The Killer's Game Page 9

  They waded through the swamp and through the woods for some time, and just before dark, Nigger 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 co-operate?”

  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 their 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 sink holes. 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 Nigger Joe’s boot in his ribs.

  “Time to do it,” Nigger 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.”

  Nigger 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 Nigger Joe thinking,” Nigger Joe said. “You really see them.”

  “Yep,” Frank said.

  Nigger 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,” Nigger 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 Nigger 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 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. 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.

  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 sweetgums 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 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. 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, 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 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 i
s,” 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

  it anyway.

  They slept for awhile, 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 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,” 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, and 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 place for Frank and Leroy to be was terrible. The dirt they smeared on themselves came from long scoops they made. Then they lay down in the scoops with their ropes, and Nigger Joe, before he climbed the tree, tossed leaves and sticks and dirt and bits of mule and hog shit over them. The way they lay, Frank and Leroy were twenty feet apart, on either side of what Nigger Joe said was a trail the hog and mule traveled. It wasn’t much of a trail. A bit of ruffled oak leaves, some wallows the hog had made.

  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 leaped 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 that 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 removed. 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. It looked at him with a feral eye. This wasn’t a hog who had been slopped and watered. This was an animal wh
o early on had escaped into the wild, as a pig, and had made his way to adulthood. His 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 hog flexed its shoulders to startle a fly, those 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 the hog pen, at his friend. 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 missing 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, but with 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 starred 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