The Mule Cart

Sammy Fisher was our new kid on the base, short, gangly skinny, blue black in skin tone, and he had a long skinny peanut shape head. He had a speaking voice with a scratchy coronet timbre and he ran everywhere. No one could keep up with him. He seemed to know every piece of kid doggerel there was from hey hey get out of my way I just got back from the USA to Donald Duck drives a garbage truck and other such poetic masterpieces. A regular repertoire of lyrical wonders.

He also had a father who knew how to put together odds and ends and make interesting toys. Sammy had a plastic biplane that his father had attached to a reel of light fish line. His dad mounted the reel on a casting rod. Sammy would stand out on the front lawn tossing that yellow and red biplane out on the end of a cast and the propeller of the thing would flutter a little. It wasn't a toy just anyone could master, one had to have a certain no nonsense flick of the wrist that could send the plane sailing out and give the reel a cool gnzzing sound.

But this wasn't a skill that was easy to pick up. Most often the rest of us would flick a feeble cast that resulted in the line spiralling loosely and dropping at our feet, the plane dropping a couple of feet away. The line didn't always tangle but we would have to stretch it out and rid it of bermuda weed and little green mace sticker things and dead grass. But Sammy, he had the cast down with a cool savoire faire, a cool juju some kids just have with toys of a similar category like inuit yo yos and those paddle and ball thingies.

The end of winter breaks gorgeous everywhere, and it was certainly golden when it poured through the Saw Tooth mountains above White Sands Missile Range that spring of 1968 . The real desert heat bludgeoning was still weeks off, what rain there was came as a warm sprinkling scented with a dash of high desert sage. The main cloud in our lives was the Vietnam War, and several of us had a father or mother in SE Asia. My pops had left for Long Binh Vietnam a couple of months before.

My sisters, my mother and I never thought we would get used to it, but of course we did. Hearts track over the missing presence the same way a tongue prods an abscessed tooth, absence is a pulpy feeling always bloody or dry. But wartime families adjust There were group terrors waiting for all of us, though, events we could never have anticipated. It was on a cool April evening that year that we were to encounter the first of many that would come that year.

Every street on White Sands was named after some kind of missile named after the folkloric gods of antiquity, Thor, Vanguard, Nike, Poseidon, Pluto, Ceres. Our families lived on the edge of base near the first of two water towers on a short cul de sac called La Crosse Street. My friends and I were the LaCrosse Street Sidewinders.

Insulated from the hazards of the civilian world, we could imagine ourselves to be rough toughs, and so our crowd were little wannabe badasses who called ourselves the Sidewinders. That was me, and the Yarborough Kids Walt,, Martin and Evie, Armando Llanos and his little brother Arturo, and now, Sammy Fisher and his younger sisters Deborah and Lisa, the three of them recently arrived from Buffalo, New York.

We of the LaCrosse Street Sidewinders were a contentious crew who went on long hikes and argued about who could beat who up; Batman or Daniel Boone? Was the star Betelgeuse named after the blood of bugs or a juice company owned by the rock band? What made golf balls bounce so high, super ball stuff or Lee Trevino's own special lick? All kinds of science was brought to bear in such discourse.

We were sauntering along, engaged in such heated discourse, someone remembered early evenings was when tarantulas and desert bats came out. So we decided to run just to make sure we made it home before we ran into any desert bats or tarantulas on their way out for the evening.

We were galloping around the corner to beat the spiders and bats when Deborah, Sammy Fisher's mid sister, came running out to greet us and shouted, "They killed Dr. King! They killed Dr. King!!" and burst into tears. We stopped and looked at each other in very real puzzlement.

"Who's Doctor King?" almost all of us asked, except for Sammy, who was hugging his sister. She pulled away from him and turned and looked at our bemused expressions. "Oh." said Sammy, quietly. He looked at all of us as though he were seeing us all for the first time, and I suppose we were looking back at him in much the same way.

Deborah reached over and tugged the sleeve of his polo shirt. "Come inside." she said. "Mom and dad sent me looking for you. They want us all to come inside." They took a couple of stumbling steps together, broke apart, and went over to their quarters. The rest of us continued ambling to the front yard at the Yarborough's house.

And we sat there maybe a minute before Walt Yarborough stepped out the front door of their house and shouted, "Guess what? Dad says a trouble making nigger got it right in the face tonight."

"Huh?" we all asked, still looking at each other confusedly.

Walt continued. "Dad says Martin Luther King went down to Memphis looking for trouble and someone finally gave him what he's always been looking for. Right in the face!" Walt extended his arm and his finger like he were aiming a pistol. "BLAM!!"

We all knew Mr. Yarborough was what he called "rebel born". The family was originally from Arkansas and Mr. Yarborough had leather rebel flag emblems sewn into all the seat covers of his Corvair. The Corvair had two bumper stickers, one was another rebel flag, and the other a cartoon of a pregnant "picaninny" type sister with the caption "Ah went all th' way wif LBJ". Mrs. Yarborough was a German war bride. Both parents drank a lot of beer mixed with V8 juice and their continual topic of conversation was the President, who they called Hose Nose Johnson. They were always complaining about "coloreds" and "coons". And Walt, he repeated whatever he heard his parents say.

We all went home to find the television was on nonstop the same way it sometimes was when something happened over in Vietnam. It had been like that during something over in Vietnam called Tet just a few weeks before. The news, blaring about a suspect named Ray something or other who drove a white mustang. Line sketches of a horse faced white man. Robert Kennedy announcing to a crowd that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed. Flames and fire in the streets of Baltimore and Kansas City and Chicago. Black people and police. Police and black people. Lyndon Johnson talking about King. Ronald Reagan talking about King, and hoping we could soon put all the sadness behind us now that baseball season was beginning.

"But what was he doing that someone killed him?" I asked Sammy as we sat out on the front step of his family quarters the next day. "He must have been doing something." I said.

"What was President Kennedy doing, Mike? They killed him, didn't they? He must have been doing something." Sammy said angrily. He looked like he was going to cry. Then he looked at me like I had maybe slapped him.

"You, Armando, Arturo, you know who Batman is, you know who Daniel Boone was. One dude isn't even real, the other dude is just on tv."

"Daniel Boone was real, though." I replied. "A long time ago."

"Yeah, he was real." Sammy agreed. " But like you said, a long time ago. I know he did something, but I don't know what he really did for anybody. I just know he was real. Killed bears and indians like on the show. I guess that was important. I just think it's funny you guys know who Daniel Boone was a long time ago, but you don't know anything about what Dr. King was doing. And you just asked me what he was doing wrong, like he must have been doing something wrong to get killed. That doesn't make any sense to me. Where I come from, in Buffalo, guys just a little older than me sometimes get killed. And they weren't doing anything wrong."

Sammy stood up, tore a branch off of the laurel bush next to the porch, pulled a couple of leaves off of it and looked at the spots where the leaves had been torn off. Then he threw it back into the bush and sat back down. He looked at me like I had a fly on my face or something.

"I can't quit thinking about how dumb that seems to me. I mean, not even what you say Walt said, Walt is dumb, I know that. His parents are kind of dumb too, some grown ups are dumb, I know that. They talk to him about Dr. King, different than how my mom and dad talked to me and Lisa and Deborah about him, but they talked to them about Dr. King. I know your dad is in Vietnam, Mike. But what do your folks talk to you about? Daniel Boone and Batman? What do your parents say? "

Sammy got up, pulled the screen door of his house open, turned and looked down at me and said, "I got to go in. Sometimes everything is too much to think about and right now I can't stop thinking and I don't know why. I'll see you later."

And he went inside, and he didn't talk much to me or any of the rest of us much that week.

The King funeral was a couple of days later, a humid drizzly day that song birds decided to boycott. All the air was still. Little more than the sounds of rain in the school yard and then along Nike Avenue, the occasional hiss of tires on wet pavement. But then, when I turned the corner of Nike onto LaCrosse street, a hum asserted itself. The steady drone of televisions, broadcasting a funeral a thousand miles away. The sound of a chorus singing a marching spiritual, on the battle field with my lord, coming out of streets uninterruptedly all down the way. The steady clunky rhythm of what sounded like an armful of two by fours being banged on a solid surface. an ongoing dull clatter that rattled on underneath all the quiet commentary. And the smell of wet honeysuckle, and the buzz of a flying insect somewhere, and the subdued drone down a distant street, and the announcer, and the rattle of wood on a solid surface.

All the steady patterns, coming through every screen door on La Crosse Street until I reached my house. And the sticky feel of my shirtsleeves on my skin damp from the warm drizzle. And the door drawn open on the stoop of my family's quarters, finally, to enter the shadowed living room where my mother and my sisters sat quietly taking the grainy rows, the fuzzy lines of the procession. And the image in focus, the slow tread of a middle aged brother in dark slacks wearing a short sleeved white shirt and tie, leading a mule in harness. And the shiny casket resting on the weather beaten surface of the back of the conveyance vehicle, the cart rattling on over the pavement, rattling on, the mule cart.