling at the kids and telling them how she was going to kill them and feed them to the chickens. One of the boys, the ten-year-old, ran by the porch whooping, and the Mrs., moving deftly for such a big woman, scrambled to the edge of the porch, stuck her foot out, caught him one just above the waist and sent him tumbling. He went down hard. She laughed like a lunatic. The boy got up with a bloody nose and ran off across the yard and into the woods, screaming.
Frank climbed down from Dobbin and went over to Leroy, who was sitting on a bucket in the front yard whittling a green limb with a knife big enough to sword fight. Leroy was watching his son retreat into the greenery. As Frank came up, leading Dobbin, Leroy said, “Does that all the time. Sometimes, though, she’ll throw something at him. Good thing wasn’t nothing lying about. She’s got a pretty good throwin’ arm on her. Seen her hit a seed salesman with a tossed frying pan from the porch there to about where the road meets the property. Knocked him down and knocked his hat off. Scattered his seed samples, which the chickens ate. Must have laid there for an hour afore he got up and wandered off. Forgot his hat. Got it on my head right now, though I had to put me some newspaper in the band to make it fit.”
Wasn’t nothing Frank could say to that, so he said, “Leroy, Rupert got hit by lightning. Right in the head.”
“The head?”
“Wouldn’t have mattered had it been the ass. It killed him deader than a post and burned him up.”
“Damn. That there is a shame,” Leroy said, and stopped whittling. He pushed the seed salesman’s hat up on his forehead to reveal some forks of greasy brown hair. Leroy studied Frank. “Is there something I can do for you? Or you come around to visit?”
“I’m thinking you might could help me get a mule and get back in the race.”
“Mules cost.”
“I know. Thought we might could come up with something. And if we could, and we won, I’d give you a quarter of the prize money.”
“I get a quarter for grooming folks’ critters in town.”
“I mean a quarter of a hundred. Twenty-five dollars.”
“I see. Well, I am your man for animals. I got a knack. I can talk to them like I was one of them. Except for chickens. Ain’t no one can talk to chickens.”
“They’re birds.”
“That there is the problem. They ain’t animal enough.”
Frank thought about Leroy and the fucked goat. Wondered what Leroy had said to the goat as way of wooing it. Had he told her something special? I think you got a good-looking face? I love the way your tail wiggles when you walk? It was a mystery that Frank actually wasn’t all that anxious to unravel.
“I know you run in the circles of them that own or know about mules,” Frank said. “Why I thought you maybe could help me.”
Leroy took off the seed salesman’s hat, put it on his knee, threw his knife in the dirt, let the whittling stick fall from his hand. “I could sneak up on an idea or two. Old man Torrence, he’s got a mule he’s looking to sell. And by his claim, it’s a runner. He ain’t never ridden it himself, but he’s had it ridden. Says it can run.”
“There’s that buying stuff again. I ain’t got no real money.”
“Takes money to make money.”
“Takes money to have money.”
Leroy put the seed salesman’s hat back on. “You know, we might could ask him if he’d rent out his mule. Race is a ways off yet, so we could get some good practice in. You being about a hundred and twenty-five pounds, you’d make a good rider.”
“I’ve ridden a lot. I was ready on Rupert, reckon I can get ready on another mule.”
“Deal we might have to make is, we won the race, we bought the mule afterwards. That might be the way he’d do it.”
“Buy the mule?”
“At a fair price.”
“How fair?”
“Say twenty-five dollars.”
“That’s a big slice of the prize money. And a mule for twenty-five, that’s cheap.”
“I know Torrence got the mule cheap. Fella that owed him made a deal. Besides, times is hard. So they’re selling cheap. Cost more, we can make extra money on side bets. Bet on ourselves. Or if we don’t think we got a chance, we bet against ourselves.”
“I don’t know. We lose, it could be said we did it on purpose.”
“I can get someone to bet for us.”
“Only if we bet to win. I ain’t never won nothing or done nothing right in my life, and I figure this here might be my chance.”
“You gettin’ Jesus?”
“I’m gettin’ tired,” Frank said.
—————
There are no real mountains in East Texas, and only a few hills of consequence, but Old Man Torrence lived at the top of a big hill that was called with a kind of braggart’s lie, Barrow Dog Mountain. Frank had no idea who Barrow or Dog were, but that was what the big hill had been called for as long as he remembered, probably well before he was born. There was a ridge at the top of it that overlooked the road below. Frank found it an impressive sight as he and Leroy rode in on Dobbin, he at the reins, Leroy behind him.
It was pretty on top of the hill too. The air smelled good, and flowers grew all about in red, blue and yellow blooms, and the cloudless sky was so blue you felt as if a great lake were falling down from the heavens. Trees fanned out bright green on either side of the path, and near the top, on a flat section, was Old Man Torrence’s place. It was made of cured logs, and he had a fine chicken coop that was built straight and true. There were hog pens and a nice barn of thick cured logs with a roof that had all of its roofing slats. There was a sizable garden that rolled along the top of the hill, full of tall bright green cornstalks, so tall they shaded the rows between them. There was no grass between the rows, and the dirt there looked freshly laid by. Squash and all manner of vegetables exploded out of the ground alongside the corn, and there were little clumps of beans and peas growing in long pretty rows.
Stories (2011) Page 38
