by Brian Hodge
Wasn’t nothing Frank could say to that, so he said, “Leroy, Rupert got hit by lightning. Right in the head.”
“The head?”
“Wouldn’t have mattered had it been the ass. It killed him deader than a post and burned him up.”
“Damn. That there is a shame,” Leroy said, and stopped whittling. He pushed the seed salesman’s hat up on his forehead to reveal some forks of greasy brown hair. Leroy studied Frank. “Is there something I can do for you? Or you come around to visit?”
“I’m thinking you might could help me get a mule and get back in the race.”
“Mules cost.”
“I know. Thought we might could come up with something. And if we could, and we won, I’d give you a quarter of the prize money.”
“I get a quarter for grooming folks’ critters in town.”
“I mean a quarter of a hundred. Twenty-five dollars.”
“I see. Well, I am your man for animals. I got a knack. I can talk to them like I was one of them. Except for chickens. Ain’t no one can talk to chickens.”
“They’re birds.”
“That there is the problem. They ain’t animal enough.”
Frank thought about Leroy and the fucked goat. Wondered what Leroy had said to the goat as way of wooing it. Had he told her something special? I think you got a good-looking face? I love the way your tail wiggles when you walk. It was a mystery that Frank actually wasn’t all that anxious to unravel…
“I know you run in the circles of them that own or know about mules,” Frank said. “Why I thought you maybe could help me.”
Leroy took off the seed salesman’s hat, put it on his knee, threw his knife in the dirt, let the whittling stick fall from his hand. “I could sneak up on an idea or two. Old man Torrence, he’s got a mule he’s looking to sell. And by his claim, it’s a runner. He ain’t never ridden it himself, but he’s had it ridden. Says it can run.”
“There’s that buying stuff again. I ain’t got no real money.”
“Takes money to make money.”
“Takes money to have money.”
Leroy put the seed salesman’s hat back on. “You know, we might could ask him if he’d rent out his mule. Race is a ways off yet, so we could get some good practice in. You being about a hundred and twenty-five pounds, you’d make a good rider.”
“I’ve ridden a lot. I was ready on Rupert, reckon I can get ready on another mule.”
“Deal we might have to make is, we won the race, we bought the mule afterwards. That might be the way he’d do it.”
“Buy the mule?”
“At a fair price.”
“How fair?”
“Say twenty-five dollars.”
“That’s a big slice of the prize money. And a mule for twenty-five, that’s cheap.”
“I know Torrence got the mule cheap. Fella that owed him made a deal. Besides, times is hard. So they’re selling cheap. Cost more, we can make extra money on side bets. Bet on ourselves. Or if we don’t think we got a chance, we bet against ourselves.”
“I don’t know. We lose, it could be said we did it on purpose.”
“I can get someone to bet for us.”
“Only if we bet to win. I ain’t never won nothing or done nothing right in my life, and I figure this here might be my chance.”
“You gettin’ Jesus?”
“I’m gettin’ tired,” Frank said.
There are no real mountains in East Texas, and only a few hills of consequence, but Old Man Torrence lived at the top of a big hill that was called with a kind of braggarts lie, Barrow Dog Mountain. Frank had no idea who Barrow or Dog were, but that was what the big hill had been called for as long as he remembered, probably well before he
was born. There was a ridge at the top of it that overlooked the road below. Frank found it an impressive sight as he and Leroy rode in on Dobbin, he at the reins, Leroy behind him.
It was pretty on top of the hill too. The air smelled good, and flowers grew all about in red, blue and yellow blooms, and the cloudless sky was so blue you felt as if a great lake were falling down from the heavens. Trees fanned out bright green on either side of the path, and near the top, on a flat section, was Old Man Torrence’s place. It was made of cured logs, and he had a fine chicken coop that was built straight and true. There were hog pens and a nice barn of thick, cured logs with a roof that had all of its roofing slats. There was a sizable garden that rolled along the top of the hill, full of tall, bright green corn stalks, so tall they shaded the rows between them. There was no grass between the rows, and the dirt there looked freshly laid by. Squash and all manner of vegetables exploded out of the ground alongside the corn, and there were little clumps of beans and peas growing in long, pretty rows.
In a large pen next to the barn was a fifteen-hands-high, chocolate-colored mule, prettiest thing Frank had ever seen in the mule flesh department. Its ears stood up straight, and it gave Frank and Leroy a snort as they rode in.
“He’s a big one,” Leroy said.
“Won’t he be slow, being that big?” Frank asked.
“Big mule’s also got big muscles, he’s worked right. And he looks to have been worked right. Got enough muscles, he can haul some freight. Might be fast as Rupert.”
“Sure faster right now,” Frank said.
As they rode up, they saw Old Man Torrence on the front porch with his wife and three kids, two boys and a girl. Torrence was a fat, ruddy-faced man. His wife was a little plump, but pretty. His kids were all nice looking and they had their hair combed and unlike Leroy’s kids, looked clean. As if they might bathe daily. As they got closer, Frank could see that none of the kids looked whacked on. They seemed to be laughing at something the mother was saying. It certainly was different from his own upbringing, different from Leroy’s place. Wasn’t anyone tripping anyone, cussing, tossing frying pans, threatening to cripple one another or put out an eye. Thinking on this, Frank felt something twist around inside of him like some kind of serpent looking for a rock to slide under.
He and Leroy got off Dobbin and tied him to a little hitching post that was built out front of the house, took off their hats, and walked up to the steps.
After being offered lemonade, which they turned down, Old Man Torrence came off the porch, ruffling one of his kid’s hair as he did. He smiled back at his wife, and then walked with Frank and Leroy out toward the mule pen, Leroy explaining what they had in mind.
“You want to rent my mule? What if I wanted to run him?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Leroy said. “It hadn’t occurred to me you might. You ain’t never before, though I heard tell he was a mule could be run.”
“It’s a good mule,” Torrence said. “Real fast.”
“You’ve ridden him?” Frank asked.
“No. I haven’t had the pleasure. But my brother and his boys have. They borrow him from time to time, and they thought on running him this year. Nothing serious. Just a thought. They say he can really cover ground.”
“Frank here,” Leroy said, “he plans on entering, and we would rent your mule. If we win, we could give you a bit of the prize money. What say we rent him for ten, and if he wins, we give you another fifteen. That way you pick up twenty-five dollars.”
Frank was listening to all this, thinking: and then I owe Leroy his share; this purse I haven’t won is getting smaller and smaller.
“And what if you don’t win?” Torrence said.
“You’ve made ten dollars,” Leroy said.
“And I got to take the chance my mule might go lame or get hurt or some such. I don’t know. Ten dollars, that’s not a lot of money for what you’re asking. It ain’t even your mule.”
“Which is why we’re offering the ten dollars,” Leroy said.
They went over and leaned on the fence and looked at the great mule, watched his muscles roll beneath his chocolate flesh as he trotted nervously about the pen.
“He looks excitable,” Frank said.
&nb
sp; “Robert E. Lee has just got a lot of energy is all,” Torrence said.
“He’s named Robert E. Lee?” Frank asked.
“Best damn general ever lived. Tell you boys what. You give me twenty-five, and another twenty-five if he wins, and you got a deal.”
“But I give you that, and Leroy his share, I don’t have nothing hardly left.”
“You ain’t got nothing at all right now,” Torrence said.
“How’s about,” Leroy said, “we do it this way. We give you fifteen, and another fifteen if he wins. That’s thirty. Now that’s fair for a rented mule. Hell, we might could go shopping, buy a mule for twenty-five, and even if he don’t win, we got a mule. He don’t race worth a damn, we could put him to plow.”
Old Man Torrence pursed his lips. “That sounds good. All right,” he said sticking out his hand, “deal.”
“Well, now,” Frank said, not taking the hand. “Before I shake on that, I’d like to make sure he can run. Let me ride him.”
Old Man Torrence withdrew his hand and wiped it on his pants as if something had gotten on his palm. “I reckon I could do that, but seeing how we don’t have a deal yet, and ain’t no fifteen dollars has changed hands, how’s about I ride him for you. So you can see.”
Frank and Leroy agreed, and watched from the fence as Torrence got the equipment and saddled up Robert E. Lee. Torrence walked Robert E. Lee out of the lot, and onto a pasture atop the hill, where the overhang was. The pasture was huge and the grass was as green as Ireland. It was all fenced in with barb wire strung tight between deeply planted posts.
“I’ll ride him around in a loop. Once slow, and then real fast toward the edge of the overhang there, then cut back before we get there. I ain’t got a pocket watch, so you’ll have to be your own judge.”
Torrence swung into the saddle. “You boys ready.”
“Let’er rip,” Leroy said.
Old Man Torrence gave Robert E. Lee his heels. The mule shot off so fast that Old Man Torrence’s hat flew off, and Leroy in sympathy, took hold of the brim of the seed salesman’s hat, as if Robert E. Lee’s lunge might blow it off his head.
“Goddamn,” Leroy said. “Look how low that mule is to the ground. He’s gonna have the grass touching his belly.”
And so the mule ran, and as it neared the barb wire fence, Old Man Torrence gave him a tug, to turn him. But, Robert E. Lee wasn’t having any. His speed picked up, and the barb wire fence came closer.
Leroy said, “Uh oh.”
Robert E. Lee hit the fence hard. So hard it caused his head to dip over the top wire and his ass to rise up as if he might be planning a headstand. Over the mule flipped, tearing loose the fence, causing a strand of wire to snap and strike Old Man Torrence, and then Torrence was thrown ahead of the tumbling mule… Over the overhang. Out of sight. The mule did in fact do a headstand, landed hard that way, its hind legs high in the air, wiggling. For a moment, it seemed as if he might hang there, and then, Robert E. Lee lost his headstand and went over after his owner.
“Damn,” Leroy said.
“Damn,” Frank said.
They both ran toward the broken fence. When they got there Frank hesitated, not able to look. He glanced away, back across the bright green field.
Leroy scooted up to the cliff’s edge and took a gander, studied what he saw for a long time.
“Well?” Frank said, finally turning his head back to Leroy.
“Robert E. Lee just met his Gettysburg. And Old Man Torrence is somewhere between Gettysburg and Robert E. Lee… Actually, you can’t tell which is which. Mule, Gettysburg, or Old Man Torrence. It’s all kind of bunched up.”
When Frank and Leroy got down there, which took some considerable time, as they worked their way down a little trail on foot, they discovered that Old Man Torrence had been lucky in a fashion. He had landed in sand, and the force of Robert E. Lee’s body had driven him down deep into it, his nose poking up and out enough to take in air. Robert E. Lee was as dead as a threepenny nail, and his tail was stuck up in the air and bent over like a flag that had been broken at the staff. The wind moved the hairs on it a little.
Frank and Leroy went about digging Old Man Torrence out, starting first with his head so he could really breathe well. When Torrence spat enough sand out of his mouth, he looked up and said, “You sonsofbitches. This is your fault.”
“Our fault?” Leroy said. “You was riding him.”
“You goat-fucking sonofabitch, get me out of here.”
Leroy’s body sagged a little. “I knew that was gonna get around good. Ain’t nobody keeps a secret. There was only that one time too, and them hunters had to come up on me.”
They dug Torrence out from under the mule, and Frank went up the trail and got Old Dobbin and rode to the doctor. When Frank got back with the sawbones, Torrence was none the happier to see him. Leroy had gone off to the side to sit by himself, which to Frank meant the goat had come up again.
Old Man Torrence was mostly all right, but he blamed Frank and Leroy, especially Leroy, from then on. And he walked in a way that when he stepped with his right leg, it always looked as if he were about to bend over and tie his shoe. Even in later years, when Frank saw him, he went out of his way to avoid him, and Leroy dodged him like the smallpox, not wanting to hear reference to the goat.
But in that moment in time, the important thing to Frank was simply that he was still without a mule. And the race was coming closer.
That night, as Frank lay in his sagging bed, looking out from it at the angled wall of the room, listening to the crickets saw their fiddles outside and inside the house, he closed his eyes and remembered how Old Man Torrence’s place had looked. He saw himself sitting with the pretty, plump wife and the clean, polite kids. Then he saw himself with the wife inside that pretty house, on the bed, and he imagined that for a long time.
It was a pleasant thought, the wife and the bed, but even more pleasant was imagining Torrence’s place as his. All that greenery and high-growing corn and blooming squash and thick pea and bean vines dripping with vegetables. The house and the barn and the pasture. And in his dream, the big mule, alive, not yet a confusion of bones and flesh and fur, the tail a broken flag.
He thought then of his mother, and the only way he could remember her was with her hair tied back and her face sweaty and both of her eyes blacked. That was how she had looked the last time he had seen her, right before she run off with a horse and some corn meal and a butcher knife. He wondered where she was, and if she now lived in a place where the buildings were straight and the grass was green and the corn was tall.
After a while he got up and peed out the window, and smelled the aroma of other nights drifting up from the ground he had poisoned with his water, and thought: I am better than Papa. He just peed in the corner of the room and shit out the window, splattering it all down the side of the house. I don’t do that. I pee out the window, but I don’t shit, and I don’t pee in the corner. That’s a step up. I go outside for the messy business. And if I had a good house, I wouldn’t do this. I’d use the slop jar. I’d go to the privy.
That didn’t stop him from finishing his pee, thinking about what he would do or ought to do as far as his toilet habits went. Besides, peeing was the one thing he was really good at. He could piss like a horse and from a goodly distance… He had even won money on his ability. It was the one thing his father had been proud of. “My son, Frank. He can piss like a race horse. Get it out, Frank. Show them.”
And he would.
But, compared to what he wanted out of life, his ability to throw water from his johnson didn’t seem all that wonderful right then.
Frank thought he ought to call a halt to his racing plans, but like so many of his ideas, he couldn’t let it go. It blossomed inside of him until he was filled with it. Then he was obsessed with an even wilder plan. A story he had heard came back to him, and ran round inside his head like a greased pig.
He would find the White Mule and capture it and
run it. It was a mule he could have for free, and it was known to be fast, if wild. And, of course, he would have to capture its companion, The Spotted Pig. Though, he figured, by now, the pig was no longer a pig, but a hog, and the mule would be three, maybe four years old.
If they really existed.
It was a story he had heard for the last three years or so, and it was told for the truth by them who told him, his Papa among them. But if drinking made him see weasels oozing out of the floorboards, it might have made Papa see white mules and spotted pigs on parade. But the story wasn’t just Papa’s story. He had heard it from others, and it went like this:
Once upon a time, there was this pretty, white mule with pink eyes, and the mule was fine and strong and set to the plow early on, but he didn’t take to it. Not at all. But the odder part of the story was that the mule took up with a farm pig, and they became friends. There was no explaining it. It happened now and then, a horse or mule adopting their own pet, and that was what had happened with the white mule and the spotted pig.
When Frank had asked his Papa, why would a mule take up with a pig, his father had said: “Ain’t no explaining. Why the hell did I take up with your mother?”
Frank thought the question went the other way, but the tale fascinated him, and his Papa was just drunk enough to be in a good mood. Another pint swallowed, he’d be kicking his ass or his mama’s. But he pushed while he could, trying to get the goods on the tale, since outside of worrying about dying corn and sagging barns, there wasn’t that much in life that thrilled him.