I looked at Jasmine and smiled.
She smiled back, reached out and patted my shoulder. “Oh, yeah,” she said, and opened her purse and took out an envelope. “This is for you. From Mama.”
“Open it,” I said.
Jasmine opened it and handed it to me. I took it. It was a get well card that had been sent to Connie at some time by one of her friends. She had blatantly marked out her name, and the senders name, had written under the canned sentiment printed there, “Get well, SLOWLY.”
“I’m beginning to think me and your Mom aren’t going to patch things up,” I said.
“Afraid not,” Jasmine said.
“Good reason to move then,” Martha said. “I’m getting out of this one-dog town. I’ll level with you. I got a little inheritance I live off of. An uncle left it to me. Said in the will, since I was the ugliest one in the family, I’d need it.”
“That’s awful,” Jasmine said. “Don’t you believe that.”
“The hell it’s awful,” Martha said. “I didn’t have that money put back to live on, me and those damn books would be on the street. Ugly has its compensations. I’ve decided to start a bookstore in LaBorde, and I’m gonna open me a private investigations agency with it. Nice combo, huh? Read a little. Snoop a little. And you two, you want, can be my operatives. You full time, Plebin, and Jasmine, you can work part time while you go to college. What do you think?”
“Do we get a discount on paperbacks?” I asked.
Martha considered that. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“Air conditioning?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Let me consider it,” I said.
Suddenly, I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
Jasmine gently placed her hand on my arm. “Rest now,” she said.
And I did.
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 where ever 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 run down 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 bed clothes, so there really wasn’t any really 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 thumb nail and leaned on a sick 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 corn meal, 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 jolt of refreshment.
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 their 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.
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 prayers. 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 run off.
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, on more than one occasion, had seen a half-dozen chickens go at a weak one lying on the ground, tearing him apart 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
