The Call

by Yannick Murphy

  WHAT I SAID: Then that makes it some kind of island, and the trees some kind of danger, a thing to drown in, the crowns of pines so thick no daylight passes through to the forest floor below, no air visible to breathe. Panic is just steps away. Feel better now? I asked.

  WHAT THE HOUSE SAID: I have let the mice come in for the winter to live in the walls, for if I don’t they will be cold and hungry and I am not that kind of house to shut them out.

  CALL: A man with an old Appaloosa he wants to put down. (See, I told the wife, how now there are so many of these calls.)

  ACTION: Drove to farm. Tranqued the horse so the owner could walk him calmly alongside the hole that had been dug with a backhoe.

  WHAT THE OWNER SAID: I want him in the hole facing east.

  WHAT I SAID: East?

  WHAT THE OWNER SAID: Yes, east.

  RESULT: The owner turned the horse facing east and held on to the horse’s halter. Did the horse love the mountains facing east, did he go for trail rides there his entire life? I wondered. Or was it something Asian, something feng shui I had never heard of before that the owner believed in. I thought how if I hadn’t myself seen an object with bright lights floating in the sky, I would have thought feng shui was bunk, but now feng shui quite possibly contained a kernel of truth. I felt ready to accept feng shui, and maybe even the yeti. I looked behind my shoulder, into the woods, but there wasn’t anything nine feet tall crashing through them. What was crashing down, more dangerously, was the horse. After I gave the series of shots, the horse started to fall, he was going down, but the owner was standing too close to the horse. The owner was going to fall in the hole with his horse because he forgot to let go of the horse’s halter. The owner was old. He had white hair and gray stubble. I did what I had to do. I pushed the owner back with a swing of my arm. The horse then turned his backside, he swung his hips so that instead of facing east, he was now facing west. He was going in the hole the opposite way. After he fell in, I turned to the owner. He was on the ground. He was just looking up. His name was Jack. Did Jack know the man who shot my son? I looked around. What clues were there to tell me that he did know? It did not seem the old man hunted, himself. It did not seem the old man could even see so well. It did not seem the old man had the strength to even raise a shotgun in the air. Jack, I said, I am going to give you a hand up. I held out my hand to Jack, but he still looked up. I looked up, too, thinking there was something other than the sky to see. I grabbed on to Jack’s arm and pulled. When Jack was standing he took his cap off his head and put it on again. Then he looked down into the hole. He nodded when he saw his horse, as if to say even in your moment of death you have done what was contrary to what I wanted you to do. And I thought on these mountains facing east, on these trails his horse so often rode, was Jack the one who had to yank his horse’s reins hard, get him going where he wanted him to go? Was Jack’s horse that kind of stubborn mule?

  THOUGHTS ON RIDE HOME: If my levels get too high, if they talk too much, then put me out of my misery and burn me on a pyre, that’s how I want to go. Don’t bother with a backhoe to try and dig the hole. Take down the trees to build the pyre off our land. Let the Newfoundlands have my bones. Let them walk the property drooling with my femur between their massive jaws. I am renewable energy.

  WHAT THE WIFE COOKED FOR DINNER: Meat loaf with sweet pickle.

  WHAT SARAH AND MIA SAID: We love sweet pickle.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Sweet pickle is so sweet I might as well put candy in your meat loaf instead.

  WHAT THE HOUSE SAID AT NIGHT WHILE WE LAY IN BED: I am just made of wood. I can break.

  WHAT SARAH SAID THAT WE COULD HEAR HER SAY FROM HER BED WHILE WE LAY IN OURS: Mom, Pop, the house is coming apart.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Is it true, can the house break apart?

  WHAT I FELT: That it was my heart that was breaking in two. I turned over, switching sides.

  WHAT I SAID: The house will be the last thing to go, I said, now facing the wall.

  WHO IS NICER THAN THE DAY NURSE: The night nurse. The night nurse brings Sarah and Mia extra blankets and lets them create a very dark fort without having to use Sam’s blankets. The night nurse sees the stack of papers and magazines on the floor and admits that that’s what her house looks like and she is always afraid to throw them away for fear she has missed reading an article in them, an article that will save her life maybe. A recall on her brake pedal, a recall on ground meat, a recall on a faulty crib railing, even though she doesn’t have a baby. The night nurse has glasses with pink rims the color of the eyes of an albino pet mouse I had as a child. I would let the mouse run up and down my arms, liking the way he tickled my skin.

  CALL: A prepurchase exam on a horse.

  ACTION: Drove to farm. Owner’s daughter held the horse while I took X-rays of the horse.

  RESULT: Horse, thankfully, stood very still. The X-rays came out clear. The daughter was a young woman. She talked about snow-boarding. She talked about competing as a snowboarder. I told her about surfing, how she should really try it. I told her how I had lived by the ocean out west and surfed the waves and when there weren’t waves to surf, I still went out on my board, lying flat and eyeing orange garibaldi in the clear water. I told her how waves are not like mountains, and how every wave is different and every ride is different and the ocean always changes. I told her that surfing is learning to spot where the wave out on the horizon will be coming from. She laughed, she threw her head back, mountains are like that, too, she said. The conditions are never exactly the same. Her mother brought me out a scone to eat while I X-rayed the horse, a small Morgan with his winter coat beginning to grow in woolly so that he looked more like some Mongolian pony. The scone was delicious. Bits of orange were grated into the batter. Fresh cranberries and bits of apple were mixed in. I asked the owner for the recipe and after I X-rayed the horse, she invited me into her house. Her husband was a carpenter and had carved the doors between the rooms, and he had carved the moldings and the cupboard doors. He had carved the shapes of trees into the wood, not trees you’d expect to find here, but trees, maybe, from the likes of Indonesia. Their canopies were spread wide and their branches thin and delicate and numerous below the canopies, leading down to trunks that were not smooth but ropy in appearance, as if the trunks were twisted strands. Your house is beautiful, I said, and I feasted on the details, wishing everyone’s house I entered could be so distinct and interesting to walk around in. The owner folded up the paper she had written the recipe on and she handed me a check and I put them in my coat pocket. I wanted to ask her if she had heard about Sam, but I knew she had, everyone had heard by now. When she handed me the recipe, she folded it up right after she wrote it, so I could not see the letters. I hoped walking back to my truck that what she had written was the name of the man who had shot my son.

  WHAT I DID DRIVING HOME: Unfurled the recipe. There was no name in it, even though I studied the words “grated orange peel” thinking it was some kind of anagram for a man’s name, but what could it be? I came up with “Pete Darlan George” and reminded myself when I got home to look up the name in the phone book.

  THOUGHTS WHILE DRIVING HOME: This is a good feeling, a check and a good scone recipe in my coat pocket. What more could a man ask for? Then I answered the question myself, alone in my truck. “For my son to be awake,” I said and as I said the words I passed by a man jogging down the road and he must have seen my mouth moving and he must have thought I was talking to him, because he waved and he smiled as I drove on by.

  WHAT THE SPACECRAFT WAS DOING WHEN I GOT BACK HOME: Moving quickly up and down, then back and forth, the way a child would wave a sparkler on the Fourth of July, trying to spell his name out in the air with the burning tip. Was the message the name of the man who had shot my son?

  WHAT SARAH AND MIA SAID WHEN I GOT HOME: “Father” in German sounds like “Farter.”

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: They got that right.

  WHAT WAS NOT IN THE PHONE BOOK: Anyone
named “Pete Darlan George.”

  WHAT THE FIRE SAID IN THE WOODSTOVE: You have loaded me with wet wood. You did not cover my log piles over the summer, and now I will smoke instead of burn.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID I DID IN MY SLEEP: Cried.

  WHAT THE WIFE DID IN HER SLEEP: Snored.

  WHAT THE TRUCK IS TELLING ME: Check engine.

  WHAT I TOOK THE TRUCK INTO THE SHOP TO BE REPAIRED FOR: The CHECK ENGINE light.

  WHAT THE TRUCK COST ME AT THE SHOP TO BE REPAIRED: $300.

  WHAT THE TRUCK IS STILL TELLING ME AFTER $300: Check engine.

  WHAT I HAVE DECIDED: That having a light on all the time telling me to check something is a good thing and it will make me check my levels more often. It will make me more aware and alert and maybe I need this constant state of alertness to feel alive. Maybe, just maybe, my high levels are keeping me young in ways I never knew. I have my levels to thank. To show my appreciation, I make the appointment with the doctor when I’m at the hospital visiting Sam. I stand by Sam’s bedside and talk to him and tell him I will be right back, I am going down to floor 5 to make an appointment with my own doctor. I feel stupid talking to Sam. I am too much like my wife for a moment, and I do not want to be like her. Talking to him, having him smell food she has brought for him that he cannot eat, brushing his hair for him when it did not have the chance to get messy—he was not running through the pastel yellow walls of the halls, the window was not open letting through winter’s blustering wind, he was not wrestling with his sisters the way he did before.

  WHAT GISELA SAYS: Meine Telefonnummer ist zwei, sieben, neun, null, neun.

  WHAT JÜRGEN SAYS: Do you play chess? (You see Jurgen is always trying to get Gisela to go out with him and do something. He suggested playing table tennis earlier, but Gisela, can you blame her, hasn’t got a thing for table tennis.)

  WHAT MY WIFE CALLS GISELA: A slut, and then my wife wants to know how you say slut in German, and my wife guesses it’s something like a Schatz, but she’s not sure, considering how anything she ever learned about German was from the movie Das Boot, which we have seen several times over and over, because we love Das Boot and we and our children are known, every once in a while, to walk around the house and belt out the piercing cry of “Alarm! Alarm!” in German accents, as if we were not living in a house with creaking timbers, but living in a U-boat about to be attacked by the Allied forces and we have to quickly descend to crush depth in order to save our tails in our beloved tin can.

  CALL: No call. Just the caller who hangs up. Jen wants to know who it was. I don’t know, I say. Was it the hospital? she says. I don’t know, I say. Well, who was it? How do you know it wasn’t the hospital? she says. Why would the hospital hang up? I say. The hospital hung up? Jen says, then call them back. And then she calls the hospital and talks to the day nurse asking if we had been called, if there had been any change in our son.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAYS AFTER SHE GETS OFF THE PHONE WITH THE DAY NURSE: Well, he’s fine. There’s been no change. Thank God, Jen says. But I’ve been hoping for a change, any kind of change.

  WHAT THE CHILDREN DO IN THE MORNING: Climb into bed with us. Sarah curling around me, pulling hairs from moles off my back. I tell her not to. She reads, her eyes close to the page, words from The Secret Garden somehow hard for her to see. Propped up on her elbows, the small muscles in her back pop up, and off her skin comes the faint smell of chlorine from when she had her practice swim the night before. A heavy header on the team, her face looking down at the tiles and the drain, rather than where the coach would have her look—up and out and toward the wall. Who can blame her, not wanting always to swim into a wall, when looking down is where one might want to go. At least down there in the holes between the hairs tangled in the drain there is a possible way out.

  OTHER THINGS GISELA DOES NOT WANT TO DO BESIDES PLAY TABLE TENNIS: She doesn’t want to play chess, she doesn’t want to go to a movie, she doesn’t want to lift weights. Gisela is too tired for all of this. Perhaps, another day, she tells Jürgen, she will go in-line skating when she is feeling better.

  THINGS I DO NOT WANT TO DO: Cut the limb off the big maple that leans on the asphalt shingle roof covering my wife’s office and threatens to rot a hole all the way through to the timbers. Oil the windows so the sun and rain and snow don’t ruin the wood. Fix the drawers in my wife’s desk. She tries to pull them out and they don’t work, the bottoms fall through, and the drawers’ runners are broken or out of line, so that in order to open them she has to pull hard, making her stapler, and three-hole punch, and black Sharpies all jump from the drawer and onto the floor. I don’t want to bring in more wood for the fire. I really don’t mind the hearth turning cold under my butt, at least not for a while. It is still only fall and the clutch of winter not yet here and besides the last time I went to the log pile to get more wood, I stepped in dog shit and I don’t feel like having to shovel up the dog shit now so that I can get more armfuls of wood. Maybe I will feel like going in-line skating in a few days, but not right now. Not right now, Jürgen. I am so tired right now, and I can say that in German. I have learned that much.

  WHAT I DO: I lie down and close my eyes. What I see is an outline on my eyelids of the spacecraft and I wonder if that’s where it’s been all this time anyway, and it’s never even been in the sky.

  WHAT WE HEAR ON THE RADIO: That the animal shelter has an overabundance of cats. Cats are being brought in by the sackfuls, quite possibly, and now there is no more room. The shelter is full. Owners can’t afford their cats anymore. What will happen to the cats? I wonder. They will be turned out into the woods. The coyotes will make meals of them. They will try to survive. They will band together, they will roam in cat packs. Cars will have to stop and let them cross in packs across the road, yellow-eyed in the headlights and silent except for the flicking speech of the ends of their tails.

  WHAT ELSE I HEAR ON THE RADIO: Transmissions from Mars. It’s a break in the reception, the show that’s on is interrupted by a series of broken beeps. Beep-di-dah-beep-di-dah-beep-beep-beep. When it happens, my wife puts her fingers up on her head like antennae of an alien and says in a monotone to the children: I am getting a transmission … the next flight to Mars is scheduled to lift off soon. This is a very important mission. We need to fill a number of vital posts on board. We are searching for a loyal and dedicated Head Potty Cleaner. We are pleased to announce that you, Sarah, have been especially selected for this high honor. Welcome aboard, Sarah, Head Potty Cleaner.

  WHAT WE DON’T HAVE: Cats.

  WHAT WE HAVE: The two dogs, of course, fish, crayfish, and a rabbit. The rabbit is now wearing diapers. Pampers, sized newborn. Because the rabbit wears diapers, it gets to come out of its cage and run around the house with us while we cook, while the children do their homework, and we are not worried about it peeing on the furniture. Rabbit pee smells worse than cat pee. The rabbit likes to stand on its hind legs in the easy chair and look out the picture window. The rabbit is really cute wearing diapers and my wife looks fondly at the rabbit, remembering when our children wore them, too.

  WHAT THE RABBIT SEES: The pond, maybe, down our field. The chairs we sit on in the summer that I have not yet brought in. The rope swing I made for the children that hangs from the apple tree, now apple-less, now leafless.

  WHAT THIS WEEKEND IS: Still bow season. I sit in my tree stand. I sit and listen and watch. It is raining. The drops of rain are good, masking any noise the turn of my head may make, the creak of a neck joint, a sigh I may exhale.

  WHAT I DO: Go to my doctor’s appointment.

  WHAT THE DOCTOR, MY DOCTOR, WORE WHEN I WENT FOR MY EXAM: A pink ribbon brooch. Anti-AIDS, anti-breast cancer sentiments pinned to his white coat lapel. And I wanted to ask where the pin was he might have had for anti-coma, and what would that look like, because I wanted to tell him about my son on floor 9, whom I had just come from visiting, still with his eyes closed.

  WHAT THE DOCTOR OFFERED ME AFTER MY BLOOD WAS DRAWN:
Orange juice.

  WHAT I TALKED TO THE DOCTOR ABOUT AFTER MY BLOOD WAS DRAWN: A parallel universe, one that was created at the same time ours was. I had read this.

  WHAT HE SAID: Yes, yes, that’s all very interesting. Now, about your levels.

  WHAT I AM: An anomaly. A man my age with such high levels unheard-of. It’s only in older men, the doctor has told me, that we have seen these kinds of numbers. The doctor is a little giddy with the news he reads on the chart, and maybe he wouldn’t let his giddiness show if he were talking to someone who was not also a doctor, but being a doctor myself, he can let me join in on the wonderment of it all, the beauty in the numbers.

  CALL: The alpaca that spit in my eye is dead.

  ACTION: Drove to farm. The owner wanted to know what had done it. There’s no blood, the owner said, and there wasn’t, only the barn floor strewn with the neat balls of alpaca dung. He looks like he’s sleeping, that’s all, the owner said and he bent down next to the alpaca, putting his knees into the balls of dung, and stroked his belly. I looked around the barn and then I stepped outside and into the paddock where the alpaca used to stand and look out across the field. The field was wet from a storm in the middle of the night before. The storm came back to me and how the rain started to pour right after a deafening clap of thunder as if the rain had been kept inside a huge metal bin that spanned the sky and was suddenly released with the pull of a handle. He died from fear, I said to the owner. Your alpaca died when the thunder clapped.

  WHAT THE OWNER SAID: Yes, it was loud here. I could see the lightning strikes start in the middle of the sky and then reach all the way down to the ground. We lost some trees and the phone even, he said. My heart raced, too, he said, and he stood and put his hands on his hips and shook his head while he looked at the alpaca. Then the man looked at me. Wait right here, he said. He went outside the barn. He looked left and then right. He is about to tell me something secret, I thought. Something no one else should know. He is about to tell me the name of the man who shot my son. I tried not to look too anxious. I looked at the dead alpaca, its cleft hooves filled with dirt and a bit of straw. I wrote down the name and number of a man I knew who could dig a hole for the alpaca on the property with his backhoe. The owner came back into the barn.