The Call Read online

  WHAT I SAID: Why, that’s horse saliva.

  WHAT THE WIFE COOKED FOR DINNER: Pizza.

  WHAT KEPT ME AWAKE AT NIGHT: Pizza.

  WHAT I LOOKED FOR OUT THE WINDOW WHILE I WAS AWAKE: The bright lights, the object moving back and forth in the sky, but I didn’t see it. I just saw the horizon and what looked to be the sun still setting, only it was the middle of the night and the sun was long gone. I wondered if what I was looking at was just the glow from the moon shining over our back field.

  CALL: A one-inch-long curved laceration above the eyebrow on Sarah.

  ACTION: Laid out a blanket and a pillow on kitchen table. Told her to lie down on them under the bright light. Blocked her, then began to suture.

  RESULT: Sam took pictures with the camera, so close to her face I had to tell him to step back.

  WHAT MY WIFE SAID: Maybe we should take her to a real doctor.

  WHAT I SAID: I am a real doctor.

  WHAT MY WIFE SAID: They have staples, they have glue these days at the emergency rooms. Maybe she won’t scar as much with staples or glue, she said.

  WHAT I SAID: A scar gives you character.

  WHAT SARAH SAID: I want to go to the emergency room!

  WHAT SAM SAID: I took eighty-six pictures; want to see?

  THOUGHTS WHILE WIFE COOKED DINNER: We must buy a cow. The depression will be upon us soon. No one will be able to afford milk when it happens. Milk will be a thing of the past. And cheese, think of the cheese. We will make our own ice cream, we will no longer have to buy cartons of it from the supermarket, the ice cream whipped with air. Why are we paying for air? When the depression comes we will no longer be able to afford our property taxes. We must sell now, go live in a small house in the woods. We won’t have a view. We won’t be taxed for our view if we don’t have one. We will not have a pond or a stream. We will not be taxed for them if we don’t have them. We will continue to heat with wood. We will live off the grid. Our light will come from solar panels. Our woodstove will be our kitchen stove. We will never turn a knob to turn it on. There will always be heat on the range.

  WHAT I TOLD MY WIFE BEFORE BED: Let’s move to the woods.

  WHAT MY WIFE SAID: We already live in the woods.

  WHAT I SAID: No, the real woods, way back on the roads where the poles for electricity end.

  WHAT MY WIFE SAID: I am not moving from here. I like our house. I like our pond. I like our fields.

  WHAT I SAID: You will not have a choice. The calls will stop. People will stop treating their horses, and cows, and sheep. It will cost too much money to treat them. Even if the calls do not stop and I still get called to treat the horse or the cow or the sheep, the bill will not be paid. The people will not pay. Our taxes will continue to rise.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: How did a bat get in here? Who left the front door open?

  WHAT THE BAT DID: Flew low, over Jen’s head in bed so that she had to bring the covers up over her head. It reminded me of the spacecraft. Why was everything flying so low? Why did everything want to be so close to us?

  WHAT I DID: Opened up the window and let the bat out into the full-moon night. I could see the moon on the grass that was frosting. It reminded me of a Christmas bulb my mother used to put on the tree when I was a child. The bulb was frosted, sprayed on with something white and granular, something like snow.

  WHAT I THOUGHT: Something is wrong when something in nature reminds you of something man-made. It should be the other way around. Is this the result of the human race having been around too long?

  THOUGHTS WHILE SHOWERING: Maybe we don’t need a milk cow, maybe we need cattle raised for beef. A milk cow you have to be at home twice a day to milk. Ah, but the good taste of fresh milk. Maybe we need both dairy and beef.

  WHAT THE CHILDREN SAID: Pop, we don’t have a barn.

  WHAT I DID: I looked around for a place to put a barn. Too close to the house, you would be sorry in the summer for the flies. Too far you would be sorry in the winter, walking all the way across the snow and ice. Besides, put up a barn and they will tax you. They will count the added square footage. They will consider the property improvement. The cost of raising a barn and the added taxes and feeding the cattle the hay that is now so expensive will undermine the profit.

  WHAT THE WIFE COOKED FOR DINNER: Steamed squash and rice.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: I really could be a vegetarian. We would all be better off if we were. Who needs meat?

  WHAT I SAID: All those dogs on the meat wagons.

  WHAT I THOUGHT: I am one of those dogs.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID AFTER DINNER: Whose sneakers are these on the floor? Who left the butter out? Whose books are these? Whose sweater? Whose crumbs? Can’t you clean up after yourselves? Don’t leave a wet towel on your bed. Flush the toilet. Can’t anyone flush the toilet? These papers will get ruined on the table in the kitchen. Do you want your papers ruined?

  WHAT THE CHILDREN DID: Ran outside.

  WHAT I DID: Ran outside. We went and looked for trees that would be good for raising my deer stand. There’s a hill and ridge below where a stream runs through. There are game trails going down the ridge. There is already a wooden deer stand there someone put up long ago where Sam could hunt from while I hunted from my tree stand at the same time. This would be a good place for my stand. I thought I could use my stand for other things than hunting, too. I could stand in my stand at night and call to the owls. I could stand in my stand at night and look for the bright lights in the sky, the object moving quickly back and forth, but then I remembered there was a warning that came with my stand. The warning said never to strap yourself into the harness in darkness because you may make a mistake, you may not be able to see where your leg should be going through a loop. You could be strapped into nothing. Also, you may not see a rung as you’re climbing up to the stand. Your footing will have no purchase. You will fall like a shot bird from a branch, head over heels to the forest floor heavily strewn with needles of pine.

  WHAT SAM DID: Imitated me standing in the stand and falling out and landing with my head on a rock.

  WHAT MY DAUGHTERS DID: Jumped on top of him as he lay with his head on the rock being me.

  WHAT I SAID: Shhh, if you want to see something in the woods you have to be quiet.

  WHAT THE KIDS SAID ON THE WALK HOME: Tell us about when you were young. Tell us about the time you hit that kid with a pipe by accident and he had to get five stitches. Tell us about the boy who died after a hard rain in the culvert. Tell it to us again, they said, how he drowned, how the mother stood on the grass, holding her hand to her mouth, her legs giving way, her skirt darkening as she fell to the wet grass, as if she had peed herself, after hearing the news.

  WHAT I SAID: Tell me instead what you did in school today.

  WHAT THE CHILDREN SAID: Oh, today, some bad kids. Some older kids, they changed the words on the sign outside the school last night. You know the sign that says COME TO THE FALL BREAKFAST, that sign, well they changed the letters and they made the school sign say COME TO THE FALL BOOB FEST.

  WHAT I SAID: I would like to go to that Fest.

  WHAT THE CHILDREN SAID: Oh, Poppy.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID THE NEXT MORNING WHEN THE KIDS WERE AT SCHOOL: David, have you scheduled your next exam?

  WHAT I SAID: Not yet, Jen.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: You should schedule it soon. What if your levels are high again? Then what will you do?

  WHAT I SAID: Cut it out.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Cut it out.

  WHAT I SAID: I like living. I’ll cut it out to get rid of it all.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: I knew we should have had more sex.

  WHAT I SAID: Want to have sex?

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Now?

  WHAT I SAID: It could cure me. It can’t hurt.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Pleased to oblige.

  WHAT THE KITCHEN ISLAND SAID: This is not the usual pounding of dough being kneaded.

  WHAT FELT GOOD: Her breasts. The sex.


  WHAT HURT AFTERWARD: My dick.

  WHAT I SAID TO MY WIFE: That was a bad angle.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: I should have worn heels.

  WHAT I SAID: I made it to the boob fest after all.

  WHAT THE WIFE DID: Laughed, hit my shoulder.

  WHAT THE HOUSE SMELLED LIKE: Anadama bread the wife was baking.

  WHAT WE ATE FOR LUNCH: Anadama bread, butter, and jelly.

  WHAT WE ALL SAW FROM THE KITCHEN WINDOW WHEN THE CHILDREN CAME HOME: A spikehorn, too young a buck for me to shoot, behind the house, eating apples fallen to the ground beneath the apple tree. The children were noisy, too noisy, fighting over binoculars. They almost scared the buck away. Sam pretended he was holding his rifle. Bam-bam, he said excitedly, shooting multiple times. I hit him in the chest hard with the back of my hand. Be quiet, I said. I didn’t want him to act this way when we would really go out to hunt. It wasn’t safe. He ran upstairs, starting to cry, and the moment he ran up, I was sorry, and I wished he’d come back down. I almost ran up after him, but just then the buck scraped the dirt on the hillside with his front hoof, then he turned and stood over where he had scraped and shook his tail, releasing secretions from his glands. He hardly chewed the apples. He mostly swallowed them whole. I could hear Sam upstairs. He was watching the buck from the bathroom window. He had stopped crying now, and I could see the buck lifting his head, listening to sounds coming from our house, from my son above me who shifted his weight on the slate tiled floor of the bathroom, who rested an arm on the top of the clothes washer, who wiped his nose, runny from crying, on his shirtsleeve. Tell no one at school that we have a buck on our land, I told the children. Other hunters will want our buck if they hear, I said. The children nodded their heads.

  WHAT THE CHILDREN DON’T KNOW: That their father may or may not need surgery.

  WHAT I DID INSTEAD OF MAKING A DOCTOR’S APPOINTMENT: Cleared land by the stream. If the banks of the stream are cleared, the children can run to the stream, they can lay their bodies down beside it, watching the small trout as small as their hands swimming.

  CALL: A colicking horse.

  ACTION: Drove to farm during snow flurries. Directions from owner were to keep driving down a dirt road, and when you feel as if you’ve missed it and that you’re in the middle of nowhere, then keep driving. Finally found the farm. Gave horse Buscopan, a new tranquilizer I had just ordered, to ease his pain. Decided to oil horse to relieve colic. Inserted tube inside his nostril and pumped the oil in. Stood talking to owner. She told me to guess what she had seen on her front lawn. I thought she would say the flying object with the bright lights. I thought I had found someone else who had seen what I had seen. Instead she said that one day her husband and her sons took their rifles and went hunting up on the hill behind the house. She could see them hiking up the hill through the window. But in the front yard, through the picture window, she noticed a huge twelve-point buck just standing and nibbling grass in the yard. She knew that if she opened a window to yell at her husband and her two sons to come back down the hill and shoot the buck, then the buck would take off and bound through the woods. She just sat in her chair in the living room and watched him through the picture window. He had a broad chest and a handsome head and when he lifted it every once in a while it seemed to her as if he could see her watching him from her easy chair.

  It was then that the owner stopped talking and pointed to the floor of the barn by the horse’s feet and said, Look at all that oil on the floor.

  RESULT: A cold shiver ran up my spine. This is a horse doctor’s worst nightmare, that you have inserted the stomach tube through his nose but you put it into his lungs instead of his stomach and now it’s coming back out and you have just drowned the horse. You have just bought the horse. I was content listening to the owner talk about the big handsome buck in her front yard. I wanted to keep listening to her telling the story. For a moment, I was her in the nice easy chair positioned in front of the window with a view of the beautiful twelve-pointer lifting his head and looking me in the eyes and her husband and sons far away by now, up over the back of the hill and into the woods. But no, there was now this oil pooled at our feet and the horse with his head down so low it looked as if he would drink up the oil beneath him.

  I checked the tube. I blew into it. There was no buildup of pressure. I was able to blow air through it. This was a relief. I knew then that I had not put the tube down the lungs instead of the stomach. It was the new tranquilizer, the Buscopan, that had relaxed the smooth muscles of the esophagus so much that when the horse lowered its head, the oil came out its nose. After a while, the horse seemed better. The symptoms of his colic subsided. I put my stethoscope to him and I could hear the sloshing sounds of his moving gut. He was breathing easier now. The owner wiped up the oil with a towel, and the place on the floor where the oil had been was now clean.

  THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME: That was scary. That was not good for my levels. Calm your levels, I said to myself. Look how the sun is over the fading green lawns now, raked clean of October’s falling leaves, and the sky is blue with passing clouds. The snow flurries are over.

  WHAT SAM SAID TO ME WHEN I GOT HOME: Pop, they have given deer eye tests and they have found out what deer can and cannot see. They can see the camo that hunters wear. They roll their eyes at camo. They’ve invented a new kind of camo, it’s not shaped like leaves or branches, it’s like computer dots! The tiny pattern matches the colors of the woods, it looks the way the woods would feel to a deer. They learned how to do it from leopards and tigers. Leopards and tigers don’t look like leaves or trees, they have spots and stripes, but when the leopard runs or the tiger runs, their spots and stripes blend into the background.

  WHAT I SAID: Deer have entered the computer age? I myself have not mastered email.

  WHAT THE WIFE COOKED FOR DINNER: Falafel.

  WHAT THE CHILDREN SAID: Fal-awful.

  WHAT THE MORNING SAID: The deer have already walked through here and you have missed them and next time you should wake up earlier. You should be out here before morning, before my fog has lifted, before the birds have sung.

  NUMBER OF DEER I SAW WHILE DEER HUNTING: 0.

  NUMBER OF SQUIRRELS I SAW WHILE DEER HUNTING: 6.

  NUMBER OF TIMES I WIPED MY HAND ON MY SLEEVE BECAUSE I WAS COLD AND MY NOSE WAS RUNNING: 10.

  NUMBER OF THINGS I CAN TAKE TO HELP MY LEVELS GO DOWN: 0. No vitamin A, B, C, D, or E can bring them back down.

  WHAT THE CHILDREN SAID TO ME WHEN I GOT HOME: Hi, in German.

  WHAT I SAID: Oh, my lieblings, you have been paying attention to your Poppy! German is a great language.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: They should speak Spanish instead. So much of the world does.

  WHAT I SAID: Do you really want to know what the Mexicans are saying? I’d rather know what the Germans are saying.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: To the showers, mach schnell. That’s what they said.

  WHAT I SAID: No, no, they said that only during a fascist regime, but they also strived to do the best. Do the very best, they said. Make the very best, they said. That’s what I want my children to learn, I said.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Maybe they should learn a little Buddhism. A little maybe it doesn’t matter to be the best.

  WHAT I SAID: Listen to the children. Hear them say let’s race to the car. Let’s race up the stairs. Let’s race to the end of the field. Who can be the first to finish this book, that meal, brushing their teeth. This is what the children want, I said to my wife. They want to be the best.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Dinner? You and the children make your own. I’m sure it’ll be the best.

  WHAT I COOKED: Tomato soup and grilled cheese.

  CALL: No call again, just the caller who hangs up. Bist du krank? I said to the caller, practicing my German. “Der Ozean ist blau. Die Maus ist grau.” Who are you talking to? the wife and children said. I put my hand on the mouthpiece, shhh, it is Merkel, she wants to know how I feel about health care. Then I took my h
and off the mouthpiece and continued talking into the phone. “Ja, die Banane ist gelb.”

  WHAT THE HOUSE SAID: The house creaks and groans. The house of hemlock, pegged together, framed like a barn so our children can say they grew up in a barn. So they can say they grew up in a house that always sounded like it was coming apart.

  WHAT WE HEARD AT NIGHT: Rifle shots.

  WHAT SAM DID: He ran into our room and turned our light on. Pop, he said, I can see from my window, they are jacking deer up the road. They are turning their cars into the field and catching deer in the headlights. They should be stopped, Sam said. It’s unethical, he said.

  WHAT I SAID: When did you learn that word? sitting up on my elbows and rubbing my eyes, “unethical”?

  WHAT SAM SAID WHILE STANDING IN THE DOORWAY IN HIS PLAID BOXERS: Pop, I didn’t take hours of hunter safety not to know what unethical means.

  WHAT I SAID: Yes, I forgot. I am living with a walking talking hunter safety manual.

  WHAT I FELT: Sad for the deer. They had no chance frozen in the headlights. All right to kill them by day, I mused. But it wasn’t yet rifle season. Just coming on bow. What right have they got? I ranted. I shook my wife’s shoulder.

  WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Call the police.

  WHAT I DID: I called the police. Not an emergency, I said right away. The warden came. He went on his hunt for the men who were probably crouching by their dead deer in the woods, slitting it open. The warden would find them. He would arrest them. Go back to bed, I told Sam. I hope they didn’t shoot the buck I am going to shoot when it’s rifle season, that wouldn’t be fair, he said, and then he stomped back to his room and slammed the door shut, only be cause every door he shut was slammed and every floor he walked across was stomped across because he did not know the meaning of quiet and I wondered if he would really be able to be quiet enough this year in the woods to shoot a deer or if I should wait to take him out next year when maybe he would be more Indian, more light of foot and aware of how to stop his body from crashing against boughs of pine and treading noisily over fallen leaves.