Brando Read Online Free Page B

bars as the pony watched me. The pony didn’t move, but he was flexing his nostrils and his ears were bent back. I reached out slowly to touch his nose and Wes said, “You better grab your nuts, kid. That damn dink can kick you frontways just as good as back.”
    I lost air like a ripped gas bag and sank gently to the warm manure. Wes didn’t say anything, just stared at me, and the more he did and the more he remained silent, the more I had to thrash around trying to gulp some air into my body as I laughed.
    Wes finally walked away, but when the pony looked at me with its big eyes that seemed to be saying, “What in the world is the matter with you?” I went into a life-threatening seizure. Finally I was able to manage a few hoots and crawled around the stable looking for my hat.
    Wes was in the terminal stages of tuberculosis. Pretty soon his back was a hump and he was carrying his elbows a little higher, so that when he walked they pointed back like arrows. He was always coughing, hacking and spitting out thick wads of mucus that sometimes was so lumpy it caught on his front teeth when he tried to spit. He almost never smiled, but when he did his mouth looked like a golden cemetery. You could see his skull showing through his face, and his smoky blue eyes seemed to be falling out of his head whenever he bent over to spit.
    But when Wes was on a horse, he had a smile, golden cemeteryor not, that made you feel that he knew something you didn’t. He always glittered when he was up there, looking like he grew out of the horse’s back. And he always talked softly to any horse under him—like it was a woman. He was sure of himself on a horse; he was home. But after a while, he couldn’t mount up anymore. Mostly he just sat in the chair outside the tack room and waited for death. I thought he would spit away his whole body, and one day he did.
    Wes Mickler, born someplace, died on Bradley Road. He never said what happened in between.
       Sometimes when my mother got bent out of shape, an acquaintance from a bar or a stranger brought her home; other times we’d have to go looking for her or the phone would ring and I’d hear a police sergeant say:
“We have a Dorothy Pennebaker Brando here. Could you come down to the station and get her?”
    Jocelyn usually ran the show at home. Even though she was only a few years older than Frannie and me, she had to assume the responsibility for bringing us up, for which I owe her a debt of gratitude that is unpayable. Although I may have argued more with Frannie than I did with Jocelyn, we were close, too. After all, we shared the same bunk in purgatory. But it was Tiddy who kept the family together. When my mother was missing, I always looked to her for instructions about what to do. She made sure I had something to eat and clean clothes to wear. She was as magnificent, as strong a person as I’ve ever known, but everybody reaches their breaking point sooner or later, and in time both she and Frannie did.
    The three of us, and sometimes my father, spent a lot of time looking for my mother. I’d tramp door-to-door through Chicago’s skid row on a sunny afternoon, push open the door of each bar in succession, peer into a dark cavern and try to spot her on one of the stools.
    When I was about fourteen, my father brought her homeonce and took her upstairs. I was downstairs in the living room. I heard her fall, then the sounds of slapping and hitting, and I ran upstairs. She was lying on the bed crying and he was standing over her. I became insane with rage and set my teeth in an attack mode; filled with Goliath strength, through a clenched mouth nine inches away from his nose, I said in a low, clear voice, “If you ever hit her again, I’ll kill you.”
    He looked in my eyes and froze. He knew he was staring at more adrenaline than he had ever seen in his life. My father was afraid of nothing and we probably would have fought to the death had it not been for the fact that