White People (21 page)

(Whenever
my
first wife feared losing one of our arguments, she hinted I should go and have my ears surgically “pinned.” Hideous word, “pinned”—especially when the features are yours and visibly inherited. I had confided Grand’s early nickname: “Bi-plane Grafton.” And do you know she used this against me, in front of two other couples and in a good New York restaurant? She did. She hinted we were presently getting such poor service because of a certain rustic somebody’s ear size. “Obscene,” she once called these units you’ve occasionally glanced at. Go ahead—hey, no offense, really. My first wife’s inappropriateness finally stuck out even more than do these Willy flaps. They’re still with me, she is not.)

“Now—buddy-ro for which I’m trying to spell what ‘like Lancaster’s mule’ means, young as you are, and as lost in the modern world as everybody seems now, do
you
figure it’s too good of an idea, buying yourself a mule—or, for that matter, a little runabout motorcar—at nighttime? Huh, Willy? I’m asking this one straight out, so go ahead and answer if you can.”

I stalled. With Grand, I kept my favored standing by avoiding the porch (its gossip was considered beaucoup more entertaining than his). He loved my admitting what I didn’t know, he loved the way I pleaded for his Sunday installments. He let me take out his pocket-watch and fidget with its chain’s three toy brass horseshoes (they came with penny candy in the 1890s, when animals were still the gauge of distances and dollars). But if Grand offered me direct questions, I could not be wrong twice in a single visit. My mother explained I need not humor the old man. She considered her father-in-law sweet, well-meaning, reasonably pathetic. While I sat indoors with him, I missed some good porch rumors, ones my folks and kid brother would mention in our station wagon bound home to the suburbs. But I was hooked on his fierce attention, on weekly news from one gent literally rednecked. Sundays I rushed toward his chair. “Okay, start me off with ‘Carlton’s Wren,’ then do ‘Lessie Poland’s
Boot’ the long way. I mean, please, sir,
please
do those ones first.”

Mention any creek from Pitt to Nash counties, you’d siphon a tale. The awful flood of ’89; the beautiful sisters who left a note, then drowned on purpose; the fellow who swapped Indian Creek for a diamond brooch, then lost it to his wife at poker. When our station wagon zoomed home from Grand’s and over a bridge, I looked down on Legend. My loved ones saw just weeds and bilge.

Our
Compton’s Encyclopedia
showed Egyptian murals: Pharaohs were giant athletes—their helpful midget commoners came knee-high. For Grand, the dead of Falls were royally huge. They towered over all us present pygmies of the 1950s. (Ours was an age of sleekest tail fins. A big war had just been won—by my father; Falls’s stores sold smooth, good, streamlined things. Each year at the State Fair, we saw U.S. Army rockets displayed, but mules? They were already scarce in suburban Falls. If some hold-out farmer led one down our street, people swarmed outdoors, smiling, aiming Kodaks, calling, “You kids? Unglue yourself from that TV set. Come look for once. You’ll thank me later. It’s historical.”)

My own secret interest in the future changed the way I heard Grand’s yarns. He weekly binged forth a gallery of good-sized hucksters, men brilliant as my
Superman
comics’ space masterminds. At ten, I was a glum little comic-book pedant (such kids are now computer whizzes). I listened to the muddy landscape Grand described, but sent it light-years forward into chilly mineral space. I pictured crystal tower residences so tall, spotlights shone up top warning away rocket ships. Grand often mentioned hogs; I reshaped even these: rooting carnivorous robot units, stainless steel as Mother’s weekday flatware. Here and now, alive and in secret in modern life, I’d found a talking map. He stayed hushed around others, semidignified; but with me in lap, Grand sketched a space frontier: vigilantes, potent animals, robberies, feuds. His past unrolled a fresh (free) Marvel Comics. Soon, our own Indian Creek—wagered for diamonds, lost at cards—seemed mythic as some Mars canal traded for hunks of white-hot Kryptonite.

Grand’s mission? Explaining Falls’s deceased to Falls’s more newly born. Who new cared except his single scrawny disciple, the one kid
willing to stay indoors, to shut up for a change, and just sit here big-eyed, positively floppy with hearing equipment? The old man told and told—unaware of giving me a future, not a past.

I
FINALLY RISKED
: “No, sir. It’s not really all that good of an idea, buying stuff at night and everything. Because, see? it’s dark and they could … put something over on you.”

Which got me one raw assessing look. Praise might be hid in it; I couldn’t yet decide. So, taking a chance, I added, “Lancaster especially.”

A shudder ran through runty knobbled shoulders. Grand stared. For a second I feared I needed to blow my nose, so rarely did he gape right at a person’s face. Then hard hands slipped under my arms, he turned me (roughly) toward window light, he checked my freckles, coded like star charts or our genes. “I know whose grandchild
this
one is. Folks, how
about
our Willy here?” But looking around the parlor, Grand found everybody’d wandered to the airier front porch. Even so, he held me inches up in air, showing me off to absolutely nothing. “‘Lancaster especially,’ says this one, like he was there. I like that. ‘Lancaster
especially.’
“He set me down harder and sooner than I wanted.

“So Buck says to our farmer, says, ‘Sir, what you’re studying is the smartest single mule currently alive in our continental America, meaning, fellow patriot, the world generally. Please greet the Mule of Your Dreams, why, the mule of
anybody’s
. But first tell me how you heard about him. You waited till closing time when all the earlier bidders got dragged away, right, you dog, you?’ Buck was not above nudging a fellow’s ribs. Whatever works. The poor farmer grinned—sucker was slow, Willy. I’ve heard your mother talk about somebody’s children having reading problems and all like that. There is—your present-day liberal hates admitting—such a thing as plain D-U-M. And this clodhopper
was
it. What can you do?

“Goes Buck, ‘Certain mules kept torturing this paragon, actually biting him. I’m ashamed to admit: some kicking was involved. So we hid our rarity. Reason? I caught him trying to plow, sir. Kept
digging ruts, using nothing but his hoof. At the time, it was all he had
on
him. Pulling said hoof back and forth, making little furrows, steady as a Singer. By noon, my front paddock could have been the start of a decent truck garden. Of course, the other mules hate this one for being so work-loving. Makes
them
look bad. So here it is, banished from its shiftless kind, the workingest damn animule I have laid eyes on in my fifty years of community service from one single convenient location.’ Buck adds that if all this is not true, may his lovely daughters suffer chilblains, gout, and facial warts right … this …
second
. He stands still, like listening. One slow grin proves honesty’s won out again, his girls are yet smooth as satin sheets. Buck tells the customer to go freely peruse yonder mule. But our farmer cannot get a real clear look-see, and why, Willy?”

“It’s still night.”

“You’re goddamn right, it’s still night. And by now it’s pitch-black coal-bin midnight dark. Lancaster’s moving faster. ‘Young sir, I love dealing with gents who so
know
mulekind. Heck,
let
those other bidders duke it out come morning. For a price our dream mule is yours alone.’ Now, say the beast cost eighty dollars. Might sound cheap to a pip with an allowance big as yours (your daddy told me what he pays you for doing nothing). But back then, money was still a law unto itself. Why, you could get you a whole motorcar for under three hundred dollars, new.”

“Naw.” I slapped the leather roof of his hand. “Naw.
New?”
(I pictured a rocket ship, all my own and as silver as Reynolds Wrap.)

“Truth. Sure. Brand-new. Tires inclusive. (Means: it comes
with
, Will.) So that farmer’d shelled out his whole life savings. Boo-coo bucks. And don’t you know, his wife and kids were waiting up by lantern light to see what hero-animal they’d got. Maybe they patted it, probably they named it. We named everything back then. My daddy’s favorite plow was called Atlas … be one example. I still know the names of certain hogs I personally ate most of. I’m saying this to feed the fire of our story till I tiptoe in with what I eyewitness-saw. Plus I’m hoping to put off going out on the porch, having your grandmother tell me in front of everybody that I’m wearing one too many plaids again—how do people know? Come dawn, our poor
farmer was probably up before the larks—if we
had
any round these parts, well, meadowlarks, I guess we do—he hit a snag once the harness was oiled, plow-sharpened, ready to start life over behind the Mule of His Dreams—behind the mule of anybody’s, Willy o’ mine …”

(Since I turned four, Grand had ignored my faintly suburban first name. “Bryan is somebody’s
last
name. And not
ours
either. No, here we got a person called Willy … it’s as solid of a Willy as I’ve ever seen.” Since then I have tried becoming the pure shrewd decent country “Willy” Grand considered me. Even in my present spreading urban middle age, I work at being worthy of the name.)

“Now we finally strike my own patch of it, a relief. Good clean fun, Buck’s hog sales. Free. What us poor kids had instead of wireless or these new television sets. Maybe I was only your age and yea-high to nothing, but ‘Ears’ Grafton was all eyeballs in the front row. Here comes Little Bobby Grafton who lived in trouble and missed nothing and got punished even for things he didn’t do, but never snitched on who did. A boy like you, only maybe keener, if not so book-smart. Your daddy went to Harvard College—though I paid for it. He swears you will. Go there.
He’ll
have to pay. I don’t know as I approve. Your dad’s still rotten with Cambridge this and that. If you go, you’ll probably forget everything Grand here ever tried telling. But I plan to anyhow. Nobody can say
my
Willy never learned what ‘Lancaster’s mule’ means. Sure I was scrappier and smarter than you are now—but not by much, so don’t pout so.

“Was the morning after last night’s mule sale, was during a hog auction, with Buck conducting bidding at forty miles a minute (who
else
would he trust to do it?). Say Buck was making regular waltz music and a sermon from his morning’s shoat sale, when in blunders our young hayseed. Boy’s definitely gnawing his lower lip, dark in the face, hat pulled low, leading the selfsame mule (all dusty now, limping bad, one eye closed). The farmer also totes a huge aught-aught shotgun, old-fashioned even for then. Quite the hush falls over everything, hogs included. Hogs are smart, Will. A hog loves its life.

“Soon as Buck spots that musket, which just
looks
loaded, he signals everybody to please hold still, not run for cover. Not yet.
Using eyebrows only, he hints how his hirelings should sneak behind the customer, disarm him. And you can wager that during all of this, Buck kept the last and highest hog bid in his head. Didn’t his very
name
have a ‘Buck’ in it? He grins. ‘So, my agriculturally minded young friend, returned to the scene of earlier glories, I see. What, sir, can we do for you today?’

“At this the farmer gets to breathing funnier, hiccuping, little stray burps roll out—uncontrolled, we’re talking here. ‘What can
you
do? What can you
do?’
His red face under the straw brim goes toward purple. “More like
undo
, you double-dipping jackal. You might could give me my durn money back with interest and travel expenses. Is one thing you might could do. To save your hide. I’m here to announce before every other fool present, Mr. Lancaster, that me, my precious wife and six children—we consider you a … flesh-eating liar and a thief.’

“Certain murmuring rises. Even hogs squeal some, like whistling. A hog knows a insult when he hears it; a hog is so smart that he can … Hogs are smart. But not
that
smart, Will. What is it about you makes me tack on extra stuff?

“‘Those’—Lancaster stands taller—‘constitute strong words, stranger.’ (He’s secretly signing his hog gaffers to sneak up from behind.) Meantime, Lancaster stalls by checking his famous pocket-watch. The case chimes open, its usual hymn ‘Work for the Night Is Coming.’ Buck rolls eyes through barn roof and heavenward.

“Hirelings whip off their hats to prove how religious Buck is. Lancaster does a silent ‘Amen,’ grinning down the gun’s very barrel. ‘Come, let us reason together. As says the Book. Take it you had a bit of trouble managing your new animal?’

“‘Trouble? Trouble? Mr. Snake, I’m up before sunrise, planning to get a full day’s work from this critter I paid way too dear for. Broke out the new harness. Even combed my
own
hair. Overdid, I admit it. My wife and young ones line along our fence, smiling, half asleep. Well, our noise wakes the new mule. Seems a good sign. He trots out of the barn. He takes him a deep breath. Well, that strikes us
all
as a pretty good sign. A lot of nodding from folks on the fence to me, from me back to them at the fence, then back to …’

“‘Get
on
with it,’ Buck snaps, bold—even at gunpoint. That Buck! We should all be more like him.

“‘My new mule breaks into a full trot (extra good sign). Mule heads straight toward the only oak tree in my paddock. Mule knocks hisself clean out. Lays there, cold-cocked, panting in the dust. Well, me and my family eyeball each other. Mule finally comes around, shakes his head, picks hisself up, leans on the tree for help. I’m thinking: Could happen to
any
creature, just overeager is all. Pounds into the side of my barn. Hits so hard—half the hay I spent all Saturday getting up there drops. Not real good of a sign. Every time he came to, got his bearings, he’d gallop slap into some fence, wagon, barn, tree, barn, barn, tree, fence.
Lancaster
—I don’t mind telling you and all these fellow suckers, my wife and babies just stood at our fence crying. They acted disappointed in my
judgment
. And I’m man enough to admit: made me cry, too. So, you latrine-mouthed coyote—I am here to get a total refund or your life, one. Because, Lancaster, you done went and sold me a blind mule!”