Stories (2011) (54 page)

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 cornmeal 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
racehorse. 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.

The story his papa told him was the farmer who owned the
mule, and no one could ever put a name to who that farmer was, had supposedly
found the mule wouldn’t work if the pig wasn’t around, leading him between the
rows. The pig was in front, the mule plowed fine. The pig wasn’t there, the
mule wouldn’t plow.

This caused the farmer to come up with an even better idea.
What would the mule do if the pig was made to run? So the farmer got the mule
all saddled, and had one of his boys put the pig out front of the mule and swat
it with a knotted plow line, and away went the pig and away went the white
mule. The pig pretty soon veered off, but the mule, once set to run, couldn’t
stop, and would race so fast that the only way it halted was when it was tuckered
out. Then it would go back to the start, and look for its pig.

Never failed.

One night the mule broke loose, kicked the pig’s pen down,
and he and the pig, like Jesse and Frank James, headed for the hills. Went into
the East Texas greenery and wound in amongst the trees, and were lost to the
farmer. Only to be seen after that in glimpses and in stories that might or
might not be true. Stories about how they raided cornfields and ate the corn
and how the mule kicked down pens and let hogs and goats and cattle go free.

The White Mule and the Spotted Pig. Out there. On the run.
Doing whatever it was that white mules and spotted pigs did when they weren’t
raiding crops and freeing critters.

Frank thought on this for a long time, saddled up Dobbin and
rode over to Leroy’s place. When Frank arrived, Leroy was out in the yard on
his back, unconscious, the seed salesman’s hat spun off to the side, and was
being moved around by a curious chicken. Finding Leroy like this didn’t
frighten Frank any. He often found Leroy that way, cold as a wedge from drink,
or the missus having snuck up behind him with a stick of stove wood. They were
rowdy, Leroy’s bunch.

The missus came out on the porch and shook her fist at
Frank, and not knowing anything else to do, he waved. She spat a stream of
brown tobacco off the porch in his direction and went inside. A moment later
one of the kids bellowed from being whapped, and there was a sound like someone
slamming a big fish on flat ground. Then silence.

Frank bent down and shook Leroy awake. Leroy cursed, and
Frank dragged him over to an overturned bucket and sat him up on it, asked him,
“What happened?”

“Missus come up behind me. I’ve got so I don’t watch my back
enough.”

“Why’d she do it?”

“Just her way. She has spells.”

“You all right?”

“I got a headache.”

Frank went straight to business. “I come to say maybe we
ain’t out of the mule business.”

“What you mean?”

Frank told him about the mule and the pig, about his idea.

“Oh, yeah. Mule and pig are real. I’ve seen ’em once myself.
Out hunting. I looked up, and there they were at the end of a trail, just
watching. I was so startled, I just stood there looking at them.”

“What did they do?”

“Well, Frank, they ran off. What do you think? But it was
kind of funny. They didn’t get in no hurry, just turned and went around the
trail, showing me their ass, the pig’s tail curled up and a little swishy, and
the mule swatting his like at flies. They just went around that curve in the
trail, behind some oaks and blackberry vines, and they was gone. I tracked them
a bit, but they got down in a stream and walked it. I could find their tracks
in the stream with my hands, but pretty soon the whole stream was brown with
mud, and they come out of it somewhere I didn’t find, and they was gone like a
swamp fog come noon.”

“Was the mule really white?”

“Dirty a bit, but white. Even from where I was standing,
just bits of light coming in through the trees, I could see he had pink eyes.
Story is, that’s why he don’t like to come out in day much, likes to stay in
the trees, and do his crop raiding at night. Say the sun hurts his skin.”

“That could be a drawback.”

“You act like you got him in a pen somewhere.”

“I’d like to see if I could get hold of him. Story is, he
can run, and he needs the pig to do it.”

“That’s the story. But stories ain’t always true. I even
heard stories about how the pig rides the mule, and that the mule is stump
broke, and the pig climbs up on a stump and diddles the mule in the ass. I’ve
heard all manner of tale, and ain’t maybe none of it got so much as a nut of
truth in it. Still, it’s one of them ideas that kind of appeals to me. Course,
you know, we might catch that mule and he might not can run at all. Maybe all
he can do is sneak around in the woods and eat corn crops.”

“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.