Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review

MULE

by Brad Vice

     Owen O’Sheilds pulled his pickup into the teachers’ parking lot of Lurleen Wallace High School out of habit. Only after he killed the motor did he remember he no longer worked there, and so for a moment he considered moving to the general parking lot in the back where people parked for ballgames. But the school day was over, and most of the teachers had already gone home; he wasn’t taking up needed space. He stepped out of his truck and pulled his baseball cap down over his ears. It was raining. Alongside the wide awning that covered the school’s front doors, two yellow buses, 78 and 112, now on their second routes, had stopped just long enough to load the last students bound for home. The buses’ windshield wipers bounced back and forth as regular as metronomes. Owen knew the women that captained these bright yellow mammoths; they were teachers picking up extra money, both of them near retirement age. He raised his hand in a wave as he ducked under the awning, water trailing down the aluminum overhead. Safe from the rain, he took off his cap and entered the dimly lit corridor. The school buses rolled away even before the steel doors shut behind him, and the rumble of the departing engines detonated a strong surge of déjà vu that left him woozy.
     On unsure legs, Owen walked down the sloping hallway toward the auditorium where the cheerleaders assembled in the afternoons. When he reached the entrance, he quietly peered inside. Immediately he spied Amber, his stepdaughter, standing at the base of a human pyramid of lovely teenagers. Owen was glad his stepdaughter, tall and statuesque like her mother, was not one of those 98-pound pixie girls the male cheerleaders flung up in the air like rag dolls, looking up their skirts every chance they got. He had married two years ago after a lifetime of bachelorhood, but it hadn’t taken Owen long to learn to play the part of the worried father. Amber was attractive and outgoing, and when he’d worked at the school, he had seen for himself that the boys followed her around the hallways like a pack of love-addled hounds. Owen entered the auditorium and leaned against the wall, hoping to observe his new daughter tumble and cheer awhile before he reached his final destination, the maintenance office.
     When the pyramid disassembled there was a great deal of squealing and clapping. In the midst of the jangle, Amber caught sight of Owen and, without the least concern for what others might think, ran toward him full-speed, tackling him with a hug that made him flush with both love and fear. Why was he afraid? Maybe it was because he could feel the ample weight of his stepdaughter’s breasts pressing into his chest and it embarrassed him that he noticed. Maybe he was just afraid that soon the hugs would have to end. He had never been a father before, and it seemed sad that soon Amber would be grown and married, gone away before he got a chance to really be her daddy. Owen patted Amber gently on the back and looked up to see the women’s coach frowning in their direction. Owen gave her a sheepish wave. Until his retirement a few short months ago, Owen had been one of the vice principals of Lurleen Wallace High. Having once been her boss, it annoyed him that the women’s coach felt free to frown at him openly.
     "What are you doing here?" Amber asked, untangling her limbs from his.
     "Oh, I came to see Mr. Amos. I loaned him some tools I need to get back. I thought I’d come and look in on y’all’s practice before I hunted him down."
     "Did the stud come today?"
     Owen felt a tic of jealousy move through his body. He hoped it had not registered on his face. "Oh, yeah. He’s there, running around like he owns the place."
     The new horse had arrived at the stables only a few hours before. The stud was solid black, stood sixteen hands high and weighed just over half a ton. His chest was broad and smooth like a bar of iron a blacksmith had beaten to flat perfection; his long, muscular legs dovetailed into his haunches like the work of a master carpenter. The horse’s arrogant, marbled head, a model of equine conformation, looked as if it belonged atop the dark square of a chess set. Within the aquiline skull, behind the long, fine lashes, the stud’s roving eyes fixed upon everything about him, whether living or dead, with a suspicion that bordered on hate. When he looked at Owen, Owen could feel the hate radiating off the brute like heat from a stove eye. This horse, Owen had thought, was going to be every bit as dangerous as working around a running lawnmower.
     "I can’t wait to see him. I’ll bet he’s beautiful. Just beautiful."
    "He’s something, all right," said Owen, gently pushing her away. "You better fall back in formation or Coach Simmons will make us both run laps."
     Amber gave Owen a grin that lit up her freckles. Then quick as a minnow, she darted back into the school of teenagers in their deep blue-and-white uniforms. Owen watched them tumble and clap as he walked the perimeter of the auditorium. Just before exiting, he witnessed Amber boost a tiny redheaded girl up on her solid shoulders. The redhead held her left hand up to her eyes like a visor, as if she were in the process of observing some brave new landscape and had discovered there "Wildcats! Wildcats! Go Wildcats! Yeaaaa!"
     "Wildcat," he thought, maybe that would be the name Amber would choose to give the stud. Amber named all the animals on the farm, the horses, the heifers, the cats, the dogs, the hutch of goslings Owen had given her for Christmas. She spent many long hours picking out the perfect name for each critter and even bought a book of baby names to help her with the process. But whatever they ended up calling the stud, Owen knew the horse’s real name was "Trouble."

UPON ARRIVAL, THE stud had backed out of the trailer kicking and screaming so violently that there was concern he might injure himself. Sue, Amber’s mother, had decided not to put him in a stall or even the corral until he had a chance to calm down. She turned him loose in the small green pasture behind the stables, where the stallion ran full-speed through the misting rain toward one edge of the barbed-wire fence, only to stop inches away from the line, spin about like a dancer, kicking sheets of rainwater off the fescue under his hooves, and then race toward the opposite stretch of wire.
     "Let him run the evil out of himself," Sue had said, taking off her Stetson-style patrolman’s hat and shaking the water off the plastic rain guard. She adjusted her tight blond braid. This was how she dressed for work when she went on ride-a-longs with the Tuscaloosa County Sheriff’s Department. She had on her brown-and-yellow slicker, too, with the five-point star on the breast. "When he’s good and tired we can get a fresh start."
     "How long you reckon that’s going to be?" asked Owen. He took his glasses off and cleaned the vapor condensing on the lenses with the blue bandana he kept in the hip pocket of his jeans.
     "I don’t know. A horse built like him, could be a long time," said Sue smiling, clearly as pleased with herself as she was with the stud.
     Owen watched as the stud ran along the entire perimeter of the fence. Each time the horse’s running room evaporated, he whinnied and screamed as if part of the world had been snatched away from him.
     "I still don’t know why you’d want to buy a horse like that. He’s heartbreak waiting to happen."
     "He’s goddamn gorgeous is what he is, Double O. The stud fees alone will pay for him in a couple years. Besides, I’ve told you, Amber wants a foal out of Mix to help raise this summer, and I aim to give her one. She’s had Mix her whole life. Her daddy gave her that horse when she was ten, and pretty soon Mix will be too old to breed. Besides, it’ll give Amber something more constructive to do than lay out at the lake and talk on her cell phone all summer." Sue shoved her fists into the pockets of her jacket as if to say — there, period, end of conversation.
     They had been having this argument ever since Sue had spotted the stud in the online version of the Quarter Horse Trader. Around Christmas Sue had started talking about early retirement from her job as a psychologist with social services. Now that Owen’s pension checks were coming in every month, she thought they had the resources they needed to turn the stables into a real horse farm, to start training, breeding and giving lessons fulltime. But to have a real horse farm, Sue thought she had to have a badass in the stables. Owen had told her he was all in favor of her retiring (his nerves weren’t what they used to be, and he worried when she was out in the field), but not if it meant trading one dangerous job for another.
     Seeing the stud wheel about the pasture, Owen said, "He’s vicious as all hell, Sue. It’ll be like boarding a death-row convict."
      "He’s three, Double O, and high-strung. He’ll calm down soon enough." She took her right hand out of her slicker and made a motion as if she were shooing a fly.
     Owen knew he should let it drop but couldn’t. "Well, I’m not sure I’d want my daughter messing around with anything as hellacious as what’s liable to come out of that son-of-a-bitch."
     Sue went cross-eyed. "Yeah, well, she’s not your daughter. So let me worry about that." She winced as soon as she said it, but she then set her jaw, refusing to let regret take hold of her.
     Owen managed to put his glasses on and turn away from her in one fluid motion. "All right, she’s your daughter. He’s your horse," Owen said over his shoulder. "But when he tears this place down around y’all’s heads don’t blame me. Stand out here like a turkey in the rain and marvel all you want; I’m heading for the house." Owen tromped off, leaving Sue to unhitch the gooseneck trailer and the brake lights from the ton truck by herself.

AS SOON AS Owen stepped out of the auditorium, cold rain slap-ped him in the face, and the memory of Sue’s barb angered and frustrated him. The sky was almost black now. Outside he looked across the student parking lot toward the field house; beyond it the football coach was making the team duck-walk around the goal post. On a rainy day like today, Owen hoped the bastard would have sense enough to bring them in soon. Most of the team would still be worn and frayed from August’s relentless two-a-day practices. He knew that a winning team had to be tough, but the coach was a silly son-of-a-bitch that literally didn’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain. "Another turkey," Owen said to himself out loud. "He’ll give the whole team pneumonia." Owen disliked the coach. He was a belligerent, fat man whose manner had often forced Owen to counsel with outraged parents. The coach’ s contract also stipulated that he got full teaching wages in the summer for simply cutting the grass. The school could barely pay for toilet paper, and the fat bastard made more than Owen had just for riding around on a John Deere on Friday afternoons.
     The maintenance shed was connected to the field house where Mr. Amos, the head custodian, kept his office. But Owen knew Mr. Amos would be busy now, directing his clean-up crew. Owen walked across the parking lot and entered the other side of the building, stepping into a row of empty classrooms. The hallways echoed with his footsteps. This building was as familiar to him empty as it was full of students; it was a lonely thing, a school without children.
     The last three years of his career had been the worst. He’d quit teaching social studies and had accepted a position as one of the vice principals in order to up the payout of his retirement checks. Being in administration meant he’d lost his summers off. He was used to breaking a sweat in the hot months and not sitting meekly in the air-conditioned office playing phone tag with wheedling textbook reps and running defense for the principal when relations with the superintendent were strained.
     Owen would have much rather been out in the open field on his blue Ford tractor, bush-hogging and cutting hay. His father died the same year he became vice principal, so Owen had sold the old man’s last few head of cattle that had grazed clean the old cotton fields of his youth. He then contracted with Weyerhaeuser to set the open pasture out in pine to go alongside the 120 acres of hardwood that kept the farm hidden from highway traffic. Soon after he began the thuggish business of running a school: checking lockers, dispensing licks with a thick wooden paddle and meeting with irate parents that often as not would threaten to whip his ass right in front of their child. Nothing about the job, other than the money, was satisfying. Those last three years, he learned the names of only the worst students, those troubled young creatures, most of them drugged and abused, that paced back and forth through the halls like angry zoo animals, dreaming of the day they’d grow old enough to drop out. Only Sue had kept him together in the first year, still battling the grief over his father. Sue always encouraged him, telling him how important his job was — he saved lives, she said.
     "No, that’s what you do. I just keep them pieced together with bubble gum and pipe cleaners from eight in the morning ‘til three-fifteen in the afternoon and hope they make it back alive the next day." Even then he knew, strictly speaking, this wasn’t true. He had broken up knife fights, performed CPR on a basketball player with an undiagnosed heart condition, even saved a whole bus full of kids once when he’d spotted torn tread on the right back tire. But mostly he watched them, watched them the way a sheepdog watches a herd, silent and serious. Rarely a day went by when he didn’t spot the germ of some hidden danger waiting to blossom.
     But Sue was the real life saver. She worked in tandem with social services, the sheriff’s department and the county schools. When there was a report of child abuse, Sue was the investigator who decided whether the kid should be removed from the home immediately or undergo further observation. When a child was removed from the home by force, Sue was there to comfort the stunned boy or girl about to be delivered into foster care and, if possible, to reason with the parents almost always threatening violence. If she couldn’t reason with them, she would help arrest them. Though her salary was funded by social services, she had trained in the police academy in Tuscaloosa and had been deputized. She kept a badge in her wallet, a Kevlar vest in the extended cab of her Toyota Takoma and a nine millimeter Glock in the glove compartment.
     After the removal of an older child from an abusive home, Sue would visit Owen’s office in order to apprise the school of any potential problems. After his first meeting with Sue Bonny, Owen had done some asking around about her and discovered she was Spencer Bonny’s widow, the fire captain that had died of a heart attack a few years back at the West Alabama Fair Grounds. When Sue made her follow-up report concerning a father molesting one of the girls in Mrs. Upright’s homeroom, Owen enticed her out on a lunch date with the promise of selling her the hay in his father’s barn for cheap. The talk turned from hay to the price of feed, then to people they knew in common at the co-op, then the other farmers that lived in Tuscaloosa County, what they raised and how they treated their kids.

AFTER SUE HAD hurt Owen’s feelings earlier that afternoon, he had tromped off around the corral, then paused briefly at the mound of pine chips he’d recently purchased to line the stalls. Damn, why hadn’t he put a tarp on them this morning before it started to drizzle? Owen hurried toward the stables, relieved to be out of the wet air. Mix, Amber’s Blood Bay Mare, stuck her nose out of the stall and peered out intently. Owen had forgotten to give her her oats. Since Amber had cheerleading practice in the afternoons, Owen would have to feed the horses and muck out the stalls until football season was over. Annoyed, Owen walked past Mix. As he came close, Mix retreated back into the darkness of her stall, as did Sue’s gelding, Desoto. Unlike the stud, these were friendly creatures who should have been made more friendly by hunger. They could probably tell just by the seismic quality of Owen’s footsteps that Owen was pissed. Everything people said about horses being sensitive was true. No matter what their individual demeanors, horses didn’t do well around intense feelings. Even pure joy could send them into a quivering panic. God made the horse an emotional barometer.
     Owen made his way to the middle of the stables and unhooked the chain to the feed room. The tarp was high on the top shelf, along with various vitamins, powders and food supplements, all of them advertising essential amino acids or glossy coats. The plywood shelf stretched out like a mantel over the ancient Frigidaire deep freeze, dead now twenty years, but still a good, airtight place to keep feed from going stale. On each side of the freezer there were stacks of empty Ripsnorter Sweetfeed sacks. Owen reached for the folded tarp and tucked it under his arm, exited the feed room and made his way back down the long corridor to the end of the stables. His jaw clenched as he braced for the unpleasant pin drops of rain that pelted his face like birdshot. By the time he covered the pine chips, his baseball cap was wet and his glasses had fogged up again.
     Already he was replaying the argument in his head. He did not expect Sue to run after him, nor did he expect she would find a quiet moment in the evening or the next day to apologize. He had realized only after they had married that Sue never apologized for anything. If he acted hurt, she would resent the fact she’d hurt him and hold that against him, too. Not your daughter — damn, what an ugly thing to say. He loved Amber, loved her as much as Sue would let him. Sometimes it seemed like Sue tried to keep them distant.
     Once when Amber and Sue had returned from an all-day trail ride, Amber had tutored Owen in the proper way to way to bathe a horse. "You can’t turn the hose on one like a dog. You’ll scare the fool out of her. You have to distract her. You have to sing to her."
     "Sing?" Owen pointed to the five-gallon pail full of warm water and laundry detergent at Amber’s feet. "I couldn’t carry a tune in that bucket right there."
     "It don’t matter what you sing or how you sing it. The important thing is you take the horse’s mind off the fact you are fooling with her. Give her a tune to pay attention to so she’s not always looking for boogers in the shadows."
     "That’s easy for you to say. You’re in the choir. Didn’t your friend Carmen ask you to sing at her wedding?"
     "Harmon," Amber corrected. "Here I’ll sing with you."
     And so they sang the only song Owen knew all the words to, "Amazing Grace." With a wavering but happy harmony, they soaped and lathered the perplexed horse. For an encore they sang the first verse of "If Heaven Ain’t a Lot Like Dixie" as Amber held Mix’s halter and Owen hosed her off like a car.
     "We had a good time washing Mix today, didn’t we, Daddy-O?" Amber announced at dinner later that night. She balled up her fist and kneaded it into Owen’s upper arm. Despite a volley of good-natured tomboy punches, Owen managed to serve his plate. Daddy-O — it had all the makings of a fine nickname, something more intimate than Mr. O’Shields, something less awkward than Owen, but Sue didn’t react well to the Daddy and the O getting mixed up together, and she gave the girl a withering look that wilted the salad and turned the hamburger steak grease-cold.
     Still, Owen was just starting to feel like the three of them belonged together. Not your daughter — hadn’t Sue realized how low saying something like that would make him feel? Why hadn’t he snapped back, Well then, why am I paying for your daughter to go to college next year? But Owen had never been that quick on his feet, had he? It angered him that he could only think of the right things to say long after the right time to say them had passed. Not your daughter, not your daughter — the words reverberated in the cave-like hollows of his imagination. Sometimes it was hard to believe that Sue was a psychologist. Or maybe it wasn’t, maybe she knew exactly how low saying something like that would make him feel.
    Damn, he was daydreaming in the rain. Owen unfolded the tarp like a bedsheet and covered the mushy chips, saving them from further saturation. Then he trotted back to the safety of the stables. He stood for a moment in the mouth of the wide double doors and cleaned his glasses again. Because of the corral, he could see neither Sue nor the stud, so he simply watched the rain grow heavy as he rubbed the bandana in soft circles around his bifocals.
      Sue’s first husband, Spencer, would have probably slapped her face for her if she had ever talked to him so ugly. Owen had taught Spencer seventh grade world history thirty years ago — Owen’s very first class. Spencer Bonny, he’d been third on the roll, right behind Anders and Askew. Spencer had been a hellion even then, unruly and wild as a cartoon cowboy. Once he’d brought a cap gun to school in his lunch box and held up the lunchroom lady that took up dollars for hot lunches and milk. That was back in the day before you suspended kids for things like that. Back then you just beat the hell out of them with a thick piece of wood and set them to washing the school’s windows or helping Mr. Amos pick up trash after the final bell.
     Still, Spencer couldn’t have been all bad. He’d built this place with his own two hands: the house, the barn, the corral, the stables — the carpentry was first rate, not so much as one jagged splinter hanging off the lumber to mar the workmanship, not so much as one loose piece of tin atop the stables to disrupt the even tone of the rain beating down over his head. Owen looked up at the high rafters where the wood and tin joined. Faintly he heard mewling over his head, tiny cries echoing off the underbelly of the roof. High in the honeycomb of the hay, the cats that lived in the loft were hungry, too.
     Owen again walked past Mix and Desoto, past the tack and dressing area, back to the feed room. He opened the lid of the old deep freeze. Using a Red Diamond coffee can as a measuring cup, he scooped out a level quart of sweet feed and another of oats and deposited them in one of the empty gallon ice-cream buckets at the bottom of the freezer. The rich smell of industrial molasses wafted up into the damp air, as if a cloud of syrup were just about to accumulate overhead.
     Desoto, as always, knocked Owen out of the way to get his feed. But Mix waited for Owen to leave before she would lower her muzzle into the trough. She was a shy creature, and Owen cringed at the thought of the rough way the stud would come after the mare when Sue had her bred. They would probably tie her to a tree at the edge of the pasture or even shank her in the dressing room and allow the brute to rape her there. In a strange way, Mix’s refusal to eat with him in the stall made Owen feel worse, like a lonely Adam exiled from the garden; even the beasts of the field had withdrawn fellowship. "Good ole Spence was a real horseman through and through," Sue had told Owen on more than one occasion, and Owen couldn’t help but feel that in some subtle way he was being unfavorably compared. Spencer had died with his spurs on, so to speak, from a massive heart attack during the barrel races at the West Alabama Horse Show. His stallion had dragged his limp body round and round the sandy rink of the PARA fairgrounds until one of the line judges could catch the quarter horse and unhook the dead man’s boot from the stirrup. Rumor had it he was drunk. Still Spencer had made it through school, made a fire captain out of himself and was insured to the gills — he’d left enough to pay for most of the land and the property. The new stud was probably the son of a bitch’s reincarnation come back to claim everything he’d purchased in death.
     Owen fed the boarded horses on the other side of the stables. Two gaited paints, a pure-bred Arabian and a pathetic little Shetland pony, fat, old, practically oozing glue. A rich doctor had bought the pony for his little girl, and they came to ride it about twice a year. Still, the checks for the boarding fees came on time. The other three belonged to deputies who worked with Sue. Most of the cops were hunters who contented themselves with expensive rifles and four-wheelers. Those that fished bought boats. The few that remained bought horses they couldn’t afford. The checks for their boarding fees floated in haphazardly, if at all. Nothing Owen’s pension couldn’t absorb, but he resented having to foot the bill for them. Owen guessed he should be grateful, as the horses’ owners looked out after Sue. He was afraid to complain — if he did, and something bad happened to her, well, he’d never forgive himself, would he?
     It was growing dark in the stables. Owen flipped the light switch that electrified the barn near the back doors. The raw light bulb dangling over the dressing area in the middle of the stables came alive, and the old hi-fi system in the saddle room flooded the hall with music. The music kept the horses calm, and for this reason the dial never wavered from the country oldies station, not that Owen would have had it any other way. Smooth crooners like Willie Nelson and George Jones worked wonders on the horses’ nerves. You couldn’t tune in to any of that new Nashville crap with all the drums and synthesizers. You might as well light a string of Black Cat firecrackers and toss it under the horses’ hooves. Owen turned over a plastic five-gallon bucket, sat down and listened to Bobbie Gentry sing "Ode to Billie Joe." The song took him back to his childhood. He had been raised on a cotton farm, where he plowed and chopped his way through the late 1940s and much of the fifties until the boll weevils ruined everything. Though he knew relatively little of horses, Owen knew everything there was to know about mules. Often as an adult, trapped in the air-conditioned nightmare of his office, he had wished for a pair of mules and forty acres of terraced topsoil to plow. Strangely enough, mules had more horse-sense than horses and were usually less stubborn, certainly less flighty. You didn’t have to serenade a mule to make him stand still. A mule understood both the carrot and the stick and between the two you could form a more-or-less permanent relationship. A mule could be mean as hell, for sure, but once you established a working contract with them, it seldom changed. A certain amount of trust developed. With Sue and her horses, things were always up for renegotiation. One minute you could be rubbing ‘Soto’s nose and the next, if you weren’t careful, your hand would be in his mouth.
     When Owen was a teenager, he had watched as his fifteen-year-old cousin Sarah, a voluptuous brunette, had her breast bitten off by his father’s mare, Sugar, a loveable old nag named for her sweet disposition. Sarah and her parents had come to visit after church one Sunday, and after dinner Sarah and Owen gathered up green apples to feed the graying old mare. They fed Sugar apple after apple, until a sour green froth coated the fine gray whiskers on her muzzle and chin. Holding the very last apple, Sarah extended her hand to the horse’s lips, forgetting to hold her hand flat the way Owen had shown her. Sugar nosed the apple to the ground, then playfully darted her nose up under Sarah’s arm and clamped down onto her left breast. There was a scream and Owen was surprised to discover it was coming from him. The rest was a strange mix of blood, ripping cloth and soft tissue. Almost like a silent movie, Owen remembered Sarah gripping her chest as if in the throws of a heart attack. Terrified, the horse stood back on her heels and trembled, the green froth on her mouth now pink with blood, the very sheen of a perfect and healthy lung.
     Owen sat through two more sets of oldies before he had finished formulating his plan. When he finally rose, he closed the double doors at the back entrance and said, "Goodbye, Mix. Goodbye, ‘Soto. I got to see a man about a mule."

"MR. O’SHIELDS?"
     Owen turned from the window from which he had been staring. Behind him stood Mr. Amos, the maintenance man, shouldering a hundred-foot-long extension cord. His navy blue coveralls, adorned with grease, seemed to shimmer around his dark flesh.
     "Hey there, Mr. Amos."
     "Why, Mr. O., it’s good to see you." Mr. Amos was one of those ageless black men who could be anywhere from 60 to a hundred. He had tiny, almost gritty-looking creases around his eyes, as if his sockets needed to be recaulked. When the janitor extended his hand, Owen noticed the flesh on his palms looked like shrimp. He had not shaken the man’s hand in almost thirty years, not since the day Owen was hired as a history teacher.
     "I would’ve allowed you’d seen enough of this place."
     "Maybe I have." Owen careened his neck around wistfully. "But I came to see you."
     "Did you now?"
     Later, in the maintenance office, Mr. Amos offered Owen one of the two padded folding chairs next to his desk. "Would you like a drink?"
     Before Owen could even form a disapproving expression, the old man had unlocked the bottom drawer to his big, steel, green desk, World War II army surplus no doubt, and set a bottle of Thunderbird on the flat surface which, other than the bottle, contained only an old rotary phone and a framed picture of Mr. Amos’ ten grown children. Mr. Amos’ drinking was the only case of alcoholism at Lurleen Wallace that every school administrator, including Owen, willfully ignored. It was easy to ignore, for it was as invisible as Mr. Amos himself.
     "Sure. What the hell." Owen grinned. "What are they going to do, fire me?"
     Mr. Amos selected a conical paper cup from the water-cooler and filled it with a shot of cheap wine. Mr. Amos did not seem to drink because he was depressed or angry. In fact, Mr. Amos was the only employee of the school that never had a dark word concerning the state proration of funds that had prevented any of them from getting a raise in the last five years. Of all the people Owen had worked with on a daily basis, Mr. Amos was the only one he actually liked.
     "I was wondering if you might like to go in on a little business venture with me."
     Both Owen and Mr. Amos threw back a swallow of the cheap wine. Afterward Mr. Amos shrugged. "What did you have in mind?"
     "I got a hundred-and-fifty acres in hardwood up on my daddy’s old place, but I don’t want it clear cut. I want the big trees skidded out. I want somebody to help me that knows how to reason with mules. You ’re one of the only fellows left I know of that’s familiar with that kind of work a-tall."
     Mr. Amos looked thoughtfully upward toward the ceiling. Owen choked down his wine and made a face. Before he knew it, Mr. Amos had topped off Owen’s Dixie cup. "I haven’t fooled with mules for a coon’s age," said Mr. Amos. "Not since I took this job here. Last one we owned was called Chicken."
     "Chicken? Why’d you call him that?"
     "It was a jenny. She was bad to eat chickens. She had a solid black nose and they say that will make one mean as possum fuck. Any chicken that managed to toddle into her stall got its head bit off."
     "Yeah, we had one that would do that very thing. We called him Frank." Owen took another sip of his wine, momentarily studying the tan imprint of vines and flowers running the length of the paper cup in his hand. "He even got holt of a half grown cat one time and bit a chunk out of her back. He wouldn’t let nobody plow him but my daddy. If one of us kids got behind him, he’d either run away with us or just lie down like he was sick. When I was thirteen, I quit dinner early and hooked him up to the singletree by myself, then I got behind him and said ‘step up,’ and I slapped him across the neck with the reins. He laid his ears back and sulled up. I told him again, ‘Step up, mule,’ but he just stood there. I told him a third time, and when I did I laid my daddy’s hickory walking stick across his skull. It took him by surprise all right. He fell to his knees, and I whacked him again hard enough that the shock made my fingers ache. When everybody came out of the house from dinner, me and Frank were laying down rows straight as a plumb line. After that me and Frank had no problems. We were pals."
     Mr. Amos smiled at Owen’s story and then pointed at the picture of his family on his desk. "Too bad you can’t do children thataway."
     "Or wives," said Owen.
     For a moment, he felt proud to remember a time when he just wasn’t going to stomach feeling small and insignificant anymore. He was thirteen, damn it, and it was time for folks to listen to him, to recognize the fact that he carried weight and importance in the world, even if the first to make this realization was only Frank, a cranky and embittered chicken-killing mule. But breaking Frank had a ripple effect. From that day on Owen had an easier time looking people in the eye, his father and brothers spoke to him with less condescension in their voices, his mother served him coffee at breakfast.
     "I never heard you tell that one, Mr. O.," said the janitor, topping off the Dixie cups once again.
     "Mr. Amos, this is the first time I’ve thought of that story in thirty years. It’s like remembering a dream. If you hadn’t said anything about a mule killing chickens, it would be like it never happened."
     "But it did," said the old man.
     Owen took another sip from his Dixie cup. "Yeah, I guess it did at that." The two swapped mule stories for over an hour. When they were both good and drunk, they agreed to meet the next Saturday to drive up to a stock yard in Chattanooga that specialized in mules to select a span. They shook on it.
     When Owen left the building, he was surprised to find the stars were out. His truck sat alone in the empty parking lot. He couldn’t go home like this. Then he remembered the hungry cats mewling around in the hay and decided to sober up at the Wal-Mart. On a whim he invested in a chainsaw, a $600 Husquvarna with a twenty-inch nose bar and a Halloween-orange crank case. The purchase made him feel like he’d made a commitment to the mule-skidding operation, that it wasn’t all drunk talk. It felt like he was stepping into his own. For two years now Owen had been fixing Sue’s fences and cutting her hay; he wouldn’t have had it any other way. And yet, he wondered if he was doing much more than that. Okay, so she was independent, he knew that when he married her. But having an expensive, wild stud in the stables, she hadn’t come up with that all on her own. That was Spencer’s dream, and Owen wasn’t sure how long he could live in another man’s dream, especially one he found so dangerous.
     Owen drove home slowly, his hands at the ten and two o’clock positions. The alcohol had been ebbing out of his bloodstream ever since he’d left the school, and it left him with an ache behind his eyes. The white stripes in the median of the road were blurry, and they rose up to meet him faster than he expected. It made him feel nervous and out of control. Owen almost ran off the road when the sirens of an ambulance interrupted his concentration. At first he thought it was a police officer pulling him over. When he saw no blue lights in the rearview, he realized it must be an ambulance, but he still couldn’t tell if the sound was in front of him or behind. Eventually the white-and-red lights appeared ahead on a hill in the distance. As it passed, he couldn’t help but imagine Amber inside, her left breast lost in the black maw of the stud.
     Owen gave a small prayer of thanks when he pulled into the drive. He got out of the truck and walked around the passenger’s side door, hefting the fifty-pound bag of Special Kitty cat food up on his left shoulder and grabbing hold of the chainsaw with his right hand. Odd that the lights were on in the barn and not in the house. By this time, Owen figured Sue and Amber would be watching TV in their bedclothes. As he tromped closer to the stables he heard singing, but it sounded funny, like maybe someone had finally turned the dial away from the old honky-tonk station to something classical. The notes were clear and articulated even though Owen couldn’t understand the words.
     By the time he made it to the entrance of the stables, Owen understood that the music wasn’t coming from the radio but from Amber. She was singing "Ave Maria," the song she had sung at her friend Harmon’s wedding. As Owen peered inside, he saw both Amber and Sue standing on either side of the stud. His ears drooped in a sleepy manner; his wet, languid body was still and calm as the women’s hands stroked and caressed his neck with their curry combs. Owen listened intently outside the door to the glorious music, each note lodging into his heart. His entire life he had waited for a family that would love him for his slow and steady ways, and now he had come back home to find them worshiping at the foot of a dangerous idol. Owen’s first impulse was to burst into the room and admonish them like an Old Testament prophet. But what good would that do? That would only drive them further away. The stud would have to hurt one of them for Sue to apologize to him now. In his mind he conjured up an image of the stud becoming spooked by a sudden shadow or noise, then rearing up and trampling both of them with his powerful hooves. Instead of music, Owen longed to hear his daughter scream. He ached to hear his wife wail with sorrow and regret. At that moment, it was only the mule in him that prevented him from pulling the cord on the chainsaw and announcing his presence with its gleaming, jealous teeth.