The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

by Joe R. Lansdale

  When the crossed the marshy stretch, they came to a batch of willows and looked around there. Nigger Joe was the one who found their tracks.

  “Here they go,” he said. “Here they go.”

  They traveled through woods and more swamp, and from time to time they lost the tracks, but Nigger Joe always found them again. Sometimes Frank couldn’t even see what Nigger Joe saw. But Nigger Joe saw something, because he kept looking at the ground, stopping to stretch out on the earth, his face close to it. Sometimes he would pinch the earth between finger and thumb, rub it about. Frank wasn’t sure why he did that, and he didn’t ask. Like Leroy, he just followed.

  Midday, they came to a place that amazed Frank. Out there in the middle of what should have been swamp, there was a great clear area, at least a hundred acres. They found it when they came out of a stretch of shady oaks. The air was sweeter there, in the trees, and the shadows were cooling, and at the far edge was a drop of about fifty feet. Down below was the great and natural pasture. A fire, brought on by heat or lightning, might have cleared the place at some point in time. It had grown back without trees, just tall green grass amongst a few rotting, ant-infested stumps. It was surrounded by the oaks, high up on their side, and low down on the other. The oaks on the far side stretched out and blended with sweet gums and black jack and hickory and bursts of pines. From their vantage point they could see all of this, and see the cool shadow on the other side amongst the trees.

  A hawk sailed over it all, and Frank saw there was a snake in its beak. Something stirred again inside of Frank, and he was sure it wasn’t his last meal. “You’re part Indian,” Frank said to Nigger Joe. “That hawk and that snake, does it mean something?”

  “Means that snake is gonna get et,” Nigger Joe said. “Damn trees. Don’t you know that make a lot of good hard lumber… Go quiet. Look there.”

  Coming out of the trees into the great pasture was the mule and the hog. The hog lead the way, and the mule followed close behind. They came out into the sunlight, and pretty soon the hog began to root and the mule began to graze.

  “Got their own paradise,” Frank said.

  “We’ll fix that,” Leroy said.

  They waited there, sitting amongst the oaks, watching, and late in the day the hog and the mule wandered off into the trees across the way.

  “Ain’t we gonna do something besides watch?” Leroy said.

  “They leave, tomorrow they come back,” Nigger Joe said. “Got their spot. Be back tomorrow. We’ll be ready for them.”

  Just before dark they came down from their hiding place on a little trail, crossed the pasture and walked over to where the mule and the hog had come out of the trees. Nigger Joe looked around for some time, said, “Got a path. Worked it out. Always the same. Same spot. Come through here, out into the pasture. What we do is we get up in a tree. Or I get in tree with my rope. I rope the mule and tie him off and let him wear himself down.”

  “He could kill himself, thrashing,” Frank said.

  “Could kill myself, him thrashing. I think it best tie him to a tree, folks.”

  Frank translated Nigger Joe’s strange way of talking in his head, said, “He dies, you don’t get the eleven-fifty.”

  “Not how I understand it,” Nigger Joe said.

  “That’s how it is,” Frank said, feeling as if he might be asking for a knife in his belly, his guts spilled. Out here, no one would ever know. Nigger Joe might think he could do that, kill Leroy too, take their money. Course, they didn’t have any money. Not here. There was fifteen dollars buried in a jar out back of the house, eleven-fifty of which would go to Nigger Joe, if he didn’t kill them.

  Nigger Joe studied Frank for a long moment. Frank shifted from one foot to the other, trying not to do it, but unable to stop. “Okay,” Nigger Joe said. “That will work up good enough.”

  “What about Mr. Porky?” Leroy asked.

  “That gonna be you two’s job. I rope damn mule, and you two, you gonna rope damn pig. First, we got to smell like dirt.”

  “What?” Frank said.

  Nigger Joe rubbed himself down with dark soil. He had Frank and Leroy rub themselves down with it. Leroy hated it and complained, but Frank found the earth smelled like incoming rain, and he thought it pleasant. It felt good on his skin, and he had a sudden strange thought, that when he died, he would become one and the same as the earth, and he wondered how many dead animals, maybe people, made up the dirt he had rubbed onto himself. He felt odd thinking that way. He felt odd thinking in any way.

  They slept for a while, then Nigger Joe kicked him and Leroy awake. It was still dark when they rolled dirty out of their bed clothes.

  “Couldn’t we have waited on the dirt,” Leroy said, climbing out of his blankets. “It’s all in my bed roll.”

  “Need time for dirt to like you good, so you smell like it,” Nigger Joe said. “We put some more on now, rub in the hair good, then get ready.”

  “It’s still dark,” Frank said. “They gonna come in the dark? How you know when they’re gonna come?”

  “They come. But we gotta be ready. They have a good night in farmer’s corn fields, they might come real soon, full bellies. Way ground reads, they come here to stand and to wallow. Hog wallows all time, way ground looks. And they shit all over. This their spot. They don’t get corn and peas and such, they’ll be back here. Water not far from spot, and they got good grass. Under the trees, hog has some acorns. Hogs like acorns. Wife, Sweetie, makes sometimes coffee from acorns.”

  “How about I make some regular coffee, made from coffee?” Leroy said.

  “Nope. We don’t want a smoke smell. Don’t want our smell. Need to piss or shit, don’t let free here. Go across pasture there. Far side. Dump over there. Piss over there. Use the heel of your shoe to cover it all. Give it lots of dirt.”

  “Walk all the way across?” Leroy said.

  “Want hog and mule,” Nigger Joe said. “Walk all the way across. Now, eat some jerky, do your shit over on other side. Put more dirt on. And wait.”

  The sun rose up and it got hot, and the dirt on their skins itched, or at least Frank itched, and he could tell Leroy itched, but Nigger Joe, he didn’t seem to. Sat silent. And when the early morning was eaten up by the heat, Nigger Joe showed them places to be. He had them lie down in trenches they scooped in the dirt, and Nigger Joe covered them with leaves and dirt and bits of hog and mule’s shit. It was terrible. They lay their with their ropes and waited. Nigger Joe, with his lasso, climbed up into an oak and sat on a fat limb, his feet stretched along it, his back against the trunk, the rope in his lap.

  The day crawled forward and so did the worms. They were all around Frank, and it was all he could do not to jump up screaming. It wasn’t that he was afraid of them. He had put a many of them on hooks for fishing. But to just lay there and have them squirm against your arm, your neck. And there was something that bit. Something in the hog shit was Frank’s thought.

  Frank heard a sound. A different sound. Being close to the ground it seemed to move the earth. It was the slow careful plodding of the mule’s hooves, and another sound. The hog, maybe.

  They listened and waited and the sounds came closer, and then Frank, lying there, trying not to tremble with anticipation, heard a whizzing sound. The rope. And then there was a bray, and a scuffle sound.

  Frank lifted his head slightly.

  Not ten feet from him was the great white mule, the rope around its neck, the length of it stretching up into the tree. Frank could see Nigger Joe. He had wrapped the rope around the limb and was holding onto it, tugging, waiting for the mule to wear itself out.

  The hog was bounding about near the mule, as if it might jump up and grab the rope and chew it in two. It actually went up on its hind legs once.

  Frank knew it was time. He burst out of his hiding place, and Leroy came out of his. The hog went straight for Leroy. Frank darted in front of the leaping mule and threw his rope and caught the hog around the neck. It turned
instantly and went for him.

  Leroy dove and grabbed the hog’s hind leg. The hog kicked him in the face, but Leroy hung on. The hog dragged Leroy across the ground, going for Frank, and as his rope became more slack, Frank darted for a tree.

  By the time Frank arrived at the tree trunk, Leroy had managed to put his rope around the hog’s hind leg, and now Frank and Leroy had the hog in a kind of tug of war.

  “Don’t hurt him now some,” Nigger Joe yelled from the tree. “Got to keep him up for it. He’s the mule leader. Makes him run.”

  “What the hell did he say?” Frank said.

  “Don’t hurt the goddamn pig,” Leroy said.

  “Ha,” Frank said, tying off his end of the rope to a tree trunk. Leroy stretched his end, giving the hog a little slack, and tied off to another tree. Nearby the mule bucked and kicked.

  Leroy made a move to try and grab the rope on the mule up short, but the mule whipped as if on a Yankee dollar, and kicked Leroy smooth in the chest, launching him over the hog and into the brush. The hog would have had him then, but the rope around its neck and back leg held it just short of Leroy, but close enough a string of hog spittle and snot was flung across Leroy’s face.

  “Goddamn,” Leroy said, as he inched farther away from the hog.

  For a long while, they watched the mule kick and buck and snort and snap its large teeth.

  It was near nightfall when the mule, exhausted, settled down on its front knees first, then rolled over on its side. The hog scooted across the dirt and came to rest near the great mule, its snout resting on the mule’s flank.

  “I’ll be damned,” Leroy said. “The hog’s girlie or something.”

  It took three days to get back, because the mule wasn’t co-operating, and the hog was no pushover either. They had to tie logs on either side of the hog, so that he had to drag them. It wore the hog down, but it wore the men down too, because the logs would tangle in vines and roughs, and constantly had to be untangled. The mule was hobbled loosely, so that it could walk, but couldn’t bolt. The mule was lead by Nigger Joe, and fastened around the mule’s waist was a rope with two rope lines leading off to the rear. They were in turn fastened to a heavy log that kept the mule from bolting forward to have a taste of Nigger Joe, and to keep him, like the hog, worn down.

  At night they left the logs on the critters, and built make-do corrals of vines and limbs and bits of leather straps.

  By the time they were out of the woods and the swamp, the mule and the hog were covered in dirt and mud and such. The animals heaved as they walked, and Frank feared they might keel over and die.

  They made it though, and they took the mule up to Nigger Joe’s. He had a corral there. It wasn’t much, but it was solid and it held the mule in. The hog they put in a small pen. There was hardly room for the hog to turn around. Now that the hog was well placed, Frank stood by the pen and studied the animal. The beast looked at him with a feral eye. This wasn’t a hog who had been slopped and watered. This was an animal who early on had escaped into the wild, as a pig, and had made his way to adulthood. The hog’s spotted hide was covered in scars, and though he had a coating of fat on him, his body was long and muscular, and when the critter flexed its shoulders to startle a fly, muscles rolled beneath its skin like snakes beneath a tight-stretched blanket.

  The mule, after the first day, began to perk up. But he didn’t do much. Stood around mostly, and when they walked away for a distance, it began to trot the corral, stopping often to look out at his friend in the hog pen. The mule made a sound, and the hog made a sound back.

  “Damn, if I don’t think they’re talking to one another,” Leroy said.

  “Oh yeah. You can bet. They do that all right,” Nigger Joe said.

  The race was coming closer, and within the week, Leroy and Nigger Joe had the mule’s hooves trimmed, but no shoes. Decided he didn’t need them, as the ground was soft this time of year. They got him saddled. Leroy got bucked off and kicked and bitten once, a big plug was out of his right elbow.

  “Mean one,” Nigger Joe said. “Real bastard, this mule. Strong. He got the time, he eat Leroy.”

  “Do you think he can run?” Frank asked.

  “Time to see soon,” Nigger Joe said.

  That night, when the saddling and bucking was done, the mule began to wear down, let Nigger Joe stay on his back. As a reward, Nigger Joe fed the mule well on grain, but gave him only a little water. He fed the hog some pulled-up weeds, a bit of corn, watered him.

  “Want mule strong, but hog weak,” Nigger Joe said. “Don’t want hog strong enough to do digging out of pen that’s for some sure.”

  Frank listened to this, wondering where Nigger Joe had learned his American.

  Nigger Joe went in for the night, his two wives calling him to supper. Leroy walked home. Frank saddled up Dobbin, but before he left, he led the horse out to the corral and stared at the mule. There in the starlight, the beams settled around the mule’s head, and made it very white. The mud was gone now and the mule had been groomed, cleaned of briars and burrs from the woods, and the beast looked magnificent. Once Frank had seen a book. It was the only book he had ever seen other than the Bible, which his mother owned. But he had seen this one in the window of the General Store downtown. He hadn’t opened the book, just looked at it through the window. There on the cover was a white horse with wings on its back. Well, the mule didn’t look like a horse, and it didn’t have wings on its back, but it certainly had the bearing of the beast on the book’s cover. Like maybe it was from somewhere else other than here; like the sky had ripped open and the mule had ridden into this world through the tear.

  Frank led Dobbin over to the hog pen. There was nothing beautiful about the spotted hog. It stared up at him, and the starlight filled its eyes and made them sharp and bright as shrapnel.

  As Frank was riding away, he heard the mule make a sound, then the hog. They did it more than once, and were still doing it when he rode out of earshot.

  It took some doing, and it took some time, and Frank, though he did little but watch, felt as if he were going to work every day. It was a new feeling for him. His Old Man often made him work, but as he grew older he had quit, just like his father. The fields rarely got attention, and being drunk became more important than hoeing corn and digging taters. But here he was not only showing up early, but staying all day, handing harness and such to Nigger Joe and Leroy, bringing out feed and pouring water.

  In time Nigger Joe was able to saddle up the mule with no more than a snort from the beast, and he could ride about the pen without the mule turning to try and bite him or buck him. He even stopped kicking at Nigger Joe and Leroy, who he hated, when they first entered the pen.

  The hog watched all of this through the slats of his pen, his beady eyes slanting tight, its battle-torn ears flicking at flies, its curly tail curled even tighter. Frank wondered what the hog was thinking. He was certain, whatever it was, was not good.

  Soon enough, Nigger Joe had Frank enter the pen, climb up in the saddle. Sensing a new rider, the mule threw him. But the second time he was on board, the mule trotted him around the corral, running lightly with that kind of rolling barrel run mules have.

  “He’s about ready for a run, he is,” Nigger Joe said.

  Frank led the mule out of the pen and out to the road, Leroy following. Nigger Joe led Dobbin. “See he’ll run that way. Not so fast at first,” Nigger Joe said. “Me and this almost dead horse, we follow and find you, you ain’t neck broke in some ditch somewheres.”

  Cautiously, Frank climbed on the white mule’s back. He took a deep breath, then settling himself in the saddle, he gave the mule a kick.

  The mule didn’t move.

  He kicked again.

  The mule trotted down the road about twenty feet, then turned, dipped its head into the grass that grew alongside the red clay road, and took a mouthful.

  Frank kicked at the mule some more, but the mule wasn’t having any. He only moved a few fee
t down the road, then across the road and into the grass, amongst the trees, biting leaves off of them with a sharp snap of his head, a smack of his teeth.

  Nigger Joe trotted up on Dobbin.

  “You ain’t going so fast.”

  “Way I see it too,” Frank said. “He ain’t worth a shit.”

  “We not bring the hog in on some business yet.”

  “How’s that gonna work? I mean, how’s he gonna stay around and not run off.”

  “Maybe hog run off in goddamn woods and not see again, how it may work. But, nothing else, hitch mule to plow or sell. You done paid me eleven-fifty.”

  “Your job isn’t done,” Frank said.

  “You say, and may be right, but we got the one card, the hog, you see. He don’t deal out with an ace, we got to call him a joker, and call us assholes, and the mule, we got to make what we can. We have to, shoot and eat the hog. Best, keep him up a few more days, put some corn in him, make him better than what he is. Fatter. The mule, I told you ideas. Hell, eat mule too if nothing other works out.”

  They let the hog out of the pen.

  Or rather Leroy did. Just picked up the gate, and out came the hog. The hog didn’t bolt. It bounded over to the mule, on which Frank was mounted. The mule dipped its head, touched noses with the hog.

  “I’ll be damn,” Frank said, thinking he had never had a friend like that. Leroy was as close as it got, and he had to watch Leroy. He’d cheat you. And if you had a goat, he might fuck it. Leroy was no real friend. Frank thought Leroy was like most things in his life, just something to make do till the real thing came along, and so far, he was still waiting. It made Frank feel lonesome.

  Nigger Joe took the bridle on the mule away from Frank, and led them out to the road. The hog trotted beside the mule.

  “Now, story is, hog likes to run,” Nigger Joe said. “And when he run, mule follows. And then hog, he falls off, not keeping up, and mule, he got the arrow-sight then, run like someone put turpentine on his nut sack. Or that the story as I hear it. You?”