by Brian Hodge
Anyway, I didn’t believe about the dog bite, and now the wound looked really bad. I knew the real cause of it, or at least the general cause, and it made me sick to think of it. I doctored the wound again, gave her some antibiotics that we had, wrapped it and went out. I didn’t tell Carol what she was already thinking.
I got my shotgun and went about the compound, looking. It was a big compound, thirty-five acres with a high wall around it, but somehow, someone must have breached the wall. I went to the back garden, the one with trees and flowers where our little girl liked to play. I went there and looked around, and found him sitting on one of the benches. He was just sitting. I guess he hadn’t been the way he was for very long. Just long enough to bite my daughter. He was about her age, and I knew then, being so lonely, she had let him in. Let him in through the bolted back door. I glanced over there and saw she had bolted it back. I realized then that she had most likely been up on the walk around the wall and had seen him down there, not long of turning, looking up wistfully. He could probably still talk then, just like anyone else, maybe even knew what he was doing, or maybe not. Perhaps he thought he was still who he once was, and thought he should get away from the others, that he would be safe inside.
It was amazing none of the others had forced their way in. Then again, the longer they were what they were, the slower they became, until finally they quit moving altogether. Problem with that was, it took years.
I looked back at him, sitting there, the one my daughter had let in to be her playmate. He had come inside, and then he had done what he had done, and now my daughter was sick with the disease, and the boy was just sitting there on the bench, looking at me in the dying sunlight, his eyes black as if he had been beat, his face gray, his lips purple.
He reminded me of my son. He wasn’t my son, but he reminded me of him. I had seen my son go down among them, some, what was it, five years before. Go down in a flash of kicking legs and thrashing arms and squirting liquids. That was when we lived in town, before we found the compound and made it better. There were others then, but they were gone now. Expeditions to find others they said. Whatever, they left, we never saw them again.
Sometimes at night I couldn’t sleep for the memory of my son, Gerald, and sometimes in my wife’s arms, I thought of him, for had it not been such a moment that had created him?
The boy rose from the bench, stumble-stepped toward me, and I shot him. I shot him in the chest, knocking him down. Then I rushed to him and shot him in the head, taking half of it away.
I knew my wife would have heard the shot, so I didn’t bother to bury him. I went back across the compound and to the upper apartments where we lived. She saw me with the gun, opened her mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out.
“A dog,” I said. “The one who bit her. I’ll get some things, dress him out and we’ll eat him later.”
“There was a dog,” my wife said.
“Yes, a dog. He wasn’t rabid. And he’s pretty healthy. We can eat him.”
I could see her go weak with relief, and I felt both satisfied and guilty at the same time. I said, “How is she?”
“Not much better. There was a dog, you say?”
“That’s what I said, dear.”
“Oh, good. Good. A dog.”
I looked at my watch. My daughter had been bitten earlier that day, and it was almost night. I said, “Why don’t you go get a knife, some things for me to do the skinning, and I’ll dress out the dog. Maybe she’ll feel better, she gets some meat in her.”
“Sure,” Carol said. “Just the thing. She needs the protein. The iron.”
“You bet,” I said.
She went away then, down the stairs, across the yard to the cooking shed. I went upstairs, still carrying the gun.
Inside my daughter’s room, I saw from the doorway that she was gray as cigarette ash. She turned her head toward me.
“Daddy,” she said.
“Yes, dear,” I said, and put the shotgun against the wall by the door and went over to her.
“I feel bad.”
“I know.”
“I feel different.”
“I know.”
“Can anything be done? Do you have some medicine?”
“I do.”
I sat down in the chair by the bed. “Do you want me to read to you?”
“No,” she said, and then she went silent. She lay there not moving, her eyes closed.
“Baby,” I said. She didn’t answer.
I got up then and went to the open door and looked out. Carol, my beautiful wife, was coming across the yard, carrying the things I’d asked for. I picked up the shotgun and made sure it was loaded with my daughter’s medicine. I thought for a moment about how to do it. I put the shotgun back against the wall. I listened as my wife came up the stairs.
When she was in the room, I said, “Give me the knife and things.”
“She okay?”
“Yes, she’s gone to sleep. Or she’s almost asleep. Take a look at her.”
She gave me the knife and things and I laid them in a chair as she went across the room and to the bed.
I picked up the shotgun, and as quietly as I could, stepped forward and pointed it to the back of my wife’s head and pulled the trigger. It was over instantly. She fell across the bed on our dead child, her blood coating the sheets and the wall.
She wouldn’t have survived the death of a second child, and she sure wouldn’t have survived what was about to happen to our daughter.
I went over and looked at Ellen. I could wait, until she opened her eyes, till she came out of the bed, trying for me, but I couldn’t stomach that. I didn’t want to see that. I took the shotgun and put it to her forehead and pulled the trigger. The room boomed with the sound of shotgun fire again, and the bed and the room turned an even brighter red.
I went outside with the shotgun and walked along the landing, walked all the way around, came to where the big gun was mounted. I sat behind it, on the swivel stool, leaned the shotgun against the protecting wall. I sat there and looked out at the hundreds of them, just standing there, looking up, waiting for something.
I began to rotate and fire the gun. Many of them went down. I fired until there was no more ammunition. Reloaded, I fired again, my eyes wet with tears. I did this for some time, until the next rounds of ammunition were played out. It was like swatting at a hive of bees. There always seemed to be more.
I sat there and tried not to think about anything. I watched them. Their shapes stretched for miles around, went off into the distance in shadowy bulks, like a horde of rats waiting to board a cargo ship.
They were eating the ones I had dropped with the big gun.
After awhile the darkness was total and there were just the shapes out there. I watched them for a long time. I looked at the shotgun propped against the retaining wall. I looked at it and picked it up and put it under my chin, and then I put it back again.
I knew, in time, I would have the courage.
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 sh
oes, 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 where ever 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 run down 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 bed clothes, 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 thumb nail and lit a rolled cigarette and leaned on a sick 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 corn meal, 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 to 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 that 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 where 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, the 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 clouds 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 single tree 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.”
