Bridge of Clay(95)

ONE STUBBORN BUT FRENDLY MULE


NEVER BUCKS, NEVER BRAYS

***

$200 (negotiable)

YOU WON’T BE SORRY

Call Malcolm



I said, “Don’t show Tommy, whatever you do,” but Clay wasn’t close to caring. He’d gently thrown a finger again, at the mistake on the very first line.

“Stubborn,” he said, “but frendly.”



* * *



—

We settled for one of the cats—a family moving overseas. Too expensive to carry the tabby. They told us his name was Stripey, but we knew for a fact we would change it. He was a big and purring heap of a thing—black lips and tarmac paws—and a tail like a shaggy sword.

We drove to the place in Wetherill, two suburbs west, and the cat came home in Clay’s lap; he never moved an inch, he just purred with the engine, in tune. He happy-pawed him with his claws.

    God, you should have seen Tommy.

I wish you could have seen him.

At home, we hit the porch.

“Hey, Tommy!” I called, and he came, and his eyes were young and permanent. He nearly cried when he brought the cat close, the stripes against his chest. He patted him, he stroked him, he spoke to him without speaking.

When Rory and Henry both came out, they were both of them gorgeously right; they complained with jinx-like timing.

“Hey—how come Tommy gets a bloody cat?”

Clay looked away. I answered.

“Because we like him.”

“And you don’t like us?”

Soon we heard Tommy’s announcement, and Clay’s instantly blunt response: “I’m gonna call him Achilles.”

Abruptly, “No, not this one.”

Immediately, I looked at him.

I was stubborn and certainly unfrendly: No, Clay, Goddamn it, I said, if only with my eyes—but who did I think I was kidding? After all, Tommy held the cat like a newborn.

“Okay then,” he said, “Agamemnon,” and now it was Rory who stopped him.

“How about a name we can fucking pronounce?”

And still he paid homage to Penelope.

“What about Hector then?”

The champion of all the Trojans.

There were nods and murmured approvals.



* * *



—

Next morning, out in the racing quarter, there were turns I’d never known of, and we came to Epsom Road. Not far from the Lonhro Tunnel. The train line rattled above. It was one of those forgotten streets here, with a single forgotten field. The fences were mostly wayward. The trees were molting stringy barks; they towered and stood their ground.

    At the bottom was the patch of land; and grass, like fists, in the dust. There was a barbed wire fence, corroded. A shack had faded to greyness. And a caravan, old and weary; a drunk at three a.m.

I remember the sound of his footsteps then, how they slowed on the potholed road. Clay never slowed down at this point of a run; it was up and only up—and soon I understood. Once I’d seen the caravan, and the unkempt segment of land, I saw that logic didn’t live here, but mules most definitely did. I walked and spoke with disgust.

“You called the number from the Tribune, didn’t you?”

Clay walked purposefully on.

His breath was so quick to normalize, from running to everyday life.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And then we saw the sign.

Looking back, there was something right about it.

I can see it and say that now.

At the time, though, I was suspicious—highly annoyed, as we walked to the fence line—and the sign had once been white. Musty and dirty, it hung diagonally, from the middle of the highest wire—probably the greatest sign in the racing quarter, if not racing quarters worldwide.

In faded thick black marker pen, it said:





ENYONE CAUGHT


FEEDING THESE HORSES


WILL BE PROSECUTED!



“God,” I said, “look at that.”

How could a person spell anyone wrong and get prosecuted right? But that, I guess, was the racing quarter. That, and there weren’t any horses there, and for a while, it seemed, nothing else— But then he came rounding the shack.

Quite suddenly there was a mule’s head, and the expression that often defined him:

    He watched, he gleaned.

He communicated.

Like a supreme-yet-derelict being.

Already he had that what-the-hell-you-lookin’-at look on his long, lopsided face—till he’d watched a moment longer, and seemed to say, Oh, okay then.

In the pieces of dappled sunrise, he slowly gangled over.

Up close he was almost charming; he was talkative, though mute, and personable. His head was a texture, a scrubbing brush—and he ranged in careless colors, from sandy to rust throughout; his body, a dug-up farmland. His hooves were the shade of charcoal—and what were we supposed to do? How do you talk to a mule?

But Clay would take him on.

He looked in the eyes of the animal, which seemed so much like calves’ eyes, like babies sent for the slaughterhouse, pure sadness but so alive. He went to his pocket and reached for it; and it wasn’t the bright yellow peg.