The Call Read online

  WHAT I SEE ON DECK: Ted sitting in his wheelchair and laughing at us too and clapping his hands together, only both the palms of his hands don’t seem to touch when he claps, and mostly it’s his fingers that meet together, and so his clapping doesn’t make a sound.

  Spring

  CALL: No call, just a voice I heard in the evening. I knew the voice. It was the one I had heard before on the phone. It was the voice like my own. The voice was calling my name. I had just come inside. I had just seen the spacecraft flying over our pond. I opened the door, and in the dying light I could see a young man walking up to our house. I didn’t see his car. I wondered where he had come from. Was Sam’s doctor right? Had the man who had shot my son decided to show up at my door after all? Had this man come from the spacecraft? Was he a spaceman? Was he the pilot? Had our radio beeped him in, had it divulged our location? I wanted to go back into the house, where the children were settling in for the night, brushing their teeth in the bathroom, pulling out footie pajamas from their drawers and arranging hordes of stuffed animals around their pillows on their beds.

  WHAT I SAID TO THE SPACEMAN: Hello.

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID TO ME: I hope I’m not disturbing you.

  WHAT I THOUGHT: We were doing nothing. The wife was starting the dishwasher. I could hear the detergent being squeezed from the bottle. Was the spaceman here to take me up in the spacecraft?

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: My name is Mark Howell. Then the spaceman shook my hand. Even though it was cold outside, the spaceman’s hand was warm. They must have good heating on that spacecraft, I thought to myself. May I come inside? the spaceman said.

  WHAT BRUCE AND NELLY DID: Greeted the spaceman like he was one of us. They tried to jump on him. I had to pull them down. They wanted to lick the spaceman’s face. The spaceman didn’t mind Bruce and Nelly. He did not mind their smell or their size or their hair.

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: Well, I made it all the way here. It took me a long time.

  WHAT THE WIFE DID: She came to the door, wiping her hands on a dishrag. She looked at me. She looked at the spaceman. I introduced the wife to the spaceman. This is Mark Howell. He has come a long way, I said.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Oh, won’t you come inside?

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN DID: He stood in our kitchen. He looked around the house. He looked at me. This is it, I thought. This is when the abduction starts. I could hear the children screaming at each other upstairs. They were not going to go to bed quietly. They would be part of the abduction. The spaceman had already heard them. He pointed at the ceiling. Kids? How many? he asked. Three, Jen said. Can I offer you some water or juice?

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: I’m beginning to think that maybe I shouldn’t have come. But the spaceman sat down right after he said that. He sat down in one of our kitchen chairs with a cushion on it. The cushion was not the cleanest thing. The children often dropped their food, and crumbs of it collected in the dimples where the buttons on the cushions were sewn. Jen looked at me, I looked at Jen. We sat down at the table with the spaceman. He ran his palm over the wooden tabletop. It was a table my father had made. The wood was maple. The knots in the wood drove my mother crazy when her eyes started to fail her. She had tried many times with a sponge to rub them out, thinking they were stains from certain foods. The spaceman said he had come from Philadelphia. He had driven straight through without stopping. He had known my name and my address for a while now and it was just recently he decided to come.

  WHAT I THOUGHT: The spaceman and his kind have been looking for me for a long time. They have observed me from up above. They have traveled with me to farms. They have watched me treat horses and goats and llamas and cows and lambs from the sky. Now they need me on their planet. There is some kind of animal they have that is dying, that is going extinct, like our bats. Maybe there is a man on earth who can help them. I am their man.

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: You are my biological father.

  WHAT I THOUGHT: Or the spaceman and his kind need help with gravity, and they think I’m their man. Their planet is losing their field, and they think I can help them restore it.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: How can that be?

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: He was a donor, a long time ago. Twenty-seven years ago, to be precise. My mother wanted a medical student. She had seen his picture. He was handsome. He had scored well on tests. She decided on him.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Why?

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: Money. One hundred dollars for a sperm donation was the going rate. I think we look alike, don’t you think? the spaceman said to Jen. Jen looked at the spaceman, then she looked at me. Yes, a little, she said. Excuse me, she said. I have to check on the children. And it was a good thing she went. Sarah was screeching. It seemed that Sam had stolen her tooth that she had left in an envelope for the tooth fairy and Sarah was chasing him with a broom, ready to smash the handle on top of his head. Alarm! Alarm! Sam was screaming in a German accent, and running through the upstairs of the house.

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID TO ME: I’m sorry to tell you this way. While driving up here I imagined a million ways I could do it. There didn’t seem to be a good way. I guess I could have written you a letter. But what if you didn’t answer? I tried calling a few times. I asked who you were, but then I hung up. I’m sorry. I know it must be a shock. But I want to tell you how happy I am to finally meet you. The spaceman smiled. His teeth looked very straight.

  WHAT I SAID: Your teeth are so straight.

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: Yes, I had braces as a child.

  WHAT I SAID: You’ve got a cleft in your chin.

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: Yes, I can see I inherited that from you.

  WHAT I SAID: How did you get here?

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: I drove. My car’s out there. The spaceman pointed out the window, into the darkness. You may not have heard it, the engine’s electric, the spaceman said.

  CALL: A horse that needs stitches above its eye. It was the same horse that I thought for a second I had put a stomach tube down its lungs instead of its stomach.

  ACTION: Asked the spaceman if he wanted to go with me to sew up the horse. Spaceman answered yes. Stood at the bottom of the stairs and yelled up to Jen that we were going out now to treat a horse. Jen yelled back, All right. But maybe she had yelled all right to Sarah, telling her it was all right now, and not to screech any longer, Sam would give her back her tooth for the tooth fairy.

  WHAT I NOTICED WHILE WALKING TO MY TRUCK: The spaceman is the same height that I am.

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: See, there is my electric car. And he pointed to a dark shape in the driveway.

  We drove talking about his life. He had loving parents and a blue heeler. I wanted to hear all about the blue heeler, as I have always been fond of the breed but worried they would be too protective of their owners and would have a tendency to bite children. He said his blue heeler had indeed bitten a girl on her head, and years later, he found out the girl had fallen off her bike and so X-rays were taken and the doctors believed that she had a tumor and it wasn’t until they operated that they found out that it was old scar tissue from the bite on the girl’s head from his blue heeler. The spaceman said he knew it didn’t make sense, him coming from a loving family, why he’d still want to meet me after all these years, but he did. There were some things that happened in life that he would never have the answers for, he said. And when he said it I wondered if he wasn’t really Jesus Christ, too, and maybe Ted from the pool wasn’t Jesus Christ at all, but this spaceman was because he talked so plainly and clearly. And what did that make me, being the biological father of Jesus Christ the spaceman?

  WHAT I COULD NOT SEE IN THE DARK WHEN WE DROVE UP TO THE OWNER’S HOUSE: I could not make out, in the darkness, the hill the woman had once pointed to that her husband and son had climbed to hunt deer. I could not make out the front lawn, either, where the woman had said she had watched the buck while her husband and son were up in the woods with their rifles at the r
eady.

  I introduced the spaceman to the owner. I told her, This is …, but she interrupted. Oh, your son, the owner said. Pleased to meet you. You look just like your father, the owner said and the owner shook the spaceman’s hand. The owner said the horse was banged up pretty good. The owner assumed it was the mud he had slipped in. We were slipping in it, too. We slipped in it on our way to the barn, only the spaceman didn’t slip as much because the owner showed him a board she had put down over the mud, so he could walk on it without slipping. He did not have the proper shoes. He wore deck shoes, the kind with the leather uppers and the useless bit of short leather lace that was threaded through the four eyelets, the kind that had the flat, treadless sole that was white or light colored, reminiscent of marshmallow. Do you sail? I asked the spaceman as he walked across the plank, and I walked beside him, my boots sturdy in the mud.

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: I don’t sail. I’ve been sailing, but other people sailed the boat. I’m afraid I don’t know the first thing about it. I traveled the waters of Turkey in a schooner. Turkey is a beautiful country, he said.

  WHAT THE HORSE WAS LISTENING TO IN THE BARN: Classical music on the radio. It was Dvoák, the spaceman said.

  RESULT: I had to shave the hair around the horse’s cut, so at first I gave the horse some tranq. Then I brought out my shears, but there wasn’t anywhere to plug them in. I thought I could unplug the horse’s radio, but the owner said not the music. Dvoák was one of his favorites. Sometimes I think the music calms the horse down, the owner said. The spaceman and the owner searched for another outlet. The owner found one behind some blankets that were hanging up. The music still played while the shears buzzed around the horse’s cut. I could feel the spaceman watching me as I worked. I sewed up as much of the cut as I could, but the horse had lost a chunk of flesh, so there was a bit that I couldn’t sew, due to the lack of skin. I’m leaving this part open, I told the owner. I think it will heal all right. It won’t leave too big a scar. The owner nodded. She said she expected it wouldn’t. Then the spaceman nodded, too, as if it were also his horse and he was understanding what I was telling him. I wanted to ask the owner if her husband and her son had any luck the rest of the season, if they had bagged a deer, if they had ever bagged the big, beautiful buck she had seen by herself sitting in her house and looking out her picture window. But I didn’t ask. The spaceman was busy talking to the owner about barrel racing. I hadn’t known she was a barrel racer. I had only pictured her in her free time sitting in her chair, looking out her picture window at the deer. She started talking loudly and quickly about barrel racing. She had learned to ride as a girl. She never had lessons, she just sat on horses and taught herself. She loved being at a complete stop one moment, and then the next moment being at a full gallop and making the tight turns around the barrels. There was a chest in the barn and she pulled blue ribbons out of it that smelled of mildew. The spaceman held the ribbons up to the light. The light was near the radio, and it seemed as if Dvoák’s music made the tails of the blue ribbons flutter slightly. The spaceman said the woman should hang her ribbons up where people could see them. He fastened a ribbon to the barn wall by sliding part of the ribbon into the space between two wooden boards. You wouldn’t think the ribbon would stay up like that, with so little holding it, but it did stay up.

  THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME: No thoughts. I spoke aloud. I spoke without thinking. Want to see the pool where we swim? I said to the spaceman. Sure, the spaceman said. The pool was closed, but you could still see in. The walls of the pool were glass. We leaned against the cool glass. Light from a streetlamp lit the place up. I told the spaceman how solar panels helped heat the water. I told the spaceman how the pool had very little chlorine and that ultraviolet rays were used to kill the bacteria. The spaceman said he swam on his high school team. The spaceman said that whenever he smells chlorine it reminds him of that time in high school. That’s the time, he said, that he first decided he would someday meet his real father. The father he had who was married to his mother was not a good swimmer. When they went to a pool or the beach, the father would swim sidestroke, and even then, the spaceman said, his father would swallow the water and choke and sputter and cough and his mother would worry about him and his mother would send her son into the water, to make sure his father, his not-real father, was all right and would not drown.

  WHAT THE WIFE TOLD THE SPACEMAN WHEN WE GOT HOME: Don’t be silly, there’s no need to stay in a motel. It’s late. Spend the night here, she said.

  WHAT THE WIFE TOLD ME IN BED IN A WHISPER SO THE SPACEMAN WOULD NOT HEAR: What does he want?

  WHAT I SAID: Nothing. You know, just to see who I am. Just to know.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: When is he leaving?

  WHAT I SAID: In the morning, I’m sure. What does it matter? He seems nice. Did you know he used to swim?

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: What do we tell the children when they meet him?

  WHAT I SAID: If they ask, I’ll tell them the truth. The spaceman will have his curiosity fulfilled. He’ll see I’m just an ordinary man and then he’ll go home and appreciate his father whom his mother is married to. This will blow over, I said.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: You call him the spaceman?

  WHAT SARAH SAID AT BREAKFAST: You two look alike. You both have that thingy, that hole in your chins. Are you an uncle or a cousin?

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: I’m your half brother.

  WHAT SARAH SAID: One whole brother is bad enough.

  WHAT SAM SAID WHEN HE CAME DOWN TO BREAKFAST: Cool, I always wanted a brother. I’m sick of my sisters. Are you going to live with us?

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: No, I have an apartment in Philadelphia.

  WHAT SAM SAID: You might like it here. We get lots of s-s-snow and the sledding is good. Mom’s an okay cook, that is if you like green olives.

  WHAT SARAH SAID: Sam was in a coma and now he talks funny. Sam, say Sally sells seashells by the seashore.

  WHAT SAM SAID: Bugger off, Sarah.

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: A coma?

  WHAT SARAH SAID: Yes, he was shot and fell out of the tree stand.

  WHAT MIA SAYS: They thought he was a bird. Show him your scars, Sam.

  WHAT SAM SAID: Bugger off, Mia. See how annoying my sisters are?

  WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: That’s terrible. Who did it?

  WHAT SARAH SAID: Someone in town, but we’re not sure.

  CALL: One of Arlo’s Chianina cows with porcupine quills stuck in its muzzle.

  ACTION: Spaceman and I set off in my truck to the farm. Spaceman wanted to know about my son. Is it true, he said, you don’t know who shot your son? I shook my head. In this little town, you don’t know? I shook my head again. I can’t be sure. It might have been a guy named Passen, but he’s in jail for something else now. I’ll never know for sure. It could have been anyone. He put your son in a coma for weeks? the spaceman asked. Yes, I said. I didn’t want to shake my head again. I was looking past the field where I had seen a coyote trotting across before, and I wanted to see if he might be trotting this way again. The spaceman whistled. I thought at first it was going to be a tune, but it was not. It was a whistle of surprise. A whistle of incredulity. Oh my God, he said. You and your wife must have been sick with worry. When he said it I remembered how Jen would sit up in bed at night, not reading, just staring at the windows that were dotted with cluster fly shit. It’s not too late, the spaceman said. You can still try to find out who it was. No, I said. I said it quickly and loudly. The spaceman shook his head. He looked out the window. I felt bad for saying no the way I had said it. We drove on the road where the taxidermist had his sign that said SKULL CLEANING HALF PRICE. I pointed it out to the spaceman. I laughed. Can you believe that sign? I said. The spaceman nodded his head. I can believe it, he said. If you’re not sure who it was, if it was Passen or not, then why are you still making these vet calls, and you’re not out knocking on everyone’s door trying to find out exactly who did that to your son? What are the polic
e doing? he said.

  There was no evidence. There were no telltale footprints in the woods that anyone could find. There was no car parked by the side of the road, no tire tread marks that could be traced. No way to trace the gunshot. The police did what they could do, I said. The spaceman worked his jaw. He shook his head. He exhaled loudly.

  When we drove up the road to Arlo’s, we could see his white Chianina cattle standing on the hillside in the early mist. They’re beautiful. They look like ghosts, the spaceman said, while shaking his head and smiling. I introduced the spaceman as Mark Howell to Arlo. Arlo showed us the cow. She had about seventeen quills stuck in her nose. I tranqued the cow. While I pulled out the quills Arlo held the cow and murmured to her, telling her to be still and calm. The cow was so tall that Arlo just had to turn his head to talk into the blackness of her white ear. He did not have to bend down to her. I told Arlo that the spaceman was from Philadelphia. Arlo said he had never been to Philadelphia. He said he had never been away from here because he liked the trees here and the trees were enough for him here. He did not need to leave his state and see other trees. He did not need to travel to see mountain ridges with tree lines that were not his. Arlo laughed at himself. You’d think I was goofy about trees, he said. The cow shook her head. The tranq was wearing off. I gave her a little more. I gave the spaceman the quills as I pulled them out. The spaceman lined them up on his palms, the tapered ends all facing the same way. Arlo wanted to know if the spaceman was a doctor, too. Oh, no, I teach, the spaceman said. The spaceman taught Spanish in a public school. The spaceman said he had learned it in Spain, and so there was a time when he got back from Spain that not even the Puerto Rican postman understood what he was saying because when speaking Spanish you sound out the Z’s like they were Th’s and the way the Puerto Rican postman looked at the spaceman when he spoke Spanish with his lisp you’d think he did not speak Spanish at all. You’d think, and yes here the spaceman said it, You’d think I was from another planet. Then the spaceman said, What about the doctor’s son, Arlo? Do you know anything about who shot his son, almost killed him, and then put him into a coma for weeks? Arlo shook his head. He patted the hind end of his cow with a hand that was deeply lined, and the veins popping out on the backs of his hands looked as large as earthworms as he patted the cow. I think you do know, said the spaceman. This is too small a town not to know.