Stories (2011)

by Joe R. Lansdale

  In a large pen next to the barn was a fifteen-hands-high chocolate-colored mule, prettiest thing Frank had ever seen in the mule-flesh department. Its ears stood up straight, and it gave Frank and Leroy a snort as they rode in.

  “He’s a big one,” Leroy said.

  “Won’t he be slow, being that big?” Frank asked.

  “Big mule’s also got big muscles, he’s worked right. And he looks to have been worked right. Got enough muscles, he can haul some freight. Might be fast as Rupert.”

  “Sure faster right now,” Frank said.

  As they rode up, they saw Old Man Torrence on the front porch with his wife and three kids, two boys and a girl. Torrence was a fat, ruddy-faced man. His wife was a little plump, but pretty. His kids were all nice looking and they had their hair combed and, unlike Leroy’s kids, looked clean. As if they might bathe daily. As they got closer, Frank could see that none of the kids looked whacked on. They seemed to be laughing at something the mother was saying. It certainly was different than from his own upbringing, different from Leroy’s place. Wasn’t anyone tripping anyone, cussing, tossing frying pans, threatening to cripple one another or put out an eye. Thinking on this, Frank felt something twist around inside of him like some kind of serpent looking for a rock to slide under. He and Leroy got off Dobbin and tied him to a little hitching post that was built out front of the house, took off their hats, and walked up to the steps.

  After being offered lemonade, which they turned down, Old Man Torrence came off the porch, ruffling one of his kids’ hair as he did. He smiled back at his wife, and then walked with Frank and Leroy out toward the mule pen, Leroy explaining what they had in mind.

  “You want to rent my mule? What if I wanted to run him?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Leroy said. “It hadn’t occurred to me you might. You ain’t never before, though I heard tell he was a mule could be run.”

  “It’s a good mule,” Torrence said. “Real fast.”

  “You’ve ridden him?” Frank asked.

  “No. I haven’t had the pleasure. But my brother and his boys have. They borrow him from time to time, and they thought on running him this year. Nothing serious. Just a thought. They say he can really cover ground.”

  “Frank here,” Leroy said, “he plans on entering, and we would rent your mule. If we win, we could give you a bit of the prize money. What say we rent him for ten, and if he wins, we give you another fifteen. That way you pick up twenty-five dollars.”

  Frank was listening to all this, thinking: and then I owe Leroy his share; this purse I haven’t won is getting smaller and smaller.

  “And what if you don’t win?” Torrence said.

  “You’ve made ten dollars,” Leroy said.

  “And I got to take the chance my mule might go lame or get hurt or some such. I don’t know. Ten dollars, that’s not a lot of money for what you’re asking. It ain’t even your mule.”

  “Which is why we’re offering the ten dollars,” Leroy said.

  They went over and leaned on the fence and looked at the great mule, watched his muscles roll beneath his chocolate flesh as he trotted nervously about the pen.

  “He looks excitable,” Frank said.

  “Robert E. Lee has just got a lot of energy is all,” Torrence said.

  “He’s named Robert E. Lee?” Frank asked.

  “Best damn general ever lived. Tell you boys what. You give me twenty-five, and another twenty-five if he wins, and you got a deal.”

  “But I give you that, and Leroy his share, I don’t have nothing hardly left.”

  “You ain’t got nothing at all right now,” Torrence said.

  “How’s about,” Leroy said, “we do it this way. We give you fifteen, and another fifteen if he wins. That’s thirty. Now that’s fair for a rented mule. Hell, we might could go shopping, buy a mule for twenty-five, and even if he don’t win, we got a mule. He don’t race worth a damn, we could put him to plow.”

  Old Man Torrence pursed his lips. “That sounds good. All right,” he said, sticking out his hand, “deal.”

  “Well, now,” Frank said, not taking the hand. “Before I shake on that, I’d like to make sure he can run. Let me ride him.”

  Old Man Torrence withdrew his hand and wiped it on his pants as if something had gotten on his palm. “I reckon I could do that, but seeing how we don’t have a deal yet, and ain’t no fifteen dollars has changed hands, how’s about I ride him for you. So you can see.”

  Frank and Leroy agreed, and watched from the fence as Torrence got the equipment and saddled up Robert E. Lee. Torrence walked Robert E. Lee out of the lot, and onto a pasture atop the hill, where the overhang was. The pasture was huge and the grass was as green as Ireland. It was all fenced in with barbed wire strung tight between deeply planted posts.

  “I’ll ride him around in a loop. Once slow, and then real fast toward the edge of the overhang there, then cut back before we get there. I ain’t got a pocket watch, so you’ll have to be your own judge.”

  Torrence swung into the saddle. “You boys ready?”

  “Let’er rip,” Leroy said.

  Old Man Torrence gave Robert E. Lee his heels. The mule shot off so fast that Old Man Torrence’s hat flew off, and Leroy, in sympathy, took hold of the brim of the seed salesman’s hat, as if Robert E. Lee’s lunge might blow it off his head.

  “Goddamn,” Leroy said. “Look how low that mule is to the ground. He’s gonna have the grass touching his belly.”

  And so the mule ran, and as it neared the barbed-wire fence, Old Man Torrence gave him a tug, to turn him. But, Robert E. Lee wasn’t having any. His speed picked up, and the barbed-wire fence came closer.

  Leroy said, “Uh-oh.”

  Robert E. Lee hit the fence hard. So hard it caused his head to dip over the top wire and his ass to rise up as if he might be planning a headstand. Over the mule flipped, tearing loose the fence, causing a strand of wire to snap and strike Old Man Torrence, and then Torrence was thrown ahead of the tumbling mule. Over the overhang. Out of sight. The mule did in fact do a headstand, landed hard that way, its hind legs high in the air, wiggling. For a moment, it seemed as if he might hang there, and then, Robert E. Lee lost his headstand and went over after his owner.

  “Damn,” Leroy said.

  “Damn,” Frank said.

  They both ran toward the broken fence. When they got there Frank hesitated, not able to look. He glanced away, back across the bright green field.

  Leroy scooted up to the cliff’s edge and took a gander, studied what he saw for a long time.

  “Well?” Frank said, finally turning his head back to Leroy.

  “Robert E. Lee just met his Gettysburg. And Old Man Torrence is somewhere between Gettysburg and Robert E. Lee. Actually, you can’t tell which is which. Mule, Gettysburg, or Old Man Torrence. It’s all kind of bunched up.”

  When Frank and Leroy got down there, which took some considerable time, as they worked their way down a little trail on foot, they discovered that Old Man Torrence had been lucky in a fashion. He had landed in sand, and the force of Robert E. Lee’s body had driven him down deep into it, his nose poking up and out enough to take in air. Robert E. Lee was as dead as a three-penny nail, and his tail was stuck up in the air and bent over like a flag that had been broken at the staff. The wind moved the hairs on it a little.

  Frank and Leroy went about digging Old Man Torrence out, starting first with his head so he could really breathe well. When Torrence spat enough sand out of his mouth, he looked up and said, “You sonsofbitches. This is your fault.”

  “Our fault?” Leroy said. “You was riding him.”

  “You goat-fucking sonofabitch, get me out of here.” Leroy’s body sagged a little. “I knew that was gonna get around good. Ain’t nobody keeps a secret. There was only that one time too, and them hunters had to come up on me.”

  They dug Torrence out from under the mule, and Frank went up the trail and got Old Dobbin and rode to the doctor
. When Frank got back with the sawbones, Torrence was none the happier to see him. Leroy had gone off to the side to sit by himself, which to Frank meant the goat had come up again.

  Old Man Torrence was mostly all right, but he blamed Frank and Leroy, especially Leroy, from then on. And he walked in a way that when he stepped with his right leg, it always looked as if he were about to bend over and tie his shoe. Even in later years, when Frank saw him, he went out of his way to avoid him, and Leroy dodged him like the smallpox, not wanting to hear reference to the goat.

  But in that moment in time, the important thing to Frank was simply that he was still without a mule. And the race was coming closer.

  That night, as Frank lay in his sagging bed, looking out from it at the angled wall of the room, listening to the crickets saw their fiddles outside and inside the house, he closed his eyes and remembered how Old Man Torrence’s place had looked. He saw himself sitting with the pretty plump wife and the clean, polite kids. Then he saw himself with the wife inside that pretty house, on the bed, and he imagined that for a long time.

  It was a pleasant thought, the wife and the bed, but even more pleasant was imagining Torrence’s place as his. All that greenery and high-growing corn and blooming squash and thick pea and bean vines dripping with vegetables. The house and the barn and the pasture. And in his dream, the big mule, alive, not yet a confusion of bones and flesh and fur, the tail a broken flag.

  He thought then of his mother, and the only way he could remember her was with her hair tied back and her face sweaty and both of her eyes blacked. That was how she had looked the last time he had seen her, right before she run off with a horse and some cornmeal and a butcher knife. He wondered where she was, and if she now lived in a place where the buildings were straight and the grass was green and the corn was tall.

  After a while he got up and peed out the window, and smelled the aroma of other nights drifting up from the ground he had poisoned with his water, and thought: I am better than Papa. He just peed in the corner of the room and shit out the window, splattering it all down the side of the house. I don’t do that. I pee out the window, but I don’t shit, and I don’t pee in the corner. That’s a step up. I go outside for the messy business. And if I had a good house, I wouldn’t do this. I’d use the slop jar. I’d go to the privy.

  That didn’t stop him from finishing his pee, thinking about what he would do or ought to do as far as his toilet habits went. Besides, peeing was the one thing he was really good at. He could piss like a horse and from a goodly distance. He had even won money on his ability. It was the one thing his father had been proud of. “My son, Frank. He can piss like a racehorse. Get it out, Frank. Show them.”

  And he would.

  But, compared to what he wanted out of life, his ability to throw water from his johnson didn’t seem all that wonderful right then.

  Frank thought he ought to call a halt to his racing plans, but like so many of his ideas, he couldn’t let it go. It blossomed inside of him until he was filled with it. Then he was obsessed with an even wilder plan. A story he had heard came back to him, and ran ’round inside his head like a greased pig.

  He would find the White Mule and capture it and run it. It was a mule he could have for free, and it was known to be fast, if wild. And, of course, he would have to capture its companion, the Spotted Pig. Though, he figured, by now, the pig was no longer a pig, but a hog, and the mule would be three, maybe four years old.

  If they really existed.

  It was a story he had heard for the last three years or so, and it was told for the truth by them who told him, his Papa among them. But if drinking made him see weasels oozing out of the floorboards, it might have made Papa see white mules and spotted pigs on parade. But the story wasn’t just Papa’s story. He had heard it from others, and it went like this:

  Once upon a time, there was this pretty white mule with pink eyes, and the mule was fine and strong and set to the plow early on, but he didn’t take to it. Not at all. But the odder part of the story was that the mule took up with a farm pig, and they became friends. There was no explaining it. It happened now and then, a horse or mule adopting their own pet, and that was what had happened with the white mule and the spotted pig.

  When Frank had asked his Papa, why would a mule take up with a pig, his father had said: “Ain’t no explaining. Why the hell did I take up with your mother?”

  Frank thought the question went the other way, but the tale fascinated him, and his papa was just drunk enough to be in a good mood. Another pint swallowed, he’d be kicking his ass or his mama’s. But he pushed while he could, trying to get the goods on the tale, since outside of worrying about dying corn and sagging barns, there wasn’t that much in life that thrilled him.

  The story his papa told him was the farmer who owned the mule, and no one could ever put a name to who that farmer was, had supposedly found the mule wouldn’t work if the pig wasn’t around, leading him between the rows. The pig was in front, the mule plowed fine. The pig wasn’t there, the mule wouldn’t plow.

  This caused the farmer to come up with an even better idea. What would the mule do if the pig was made to run? So the farmer got the mule all saddled, and had one of his boys put the pig out front of the mule and swat it with a knotted plow line, and away went the pig and away went the white mule. The pig pretty soon veered off, but the mule, once set to run, couldn’t stop, and would race so fast that the only way it halted was when it was tuckered out. Then it would go back to the start, and look for its pig.

  Never failed.

  One night the mule broke loose, kicked the pig’s pen down, and he and the pig, like Jesse and Frank James, headed for the hills. Went into the East Texas greenery and wound in amongst the trees, and were lost to the farmer. Only to be seen after that in glimpses and in stories that might or might not be true. Stories about how they raided cornfields and ate the corn and how the mule kicked down pens and let hogs and goats and cattle go free.

  The White Mule and the Spotted Pig. Out there. On the run. Doing whatever it was that white mules and spotted pigs did when they weren’t raiding crops and freeing critters.

  Frank thought on this for a long time, saddled up Dobbin and rode over to Leroy’s place. When Frank arrived, Leroy was out in the yard on his back, unconscious, the seed salesman’s hat spun off to the side, and was being moved around by a curious chicken. Finding Leroy like this didn’t frighten Frank any. He often found Leroy that way, cold as a wedge from drink, or the missus having snuck up behind him with a stick of stove wood. They were rowdy, Leroy’s bunch.

  The missus came out on the porch and shook her fist at Frank, and not knowing anything else to do, he waved. She spat a stream of brown tobacco off the porch in his direction and went inside. A moment later one of the kids bellowed from being whapped, and there was a sound like someone slamming a big fish on flat ground. Then silence.

  Frank bent down and shook Leroy awake. Leroy cursed, and Frank dragged him over to an overturned bucket and sat him up on it, asked him, “What happened?”

  “Missus come up behind me. I’ve got so I don’t watch my back enough.”

  “Why’d she do it?”

  “Just her way. She has spells.”

  “You all right?”

  “I got a headache.”

  Frank went straight to business. “I come to say maybe we ain’t out of the mule business.”

  “What you mean?”

  Frank told him about the mule and the pig, about his idea.

  “Oh, yeah. Mule and pig are real. I’ve seen ’em once myself. Out hunting. I looked up, and there they were at the end of a trail, just watching. I was so startled, I just stood there looking at them.”

  “What did they do?”

  “Well, Frank, they ran off. What do you think? But it was kind of funny. They didn’t get in no hurry, just turned and went around the trail, showing me their ass, the pig’s tail curled up and a little swishy, and the mule swatting his like a
t flies. They just went around that curve in the trail, behind some oaks and blackberry vines, and they was gone. I tracked them a bit, but they got down in a stream and walked it. I could find their tracks in the stream with my hands, but pretty soon the whole stream was brown with mud, and they come out of it somewhere I didn’t find, and they was gone like a swamp fog come noon.”

  “Was the mule really white?”

  “Dirty a bit, but white. Even from where I was standing, just bits of light coming in through the trees, I could see he had pink eyes. Story is, that’s why he don’t like to come out in day much, likes to stay in the trees, and do his crop raiding at night. Say the sun hurts his skin.”

  “That could be a drawback.”

  “You act like you got him in a pen somewhere.”

  “I’d like to see if I could get hold of him. Story is, he can run, and he needs the pig to do it.”

  “That’s the story. But stories ain’t always true. I even heard stories about how the pig rides the mule, and that the mule is stump broke, and the pig climbs up on a stump and diddles the mule in the ass. I’ve heard all manner of tale, and ain’t maybe none of it got so much as a nut of truth in it. Still, it’s one of them ideas that kind of appeals to me. Course, you know, we might catch that mule and he might not can run at all. Maybe all he can do is sneak around in the woods and eat corn crops.”