The Mule Boy - Jeremy Ditto in Amish Guise
The Mule Boy surfing concrete...
My brother, the firefighter who has graduated from college and knows better, is paragonic Skull-Craziness. Gin devils have been known to flee his very presence. He is the Mule Boy. I have seen him very calmly take a whiz from beside the grill on the second story deck at my house during a crowded barbecue. I have also seen him roast a rookie over a very quick and hot fire on the scene of an automobile collision because said rook was unable to change out a hacksaw blade, thus impairing resuce efforts. The Mule Boy has a big heart. He also has a big kiester, which he will show you if you let him. He will lie in the azelia bushes, calmly barking at the ants at three o’clock in the morning. He will also bitterly curse traffic over the medical resuce truck’s PA system as he races, lights and sirens blazing, to the home of a child who is gasping for air.
My brother used to fish for bats -- this is no lie -- from the roof of our parents’ house when he still lived there. This was before he discovered more rewarding nocturnal pursuits. He would take an ultralight open-faced rod and reel combo, string it with hair-thin one-pound test line, and cast trout flies out over the yard of the house at dusk. Occasionally he would reel in some squirming rat with wings that he had duped...the little blind varmint would screech and swoop madly into the juicy bull moth it had just pinged, only to find that at the last slobbering moment that dinner tonight was a gaudy barbed lintball. Bad news. But then for the bat to be seized by a strong pair of hands swaddled in stinking leather gloves and to have the barb pried out of the roof of its mouth, well...this often sent the bat into a quivering fear coma. Denied even the satisfaction gnawing the hand that fed it, the twittering thing would curse the Bat Goddess and give up all hope of salvation.
The Mule Boy would carry a bucket up the ladder to the roof with him, and his terrified, twitching catch would gradually accumulate under the bucket’s tight lid. The bats came from a small cave near my parents’ house, and on a good night my brother could reel in eight or ten of the little buggers. Eventually he would get bored with the sport and would dismount the house with bucket and gear in hand. He’d always walk to the fence surrounding our property and he would carefully shake the bucket out into the neighbors yard. A half-dozen stunned bats would usually wing wobbily away, but I often wondered about the Secret Bat Burial Ground next door...and why the neighbors never spoke to us.
Well, I left for college, and six years went by in an awful hurry. The Mule Boy found more rewarding hobbies during this time (although he narrowly escaped arrest on a couple of occasions). But I made the mistake of taking too many classes, so they proclaimed to the world that I was educated and kicked me out of school. I came back home to find a job, and a year later the Mule Boy and I moved into our own place two miles away from Ma and Pa Landlord. We had both grown up, and the scales fell from our eyes. We could say 'Been there...done that...' about a good many more things than in years previous. We were world-wise and jaded, so we began a revival to the basic pleasures in life...home, good drink, good food, a steady stream of girlfriends, and the daily adrenelin rush.
One summer night I awoke to a thumping on the roof. Too early in the year for Santa Claus, I thought. I found a ladder on the deck, and sure enough, the Mule Boy was standing astraddle the roof’s apex in his jockey shorts and leather gloves . He was blissfully taking long and graceful casts across the front yard with a small rod and reel combo. The styrofoam beer chest set squarely atop the chimney would rock occasionally, and I knew he was having a good night. I remembered the scene from 'A River Runs Through It' where the elder brother returns to his favorite trout stream to discover that his younger brother has become a fly-fishing artist in his absence. Well...I thought...at least the Mule Boy isn’t going out with men. We caught bats on that roof all night, and in the small hours of the morning we stole over to the local college campus and left the cooler on the front seat of the first BMW we could find with Greek letters on the bumper. Some vicious preppie in a blue blazer is probably still getting rabies shots and babbling incoherently to his therapist.
All stories in these pages are meant to be taken literally unless they are hyperbolic in nature.