The Call

by Yannick Murphy

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Can we go to sleep now? Close the window. It’s cold.

  WHAT I SAID: Leave the window, Jen. I want to hear for their cars. I want to hear if there are more rifle shots and tires rolling on the dirt road and car engines. I am attuned to those sounds now. They make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

  WHAT I HEARD WITH THE WINDOW OPEN: A whir. Could it be the spacecraft? I opened up the screen and craned my neck to look out the window. It was the spacecraft. It wasn’t circling the house this time. Instead it was hovering above it. It stayed that way for a while, and then it quickly sailed away, as if answering to the call of someone else far out in the universe.

  WHAT THE WIFE COOKED FOR DINNER: She didn’t. We went out. Her idea, not mine. Chinese in what used to be a train car. Sam ordered underwater conference. He picked up a shrimp and a scallop off the platter. How do you do? he said, holding the shrimp so it faced the scallop and moving the shrimp up and down, as if it were talking. Sarah, my Sarah, fell in love with crab Rangoon. Mia learned from her place setting that she was a horse.

  CALL: A Belgian cannot breathe.

  ACTION: Incised the horse’s trachea, looked around for a tube of some sort to put into the trachea to maintain an airway. Asked owner if she had a plastic gallon milk container. Cut off handle of milk container, inserted it into horse’s incision.

  RESULT: Belgian started to breathe.

  WHAT THE OWNER ASKED: How long do I keep the handle in the horse?

  WHAT I SAID: Forever.

  WHAT THE OWNER DID: She was short. She was probably eye level with the incision and the handle of the milk container sticking out. She could see the wet skin around the horse’s neck where I had dunked a towel in water and wiped the blood away. She could see how even though we had rinsed out the milk jug, we did not have time to wash it, and there was still a bit of white watery fluid inside the handle. She nodded. The horse lowered his head toward her and then she put her forehead right against the white star he had there.

  THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME: Leaves are just mini solar panels. The leaves positioned all around the tree’s trunk catching optimum rays all throughout the day. Photosynthesizing all day long. What if you designed a solar panel that looked like a tree? Why can’t you plug in a tree? Don’t they sell science kits to kids where you can plug wires into a potato and run a watch? Why not plug into a tree?

  WHAT THE KIDS SAID TO ME WHEN I GOT HOME: And oranges, you can plug in an orange and run a watch, too.

  WHAT THE WIFE COOKED: Carrot soup.

  WHAT WE SAID: What else is there to eat?

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: What do you mean what else? She shook her head and looked at us trying to understand.

  WHAT I COOKED: Fried eggs and bacon and peanut butter and mayonnaise and lettuce and tomato sandwiches made with toasted bread.

  WHAT I SAID TO SAM WHILE I COOKED: Sam, are you ready for youth deer weekend tomorrow?

  WHAT SAM SAID: My Mauser and I are ready.

  WHAT I THOUGHT: What a lucky boy to already have an attachment to his hunting rifle, as well he should, it being a German Mauser that belonged to his grandfather.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Don’t wake me up in the morning.

  WHAT SARAH AND MIA DID: Ran outside.

  WHAT SARAH SAID: I’m going to barf.

  WHAT MIA SAID: I’m going to barf.

  WHAT THEY DID: Barfed. One in the driveway, one in the flower bed.

  WHAT I DID IN THE MORNING: Woke the wife up, looking for pants that would keep out the rain while I hunted with Sam.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Fuck, do you have to fucking wake me up in the morning? Can’t you find your own fucking pants? How old are you, anyway?

  CALL: My son. I can’t get to him fast enough. He has fallen from the wooden tree stand on our property. The stand is an old stand whose supports are wooden boards nailed into branches of maples growing close together. This is not the stand I have purchased with the warning labels all over it. This is a stand that has been on our property for years. This is a stand that you climb up to by stepping on slats of gray worn wood nailed with nails now rusty, into the tree. This is a stand where there’s a milk crate sitting on its rotting platform, and you sit on the milk crate and you wait for your buck to come out and show his face while you notice how sore you are from sitting on hard plastic for so long.

  ACTION: From my store-bought tree stand set up fifty yards away, I see him fall. I see him and I do what every hunter safety manual would tell me not to do—I throw my rifle to the ground beneath me so that I can go down the footholds more easily and quickly, but nothing is quick with all the gear on. I am a tangle of canvas straps and plastic buckles that are fastened around my legs and by my crotch. My son is on the leaves, the rain has stopped but now there is a brisk wind, the leaves have already blown over him and there is a bright yellow one on his cheek, as he lies still, his eyes closed. Oh, Christ. There is no bute or Banamine or injection I can give him. There is nothing I can do. There was another hunter in the woods. He was not out for deer. He hunted with a shotgun, firing off into the sky at the grouse he had flushed while walking through our woods. These two seasons overlap, grouse and deer. My son fell twelve feet, on his head. He fell from the force of the shot hitting his shoulder. I did not see the hunter. The hunter is gone now, the grouse in more northern woods where I have seen some cedar waxwings also head, and my son is unconscious with gunshot peppering the flesh of his shoulder. I can see the holes in the cloth of his coat, and the goose feathers sticking out from them, wavering in the wind.

  I look around. Where is the hunter? Where the hell is he? But I do not hear anyone coming toward me through the fallen leaves. It’s quiet now, except for the sound of a squirrel chattering at me from a few trees away. I put my son over my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. I am surprised how fast I can run down the hillside and back to our house. I am surprised the door is already open to our house. Did the house know what happened and was it ready and waiting for me? There is no one else home. I put Sam on the kitchen table. He is breathing, but he is not awake. I take off his coat and wrap towels around his wound. There is blood, but not a lot of it. There are leaves on the table, too, from when I scooped him up to carry him home and the leaves are mixed with the mail, the bill from the gas company and the catalog from a store that sells seeds and tulip bulbs for spring.

  An ambulance isn’t smart, not where we live anyway. What is smart is if I put him in the backseat of the truck and drive him to the hospital myself. I will get there that much faster.

  On the windy back roads, I reach out behind me, only one hand on the wheel. I make sure he’s not going to slide off the seat and onto the floor, I am driving so fast. I drive fast past the Bunny Hutch preschool, even though there are signs everywhere telling me to slow down, telling me there are children at play.

  RESULT: My son is being cut out of his camouflage clothes by nurses and I’m standing beside him, my canvas straps from my tree stand safety harness dangling on the hospital floor. I have not had time to take it off, and if I did, I do not know where I would put it. There are no hooks on the wall for coats, nor for the safety harness of a deer-hunting tree stand. He is scanned and there is no sign of brain damage. And a coma, the doctor says, can be, and he knew it sounded strange, not such a serious thing. The body has the opportunity to rest, the doctor says, and on the Glasgow scale, he’s scoring high, the doctor says. His chances are good. Ah, the Glasgow scale, I say and look at my son. His face appears pale and yellow, and I wonder if the yellow fallen leaf that had lain on his cheek had somehow left some of its yellow color on his skin, and what comes to mind is the way my girls have played with dandelion flowers, rubbing them on their cheeks because they said the yellow dust was like their mother’s blush.

  The gunshot is taken out while I sit in the waiting room, head in my hands, thinking of calling my Jen, then thinking to wait until I know more, until maybe he wakes up from his coma and I can tell her how he’s better now
, how he was unconscious, but that’s over. I look up. People walk by, a few men in camo. Is one of them the hunter? I think. I feel the blood rush to my face. Is one of them the one who mistook my son for a bird? Has he come to inquire about my son? Has he come to tell me he’s sorry? But these men have not just come from hunting. They are only wearing fashionable camo-patterned pants that are more the weight of jeans than the heavy cloth of real hunting pants that are double-lined and meant to walk through sharp briar and meddlesome branches of pine. The men are wearing sneakers and short sleeves and in the brief moment they walk by me I can smell cigarette smoke on them. They have come from someplace inside and not from the woods. The man who shot my son is not here. The man who shot my son is probably home by now, removing his boots, the dirt from my land falling from the soles to his mudroom floor, his wife inquiring about his luck with game bird. The man who shot my son probably just up the road from where I live and too afraid to come to my door and tell me what he’s done.

  CALL: An owner needs a health certificate for his horse to travel to North Carolina. I do not respond to the call.

  CALL: An owner’s horse has a spot of fungus on the pastern. I do not respond to the call.

  CALL: An owner’s horse has a navicular cyst. I do not respond to the call.

  CALL: Jen wants to know where we are. Why is there blood on the table? she says in the same breath and in the background I can hear her pacing in our kitchen, walking across the loose floorboard that squeaks by the kitchen sink. It is a floorboard that is turning black from water sliding off the counter when dishes are washed, and pooling on the floor.

  ACTION: There wasn’t much blood, I tell her. The hunter was a bad shot, he only hit Sam’s shoulder. Thank God, Jen says. I can hear her sigh over the phone and I almost feel the warm breath of it coming through, or is that just my own breath coming back to me that I breathed into the phone? She is on her way, of course, even after I have told her I would stay with him. Even after I told her he would be fine. I go down to the lower level. It is more like a mall. There are shops where I can hear the coffee machines at work, spraying lattes into cups. There are shops that sell baby clothes and there are shops sporting holiday decorations early, white ceramic polar bears hanging by ribbons on the branches of fake trees. The polar bears look smooth and polished, as if they had been tumbled by waves for years at an ocean’s pebbly shore. I have an urge to buy something for Sam. I could buy him a Rapidograph. There is one in a stationery store’s window. I’d like to see the fine lines he could draw with it. I can see him drawing a submarine, the periscope bending like a goose’s neck, observing all there is to see across the sketchbook page.

  WHO I SEE IN THE LOWER LEVEL: My own doctor wearing a breast cancer pin buying a Jamba Juice.

  WHO DOESN’T SEE ME: My own doctor buying a Jamba Juice.

  RESULT: Jen has come and she is with me by his bed now and she is yelling at me. She is telling me she will never forgive me for having done this to our son, our only son. How could you? She’s holding my son’s hand while she is yelling and I think maybe she is like Arthur the farmhand and all she has to do is put her hand on my son and he will talk through her and my son is yelling at me now. How could you? she yells. I am sorry I said that, she then says and she goes to me so that I can hold her. I am so sorry, I say. I can smell the scent of our Newfoundlands in her hair, and I think how before she saw the blood on the table she must have greeted the dogs and bent down low and hugged Bruce or Nelly, and her hair must have fallen across the dogs’ fur. I tell her what the doctor said, that sometimes, not always, the coma can be not such a bad thing. I tell her about the Glasgow scale, how high he’s scoring on it and how good that is. Oh, really? she says. She shakes her head. She looks down at our son. She puts her hand on his forehead, as if he were sick with the flu and she was feeling for a fever. She bends closer to him, breathing in different places on his face. It wasn’t enough to get shot? she says, and it’s to our son she is talking.

  WHAT I DON’T TELL HER: That I will find a way to get the hunter who shot our son.

  WHAT THE DOCTOR SAYS AFTER WE HAVE STAYED THERE TWO NIGHTS: Go home and sleep. Think of your son as sleeping, too. Go home to your other children. Explain to them what has happened. It’s the best you can do.

  WHAT SARAH SAYS: Sam likes to sleep. I bet he’s happy.

  WHAT THE SHERIFF WHO IS ON THE CASE SAYS AFTER HE HAS COME BACK FROM SEARCHING OUR WOODS: Traces of the man are not to be found.

  WHAT MY WIFE DOES: Sits up in bed all night with the light on, not even reading.

  WHAT I DO: Read the paper.

  WHAT THE WIFE ASKS: How can you read the paper?

  WHAT I SAY: I can’t do anything else. You could so, she says. You’re right, I could go out, I say. I get my clothes on and grab a flashlight. I tell her I want to find my rifle that I dropped beneath my store-bought tree stand. What I really want to do is find traces of the man who shot my son that the sheriff, when he came back from his investigation in our woods, said were not to be found. I want to run through the night hitting every branch as I go, kicking up every leaf, punching my fist into the stone-hard bark of all the fifty-foot pines that bore witness, that all saw the man who shot my son, but that cannot speak to tell me his name.

  WHAT THE NIGHT SAYS: Go home. There are no clues here, no flattened leaves holding the shape of a boot of a hunter. No evidence, even, of the plate-sized footprints of the half-ton moose that has traveled here before. Your rifle will still be on the ground in the morning.

  WHAT THE COYOTES SAY: You have crossed over to where we live and now our howls could be the howls of your own heart you are hearing, or just us, our coats slightly ruffed from the November chill.

  WHAT I DO WITH THE FLASHLIGHT: Point it on my son’s tree stand, point it on the plastic milk crate, point it at the ground where I found him, point it on the ground where the hunter probably stood who shot him but there is nothing to see, no telltale impression of a hunter’s boot in the fallen leaves. I turn and walk to my own tree stand and find my rifle that I only notice because the tip of the barrel is not completely covered in leaves, and it is as if in the time since my son had been shot the leaves were trying to cover up some kind of disgrace, as if it were my rifle that was responsible for the harm done to my son, and the leaves like so many hands of creatures or fairies that live on our land would make the earth swallow it down. I pick up my rifle and head home, the howls of the coyotes flanking either side of me as if they were providing some kind of corridor leading me straight to my home and back to my bed.

  CALL: In the morning, a bread machine that needs the belt reattached.

  ACTION: Told the wife I could do it. Set bread machine on kitchen table. Unscrewed all the screws in the bread machine. (Number of screws: 62.)

  RESULT: Reattached the belt. Screwed back in 60 screws. Two disappeared.

  THOUGHTS WHILE WALKING WITH BREAD MACHINE FROM TABLE TO COUNTER TO PLUG IN BREAD MACHINE: It’s winter. Snow is falling outside the window. We are living in a snow globe. If there had been snow on the ground at the time my son was shot, the footprints of the hunter who shot him would still be in the snow, but there was no snow and the ground did not hold a man’s boot print.

  WHAT THE GIRLS SAID WHEN THEY CAME HOME: What’s that burning smell?

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Look at the floor! Take off your boots!

  WHAT SMELLED LIKE SOMETHING BURNING WHEN IT SHOULD HAVE SMELLED LIKE BREAD BAKING: The bread machine, whose paddles were not turning because the rubber belt had once again slipped.

  WHAT THE RADIO SAID: Beep-de-dah-beep-de-dah-beep-beep-beep.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID TO THE GIRLS: I am getting a transmission.

  WHAT I THOUGHT: My wife can save us all. She can save me. She can save our son. She can take us up in her spacecraft. Our son will awaken in the spacecraft and my wife will rub a window clear for him to see down below to our fields covered in frost. She will point out how places in the field hit with morning sun have alrea
dy melted, and the dead grass showing through is as tawny as the hides of lions on African land.

  Winter

  WHAT WE DO: Visit Sam whenever we can. I sit beside his bed. I bring magazines and newspapers as if I were going on a trip and knew I would need something to read. When I’m done reading them I leave them on the bed and when Jen sits down next to him she becomes angry, pulling out the newspapers and magazines from underneath her and around her, throwing them onto the floor, their pages spreading, catching air, coming down for a slow landing like the geese on Arthur’s pond. Can’t you put them away? she says. I gather them up and keep them in a stack beside his bed and tell the day nurse not to throw them away. Who knows, I say, if there is an article in one of them I missed. Sam is pale and Jen puts her hand on his cheek and rubs it and I wonder if she’s trying to give his face some color. When Sarah and Mia come they play beneath his bed, creating a fort with his blanket and his sheet, exposing him where he lies dressed in a hospital gown. Don’t, he’ll get cold, Jen says and tries dismantling the walls of their fort, but they protest. “It’s hot in here! I’m burning up!” they cry, and it’s true, the hospital is overheated. “Let them, it’s okay,” I say to Jen and she nods her head, letting Sarah and Mia play beneath his bed, every once in a while hitting a hanging blanket, making the blanket move, making it look like just maybe it’s Sam doing the moving himself.

  THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME: My hands are cracking again in this dry weather and I must rub them with Silvadene tonight and wear some gloves to keep them from cracking and bleeding further. I must order more vaccine because I am running low on vaccine. I must teach the children some German. We have not picked up our books in days. I must turn on the German language CD to listen to while driving in my car. The woman on the CD is named Gisela. I have listened to Gisela for months now in her dialogues. Gisela is my good Freundin. I wonder if I would be able to understand another woman so well as Gisela. Gisela, on the CD, has let Jürgen know her telephone number. I now know Gisela’s phone number, too.