The Call

by Yannick Murphy

  WHAT WE ALL DID: We piled into the car. We drove to the hospital. We sat in metal framed chairs by his bed and threw back his covers and stared at his foot.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Oh, God, look how dirty his toenails are, how come I didn’t notice before. She went digging in her purse for a nail clipper, but I stopped her. It’s okay, it’s dirt from home, I said. Yes, it’s not like he’s been walking around here, she said, and looked around the room at the tiled floor with gray flecks in the pattern. Put the clippers away, I said, and she did. We stayed until Sarah and Mia’s bedtime and then we drove home. We never saw Sam’s foot move.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID ON THE RIDE HOME: Tell me again what the day nurse said. Did she say she saw it move herself? How much did it move, did she say? Was it a twitch or a kick, or just a side-to-side motion? I told her I didn’t know. I didn’t ask all that of the day nurse. You didn’t ask? How could you not ask? Jen said.

  WHAT I DID: I turned the radio on. I listened to the news.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: There’s something wrong when you have all these actors and actresses promoting world peace when they’re starring in movies that are awful and violent and will surely affect our youth in a negative fashion.

  WHAT SARAH AND MIA SAID THEY SAW: A great horned owl.

  WHAT THE SEASON IS NOW: No season. Not bear, not turkey, not deer, not moose, not grouse.

  WHAT THE TRANSMISSIONS ARE DOING: Coming in more frequently. We can hardly listen to the news without being interrupted several times. My wife says the request is urgent now, more urgent than ever for the Head Potty Cleaner on her spacecraft. She looks at Sarah imploringly, with her forefingers from each hand held up by her ears, to look like antennae poking from her head. Oh no, Sarah giggles, her eyes slanting upward, nearly closing with her smile. I am not going to be Head Potty Cleaner!

  WHAT THE TOY PIGGY BANK IN THE SHAPE OF A BANK VAULT SAID IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT: Beep-beep-beep. Who has broken open my doors? Who has plundered the cash? Made away with the goods? Is it the mice who crawl across our loft boards at night? Is it the cluster flies, their beating transparent wings strong enough to turn a combination?

  WHAT THE WIFE ASKED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT: What is that noise?

  WHAT I TOLD MY WIFE: It’s just a bird. Go back to sleep.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: That is not a bird. No way that is a bird. That’s the bank, she said. The fucking bank.

  WHAT I SAID: Think of it as a bird. A tropical bird. A bakonga bird.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: What is a bakonga bird?

  WHAT I SAID: Ah, the rare bakonga bird, you have never heard of this bird?

  WHAT I THINK FOR A MOMENT: That the light flashing from the smoke alarm reflected in the window is a light from the spacecraft, but it’s not. I think what the sheriff said, that if I did not see the man who shot my son there is no way to find him, but maybe someone did see. Maybe the pilot of the spacecraft saw. If only he could tell me. I look again into the darkness, waiting to see if the spacecraft will show up. I think how the next time I see it I’ll run outside to the snow-covered field. I’ll flail my arms, I’ll land it in. If it doesn’t come close I’ll write in the snow in large letters like those written by men stranded on deserted islands, only I won’t write “Save me,” I’ll write, “Tell me who did it!” and hope that the pilot can read my words formed in three feet of hard crusted snow.

  CALL: The caller who doesn’t talk. I know because Sarah answers and she says hello, hello, and then she holds the phone up in the air and then out to the side, still saying, hello, hello, but louder every time, until she is yelling. I run to grab the phone away from her. There’s no one there, she tells me, and then she hangs up. Quickly I pick up the phone. Hello, it’s me, I say, out of breath from my running across the room, and I’m thinking maybe if he hears my voice he’ll start talking and I’ll find out who it is. But it’s too late. No one’s there now, just the dial tone of our phone, but I keep talking anyway. Brody? Brody, is that you, you fucker? Brody? I say.

  CALL: Dorothy’s sheep, Alice, seems to be sick.

  ACTION: Drove to Dorothy’s on a bright, sunny day. Snow still sat on the lower branches of the pines, but the winds over the past few days have blown the snow from the topmost parts.

  RESULT: Alice wasn’t sick. Dorothy was keeping Alice in the kitchen. There was straw on the floor, over the tile. She is not sick, I told Dorothy, but Dorothy shook her head. I know something is wrong with her, she said. I patted Alice’s head. I looked into her eyes. Dorothy sighed. I could feel the breath from her sigh reach my face. How are you feeling, Dorothy? I asked. Dorothy shook her head. I have things going on with me; at my age, who wouldn’t? she said. I nodded. I told her I thought how Alice was the luckiest sheep I knew. Yes, lucky. But who will take care of her when I’m dead and gone? Dorothy said. You can’t go anywhere, not while she’s alive, I said. You wouldn’t want someone else taking care of her. Who else would have a sheep in their kitchen? Who else would take their sheep to church? No, I said to Dorothy. You are not allowed to check out anytime soon. And I thought of Sam and how maybe if I brought him here to Dorothy’s kitchen, he would awaken. I could lay him down next to Alice under the kitchen table, and the warm breaths of Alice could bring him back.

  WHAT DOROTHY SAID: How are you, Doc? Are you all right yourself? she asked. I’m okay, I said. I’ve been busy. It seems that people are calling me who don’t even really need me. I got a call from a man named Brody, lives near me. You know him? I said. Dorothy shook her head. You’re up a ways from me. I don’t go north of here much. He must be new to here, she said. Anyway, I said, he had a horse with nothing wrong with him. Don’t you think that’s strange? I said. To spend the money on a call to a vet when nothing’s wrong? Dorothy laughed. Well, Doc, she said, that’s just what I did here to you. Seems that Brody isn’t the only one to blame, she said.

  WHAT I TOOK THAT TO MEAN: That Dorothy didn’t think Brody was the one who shot my son and I could now narrow it down to only 599 people instead of 600.

  THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME: In order to cut costs on health insurance, everyone should be enrolled in an exercise program. Everyone enrolled should receive a discount on the cost of their health insurance. Everyone would be healthier. Everyone would live longer.

  CALL: A horse who is depressed.

  ACTION: Drove to the farm in the arctic cold. My truck’s thermometer said it was minus 17 degrees. The girl who owned the horse was a checkout girl at the grocery store. The girl said she had seen me in there before with my wife and children. You buy a lot of eggs, the girl said. You should buy yourself some laying hens. I couldn’t agree more, I said. I thought the girl was good. She could help in my search. She probably knew the man who had shot my son. She had probably sold him beer, slid the six-pack across her conveyor belt, swiped his card through the machine. She knew his name, had seen it printed on the back of the card, had seen it printed on the receipt she handed back to him along with the points he had earned in the “fill-her-up for free” gas program. I bet you know a lot about the people around here, I said.

  WHAT THE GIRL SAID: You can tell some things about what people buy.

  WHAT I SAID: Like what?

  WHAT SHE SAID: Like things you don’t want to know. Like when they’re on the rag and when they’ve got hemorrhoids. The druggies, they used to buy the baby formula in the huge cans, but we’ve stopped that now, only so much allowed per customer. I hate watching it, she said, their veiny, dirty fingers holding the can, covering the picture of the cute baby. You know how a woman’s mad at her husband? she said. No, tell me, I said. She buys tons of stuff. She buys stuff that’s mostly not even food. You don’t buy frying pans, something to remind you of how you have to cook for him, when you’re flaming furious at your husband. You buy makeup and hair product. You buy the body oil and bath beads, she said.

  WHAT I SAID: What about the guys? I mean, how do you know when they’re feeling angry or guilty? Or a criminal, I said, what do they buy?
But the girl looked at her horse. I had spent too much time on the subject. I had not timed it right. I would have to wait for another time. The girl was done talking about the checkout line. Is he going to be all right? she said.

  The horse was an old Thoroughbred. The horse had his head hanging down, but the strange thing was the horse had his tongue hanging out of his mouth. I reached in and felt his tongue. I could move it from side to side. The horse did not or could not pull his tongue back in. I went to the back of the horse and lifted his tail. He let me lift it up high. He let me swing it from side to side. Swinging it that way created a breeze. The checkout girl wrapped her arms around herself. The checkout girl tucked her head down, into the collar of her parka. Look at this, I told the checkout girl, this isn’t right, I said as I kept swinging the tail back and forth and lifting it high and letting it drop. Wow, the girl said. I took the horse’s temperature. It was normal. These are classic signs of botulism, I said. The girl nodded. Do you know what botulism is? I said. The girl shook her head. It affects the horse’s central nervous system. That’s why he’s sick, but he doesn’t have a temperature. That’s why his muscles are affected and his tongue sticks out and his tail is so easy to move.

  RESULT: I took a blood on the horse. It could be botulism, I said. I’ll let you know soon, I said. If he goes down in the next twenty-four hours before the blood results come back, he will not get up again. You cannot get a horse sick with botulism up from the ground if he has decided to go down. They will almost always die.

  THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME: What if I send this blood off and it freezes in the mail before it reaches the lab? Is it too cold for the spacecraft to fly in this weather? Is this why I haven’t seen the spacecraft for days?

  WHERE I STOP ON THE WAY HOME: Phil’s. I walk the three aisles of the store, my feet making the wooden floorboards creak as I look at items like gravy in jars with dusty lids and I think if I stand around long enough, maybe the man who shot my son will walk in and will tell Phil something as Phil stands behind the meat counter, slicing roast beef. He will tell Phil how he was out hunting for grouse weeks ago and has to admit he hit something he thought might not have been a grouse, and has Phil heard of anyone hurt in the woods? When I realize the likelihood of that ever happening is zero, I buy some milk and drive home.

  WHAT THE HOUSE SAYS: I have been tricked by the wind.

  WHAT THE THERMOMETER INSIDE THE HOUSE SAYS: 53 degrees.

  WHAT SARAH AND MIA SAY: Add more wood, Poppy. Add more wood.

  WHAT THE WIFE COOKS FOR DINNER: Roast chicken with giblets alongside the chicken, all of it roasted. All the giblets dry and brown.

  WHAT I TELL THE CHILDREN: Don’t eat the skin. It’s fatty. Don’t eat the liver. Do you know what the liver is? Do you know what the liver does? The liver stores all of the toxins inside the body. Why would you want to eat it?

  WHAT THE CHILDREN DO: Eat the liver and the skin. The skin especially. They can’t get enough of it. They fight over it. The good meat, the white meat, they don’t like. They leave it on their plates, but on the bones they chew off the cartilage and suck on the marrow.

  WHAT MIA PULLS OUT OF HER POCKET FOR SAM WHEN WE ARE VISITING HIM AT THE HOSPITAL: A wizened cooked chicken heart she saved from her meal. The heart is his favorite, she says, and she puts it next to his ear on his pillow. Ugh! Sarah says and turns away.

  WHAT THE NURSE SAYS WHEN SHE COMES INTO THE ROOM: It happened again today. It’s here in the notes. His foot moved again.

  WHAT MY WIFE DOES: Grabs the notes from the nurse and reads them. It’s not just his foot, she says. It’s also his eyes! We all look to Sam’s eyes. The lids are closed, but Sarah says she swears she saw his eyeballs moving back and forth.

  WHAT MIA SAYS: It’s the chicken heart, I know it. It’s giving him dreams.

  CALL: Helga Bartlett says her old dog needs putting down.

  ACTION: Drove to Helga Bartlett’s house. The dog ran up to me and wagged his tail. The dog sniffed my pants and wagged his tail. The dog looked up at me with smiling eyes and wagged his tail.

  RESULT: I could not put Helga Bartlett’s dog down. Helga, I said, maybe it’s just not his time.

  WHAT HELGA SAID: Yesterday, it was his time. Yesterday, he could not walk. He lay on the floor by the fire hardly breathing. Yesterday, he did not eat.

  WHAT I SAID: He got over yesterday.

  WHAT HELGA SAID: I guess you’re right. Yesterday is behind him.

  WHAT THE DOG DID: Fetched a stuffed-up toy, a green fuzzy spaceship from one of the children’s rooms in Helga’s home. The dog held it in his mouth and cocked his head while looking at me. He thinks that’s his spaceship, Helga said. It’s really my son’s, she said. He’s a fine dog, Helga, I said, and for a moment I thought the dog was trying to tell me he’d seen the same spacecraft I’d seen, the object with bright lights flying back and forth in the sky. I know, she said. Yesterday was his time, but today is not. I’ll call you again, when yesterday comes—when it will be his time again, she says. Good, I said. Call me when yesterday comes again.

  WHAT I TELL SAM WHEN I SEE HIM AGAIN AT THE HOSPITAL: I tell him about Helga and her dog. I tell him things that are not about anything. I recite for him the foodstuffs I see down the three aisles at Phil’s. The marshmallows, the soup cans, the replacement arrow tips, the Day-Glo fletchings, and the Whisker Biscuit rests. I whistle for him Appalachian Spring and still there is no response, the only change in the room being the light that goes from weak sunlight to dusk to darkness.

  CALL: A woman says she found her horse on the barn floor rolling his eyes and paddling his legs. It’s a seizure, she said.

  ACTION: Drove to farm. I knelt down next to the horse. I felt his pulse. He stood up abruptly.

  RESULT: The horse was awake now. He was just sleeping, I told the woman. Sleeping! she said. Yes, I said. He must have some kind of sleep disorder. It happens to horses as well as to humans. He may not be able to sleep well at night because of a predator in the area, or too much light, a full moon maybe, and so he is so exhausted and the next day he falls asleep suddenly, and falls to the barn floor instead of kneeling to lie down. Once he’s down, he falls into a deep REM state. He rolls his eyes in a dream, and the leg paddling, that too is from galloping in his dreams. It’s not really a seizure, just a deep sleep, I said.

  The woman shook her head. Hard to believe, she said. She invited me into her house while she wrote me a check. It was a nice house, unusually large. There were so many knickknacks and ceramic figurines on the shelves that I was sure if Bruce or Nelly were inside the house, with one swipe of their bushy black tails the woman’s entire collection would have been smashed. I told the woman it was a nice house. She raised her forefinger. Upstairs there’s a bowling alley, she said. Really? I said. She nodded, saying she had bought the house a year ago and she never used to bowl, but now, after dinner, she takes her drink and her cigarette upstairs, and she bowls. The part she likes best is the sound the pins make when they fall, and she swears that on bone-chill cold nights, when the sound carries farthest, the entire town can hear her strikes. I think how the man who shot my son can hear the strikes. While cleaning his shotgun, he could smell the gunpowder that smoked after he took the shot that injured my son, and down the road he heard this woman’s pins falling down. That’s not so strange, I say to the woman. I think there are stranger people around here than that, don’t you? I say to the woman. The woman nods her head. Oh, no doubt there are stranger people around here. What about that man with those cows, she says. The cows who live in the man’s basement? How’s he ever going to get those cows out in the springtime when they’ve grown so big they won’t fit up the stairs?

  WHAT I SAY: The man with the cows?

  WHAT SHE SAYS: Yes, you know, old Greg Springer, wears overalls all the time with the straps down and his gut pouring out.

  WHAT I SAY: Ah, yes, old Greg Springer.

  WHAT SHE SAYS: Now there’s some guy I wouldn’t trust as far as I could thr
ow him. And what he’s done to those cows, letting them stand up to their necks in their own shit every day. I think that’s criminal. He’s a criminal, she says.

  WHAT I DO ON DRIVE HOME: Realize that in order to spell “Springer” out of grated orange peel I need an s, but that maybe the recipe I was given for scones was really asking for “grated orange peels.”

  WHAT I NOTICE WHEN I DRIVE HOME: That I have not seen the spacecraft in days and that I will never know now who shot my son if I cannot ask the pilot in the spacecraft if he saw anything.

  WHAT I DIG THROUGH THE JUNK DRAWER FOR IN THE KITCHEN: The scone recipe, to check and see if it really asks for “grated orange peels.” I find the rabies tags for Nelly and Bruce, I find a magnifying glass (which I think might come in handy and slip it into my pocket even though it’s a kid’s cheapo magnifying glass, the quality no better than a cereal box trinket). I find wildflower seeds whose envelope is torn and the seeds litter the bottom of the drawer, I find a dried-up glue stick and a turkey call and an owl call, I find receipts for dental work done years ago, but I do not find the scone recipe.

  WHAT I AM BEGINNING TO THINK: That my son will never awaken, even though his score on his Glasgow coma scale was a 14, even though his SPECT scan showed normal cerebral blood flow, even though his foot, according to the day nurse, has moved now and then, approximately a millimeter to the right, and another millimeter to the left. I look up while driving home on our driveway at night. I’m looking up the whole time, seeing if I can see it, and then because I’m not paying attention, I drive off the driveway and partly down the side of the road.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAYS IN THE MORNING: Some drunk kids from town must have driven down our driveway last night and gone off the road.

  WHAT SARAH SAYS: Oh, those must be the same kids who changed the sign to COME TO THE FALL BOOB FEST.

  CALL: A cow with milk fever, down and doesn’t want to get up.