“Well, it’s all the idea I got,” Frank said, and the thought of that worried Frank more than a little. He considered on his knack for clinging to bad notions like a rutting dog hanging on to 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 helpmate. 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 Black Joe to help us track him. We want him, that’s the way we do it. Black Joe catches him, and we’ll break him, and you can ride him.”
Black 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 Black 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 Black 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, than Black Joe was beside them, tall and broad shouldered with his freckled face.
“Damn, man,” Frank said, “where did you come from?” Black Joe pointed in an easterly direction.
“Shit,” Leroy said, “coming up on a man like that could make him bust a heart.”
“Want something?” Black 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?” Black 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,” Black 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,” Black 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. Black Joe shook it, then shook Leroy’s hand. Black Joe said, “Now, mule runs like the rock, that ain’t my fault. I get the eleven-fifty anyway.”
Frank nodded.
“Okay, tomorrow morning,” Black 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?”
Black Joe nodded. “They weren’t Black Joe.”
“You could have tracked them before on your own,” Frank said. “Why now?”
Black 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 bolls. 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 Black 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,” Black 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,” Black 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 Christ sakes,” 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,” Black Joe said. “Which was it, now?”
“Goat,” Leroy said.
“That is big nasty,” Black 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. Black Joe, though sweaty, appeared as fresh as a virgin in spring.
“Where you get your hat?” Black 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?” Black 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 if we win,” Frank said.
“No. You owe me eleven-fifty win or lose.” Black Joe said, 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,” Black Joe said. “I tell women it’s eight dollars, that way I make some whisky money. Black Joe didn’t get up yesterday. No, he didn’t. And when he gets up, he got Bible salesman’s hat on.”
—————
They waded through the swamp and through the woods for some time, and just before dark, Black Joe picked up on the mule’s unshod tracks. He bent down and looked at them. He said, “We catch him, he’s gonna need trimming and shoes. Not enough rock to wear them down. Soft sand and swamp. And here’s the pig’s tracks. Hell, he’s big. Tracks say, three hundred pounds. Maybe more.”
“That’s no pig,” Leroy said. “That’s a full-blown hog.”
“Damn,” Frank said. “They’re real.”
“But can he race?” Leroy said. “And will the pig cooperate?”
They followed the tracks until it turned dark. They threw up a camp, made a fire, and made it big so the smoke was strong, as the mosquitoes were everywhere and hungry and the smoke kept them off a little. They sat there in the night before the fire, the smoke making them cough, watching it churn up above them, through the trees. And up there, as if resting on a limb, was a piece of the moon.
They built the fire up big one last time, turned into th
eir covers, and tried to sleep. Finally, they did, but before morning, Frank awoke, his bladder full, his mind as sharp as if he had slept well. He got up and stoked up the fire, and walked out a few paces in the dark and let it fly. When he looked up to button his pants, he saw through the trees, across a stretch of swamp water, something moving.
He looked carefully, because whatever it was had stopped. He stood very still for a long time, and finally what he had seen moved again. He thought at first it was a deer, but no. There was enough light from the early rising sun knifing through the trees that he could now see clearly what it was.
The White Mule. It stood between two large trees, just looking at him, its head held high, its tall ears alert. The mule was big. Fifteen hands high, like Robert E. Lee, and it was big-chested, and its legs were long. Something moved beside it.
The Spotted Pig. It was big and ugly, with one ear turned up and one ear turned down. It grunted once, and the mule snorted, but neither moved.
Frank wasn’t sure what to do. He couldn’t go tearing across the stretch of swamp after them, since he didn’t know how deep it was, and what might be waiting for him. Gators, snakes and sinkholes. And by the time he woke up the others, the mule and hog would be gone. He just stood there instead, staring at them. This went on for a long time, and finally the hog turned and started moving away, behind some thicket. The mule tossed its head, turned and followed.
My God, thought Frank. The mule is beautiful. And the hog, he’s a pistol. He could tell that from the way it had grunted at him. He had some strange feelings inside of him that he couldn’t explain. Some sensation of having had a moment that was greater than any moment he had had before.
He thought it strange these thoughts came to him, but he knew it was the sight of the mule and the hog that had stirred them. As he walked back to the fire and lay down on his blankets, he tried to figure the reason behind that, and only came up with a headache and more mosquito bites.
He closed his eyes and slept a little while longer, thinking of the mule and the hog, and the way they were free and beautiful. And then he thought of the race, and all of that went away, and when he awoke, it was to the toe of Black Joe’s boot in his ribs.
“Time to do it,” Black Joe said.
Frank sat up. “I saw them.”
“What?” Leroy said, stirring out of his blankets. Frank told them what he had seen, and how there was nothing he could do then. Told them all this, but didn’t tell them how the mule and the hog had made him feel.
“Shit,” Leroy said. “You should have woke us.”
Black Joe shook his head. “No matter. We see over there where they stood. See what tracks they leave us. Then we do the sneak on them.”
—————
They worked their way to the other side of the swamp, swatting mosquitoes and killing a cottonmouth in the process, and when they got to where the mule and the hog stood, they found tracks and mule droppings.
“You not full of shit, like Black Joe thinking,” Black Joe said. “You really see them.”
“Yep,” Frank said.
Black Joe bent down and rubbed some of the mule shit between his fingers, and smelled it. “Not more than a couple hours old.”
“Should have got us up,” Leroy said.
“Easier to track in the day,” Black Joe said. “They got their place they stay. They got some hideout.”
The mosquitoes were not so bad now, and finally they came to some clear areas, marshy, but clear, and they lost the tracks there, but Black Joe said, “The two of them, they probably cross here. It’s a good spot. Pick their tracks up in the trees over there, on the soft ground.”
When they crossed the marshy stretch, they came to a batch of willows and looked around there. Black 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 Black Joe always found them. Sometimes Frank couldn’t even see what Black Joe saw. But Black 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.
Mid-day, 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 Black Joe. “That hawk and that snake, does it mean something?”
“Means that snake is gonna get et,” Black 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 led 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,” Black Joe said. “Got their spot. Be back tomorrow. We’ll be ready for them.”
—————
Just before dark they came down from their place on a little trail and crossed the pasture and walked over to where the mule and the hog had come out of the trees. Black 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, and 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 Black Joe’s strange way of talking in his head, said, “He dies, you don’t get the eleven-fifty.”
“Not how I understand it,” Black 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. Black 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 Black Joe, if he didn’t kill them.
Black 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,” Black 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.
Black 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 thou
ght, 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 Black Joe kicked him and Leroy awake. It was still dark when they rolled dirty out of their bedclothes.
“Couldn’t we have waited on the dirt?” Leroy said, climbing out of his blankets. “It’s all in my bedroll.”
“Need time for dirt to like you good, so you smell like it,” Black 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 cornfields, 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,” Black 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 Black Joe, he didn’t seem to. Sat silent. And when the early morning was eaten up by the heat, Black Joe showed them places to be, and Black 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.
Stories (2011) Page 40