Characters in My Pretty Pony

The instruction (George Banning didn’t give advice, only instruction) had taken place on the day Clive got caught out by that idiot Alden Osgood while playing hide and seek. By that time Clive’s Grandpa seemed older than God, which probably meant about seventy-two.

It ain’t like forgetting things; that’d be one thing. No, you remember em but you get em in all the wrong places. Like how I was so sure I broke my arm just after our boy Billy got killed in that road accident in ’58.

Besides, sometimes the Peter-Pinches weren’t really pinches at all; they were more like the way Patty sometimes stroked her little half-breed poodle, Brandy, and he knew she was doing it because he was bad, but he had a secret he certainly did not intend to tell her: these other Peter-Pinches, …

• • • The old man’s name was George Banning. He was the boy’s grandfather, and it was from him that Clive Banning learned the importance of having a pretty pony in your life.

She had been standing there as naked as one of the slinky babes in Foxy Brannigan’s well-thumbed Model Delights, her bath towel lying puddled around her feet. She was no slinky babe, though—Clive knew it, and she knew it too, from the look of her.

Holy hell, I’m thinkin to myself, Frank Davis has got his trick-or-treat out before the goddam summer’s even over. It crossed my mind to go up to the prescription counter where he was n tell him just that, and then a part of me says, Whoa up a second, George—you’re …

The dog (he had no name, he was just the dog) seemed puzzled. The old man hailed the boy and told him to take a walk up to the orchard with him and so the boy did. • • • The old man’s name was George Banning.

“Then,” Grandpa continued, “you start to lose track of things in your own mind. Not too much—it ain’t being senile, like old man Hayden down the road, thank God—but it’s still a suckardly thing, the way you lose track. It ain’t like forgetting things; that’d be one thing.

If He needed something to piss on, why couldn’t He have just made Him some sumac bushes and left it at that? Or what about poor old Johnny Brinkmayer, who went so slow with the bone cancer last year.”

Handsome is as handsome does, for instance—what did that mean? He had a sister, Patty, who was six years older. He understood her but didn’t care because most of what she said out loud was stupid. The rest was communicated in vicious little pinches.

‘So-and-so keeps himself a sharp practice,’ they’d say, as if sharp practice, like that butcher fella Radwick that used to always stick his thumb on the scales when he could get away with it, like that was just a honey of a way to be.

“If I was to tell it to that Reverend Chadband the wife sets such a store by, he’d trot out the one about how we see through a glass darkly or that old chestnut about how God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, but I’ll tell you what …

Sarah had to show me the family Bible first and the insurance papers on my arm second before I could believe she had it the right way around; it had been two whole months before, and by the time we buried Billy away, the sling was off.

And didn’t I already have my eye on this fella named Tim Warburton who’d come down from Schenectady lookin for work? He had a way about him, looked honest, and I thought he’d make a good foreman during picking time.

The things Grandpa said continually amazed him because they almost always made sense. His mother, his father, Gramma, Uncle Don—they all said things he was supposed to take to heart, but they rarely made sense. Handsome is as handsome does, for instance—what did that mean?