The Call

by Yannick Murphy

  I laughed. I had to say something funny soon or else I knew Arlo might want to turn and punch the spaceman in the jaw. But what was there funny to say. Was it funny to talk about the zebra? The other day, I said, my wife called Sarah a wench because she was being mean to Mia. Well, Sam had never heard the word wench. He said sarcastically, “Hah, that’s really funny, Mom, calling Sarah a wrench. What are you going to call me when I’m mean to Mia, a screwdriver?” Arlo looked at the spaceman, then he looked at me. That is funny, Doc. Do you think this cow will be all right now? Do I need to Betadine her nose or anything? I think she’ll be fine, I said.

  THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME: No drive home. No thoughts. We drove to the pool. Let’s get in a swim, I told the spaceman, even though I did not sound right to myself saying “get in a swim” because I had never said it that way before and I had always ever said to the wife or the children, Come on, let’s go swimming. The spaceman wore the extra swimsuit I carried with me and he borrowed the extra goggles I carried with me and they fit him well. While we changed I asked him how his students behaved. Did they talk to each other while he taught? Did they have their headphones in and listen to music or talk on their phones while he taught? You see, I told him, the children I teach have done these things. The children I teach, some are horrible, I said. The spaceman laughed. Yes, he said, I have had the same kinds of children. But there are just some children whom you will not be able to teach. You will not reach them, he said, but you must always try. The same with your son. You must try to find out who shot him. I’ll help you, he said. I already looked, I said. I knocked on doors. I asked questions. It could have been that guy Passen, and he’s in jail now, so it’s over. Don’t you fucking think I tried? I said. I banged my locker shut. It made a very loud noise. The spaceman opened up the locker, then shut it again quietly while he talked, as if to teach me how lockers should be shut. You were alone then. You had seen your son shot and then in a coma. You couldn’t possibly have done a good job looking. But I can help you. Together we can find out who did it. Maybe it was Passen, maybe it wasn’t. But we can find out. How many people in this town? Six hundred? Six hundred is not so many. Someone knows something and they are not telling. They are protecting someone. It is heinous what the man did. It is heinous that the man probably knows you in a town this small. What’s the old saying, Don’t shit where you eat, or should I say, Don’t shoot where you eat. I thought you were a teacher. Now you’re a detective? I said. The spaceman put his hand on my shoulder. His hand was as large as mine, maybe larger. The weight of his hand on my shoulder felt good and strong. I would have liked some of his strength. Was some kind of alien transfer going to take place from him to me, I wondered. We’ll find the man together, he said, and when he said it I became excited. Maybe he was right that I hadn’t done a good job looking. I had gone knocking on doors asking if owners had seen the spacecraft, when maybe I should have been asking more about the hunter who shot my son. Maybe the man could be found after all.

  WHAT HIS BUTTERFLY WAS: Really good. When he came up for a breath, he moved his head to the side, and I thought how Misty Hyman wouldn’t have done it that way. Misty Hyman would have gotten her breath from directly in front of her. But the spaceman’s way seemed to me like an efficient way to breathe. He did not always have to be searching for that hidden pocket of air. The way he lifted his head from side to side, the air for him was easy to find. The air was all his.

  WHO WE SAW AT THE POOL GETTING IN A SWIM: Coach. He brought Ted and Ted sat in the wheelchair waiting for coach to get in his swim. The spaceman got out of the pool before I did. I could see him talking to Ted in the wheelchair on the deck of the pool. The spaceman knelt down in front of Ted and Ted put his hand on the spaceman’s shoulder. What were they talking about? Were they trading religious insight? Was the spaceman being ordained? Later, in the locker room, I told the spaceman I could never understand Ted, and so I didn’t try to talk to Ted too much. The spaceman said he could understand Ted. He once worked with others like Ted and had learned to understand their speech. He said that all Ted was telling him was that his foot hurt, and that his sneaker was on too tight, and so the spaceman had reached down and loosened Ted’s laces for him. The spaceman handed me back my bathing suit that he had borrowed, and when I took it he covered my hand with his own. I wondered if this was how the boys, the bad boys, the gang boys, shook hands at the school he worked in. We’re going to find the fucker who did that to your son, the spaceman said, and when he said it I could feel my heart race. It almost hurt. I remembered the alpaca who had died from the sound of the clap of thunder. It was like fear, him saying it. Yes, I thought, maybe this spaceman is right. Maybe this spaceman with the beautiful fly is someone I’ve been waiting for all along. Someone who can help me. Let’s find him, I said, and for a moment I let myself feel the anger all over again that I felt right after my son had been shot.

  WHAT WE SAW ON THE WAY HOME: The children’s school. I pointed it out to him. I showed him the apple tree where in the fall, during recess, the children’s teacher would let one child climb into the tree and let the child shake all the apples to the ground, then the teacher would let all the other children run under the tree and collect the apples. The children would put the apples on the ends of long sticks and then throw the apples off the ends of the sticks, far out into the field toward the base of the mountain, just for fun. Oh, in Philadelphia, the spaceman said, there would be lawyers around to stop that kind of play. But then again, in Philadelphia we don’t have people shooting each other out of trees.

  CALL: Dorothy says her sheep Alice has a bad leg.

  RESULT: Spaceman and I drove to Dorothy’s, past a field where for-sythia bushes grew, their buds about to bloom. I told the spaceman that when I was little I thought forsythia was really “forcynthia” and that it was named after a woman, the kind one would want to give flowers to. Outside Dorothy’s, the spaceman wanted to know where the barn was. No barn, I said. The sheep lives inside the house. Inside the house, Alice walked up to the spaceman and sniffed his knee, then she walked under the kitchen table and peered out at us from under the tabletop with her wide, kind eyes. Dorothy shook her head. It’s something with her leg, Doc, she said. I looked at Dorothy. She looked more tired than the last time I had seen her. I noticed the hem of her dress had come undone in places, and the cloth that had been turned under for years was much more colorful than the rest of the cloth on the dress. Come over here, Dorothy said to Alice, and she said it as if she were talking to another person and so the spaceman thought she was saying it to him because he went forward a step. But Dorothy was looking at Alice when she said it and Alice came out from under the tabletop and put her head in Dorothy’s lap. Dorothy rubbed Alice’s neck. This sheep has gone to church and met the local pastor, I said to the spaceman. The spaceman nodded. She’s a pretty sheep, he said. Both Dorothy and I nodded because Alice really was a pretty sheep and Dorothy kept good care of her and kept her wool clean. I knelt down and palpated the leg that Dorothy said hurt Alice, but I could find neither heat nor swelling. I did notice, however, that Dorothy seemed to be shifting her weight often while she sat in the chair with Alice’s head in her lap. How about you, Dorothy? How is your leg? I asked. Dorothy shook her head. Well, it so happens, I’ve been having trouble with my leg, too. It hurts me all day and it hurts me all night. I guess, and now Dorothy laughed, I guess that means it hurts me all the time, she said. Dorothy, I said, it sounds like you should make the appointment to see the doctor. Have you got the doctor’s telephone number? the spaceman asked, stepping closer to Dorothy now. Dorothy shrugged, I suppose it’s on the fridge, but if I go to the doctor for my leg, he will probably find something wrong with my arm. Maybe not, maybe he will just fix the problem with your leg, the spaceman said. You think so? Dorothy said and Dorothy looked up at me and the way she looked up at me she looked just like Alice when Alice looked up at me from underneath the tabletop.

  RESULT: I was getting ready to leave,
but the spaceman wanted to stay and help Dorothy find her doctor’s telephone number on her refrigerator. There were a lot of cards on her refrigerator door hanging there by the use of magnets and we looked through all of them. There were magnets so old they were cracked in half and some of the magnets had words on them advertising stores that had once been in the area, but had long since gone out of business. When we found the right card, the spaceman called the doctor for Dorothy and made the appointment. You’d think that Dorothy would be able to go to a doctor’s appointment any day, but the only day she wanted to go to the appointment was on a Thursday, so the appointment was made for a Thursday weeks from then. Before we left, Dorothy asked if I wouldn’t mind driving her to the appointment because her leg hurt her and she didn’t think she could push down on the gas pedal. Oh, and, Alice, too, she’s coming with me to the appointment in the back of the truck, Dorothy said. Okay, both you and Alice to the doctor’s, I said, and then the spaceman made sure that I wrote it down in my book.

  One last thing, the spaceman said to Dorothy. Did you know about the doctor’s son? No, don’t answer that. Of course you knew. This is a small town, everyone knew. Dorothy lowered her eyes to her linoleum floor. Yes, the poor boy, Dorothy said. Isn’t that right, Alice, she said and she reached out for Alice so she could rub Alice’s head. Well, said the spaceman, the police have said they’re getting closer to finding out who that man was. They’re very close. He doesn’t stand a chance now. No one can help him now. It’s almost water under the bridge, the spaceman said. Dorothy kept rubbing Alice’s head. Who was that man anyway? He couldn’t have been a churchgoer like you. You probably never saw the likes of him across the pew, did you? the spaceman said. Dorothy looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. Your son’s all right now, isn’t he? Tell us he’s all right? Dorothy said, and I knew that when she said “us,” she meant Alice and herself. I nodded my head. My son is fine. He’s perfectly fine now, I said. It’s time for us to go, I said to the spaceman, all of my excitement about finding the hunter who had shot my son gone now.

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID WHEN WE WERE BACK IN THE CAR: I think she knew. Everyone in this town knows, your Arlo with the ghost cows knows, this Dorothy knows. Hell, the sheep probably knows. It’s pretty sickening, what they’re doing to you, he said. You may not be from here originally, but still, you should be treated fairly. You live here and work here. You’re nice to these people. You’re probably not even going to charge her for that call, are you?

  WHAT I SAID: She is so poor. I wanted to open her refrigerator to make sure she had food in there.

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: You’re not good for your own business, are you?

  WHAT WE LISTENED TO ON THE WAY HOME: The bit on the CD about Gisela talking about how she did not want to go play chess or table tennis or go to the movies or go lift weights or go in-line skating or go on a hike. What is the matter with Gisela? the spaceman said after I translated for him. Why doesn’t she want to go out? I don’t know, I answered the spaceman. I guess that’s strange, I said, but I think I knew why she didn’t want to go out. I didn’t want to go out, either. I didn’t want to visit any more farms. I was very tired. I thought it would be nice to go home and sit by the fire and have my children read aloud to me. Sarah was now reading A Separate Peace, and I wanted to hear the description of the stately old school, and how even a thing like the hard stone steps could change and become worn from all the students over the years that had walked on them.

  WHAT THE WIFE WAS COOKING FOR DINNER: A rib roast with baked potatoes and a salad.

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN DID: Went up to Sam’s room and played his race car set with him.

  WHAT I COULD HEAR: The high-pitched insect sound of the race cars going around the track, and the spaceman and Sam laughing and yelling every time the race cars crashed and flew up into the air when vying for the single track around the turn.

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID TO SAM: That’s the fun of this game, isn’t it? The race cars crashing?

  WHAT SAM SAID: Oh, yes. That’s the best part.

  WHAT I COULD ALSO HEAR: How both their laughter and their yells sounded almost the same. The spaceman sounding as young as Sam.

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN AND I DID NOT EAT: A rib roast with baked potatoes and a salad. We had a call instead. We would grab food on the road, I told Jen. She nodded while slicing carrots on a bias while we walked out the door, leaving the roast on the table with the aroma and steam floating above it toward the rafters.

  CALL: An owner, one I’ve seen before, thinks her horse has choke. It’s the family that is so poor, the one where the boy sat on the tractor that looked like it had been driven up through the ground, the one where the mother sat in her car seat to talk to me, because there was nothing else to sit on outside, no lawn chairs or even rock walls.

  ACTION: Drove to farm with the spaceman beside me. I asked him how he found me. Finding out who you were and where you lived was not so hard. There are places now that keep your information on file if you’d ever donated a sample of your DNA, the spaceman said, and a relative of yours had done that, and it was through him I found you. It was a process of elimination, the spaceman said. I drove with the spaceman saying how he was glad, after all, that he had discovered who I was. In fact, you’re more than what I had hoped for in a real father, he said. It’s funny, but I wanted to meet you so I could see what I myself could become. You’re like a benchmark for me, and I’m happy to see you’re someone I can really admire, he said. We passed the fields at night where a coyote trotted by a tree line. I slowed the truck so we could see his yellow eyes in the headlights.

  The boy was there and so was the mother. There was no barn, there was no electricity. The mother held up a kerosene lantern. The smell of the kerosene was strong. Maybe it had a leak, or maybe when the kerosene had been poured into the base, it dripped. I have a flashlight, I said. It might make it brighter. I was glad when the mother blew out the kerosene lantern and left it on the porch of the house, far away from where I could smell the kerosene. The boy held the horse while I took out my stomach tube. After I easily passed a stomach tube through him, I realized the horse did not have choke. If it had choke, I wouldn’t have been able to pass the stomach tube through him. But it was too late. The spaceman had already touched the nose of the horse because it was a good-looking horse, with a blaze in the shape of a moon. Stand back, I told the spaceman calmly. This horse might have rabies. The horse was salivating. The horse was tilting his head back and to the side, the moon blaze looking like the moon being jerked by a string in the sky. The horse was not eating. He had gone over to his feed, but he had just lifted the hay in his mouth, and was not chewing it and was not swallowing it down.

  RESULT: I asked the mother questions. I asked if she knew if the horse had recently been bitten by an animal, but the mother did not know. Has he been bit? she asked her son, who was still holding the horse. Her son shrugged his shoulders. There were marks on the horse. They could have been scratches from bushes or the fence. They could have been marks left from an animal’s teeth days ago. I told the owner we just wait a few days and if the horse dies, then we have the horse tested. Do not get near the horse for the next five days, I told the owner. Sometimes these animals, in the furious stage of rabies, will come after you. The mother shrugged. She looked like her son when she shrugged and I thought how they were two of those people who looked alike not because they share the same facial features, but because they have the same mannerisms. The mother said she had a .38 in the house and she would just shoot the horse if it came to that. I wished she hadn’t said that, because after she did, I knew that the spaceman would remember he was on a mission to find out who had shot my son. I spoke fast. I would not let the spaceman interrupt and ask her about the shooting of my son. Whatever you do, I told the mother, don’t shoot the horse in the head, because it’s the brain that’s sent off to the lab in order to determine if it’s been infected with rabies. If it is, then we know to treat everyone who cam
e into contact with it with a series of rabies shots. Then it happened. He sidled up to the son. I could not hear what he said, because at the same time the mother was asking how much she owed me. She was holding bills that smelled like kerosene. The spaceman was whispering, and then I saw him pull out his wallet and show the son some bills. I almost ran to pull the spaceman away, but the son leaned over and whispered back into the spaceman’s ear. What was he telling the spaceman? The spaceman must have seen me watching. He turned his back to me so I could not see the son at all.

  WHAT I SAID TO THE SPACEMAN WHILE DRIVING HOME: I’m sorry I brought you here. I should have had you wait in the truck before I saw the horse. I’ve been vaccinated for rabies. I don’t think I’m at risk. I’m not even sure the horse has rabies, though. It could be other things. It could be moldy hay—they may not have the money to feed it good hay—it could be botulism. Let’s cross our fingers that it’s not rabies, I said, and then I wondered when the spaceman would tell me what the son had whispered in his ear. Did the son say the name of the man who shot Sam? Would I now finally know?

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: I’ll be going home tomorrow. I have to get back to Philadelphia. Rabies is the least of my problems. I have something to confess, the spaceman said. I had two reasons for coming here. One you already know, because I wanted to meet you. The other is because … and I don’t know how to say this, the spaceman said. The spaceman put his head in his hands.