Big Picture: Stories

by Percival Everett

“Good night, Mrs. Stoval.”

  “Marjorie.”

  “Hiram.” He smiled at her. “Good night.”

  Lewis Fife was more relaxed during the drive home than he had been during the ride to see the lion. He drove faster, his fat fingers holding the bottom of the steering wheel lightly.

  “Seems like a nice woman,” Lewis Fife said.

  Hiram agreed.

  “I never met her before tonight.”

  Hiram glanced out the window at the river as they passed it. “I’ve been out to treat her animals a few times. I was out at her place treating her horse just today.”

  “She live there by herself?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “Not married?”

  Hiram shrugged. He didn’t want to seem removed, but neither did he want to broadcast the woman’s life story all over the county. “I think there’s a Mr. Stoval, but I’ve never seen him.”

  “Funny,” Lewis Fife said, “the things we assume.”

  Hiram looked back out his window and his thoughts turned to the lion. “I wanted to scream just like she did,” he said. “I just don’t get people. Did you see the look on the Wilcox boy’s face?” He glanced over at the silent Lewis Fife. “He hurt that boy.”

  “Takes all kinds.”

  At home, Hiram found Carolyn already in bed and sound asleep. He didn’t pause for the cup of tea he wanted, just undressed and slid into bed next to her. He felt the cool sheets against his back and stared up at the ceiling. The vapor lamp over the door of the barn always threw just a little light through the window. He listened to his wife’s breathing and closed his eyes. The world was thirty inches high and full of scents, the pads of his paws struck the ground fully, completely, feeling it thoroughly, absolutely, pushing it away beneath his body with each stride and he was floating, the muscles of his haunches and shoulders replete with eager power, power resting, power tightly wound, his nerves on fire, his eyes pressed to the edge of capacity and all of it, all of it set to the quiet his presence created in the woods, the quiet and his subdued, continuous, vibrating breathing. He understood that he was in danger, that he fell centered in the crosshairs of someone’s sad and human weapon, but he could not pause to be apprehensive, could not pause to locate the enemy, but instead walked through the woods that were his, the quiet of his making, looking for life where life always was, walking on the floor that had always been his, waiting for the report to split the air. Now he was Hiram Finch and he was standing in Marjorie Stoval’s kitchen, at least he believed it was Marjorie Stoval’s kitchen, it being oddly made of wood with the bark still on it, and Marjorie was standing in front of him, her blouse open and her breasts exposed and he was attending to her nipples, large nipples, the kind he had never found appealing, but here they were and he wondered why he was in her kitchen and she was pushing her finger toward him, toward his chest that he realized was uncovered, to his sternum. Her finger landed lightly and he could feel his heart rattling in its cave, vibrating and filling his torso with that low, continuous purring and her finger dragged its nail down along the line that separated his left from his right.… Hiram awoke with a start and saw the light from the vapor lamp still on the ceiling and heard his wife breathing beside him. He pushed the top sheet off his body and tried to let the air through the window cool him. He was afraid and lonely and hungry, terribly hungry. He rolled onto his side and faced his wife’s back. He put his hand on her hair.

  Dicotyles Tajacu

  Michael Lawson didn’t believe his wife when she told him that she was tiring of his periodic depressions, nagging headaches really, bouts that would often last for a couple of weeks. The headaches manifested themselves in overly quiet behavior and some grumpiness, but mostly in minor absent-mindedness and seeming apathy. He didn’t believe Gail when she said that she didn’t like the way he talked to her when he was “lost in his own little world,” nor when she informed him that she was falling out of love with him, although he had actually noted the germinating distance in spite of his ostensible lethargy and inattention. He didn’t believe any of it when the message was conveyed by a “concerned” third party, his wife’s friend Maggie, who had never seemed to like Michael anyway. Maggie made a special trip over for a chat, knowing that Gail was not there, and in fact admitted early on in the chat that Gail was waiting at her house. It didn’t appear to bother Michael that Gail had a new close friend named Bob who was “fun” and “bright” and single, although the friendship hadn’t, contrary to Maggie’s accusation, gone without regard. He was some kind of skin doctor who lived way out with other skin doctors in a cul-de-sac in the foothills north and west of Denver. But when Michael came into the house from his studio, which was just seventy yards away, and found that all of the spots where the furniture had been were now merely spots, he could only do what the note on the bare wood of the kitchen floor said—“Believe it.”

  Michael didn’t go to the foothills to talk to Gail, or to finally get a good look at Bob the skin doctor and his house with the bathroom the size of a barn. She left in the middle of one of his depressions and he somehow wanted her to be okay, at least he talked himself into believing that was what he wanted. He folded the note neatly and placed it on the counter. He thought perhaps he had never really loved Gail, and was saddened by the knowledge that she had loved him, had wasted her time loving him. Michael walked back out to his studio and collected his paintings, twenty-seven large canvases. He heaped them in a pile in the yard, doused them with gasoline from a can he kept for the mower, and tossed on a strike-anywhere kitchen match that he held until he burned his fingers. It was a big fire that caused a neighbor to call the fire department, who put it out quickly with fat hoses stretched across the yard, red lights twisting in the predawn sky, while the marshall wrote out a citation for Michael. When the fire fighters roared away, he packed all the clothes he could into the two suitcases that his wife had left behind, got into his pickup truck, looked into his mirror, and saw that a smattering of neighbors were still rooted, loitering and gawking and whispering. He then drove away, stopping at an automatic teller before heading north toward Wyoming.

  For years, doctor after doctor had said, “We have to do something about your headaches,” and let that pass as treatment. Finally, failed drug after failed drug, and one neurologist’s insipid question, “Are you sure they’re headaches?” led Michael to give up and admit that the pain was a part of his life. Evidently the headaches were not going to kill him, a lamentable thought, so he decided to get to know them, to feel them, to accept them, to, in what he thought was the Zen way, become one with them. He didn’t mention them, just endured them. He didn’t miss them when they left, and was not surprised when they returned: different headaches with disparate associative symptoms, which located themselves in various parts of his head, where they moved, pulsed, or sat immobile for hours behind an eye or ear like cheetah watching gazelle.

  Michael drove north on Interstate 25, then west toward Fort Collins. Clouds were already collecting over the front range, just a few then, but soon there would be many, and he was glad to be out of Denver where the weather was always sudden and extreme: hail and tornadoes or clear, blizzards followed by sunny days of sixty degrees with gentle breezes from the south. He made his way through Fort Collins and stopped for breakfast at a diner on US 287 that sported stuffed animals everywhere he looked: heads of deer, elk, and moose were hung over the tables of booths, and bobcats, coyotes, and badgers marched along a mantle that separated the dining area from a little store with cold drinks, doughnuts, and sundries. The headache he nursed was a sharp, needling pain behind his left eye that spread toward the back of his head like smoke, becoming duller, but fingering out with a scratching at the base of his brain. He cataloged it as he fell into a booth beneath the head of a wild boar with a conspicuously missing left eye. The brass plate under the trophy read, “Javelina, Dicotyles tajacu, taken July 1967, Red River, NM by C.C. Wilcox.”

  The waitress, a pl
ump woman, looking to be near thirty, was wearing off-white nurse’s shoes and a too-short navy skirt and holding a pot of coffee. She said, “You can sit somewhere else, if you want.”

  Michael looked at her.

  “If the Dicotyles tajacu bugs you,” she said. “You can move to another booth. The Odocoileus hemionus is available. So is the Antilocapra americana.”

  Michael looked at the other dead animals over the empty booths. “I’m okay here,” he said, turning his cup mouth up for the coffee.

  “A lot of people don’t like the Dicotyles tajacu,” the woman said as she poured. “That missing eye.”

  “I see.”

  She pulled a menu from the large front pocket of her apron and set it on the place mat in front of him.

  “You know all of these animals?”

  “They’re here every day, all day long. I’m here every day, all day long. You hunt?”

  Michael shook his head.

  “I’ll come back for your order.”

  Michael studied the pig. At that moment, Gail was probably in bed with Bob having her skin examined. He recalled when he and Gail had first met: she had claimed to understand his pain, claimed she wanted to be near it, and wanted to watch him at work. They were standing in front of a canvas of Michael’s at an exhibition of his in Santa Fe.

  “There’s so much pain in it,” Gail said from behind him as he faced the painting.

  Michael turned and looked at her. “Where?” he asked.

  “Everywhere,” she said.

  “I don’t see it,” he said.

  Gail was confused, but pressed on. “Here,” pointing to a sweep of maples edged with Indian Yellow across a field of pthalo blue. “Here, this looks like acute pain to me, like intense loss.”

  Michael looked where she pointed, got up close, and touched the paint with his fingers. “You don’t really believe that shit, do you?” But when he looked back at her face he saw she was near tears. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right about the pain.” A lie only because he believed that indeed he was lying every time he attempted to articulate how painting made him feel. In the middle of putting the paint on the canvas, when the desire to slide a razor across the arteries of his forearm was large and explicit before him, he recognized the urge as indulgent and decided it was made up, thought no one really had such feelings and so would sit down, leaving the work alone and rub his temples until he forgot his bad mood. But as Michael said to Gail that she was correct about the emotion she saw in his picture, he felt pleased to be able to share the pain. He was genuinely interested in this woman and what she was saying, but he also experienced considerable guilt because he knew that he was viewing this conversation as a hasty way to get her into bed.

  “I’m Gail Lybrand.”

  “Michael Lawson.”

  “I know.”

  They had sex that night and continued to have sex for eight years and in that time Michael had sex only with Gail, although he was tempted once to be unfaithful with an anthropologist whom he’d met in the hills south of Santa Fe, but didn’t because the thought of sex with another woman made his head hurt more and more and he took the pain as a sign. And so he went home to his wife of seven months and found that his headache didn’t go away, but in fact got worse, and then Gail became angry with him because he was too sick to make love.

  “What’s this?” Michael said, looking at the chocolate-covered doughnut the waitress put on the table. The doughnut had been microwaved and the brown veneer had become thin on top and formed a series of puddles around the circle.

  “On the house. Because you don’t hunt.” The waitress pulled her pad from her apron pocket and took the pen from behind her ear. “What’ll it be?”

  “How much for the pig?” Michael asked, surprising himself.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The head.” Michael pointed up. “I think I’d like to buy it.”

  “The Dicotyles tajacu?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to buy the Dicotyles tajacu?”

  “I believe that’s what I’m saying.”

  The waitress tapped her pad with her pen and looked at the boar’s head as if for the first time, then turned and walked away across the room and into the kitchen. The single door swung after her with a barely audible squeak. The bearded face of a large man suddenly appeared from the kitchen and disappeared just as quickly. Then all of him appeared, dressed in white or what was once white. Michael liked the stains on the man’s clothes, ochre and Permanent Rose and a deep green like an avocado’s skin.

  “Waitress tells me you want to buy the Dicotyles tajacu,” the cook said.

  Michael nodded, but felt a little afraid sensing the man’s displeasure.

  “Why?”

  “Because I like it,” Michael said.

  The cook sat across from him in the booth and looked absently across the room and out the window at the highway. “I’ve never had anybody wanting to buy one of the animals before. What would you do with it?”

  “I’m an artist. I just like it. I wouldn’t do anything to it,” was what he said, but he wanted to say that he was unsatisfied, agitated, desolate in heart and entrails, sick with pain, and sickened by curiosity, of all things, and that the Dicotyles tajacu had become an object of that sickness. “I’m not going to hurt it.”

  “He’s got an eye missing,” the cook said. “The left one.”

  “I realize that,” Michael said. “I think that’s why I like it so much.”

  The cook scratched his thick neck and pulled up at the back of his shirt collar. “The Dicotyles tajacu has been here since 1967.”

  “Taken by C.C. Wilcox,” Michael said.

  “You know, business has been pretty rough, what with the freeway and all those fast-food places in Fort Collins. A breakfast burrito. An egg McNuthin’. It’s hard for the little guy to make it now.”

  Michael nodded. “Are you C.C. Wilcox?”

  The cook shook his head. “Kirk Johnston.”

  “My name is Michael Lawson.”

  The cook stared off into space.

  “I can see you’re attached to the pig …”

  “Dicotyles tajacu,” the cook corrected.

  “Dicotyles tajacu,” Michael said. “How does one-fifty sound?”

  The cook looked up at the head on the wall and his eyes seemed to well with tears, the meaty fingers of his right hand were wringing the meaty fingers of his left. “Business has been awful slow.” But the cook was speaking more to the taxidermied head than to Michael.

  “One seventy-five,” Michael said.

  The man was openly weeping now. His big head fell forward to his hands; his big sides were heaving under his short-sleeved white shirt. The waitress had come out of the kitchen and was walking across the room, tossing them a sidelong glance but not approaching. A man with blond hair and his blond wife, who were seated across the room in a booth beneath a moose, stared and whispered.

  Through his tears, Kirk the cook managed to say, “Would you consider the Ovis canadensis?”

  “No, I want this one,” Michael said. The idea of owning it was getting all twisted inside him. He didn’t want to hurt the cook, but the head, the head, the idea of the head was calling to him. “Two hundred.”

  The cook let out a loud wail. His sobs caught in his throat, choking him; tears were glistening in his beard.

  The blond couple from across the room climbed out of their booth and scurried out. The bell hanging from the door was slapping against the glass.

  “Two hundred dollars.”

  “Waitress,” the cook called. When she came he said, still crying, “Wrap up the Dicotyles tajacu.”

  The waitress began to sob as well, her mascara streaking quickly as she turned her face from the stuffed head. Her crying voice was higher pitched than her talking voice and Michael paused to observe this.

  The cook stood. “Wrap it nicely, waitress.”

  Michael counted out two hundred dollars on
to the lacquered wooden tabletop. The cook picked up the bills along with a paper napkin and, without counting, stuffed the money into his breast pocket, then walked on unsteady legs back across the room and through the swinging door of the kitchen.

  Michael moved his coffee to the next table. Then he and the waitress stood on the maroon vinyl seats of the booth, on each side of the boar’s head, and took it down from the nail on which it was hooked.

  “I’m going to miss you, Dicotyles tajacu,” the waitress said. “I’ll get some newspaper.” She stepped back and looked at it there on the table before walking away.

  Michael was able to examine the head more closely now. The hair was worn away on top of the skull between the eyes, and the tusk on the right side was broken. The surface of the protrusion was Indian Red and mustard. The hole where the left eye had been, and later whatever kind of glass ball had replaced it, was full of caked dust and cobwebs. He imagined the pain when the wind blew through an empty socket to the exposed nerves.

  The waitress returned with a stack of Rocky Mountain News and spread a few sheets out on the floor. She made a mat using masking tape to secure the seams. Michael regarded how carefully she worked, as she kept adding more paper. Her hot-pink-painted nails sliced the tape precisely; the palms of her small but fleshy hands pressed the adhesive flat as the plane of paper grew into a rug. Michael stood, lifted the head from the table, and set it down. The two of them stepped back and studied the head.

  The waitress got back down on her knees and brought the opposite edges of her newspaper rug up to meet at the bald spot between the eyes. She taped it closed, then proceeded to fold shut the gaps by using more paper until finally the Dicotyles tajacu was securely wrapped.

  “I never did get anything to eat,” Michael said, looking at the waitress. “I don’t imagine it would be a good idea to order something now.”

  The waitress didn’t say anything, nor did she move her head or any other part of her round little body, but she made it clear she was in agreement.