A Phantom Herd

Another memory from a windy parades returns, 1966, blowing across my mind yet hidden behind the day's unsubstantial haziness; I recall a certain gentleman rider, prone to wild, old West, histrionics, to great and grand melodramatic gestures, and to powerful barking, who drifted slowly toward us where we stood at a curb. Seemingly borne by the wind itself, he was actually straddling the broad back of a colossal gray mule, a ghostly animal with freaky, light colored eyes and which was barely visible under an ivory skirt of dirt, of loose airborne powder, which resembled some immense billowing wedding veil of an old citizen of Tucson, which had discolored with age. Across the street the crowd and the windows of a department store had bleached to a gray sea. As this man on the mule floated near us, screeching and screaming something at first unintelligible, we came gradually to understand his words and know that he bellowed so loudly in order to impersonate Governor ______, our first territorial governor, on his famous year-long trek across the Midwestern United States which eventually saw him arrive in northern Arizona; the fat saddlebags strapped to the mule's tremendous rump, he repeatedly patted, and they were crammed to the brim with solid, disc-like buffalo chips that this man boasted to have collected on a journey across the plains, ready to make a fine fire for anyone's evening camp; besides his shouts of good cheer and his offers to share the fabulous hoard of buffalo chips with members of the crowd (and they screamed whenever he untied a saddlebag and rode toward them holding out one of the rigid golden pies) we enjoyed the bristly black sideburns which festooned both sides of his face; his cheeks were so hairy from the false pieces that he had a strange, monkey-like quality; the pair of massive whiskers, which were so obviously fake, had been slathered with spirit gum and pressed to his skin, though the glue hadn't stuck. When he rode parallel to us one of the false pieces worked itself loose and the vestige sideburn clung to his cheek under his ear and swung in the breeze like a stage door on a flimsy hinge.

  "Oh that old gentleman is coming apart, kids! What does he think he's doing? Goodness, what a mad costume. He might be taking himself a bit too seriously," Mother said.

  Taking for granted that those among the curbside crowd who were frantically pointing at the loose whisker were actually appreciating the verisimilitude of his 19th century frontier costume and his extraordinarily exaggerated pantomime with the buffalo chips, he expanded upon his store of grimaces and waved his arms even more madly. Eventually either a mighty gust tearing at his face or else his own big movements knocked the whisker completely off and sailed it, by the divine hand of God, onto a mound of steaming green dung; and, as though that were not horrifying enough, the hapless sideburn at rest on the pile was immediately run over by the front wheel of a miniature cart pulled by a miniature pony. The grinning clown who drove the cart honked his big rubber horn and waved, and then whipped the pony until it zoomed him to the opposite curb; he was oblivious to the cries of horror from those of us in the crowd who had seen what happened, and our governor, now with a very asymmetric monkey face, and his pale ghostly mule were wafted away, his bellows still heard when he wasn't visible, inside an even bigger gust of ivory dirt. This big cloud tore his image to shreds, but slowly, first taking away the mule and then his feet, his straddled legs, the saddle, his lower trunk, his jacket and finally his horrible grimacing head with its one thick sideburn.