“How do you stop a fish from smelling?” he asked and before anyone could come up with a quip, he said. “Cut off its nose.”
He dipped the bass fillets in cornmeal and fried them in last night’s bacon grease, which he had saved in a can.
“What has big sharp little teeth, a tail, scales, and a trunk?” he asked and immediately answered. “Pikey fish going on vacation. Y’all are slow. Maybe retarded.”
The pike he just gutted and roasted whole on crisscrossed green sticks. The New Faith boys all brought jars of their own pickled peppers and onion relish. It did make everything taste interesting when salt and pepper were scarce.
Elam had discovered a thicket of raspberries growing up along the roadside and we filled our hats with them as Minor cooked off the fish. We packed up directly after this lunch and resumed walking our horses toward the city, as well fed as if we had been home.
Twenty-eight
The afternoon weather resolved into an uncomfortable drizzle, driven by hot winds out of the south. I had an old ripstop nylon poncho from my collegiate camping days, but it had lost its waterproofing. We began to enter what had been the suburbs emanating out of the capital city, Albany, and its neighbor, Troy, and a handful of other industrial towns in and around the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers. We planned to cross the Mohawk at Waterford on the railroad bridge there.
Waterford began its existence as the gateway to the Erie Canal system, the first stretch of which was built to bypass several waterfalls on the Mohawk River. But the locks there no longer functioned because they were rebuilt and enlarged in the early twentieth century to open and close on electric power. Now there was no way to operate them. They were too big for human or animal power.
We began to encounter more people now, inhabiting the ruined suburbs, the lawns replaced by potato patches, the split-levels and raised ranches turned into hovels now that the electric amenities and the plumbing were out of order, including the wells and toilets. Ill-clad, scrawny children played in mud puddles in the broken streets and stopped to blink at us as we passed on our horses. When Brother Minor offered up one of his jokes, they just gaped. By and by, we crossed an old commercial highway strip with its complement of dead gigantic discount stores, strip malls, and defunct burger barns. The buildings were all in various stages of disassembly as materials of value were stripped from themcopper pipes and wires, aluminum sashes, windowpanes, steel girders, and cement blocks. The parking lots seemed especially desolate with nothing in them but mulleins and sumacs poking through the cracked pavements.
At Waterford, the bridge connected two bluffs about a hundred feet above the surface of the Mohawk River. It was one of those engineering marvels from the early twentieth century that could never be replaced now, any more than the Coliseum in Rome could be rebuilt by the most talented subjects of Frederick Barbarossa. Near the northern approach to the bridge, we came upon a man beating his donkey with a long-handled whip. The donkey was hitched to a cart full of bricks and made a terrible racket with each blow. The man, a hulking, well-fed brute, wore a pair of homespun pants tucked into crude ankle boots and a chewed up straw hat that was little more than crown. His belt was a rope. Shirtless in the drizzle, his wet muscles bulged as he laid into the donkey, which was as starved-looking as the man was stout. The donkey already had several bleeding stripes on his back.
“That ain’t right,” Brother Minor said as we came upon the scene. Minor rode up to the man. The rest of us hung back.
“Afternoon,” Minor said.
“What do you want?” the man said, drawing back his whip hand as if not to miss a stroke.
“You ever hear this one?” Minor said to him. “There’s this here zebra lived her whole life at the zoo, and the kindly old zookeeper decided to put her out to pasture on a farm in her last years.”
“What the hell—” the man said.
“Just listen up, you’ll like this.”
“You get the hell out of my sight,” the man said to Minor and turned to lay on his stroke. The donkey cried out as the lash fell.
“So, this here zebra was so excited,” Minor said, without skipping a beat, “when she got onto that farm and was amongst all these strange new animals. And she come up on this big fat brown and white critter. `Hey thar, I’m a zebra, what’re you?’ `I’m a cow,’ it says. `That so? What do you do?’ the zebra asks. `I make milk,’ the cow says-
“I’m warning you,” the man with the whip said.
“So what do you know?” Minor said. “Next this fluffy white ball of feathers steps by. What’re you?’ the zebra asks. Why, I am a chicken and I lay eggs,’ it says. So next, what do you know, the zebra sees an animal that looks exactly like her only without no stripes, and the zebra asks, What’re you-?"’
“Didn’t you hear me,” the stout man with the whip said.
“I heard you,” Minor said.
“You’re still here.”
“Don’t you want me to finish the joke?”
With that the man tried to lay into Minor with his whip. But before he could the more nimble Minor slipped down from his horse with his sawed-off shotgun drawn and leveled it at him. Seth came and got Minor’s horse under control.
“I’m anxious to tell you the rest of this story,” Minor said as he stalked the big man with the shotgun leveled.
“You regulators or something?” the man said.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Minor said. “At the moment we’re regulating the animal cruelty situation. There’s a fair bit of it these days. Where was I now… Oh yeah, so this here zebra is on the farm and met the cow and the chicken, and now she meets this animal that looks just like her only without no stripes, and the zebra says, `What are you?’ And the jackass says, `Take off them striped pajamas, little honey, and I’ll show you."’
Minor nearly fell over with laughter at his own joke, as usual. The man turned away with a snort and drew back his whip once more to strike the donkey. Minor rushed up behind him, swung the heavy barrel of his weapon, and struck the man in his right kidney. The big man crumpled onto all fours emitting a bellow as loud as the cries of his donkey had been. A kick from Minor to his ribs fetched him over on his back. Then Minor perched on his chest with the point of his pigsticker poised under the man’s chin and the shotgun barrel pressed to his cheek.
“Want to hear another one?” Minor said.
Twenty-nine
And that’s how we acquired a donkey-which Brother Minor named Jenny because it was a jennet, a female-and also the cart, which we unburdened of its cargo of bricks and helped ourselves to, thinking it might be useful if we found anything worth trading for in whatever remained of the capital city of New York state. We left the previous owner of the donkey and cart in the mud by the bridge to reflect on his conduct. I felt no qualms about confiscating his property. Jenny seemed happy to come with us once her load was lightened.
The drizzle had turned into a driving rain with thunder and lightning added by the time we got near the heart of the city, such as it had become. We were hungry, weary, and uncomfortable in our wet clothes. Perhaps a half an hour of daylight remained, and it was meager light given the dreary weather. I remembered Albany years earlier as just another down-on-its-luck small American city that had sacrificed its vitality to a whirring ring of homogenous suburbs. A flickering residue of life had persisted in the row house district near the capitol building. But that phase of its history was over, and the whole place had fallen apart from the edge to the center. Meanwhile, a strange new settlement had grown up like fungus on a log along the riverfront underneath Interstate 787 and the tangle of ramps that soared off the once mighty Clinton Avenue interchange. This new settlement was no shining city or sciencefiction fantasy of gleaming towers. Rather, it was a patchwork of spare parts, salvage, and refuse, both material and human.