The Call Read online

  RESULT: I put my stethoscope on the horse’s belly. I could hear a few gut sounds, which was good, but still the horse seemed in pain. She kept reaching up with her rear leg to kick at her belly, as if she wanted to kick the pain away. Greg Springer stood very close to me. I think he was trying to hear what I was hearing. So I let him listen to my stethoscope. He nodded his head after he listened for a while, and then the two of us just stared at the horse. We watched how she shifted her weight from hoof to hoof and how she didn’t seem to care whether we were standing there, her pain all that mattered. I gave the horse Banamine and Greg Springer and I just waited awhile, keeping an eye on the horse. I looked up at the sky through the open barn door and told Greg Springer it was probably going to be a cold night because of all the stars that were already showing. I told him it was too bad it wasn’t still hunting season, as the nonexistent wind would make for good conditions. He shook his head and said, With my horse the way she is I would not be able to go out and hunt anyway. Yes, that would be distracting, I said. Going out to hunt with something on your mind was a dangerous thing. You never know what you could shoot instead, I said. Once, I said, I was hunting and my mind was not on it and then I heard a deer walking toward me, but I couldn’t see it yet. Then all of me was listening for it and waiting for it to show its face. My finger was ready to pull the trigger the moment I saw it because I knew I would not have many chances to shoot it, there being so many trees in the way. Suddenly I saw a dark shape through the trees, and I almost shot, but I hesitated, and it was a good thing, because what came out into the clearing wasn’t a deer at all, but a man, another hunter, walking carefully through our woods, but it was scary to think how close I was to shooting him. Greg Springer nodded his head. The horse made a low whinny and then Greg Springer shook his head and reached out and touched the side of the horse’s neck. It’ll be all right, girl, he said. I told Greg Springer to call me in the morning if the horse didn’t show signs of improvement. I told Greg Springer it was going to be a cold night, and that he might want to sleep inside. He shook his head. I’ve a warm sleeping bag. I’ll just bring it out here and sleep beside her and pray, he said, and then I thought how maybe Greg Springer could go to the hospital. Floor 9, I could tell him, get off there, the fourth patient door on the left, that’s my son. Would he lie next to him and pray?

  THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME: I have Gisela’s phone number. I wonder, if I called it, who would pick up the phone? Would it be Gisela? Would she tell me the weather in Germany? How do you say, in German, my levels are lower than they were before? Would I hear in the background the sounds of the beer from the taps being poured into steins when I called? Would I hear the German? The strong glottal stops harsh-sounding, or would those sounds just be the interfering signs of static common to an overseas connection?

  WHAT THE WIFE ASKS ME AT HOME: Well, was Greg Springer your man?

  WHAT I SAY: There is no way for me to know. How could I know a thing like that from kneeling next to him in some straw?

  WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Is it going to stop now? Every time you go on a call, you come back thinking you know the man who did it. I’m getting worried about you.

  WHAT I DO FOR THE FLIES AT NIGHT: I turn the light off and open the window. I am sick of them buzzing by my head while I read the paper in bed. I am tired of them buzzing inside my lampshade making a tock-tock-tock sound as they slam into one side of the taut linen shade and then the next. There is a bright full moon out. Shoo, I say to the flies. Can’t you see the bright moon? I say. I cup my hand and move it behind them, trying to direct them to the cool air outside.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Can I read? Haven’t we sat in the dark long enough? It’s getting cold in here, she says. Shut the window. I close the window and turn the light back on, but the flies haven’t vacated our home. In a second I can hear them buzzing inside the lamp again. The tock-tock-tock sounding louder than ever.

  WHAT THE WIFE IS READING: A book about coma. There’s a syndrome, she says, that occurs in children, who, after waking from it, display delayed recovery of consciousness. Apparently the psychological stresses of being in the hospital keep them sleeping, she says.

  WHAT I SAY: That won’t happen to Sam. When he wakes he will wake right away. He will want to know which sister played with his games. He will want to eat chocolate right away. He will want to know if it’s still deer season.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: I can’t remember, did his MRI show swelling? Midline shift? Mass lesions? I shake my head. She has asked me these questions before.

  WHAT I SAY: Remember his Glasgow score. Remember how high it was?

  WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Look at that, ladybugs. I look to see where she’s pointing. There are ladybugs crawling on the sills of all the windows surrounding our bed. At least they don’t buzz, I tell her, but then I see how she sits up quickly and starts shaking out her hair. Bastard, she says, and with its small wings spread out a ladybug hops onto the blanket. And that is how our night is spent. One of us, every once in a while, waking up and shaking our head to get a fly or a ladybug out from crawling in our hair, then there is the sound of us wiping the sheet to knock the insect off and onto the floor, where no doubt we will step on it on our way to the bathroom.

  WHAT SARAH SAYS IN THE MORNING: I bet you don’t know what ambrosia is.

  WHAT I SAY: It’s a fruit salad mixed with whipped cream.

  WHAT SARAH SAYS: No, it’s whale vomit and it’s used as a preservative to keep perfumes smelling good.

  WHAT I SAY: You mean ambergris.

  WHAT SARAH SAYS: Whatever.

  WHAT MIA SAYS: Poppy, make ambrosia.

  WHAT THE RADIO SAYS: Beep-di-dah-beep-di-dah-beep-beep-beep.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: STOP. I AM GETTING A TRANSMISSION. IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT WE GET A HEAD POTTY CLEANER AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. OUR MISSION CANNOT CONTINUE WITHOUT THIS VITAL POSITION BEING FILLED.

  WHAT THE CHILDREN SAY: Too bad about the mission. Guess you’ll have to leave without us, Mom.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Who will wash your dishes and cook your food and serve you and pour your milks and collect your dishes and wipe the countertops and do the laundry and do the food shopping and pick up your dirty socks and hang up your coats and take your wet towels off your beds and put away your toys and turn off the lights you left on in your rooms? Who will do all of this if I’m gone? the wife said. I’m going on the next flight, the wife says. The socks will be easier to pick up in space, I won’t have to bend down and throw out my back. I’d like to see how wood burns in space, I wouldn’t mind stacking wood in space, I could lift a whole cord in space.

  NEWSPAPER ARTICLE I READ TO SAM WHILE I SIT BESIDE HIM EATING OATMEAL RAISIN COOKIES WHOSE CRUMBS FALL INTO HIS HAIR: The bats are sick. The bats are flying in daylight. The white fungus disease is evident on their mouths, as if they’ve been trying to eat snow. The paper says they’ve been roused from their winter sleep because they’re weak and starving. They’ve been seen drinking water, and flying low over rivers and ponds where the ice has melted.

  WHAT THE BATS SAY IN THE DAYTIME: I am sick, I am thirsty, I am hungry, I am dying.

  WHAT THE DAY NURSE DOES: She comes in and flicks off the oatmeal cookie crumbs from Sam’s head onto a paper napkin, then she takes out a small black comb from her pocket on her uniform and starts combing his hair, forming a part where he has never had a part, making him look like some kid I didn’t know, making me think maybe this is not really my son who is here lifeless in a hospital bed but some other man’s son, and I should go home now. I should drive up the driveway and find my son throwing snowballs wildly at his sisters from a snow fort he has built into the side of the hill. I should see his face red from the cold. I should see snow in his hair, and his eyes glistening and bright from his onslaught against his screaming sisters.

  CALL: The hospital. Sam is sitting up. Sam is talking. Sam’s foot is a live wire.

  ACTION: Run to the car. Start driving off with wife, Sarah, and Mia barely having time
to sit down in their seats, the car doors still open as I start to drive. Drive with wife incessantly asking if I want her to drive because she thinks I am driving too slowly. Don’t expect a miracle, I tell her. Don’t expect him to be completely recovered, I say, driving past the Bunny Hutch preschool, watching other children swinging high into the sky while sitting in yellow and red plastic swings.

  RESULT: Sam wants to know what the dis-dis-gusting thing was by his ear. He wants to know which one of his sis-sis-sisters thought he should be sleeping with a cooked chicken heart next to him all this time. He wants to know who has been made Head Potty Cleaner while he was gone because he wants to know if he is off the hook and doesn’t have to take the j-j-job.

  WHAT THE TESTS SAY: Sam’s speech, although slurred, will slowly get better.

  WHAT THE DOCTOR SAYS: Children recover much better from being in a coma than adults. By the way, the doctor says, did you ever find the hunter who did this? I tell him no, I never did, and that I didn’t think I would ever find out, either. You’d be surprised. He might turn up at your door one day, the doctor says.

  HOW WE CELEBRATE: The girls use scissors and cut out shapes in paper bags and then put candles in the bags and place them on the driveway in two lines, one on either side of the driveway. When I drive home with Sam our driveway looks like a runway instead and Sam says, “Either we’re coming in for a landing or we’re taking off.”

  WHAT WE EAT FOR DESSERT: Ice cream sundaes, the sprinkles hard and like sand between our teeth. The children are too excited from all the sugar to sleep at bedtime and so we play charades, propping Sam up in an easy chair and piling blankets around him and Nelly laying on the part of the blanket that trails on the floor. With her powerful large head at his feet she reminds us of a lioness content to have her pride back up to its original numbers. The girls act out snakes and elephants, and then move on to acting out teachers at school. After charades, I carry Sam up to bed. It’s a full moon and the eerie white pours itself on his pillow, lighting it up, as if waiting for him to lay his head down right onto it.

  CALL: The woman who works at the checkout wants to know if I’ve seen her horse.

  WHAT I SAY: Your horse?

  WHAT SHE SAYS: Yes, I put an ad in the paper to sell the horse and these people called and they said they’d come over to buy the horse. Well, I got back from doing errands to meet the people and the horse was gone. The horse has disappeared, and I thought maybe, if you were visiting other farms and you spotted my horse, you could tell me, because I could really use the money, she says, and then she sniffs and I wonder if it is because she is crying or because she has a cold.

  WHAT I SAY: I haven’t seen your horse. If I see it I’ll call you. By the way, I say, how is the job at the market? Are you still learning unusual things about people from what they’re buying?

  WHAT SHE SAYS: I quit that stupid job. Bad people buy baby diapers and good people buy knives, you know. You can’t learn anything about people from what they buy. I was all wrong about that, she says.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: That’s strange, don’t you think? A horse just disappearing into thin air?

  WHAT I THINK: Not so strange, no stranger than a hunter shooting my son and never fessing up.

  WHAT MIA SAYS: I think the spacecraft took the horse.

  WHAT I THINK: Maybe the spacecraft took the hunter, too. Maybe all bad hunters are locked inside the spacecraft and made to float around for eternity, looking in the windows of homes at all the lives they destroyed.

  WHAT WE WATCH ON VIDEO THAT WE BORROWED FROM THE LIBRARY, NOW THAT WE DON’T SPEND MONEY AT THE VIDEO STORE: A Christmas Carol.

  WHAT I REALLY LIKE: How Marley, Ebenezer Scrooge’s partner, moans horribly while holding his chains and presenting his ghostlike form to Ebenezer on Christmas Eve.

  WHAT MY WIFE WANTS TO KNOW: Whatever happened to Ebenezer’s wife, and did she die from some awful lung ailment from working so closely with those people in the poorhouse after he divorced her? And it wasn’t really a happy ending at all, was it? my wife says, except for Ebenezer Scrooge being kind to Tiny Tim and his family, and giving them a huge turkey bigger than Tiny Tim himself, and Scrooge being reunited with his niece and nephew, and giving a coin to a beggar on the street. It’s a terrible ending, because where is the wife? The one he hurt so much? my wife asks. And it’s true, there’s no more mention of the wife, the one he stopped loving in lieu of money, and it’s a terrible ending. I agree and thank God, I think, it’s not Christmas that we’re watching this, because it would really put a damper on our holiday spirit.

  WHAT THE WIFE COOKS FOR DINNER: Salmon baked with butter and paprika, and green beans cooked with chopped-up bits of bacon and couscous cooked with broth and bits of green olives stuffed with pimentos.

  WHAT MY WIFE IS CRAZY ABOUT: Green olives. She puts them in bean burritos and she puts them in tuna fish salad and she puts them in ham and cheese sandwiches and she puts them in stir-fry. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t all the bits of green olives that first raised my levels.

  WHAT SAM HAS STARTED READING OUT LOUD AFTER DINNER TO IMPROVE HIS SPEECH: The Count of Monte Cristo.

  WHAT SARAH SAYS ABOUT DANGLARS: That man is pure mean, and I think how maybe the hunter who shot my son could be as mean as Danglars.

  WHAT THE RABBIT DOES WHEN SAM READS: She goes into his lap and starts biting the pages.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAYS SHE COOKED FOR DINNER: Flounder breaded in panko and fried.

  WHAT I SAY: What’s panko? Panko is bread crumbs, she says. Then why didn’t you just say bread crumbs? I said. Because they are different bread crumbs, she said.

  WHAT I THINK: What’s happened to the world? How could a thing like bread crumbs go from being simple to complex?

  CALL: I just wanted to know, a man says. I just wanted to hear your voice, he says, and then he hangs up.

  CALL: A goat can’t deliver her kid.

  ACTION: I asked my wife to ask Mia and Sarah if they wanted to come with me on the call. Wouldn’t they love to see a kid delivered? I said to Jen. Jen said the girls were tired and that they should stay home. All right, I said, and I drove to the farm alone. The farmhand was there, standing by the pregnant goat. His hands were bloody. I have tried, he said. I have been trying for hours, he said, but the baby does not want to come out. I put my hand inside the goat. The first thing I can feel is how the uterine lining is ripped. The farmhand had pulled too hard. He had been too rough.

  RESULT: This baby is dead and the mother will die from the ruptured uterus, I said. The farmhand looked at me. Do me a favor, I said. Tell Marie, the owner, I have to put the goat down. Tell her I have to shoot it. The farmhand nodded, wiping his hands on his pants as he walked toward the house where I could see Marie standing in the doorway with the door open and with her oxygen attached to her nose, the clear tube trailing behind her, attached to her tank standing somewhere in one of her darkened rooms. She reminded me of an astronaut, the tubing keeping her from floating off while out on a space walk. I knew Marie would be okay with me shooting the goat instead of giving it an injection. Marie was poor, and she knew the bullet was free and the euthanasia solution cost money. Marie was always thankful when I saved her money. I reached into the goat again, wanting to be sure my diagnosis was right. I could feel the tear in the uterus easily, because it was so big. The goat screamed in pain. It sounded like a woman’s voice. I took my hand out and I patted the goat’s back. I told her the pain would be gone soon. When the farmhand returned he nodded his head. “I told her,” he said. I looked at Marie in the doorway and she was also nodding her head, giving me the okay to put the goat down. I took the goat to the back of the barn, where no one driving by could see. I had my .38 and I put it on her forehead and then I pulled the trigger. The bullet must have entered her sinuses, because smoke from the gun blew out through her nostrils, swirling up toward the sky.

  WHAT MARIE DID: She waved me into her house. It seemed like I was an astronaut, too, the way I floated acr
oss the ground to get to her doorway. I floated because shooting the goat and having the smoke blow out through her nostrils was surreal, and it all seemed like a dream. Marie had me come into her house and she closed the door behind me, letting the farmhand take the goat away in the cold. You want me to pay you in veal or mutton? she said. I could have my pick. The meat would be ready in a few weeks. I’ll think on it, I told her. I was dizzy. I wanted to sit down, but I didn’t. Marie hobbled over to the window and looked out at the farmhand carrying the goat in his arms. I don’t like him, she said. Something inside her oxygen tank clicked, and I wondered why. Was that a signal it was running low? Then I looked and realized it was one of her black and white border collies’ tails that was hitting against the tank; it was happy to see me, and had come into the room to meet me. He walked over to me and fit himself right up under my hand. I think I leaned on him a little. I was thankful to have him there, taking on a little bit of my weight, lightening my load.

  WHAT I SAID: Why don’t you like him, Marie?

  WHAT MARIE SAID: Just a feeling I have. He didn’t help with that kid. That mother would still be alive if he hadn’t ripped her. I walked over to the window and watched the farmhand drop the goat onto the ground. He dropped it from a height higher than I would have dropped it, even though it probably didn’t matter because it was dead. The goat slightly bounced after it was dropped so hard. Marie turned away. I guess I can’t begrudge him too much. He bagged a buck this year and gave me all the meat.