by Brad Felver
With the uncle gone Wiley squares his shoulders, sets box traps for muskrats and prairie dogs, guts and cleans them, leaving his pale hands heavy with blood and stink that he cannot wash off. He brings them home to his mother, who fries them in the skillet.
They do not sit in silence at the kitchen table, and his mother’s eyes do not hang so low. They wait for the uncle to return.
You should hack off his mule’s hooves while he’s gone, Helen says to Wiley. The mother scowls, but then turns away and smiles, and Wiley laughs, and they all laugh. We should mince them up and sprinkle his porridge, she says, and they continue to laugh, though Helen was making no joke. She has planned much worse things for her uncle.
The uncle claimed once that his bond with the mother is of necessity and not pleasure. He wished it could be another way, but they must survive. He pointed to Wiley’s narrow shoulders and bent posture. If the mule dies, where will we be then? he said. We must grow the family. How much can I do alone? But there is no new child, and it is not merely hope that steers him on all this time.
The uncle is gone longer this year, nearly two weeks now peddling the rum, and supplies run low. The wheat flour can be measured by the spoonful. The mother mashes the last of the sorghum grain and bakes a waffled cake that cuts their gums. For several days they eat spoonfuls of molasses atop Wiley’s fried vermin, and this hides the gamey bitterness. But the molasses bucket runs low, so the mother brews bitter dark coffee to help mask the flavor and swell their stomachs, and her children do not complain about this or anything.
Nights, when the temperature plummets, the mother sets outside all four mugs, filled with water, places sticks in each, so that when it freezes, the iced sticks might resemble real food that can be held and chewed. She prays each evening that someday her children will know the taste of ice cream, the scent of muskmelon.
Wiley must trot across the frozen ground with bare feet to feed the mule from the dwindling baskets of sorghum feed. Often the animal eats from its own dung pile, burrowing its snout and finding undigested grains. Wiley scratches the mule’s ears, unable to dislike the animal simply because it belongs to his uncle. It is a stupid and helpless thing and so perfectly good-natured, staid from breeding methods and unable to escape its destiny as a muscled serf.
Evenings the mother and children play musical chairs in the kitchen, burning the fire low until it is only glowing coals that they rake and draw the bellows on for hours, and they feel as if they are stealing heat this way. The mother hums a tune as they step around the twin chairs. Helen times the endings well, managing to step on Wiley’s feet or tug on his belt loops or dive lengthwise across both chairs as the song ends, and Wiley always waits too long. She feels a power in this, and Wiley does not complain or stymie her but laughs at each maneuver, not simply because he loves her but also because her freckled, ornery face stuns him. She is a beautiful little thing, cherubic and effectual, and Wiley suffers this like a swelling and private plague.
Outside, the winter has descended upon them, the cutting winds unravelling like a great rug, shaken from hundreds of miles away, so barren and free of clutter is the landscape. The dust kicks up, frozen and painful, pelting their faces. When they stand outside, backs to these gales, it nearly bends them over, like field-weary slaves yielding to the long whips of the wind.
The supplies are nearly gone, and the uncle has still not returned. Maybe someone shot him in his stupid monkey brain, Helen says. Pow! she says, and mimics a pistol shot to the temple. Wiley smiles at her, and yet he knows the awful truth, that his uncle is repugnant but vital. Wiley cannot work the farm alone, not with his narrow shoulders, his bony forearms.
Helen flashes Wiley her thin smile, has him guide the prize mule onto the front porch, which sits not thirty paces off the roadway to Denver. She latches a rope to its bridle and onto the rope she slides a small golden ring—the father’s ring—stolen from the uncle’s chest. She ties the rope’s other end to the support post, and so the ring dangles there between the two like a golden tightrope walker. From the mule’s bare back she hangs a sign: Unstring the Golden Ring and Keep It! $1/try!
You can’t get the ring off, Wiley tells her very simply. Not without unhitching the mule.
They won’t know that, Helen says. They’ll think it’s a puzzle. And they’ll be anxious to stop and stretch their legs.
They’ll figure it out.
But, she says, we’ll already have their dollar by then. She pauses, scowls at him. Do you want to eat muskrat guts all winter?
The salesmen, legs weary and nearly petrified from the road, pull onto the packed dirt circle drive. They step out, arch their backs, grunt. They are men, all of them, mostly young men, and many are overweight from the long miles spent traveling. They wear ironed shirts and short ties, and their Florsheims are without scuffs.
Most wink at Wiley and Helen, offer their dollars freely when they see the children’s red and shredded feet, and they understand they are making a small donation. Helen sees this soon and feels no guilt. Hold still! she tells Wiley, and she rips apart the shoulder seam from his shirt. She slices his cheek with her fingernail, smears the blood into his dirty face. She tears the bottom hem from her dress, flashing more of her skinny legs. She wipes mule dung on their faces and necks. They are miniature hobos, starved and reeking.
They earn their dollars, and Helen tells Wiley to ignore the sad looks. You do what you must, she says, sounding very old and wise, like the mother. These men offer their dollars, and she sends Wiley off to the small store two miles distant to buy wheat flour and coffee and, once, two strips of bacon, which burns down Wiley’s neck because he eats it so quickly. He wants to vomit it up just to eat it again.
One salesman, younger than the others, with a doughy, fresh face, spends a quarter hour with the roped ring. He slides it back and forth from the rigging to the post, thinking. He carves the air with squiggly lines, as if parsing an equation. He bends the rope over onto itself, tries tying off a Flemish knot. He checks the ring and the rigging and the bit for secret spring-loaded clasps.
It’s impossible, the man says finally.
Wiley looks to Helen, feels his abdomen go cold.
I’ll have my dollar back now.
The children sit still. Helen shakes her head.
The man shouts down at Wiley, Where’s your father?
Dead.
What about your mother?
She’s dead too, says Helen. We live with our uncle who collects swords and cannons, and one time he stabbed a man in the brain for asking a question about sausage gravy.
The man steps toward Helen. Wiley moves between them.
Boy! the man snaps.
Wiley stands still, and when the man takes another step, he latches onto the man’s leg, bites through his wool slacks near his knee and deep into his flesh until he hits bone, drawing out hot blood that stains the creases between his teeth. The man yelps. He hammers down onto Wiley’s skinny neck. Helen runs up and stomps his foot, hard, and the man falls down the porch steps. He slithers on the ground and moans.
He drives off. Wiley wipes the blood from his teeth, feels where one tooth has broken off, and realizes it must still be in the man’s thigh. He rubs on the broken tooth, its rough edge, spits.
Helen smiles at him, guides him to the porch steps where he sits. She inspects his neck, which will blush with purple and yellow overnight. She wraps her arms around his torso. We sure earned that one, she says.
Wiley leans back into her, breathes deeply her scent. He noses into her neck until she stands and backs away.
The long-armed man appears on the horizon that evening, nearly three weeks since the uncle has been gone, when the winter has softened and the snow has melted. He walks slowly, no car or horse, just an ancient, sun-scalded Stetson, knee-high boots, and a Winchester repeater poking from his canvas pack.
His arms dangle low, nearly to his knees when his posture slackens, hang there as if ready to lash fools with, an
d he looks not unlike an ape. His hands too are massive, his fat fingers long enough to wrap around a telephone pole, it seems to the children. He is not a large man, not six foot, not two hundred pounds, but his gait is lumbering like a silverback. His face is splotchy from the sun and scarred with deep pockmarks, and the children think he has been tortured by nasty men with knives, but the blots are clearly from a bout of smallpox.
The man strides up to the porch, squints at the sign. He says nothing and does not look at the children, does not seem to even notice them. Helen punches Wiley’s shoulder and gestures toward the well, and Wiley scampers off to bring the man a full ladle. He drinks it slowly, making no noise. Wiley stares at the rifle in his pack, at his dangling arms.
When the man speaks, his voice is soft like a child’s, not impolite but lean, fragmentary. That barn free for the night? he says, gesturing.
Wiley looks to Helen, and she nods without thinking. The man removes his hat and walks toward the barn. His steps are short and timid, as if he has gravel in his boots. He disappears into the dark barn.
The mother scolds Wiley for allowing the man to stay. What were you thinking? she says. A strange man when your uncle is gone? And with a gun! Wiley does not defend the decision or argue. He does not claim that it was Helen who invited the man. She is unused to strange faces. Even those of the salesmen driving past seem familiar. But a man with no car or horse is not to be trusted.
Wiley is fascinated. He has not known many men and does not remember much of his father beyond the sweet smell of his chewing tobacco and his rattly laugh that rumbled through the depths of his gullet.
He bets Helen that the long-armed man is an escaped convict from the prison in Wichita.
Then how does he have a gun?
He crushed a man’s skull, Wiley says. A police man. Crushed his skull and stole his gun.
Then why didn’t he steal the car, too?
He thinks for a moment, looks at his dirty bare feet. He doesn’t know how to drive, he says.
Are you kidding me? With those arms? I bet he could drive a car and juggle swords at the same time.
Wiley glares at her. He knows in a backward way that she is the clever one and that this is no time for imagination. But he wants only to impress her.
He stands in the shadow of the barn, peers between siding slats, watches the ape man. He undresses slowly, revealing heavy tattoos notched with matching scars, as if an outline has been carved and then colored. They are long, winding patterns, never crisscrossing, and they unfurl about his shoulder blades, down his arms, wrap around his torso and back, all of them billowing, crawling across his body like long arms reaching for things unseen. They engulf his shoulders in great waves, wrap about his pale torso with no end. And underneath the rippling, tattooed scars there are the pox craters, hundreds of them, dormant and veiled.
The man does not look up but speaks in his slow, lilting drawl: You should bring that mule in before it storms.
Wiley feels like an animal caught in a live trap. He does not move. He has not noticed the sky darkening or the clouds swirling above in a dizzying rush, and the appearance of the ape man excites him more than even the storm.
The man removes his pants, revealing pale white cheeks. His tattoos and scars halt at the waist, as if they are imprinted upon a body sleeve that can be removed.
Quickly now, the man says.
Wiley runs off toward the porch and the mule. He drags the animal away from its leftover shitpile, back toward the barn. He tethers it near the ape man. The mule begins to buck and bray because it feels the looming storm in its bones, and Wiley scratches its snout and its floppy ears until the animal calms.
The clouds burst, explode open with a thunder crack, muddying the dirt barnyard into a vast pool. Helen jumps from the porch and into the deluge, waving her arms and kicking her legs until she tumbles into the mud. She carves mud angels in it, laughs, and she does not feel her skin tighten with the intense cold of the winter rain.
Wiley watches her dance and fall and spin as if she is wrestling the rain. Her thin ripped dress clings to her stomach, revealing the hollow imprint of her belly button. He has forgotten the ape man, who stands behind him and stares without blinking. Wiley steps out in to the rain, where the fat drops are much colder than he expected, like small splotches of venom burning his bare skin, and he cannot fathom how Helen ignores it. When she sees him there, she rushes at him, tackles him to the mud and then cackles. And Wiley does not notice the cold then as she squeezes his stomach and growls, pretends to hammer his chest with her small fists. She pins him to the mud with her knees and batters his shoulders, grabs his head and smears it into the sloppy mud. They laugh and tumble in the mud. She rolls him to his stomach, stands, and then pounces again, driving her elbow into his back, and they laugh there in the mud yard while the ape man watches and pets the mule.
The night freezes the deluge, and the mud wrestling pit in the barnyard hardens into lumpy waves where Wiley and Helen have carved their imprints. If the uncle saw such a thing, he would grab his screwdriver and call for Wiley, but the uncle is still gone.
The mother wakes first to gather her children’s wet clothes and drape them near the fire. The dense mud is still stuck in between the cotton fibers, and they will never get any cleaner than they are now, but she does not worry over this, knowing that such a storm happens only rarely, knowing that her children do not laugh and play often enough.
Wiley wakes and trots to the barn in only his jockey shorts, leads the mule to the front porch and tethers him there to do his ring dance so they might eat breakfast. Helen emerges with the golden ring and slides it onto the rope. She sits on the porch steps, her tired eyes cast downward, her thin arms clutching her stomach. They sit quietly and drink from their mugs of water until their bellies bloat.
The fierce cold has returned, but Wiley and Helen sit on the porch and wait for their prey to arrive and make their donations so that they might scamper off and buy oats or wheat. The mule, which usually eats before the humans, noses through a day-old dung pile. Wiley is so hungry that he considers, for a moment, picking through it with the mule.
The ape man emerges from the barn, fully dressed with his pack and rifle. He wanders toward the front porch, and Wiley runs off to fetch him water again. The ape man does not stare at Helen. He watches the mule as it looms there, unmoving and stupid.
Would you like to give it a go? Helen asks.
The ape man squints down at her. Is the ring real gold? he asks.
Helen nods that yes, it is, though she does not know this for certain.
Wiley returns from the well, and the ape man drinks deeply. He is a menacing presence, and Wiley tries to stare through his clothes to see his scarred tattoos again, but he can see only those markings which reach up, clutching his neck like flickering flames.
No one has done it yet, Helen says.
The ape man reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out four quarters, drops them into Helen’s palm. Helen looks over to Wiley and smiles. They can both taste the warm bread they will eat soon, once the ape man has given up and moved on.
The ape man does not test the rope or slide the ring toward the rigging. He sets his pack onto the frozen ground, slowly loads his Winchester. He levels it to the mule’s head and squeezes off a single round.
The mule collapses into a heap. Steam pulses from it. Its muscles jerk and twitch, unshod hooves knocking on porch boards. The mother bursts through the front door and stops when she sees the ape man with his rifle. Helen cowers behind, and for a moment the world idles, and they fear what is next.
The mule’s legs seize, and all goes quiet. Then the ape man sheaths the rifle back into his pack. He walks to the pile of dead mule, bends, examines the bridle and the ring on the rope, which is still attached.
I’ll be back through for my ring, he says, and he leaves.
In three days the uncle returns. He has still not traded all the rum, and so he is drunk from the last me
asure of it, the congealed traces at the cask bottom which he must chew on like fat. The dead mule lingers on the front porch, and he sees this first. Even the wilting brain has been left alone because they are afraid to move anything. It is Wiley who must tell him what happened, how he could not protect the uncle’s prize mule. It is all his fault, was all his idea. He knows the mule was sterile and there is no replacing it. He has considered running away from here because the uncle’s vengeance will be gruesome. Surely it will leave him with a limp or blurred vision or without thumbs. Perhaps all of those things. But it is his job to be the family shield, to absorb twice the punishment so that his sister, his lovely smart sister, will avoid disfigurations, will marry a sweet man who can buy her shoes and parasols and fresh milk. He is not a stupid boy, has known for years how things must be.
The uncle thinks Wiley lies about the ape man. Stupid boy! he shouts and squeezes his wrist, hauls him into the workshop. Tell me what happened!
Wiley repeats the story. He leaves nothing out. He tells the uncle about the ring game they used to survive while he was away for so long and about the salesmen who stopped. The uncle smacks and kicks him for this, and Helen runs toward her brother, paws at the uncle to make him stop. The uncle turns to her, but Wiley pushes her away and says that some of the salesmen stopped for longer, some even visited the mother. Inside, he says. At this, the uncle’s face hardens. He snatches Wiley up by the armpit, driving an elbow into his neck. He slams Wiley’s face onto the workbench, and the boy’s orbital bone cracks. He yelps. The uncle jams a knuckle into Wiley’s temple, slowly, increasing the pressure until it seems his brain will explode like the mule’s. Wiley cannot even manage a moan. A croak trickles from his the back of his throat, and gobs of saliva drain onto the workbench.
