Stories (2011) (52 page)

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 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, 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.”