Redeye (26 page)

———

When we get to town I find out that the tourist trip plans are well under way along with all sorts of Billy Blankenship business. Set up for April. He had a display of relics and the mummies down at the train station. Turns out that the saddle maker's mama sits in her rocking chair all day beside the baby mummy, and when they stand her up to walk her around they have to take the little mummy along in its box. Used to there weren't no women or babies much out here. Now it's grandmas and mummies. Next it'll be penguins, or llamas. It's getting to be the world's trash heap. Pygmys.

Somebody had put a little headband on the mummy—hide that cross from the Mormons.

I stood around, looked at all the relics, the mummies, and then when Copeland stepped outside, I pulled up a chair and set down right beside his ugly little mama.

“What the hell you think you're doing?” I said.

She had on that bonnet and her mouth was all sunk in. She rolled her eyes to look up at me. Even though we were sitting side by side, she had to look up.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?” I said. They said she couldn't talk, but there was listening in her eyes. “I ought to sic my dog on you,” I said.

She looked at me.

“That baby is a mummy,” I said. “I ought to sic my dog on your baby.”

She looked at the baby.

“You're going to hell when you die,” I said. “And your baby, too.”

She looked back at me and smiled. “Kiss yo mammy's ass,” she said.

I got up and left her alone then. I figured all along she could talk.

———

“You getting a little scruffy, boy. Let's see can't we give you a little clipping. Where is them scissors? Now, you be still. Cut back the trees a little bit here so we can look down in the woods there and get them B flats and mash 'em. Good boy. There you go. That's right. Wups, there goes one . . . That a boy. You just take it easy. Here. See that? Taste good? You gone be interested in a little trip up onto that big old mesa? It might get cold up there in
April. We might have to get you a bedroll—just for you. Get you a pack mule. Maybe get you your own little donkey to ride. How'd you like that? Huh? How'd you like that?

“Think we can do a good job on him? He is a mean old man.

“Now, that looks pretty good. You hungry? What you hungry for? We got some greens, we got some potatoes, we got some elk. Here, take a little piece of that. You like that, don't you? I figured you would.

“How we ought to do it? Huh? How we ought to do it? Push him off a cliff. Come here, boy. Here, taste them greens. They good, ain't they? Don't you wish we had a little fried okra. Huh? Don't you wish we had some of that good old crisp fried okra. Yes sir. You
like
them greens don't you? Good for you. Well, old Cobb does too. Wups—there goes one. Let's get his ass. Wups. Hold still. Here. There. Was he good?

“Maybe we ought to rope old Thorpe up good and tight and take him down to that little island off the Texas coast where there's them clouds and clouds of mosquitoes. Tie him to a tree down by all that old brackish swamp water about sundown and cut his clothes all off and ride off a ways and build us a little smoky fire and rub on some fresh mosquito oil, and sit and watch that old man jerk on that rope hoping his heart out that he can run, run, run, from the clouds of mosquitoes settling down so gently and softly and quietly all over his body while he changes from a white man, all pale white in that late evening light, to a man turning brown—kind of reddish brown . . . then brown . . .
then black—right before our eyes. What you say, Redeye? What you say, boy?

“How about that little wife. What we gone do with her? You don't think she'll be along, do you? Ain't it too bad
we
couldn't be living with her down there by the river with another dozen or so wives for to run around and poke every night, with them cooking us greens and fried okra. Huh, boy? We'd get you thirty or forty little dog wives? Huh, boy?”

. . . while back in town, Blankenship and his associate, P.J. Copeland, continued their progressive inroads into the sometimes “backward” cultural ways of the Old West, the old days, when the most antiquated of ideas and methods held sway . . .

Mr. Copeland found out that rubbing a little Remove-All on the faces of the mummies livens them up some, makes them look better. So he got both of them to looking more lifelike than they had at first. It sort of turned their faces from black to brown. He told Mr. Blankenship that they could get a whole new line of business going with mummies. Mr. Blankenship said that was a good idea, that if his tourist business worked, we'd probably be bringing mummies out of the mesa right and left.

Mr. Pittman come into town and me and Mr. Blankenship and him walked from the train station down to the funeral home, which is between two canvas-top buildings, but it itself is full wood, new, and freshly painted a kind of dark yellow. They got it fixed up inside with three rooms for corpses. They've had the whole place filled on at least two occasions that I know of since they opened. They got a new shipment of supplies in a few days ago.

Mr. Blankenship wants to set up a place in the back to do the embalming, but Mr. Copeland says people wouldn't stand for that. You can't display people and embalm them in the same place, he says. So they got a shed-like place out back to embalm—a place besides Mr. Copeland's now—now that it looks like the business has started taking hold, as Mr. Copeland says, since they blew up the Chinaman.

When we started in across the porch, Mr. Blankenship says, “Naw, pard, let's leave the dog out here.”

So Mr. Pittman ties Redeye to a hitching post with his quirt.

There was a corpse displayed in the front room. We headed on back towards the office and had to walk right by the casket, which was Catholic. You could tell because there was some Mexicans in there mainly, but also because there was two big candles burning at each end of the casket, vigil candles.

“Hold on,” says Mr. Pittman. He pulls out a rolled smoke and lights it on the candle at the foot of the casket. A Mexican man sitting there says, “
Pendejo
,” or something like that.

“Ah,” said Mr. Pittman, “
Lo siento, señor.
”

We went on into the back. I was there to get two blankets for
Grandma Copeland and take them back to the train station. Mr. Blankenship told me where the blankets were, but I stood there and listened in for a minute. Mr. Pittman was saying he would like to get in on the experimental trip onto the mesa, that he had a eye disease, and while he wouldn't be no problem on the trip it might be to Mr. Blankenship's advantage to have somebody along who had a medical situation similar to blindness, just to help sell the whole idea to the public. He said archaeology was very important to him, and that he felt like him being along would be helpful. Tourists going out on the mesa to see cliff dwellings was about as sure a bet as anything he knew of, he said. And getting the Mormons in there was a good idea because they had a special interest in all that—and there was so many of them around, there was bound to be some money made that way.

We've weathered one heavy snow now, and after the roads cleared some, I had occasion to ride with Bumpy into Beacon City with a load of bridles for the Mormons. We stopped for dinner in the little house that has
MEALS
written on a sign on the porch. The woman who runs it is named Rebecca Dennings and is a Mormon friend of Bishop Thorpe's. We ate and talked about the weather mostly, and a few other things. I was hoping we'd have time to stop at Harmony Beasley's trading post across the river, also. They are very friendly and warm women.

After dinner, I stood and walked over to the window and looked out at the Bright Owl River down the slope. I could see the ferry making its way back across toward the near shore. Mr. Thorpe was poling it along. Aboard were three donkeys and a Mexican or an Indian. An Indian. Mr. Thorpe's head was down and he seemed to be hurrying so that he could get back and pick up the two wagons that were waiting, with another just pulling up. I looked at that wooden ferry, the sun glinting off the glass that was over the Bible and the
Book of Mormon,
and decided that on the tourist trip up to the top of the mesa in April—at the very latest—I would tell Bishop Thorpe whatever I felt guided by God and my own mind and Aunt Sallie to tell him. And I would see how Andrew Collier and I got along until then. I didn't want to lose them both. April was only a few months away. I'd be a good ways ahead of the year Bishop Thorpe had given me.

  ATOP THE MESA