The Killer's Game

by Jay Bonansinga

  “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 threepenny 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 corn meal 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 race horse. 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 corn fields 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 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 at 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.”

  “Well, it’s all the idea I got,“ Frank said, and the thought of that worried Frank more than a little. He considered his knack for clinging to bad notions like a rutting dog hanging onto a fella’s leg. But, like the dog, he was determined to finish what he started.

  “So what you’re saying here,” Leroy said, “is you want to capture the mule, and the pig, so the mule has got his help mate. And you want to ride the mule in the race?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Leroy paused for a moment, rubbed the knot on the back of his noggin. “I think we should get Nigger Joe to help us track him. We want him, that’s the way we do it. Nigger Joe catches him, and we’ll break him, and you can ride him.”

  Nigger Joe was part Indian and part Irish and part Negro. His skin was somewhere between brown and red and he had a red cast to his kinky hair and strawberry freckles and bright green eyes. But the black blood named him, and he himself went by the name, Nigger Joe.

  He was supposed to be able to track a bird across the sky, a fart across the yard. He had two women that lived with him and he called them his wives. One of them was a Negro, and the other one was part Negro and Cherokee. He called the black one Sweetie, the red and black one Pie.

  When Frank and Leroy rode up double on Dobbin, and stopped in Nigger Joe’s yard, a rooster was fucking one of the hens. It was a quick matter, and a moment later the rooster was strutting across the yard like he was ten foot tall and bullet proof.

  They got off Dobbin, and no sooner had they hit the ground, then Nigger Joe was beside them, tall and broad shouldered with his freckled face.

  “Damn, man,” Frank said, “where did you come from?”

  Nigger Joe pointed in an easterly direction.

  “Shit,” Leroy said, “coming up on a man like that could make him bust a heart.”

  “Want something?” Nigger Joe asked.

  “Yeah,” Leroy said. “We want you to help track the White Mule and the Spotted Pig, cause Frank here, he’s going to race him.”

  “Pig or mule?” Nigger Joe asked.

  “The mule,” Leroy said. “He’s gonna ride the mule.”

  “Eat the pig?”

  “Well,” Leroy said, continuing his role as spokesman, “not right away. But there could come a point.”

  “He eats the pig, I get half of pig,” Nigger Joe said.

  “If he eats it, yeah,” Leroy said. “Shit, he eats the mule, he’ll give you half of that.”

  “My women like mule meat,” Nigger Joe said. “I’ve eat it, but it don’t agree with me. Horse is better,” and to strengthen his statement, he gave Dobbin a look over.

  “We was thinking,” Leroy said, “we could hire you to find the mule and the pig, capture them with us.”

  “What was you thinking of giving me, besides half the critters if you eat them?”

  “How about ten dollars?”

  “How about twelve?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Eleven-fifty.”

  Leroy looked at Frank. Frank sighed and nodded, stuck out his hand. Nigger Joe shook it, then shook Leroy’s hand.

  Nigger Joe said, “Now, mule runs like the rock, that ain’t my fault. I get the eleven-fifty anyway.”

  Frank nodded.

  “Okay, tomorrow morning,” Nigger Joe said, “just before light, we’ll go look for him real serious and then some.”

  “Thing does come to me,” Frank said, “is haven’t other folks tried to get hold of this mule and pig before? Why are you so confident.”

  Nigger Joe nodded. “They weren’t Nigger Joe.”

  “You could have tracked them before on your own,” Frank said. “Why now?”

  Nigger Joe looked at Frank. “Eleven-fifty.”

  In the pre-dawn light, down in the swamp, the fog moved through the trees like someone slow-pulling strands of cotton from cotton boles. It wound its way amongst the limbs that were low down, along the ground. There were wisps of it on the water, right near the bank, and as Frank and Leroy and Nigger Joe stood there, they saw what looked like dozens of sticks rise up in the swamp water and move along briskly.

  Nigger Jim said, “Cottonmouth snakes. They going with they heads up, looking for anything foolish enough to get out there. You swimming out there now, pretty quick you be bit good and plenty and swole up like old tick. Only you burst all over and spill green poison, and die. Seen it happen.”

  “Ain’t planning on swimming,” Frank said.

  “Watch your feet,” Nigger Joe said. “Them snakes is thick this year. Them cottons and them copperheads. Cottons, they always mad.”

  “We’ve seen snakes,” Leroy said.

  “I know it,” Nigger Joe said, “but where we go, they are more than a few, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Back there where mule and pig hides, it’s thick in snakes and blackberry vines. And the trees thick like
the wool on a sheep. It a goat or a sheep you fucked?”

  “For Christsakes,” Leroy said. “You heard that too?”

  “Wives talk about it when they see you yesterday. There the man who fuck a sheep, or a goat, or some such. Say you ain’t a man can get pussy.”

  “Oh, hell,” Leroy said.

  “So, tell me some,” Nigger Joe said. “Which was it, now?”

  “Goat,” Leroy said.

  “That is big nasty,” Nigger Joe said, and started walking, leading them along a narrow trail by the water. Frank watched the cottonmouth snakes swim on ahead, their evil heads sticking up like some sort of water devil erections.

  The day grew hot and the trees held the hot and made it hotter and made it hard to breathe, like sucking down wool and chunks of flannel. Frank and Leroy sweated their clothes through and their hair turned to wet strings. Nigger Joe, though sweaty, appeared as fresh as a virgin in spring.

  “Where you get your hat?” Nigger Joe asked Leroy suddenly, when they stopped for a swig from canteens.

  “Seed salesman. My wife knocked him out and I kept the hat.”

  “Huh, no shit?” Nigger Joe took off his big old hat and waved around. “Bible salesman. He told me I was gonna go to hell, so I beat him up, kept his hat. I shit in his Bible case.”

  “Wow, that’s mean,” Frank said.

  “Him telling me I’m going to hell, that make me real mad. I tell you that to tell you not to forget my eleven-fifty. I’m big on payment.”

  “You can count on us, we win,” Frank said.

  “No. You owe me eleven-fifty win or lose.” Nigger Joe said this, putting his hat back carefully on his head, looking at the two smaller men like a man about to pick a hen for neck wringing and Sunday dinner.

  “Sure,” Frank said. “Eleven-fifty, win or lose. Eleven-fifty when we get the pig and the mule.”

  “Now that’s the deal as I see it,” Nigger Joe said. “I tell women it’s eight dollars, that way I make some whisky money. Nigger Joe didn’t get up yesterday. No he didn’t. And when he gets up, he got Bible salesman’s hat on.”