WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: I like the part about surfing. When was the last time we dug our toes in sand? Are there sharks? Is there crime? Will our children be stolen? she said and then she went to Sam and brought the blanket up to his chin even though the hospital was roasting.
WHAT I DID WHEN I GOT HOME: I walked up the hill. I cleared the land. I threw small trees in a pile and started them to burn. Night fell. I heard a coyote close by, howling a small howl outside the circle of my fire. There was no wind, but somehow, opposite where the coyote was, the leaves kicked up. They turned in a circle, forming a cyclone that spun itself into the shape of a man, then as quickly as the leaves started up, they fell to the ground. A moment later I heard the coyote howling again, only this time he had moved, he was howling right behind where the leaves had spun themselves into the shape of a man.
THOUGHTS WHILE WATCHING THE LEAVES IN THE SHAPE OF A MAN: The man looks a little like me. The man looks like a younger version of myself. The man looks the way my son might look when he is older. Where had he come from? The sky? The spacecraft?
CALL: No call. It was another hang-up call. I said, “Jawohl! Jawohl! Ich heisse David Appleton, und du?” but there was no one there. Who are you talking to? Is it about Sam? the wife said. “Der Kapitan, das Boot ist kaputt!” I said and then I said, “Alarm! Alarm! Dive, dive, dive!” and I dove under the telephone table and then Sarah and Mia started screaming it too and the wife put her hands over her ears and the dogs started barking and the wife yelled for me to shut up. It’s not funny, she yelled. None of this is, she said, and then she started to cry. Sarah and Mia went to her. They hugged her and I stayed where I was under the phone table, noticing how thick clouds of black fuzzy Newfoundland hair had shored up against the table’s spiraled legs.
WHAT I CAN DO: I can swallow my tongue. I can swim fast and for a long distance. I can tie a cherry stem into a knot with just my tongue. I can take a nap and tell myself I only want to sleep for twenty minutes and then I wake up after twenty minutes, without the aid of an alarm clock. I cannot ride a horse. I tried riding a horse. I fell off the horse. I fell from an eighteen-hand Belgian draft horse after he decided he’d rather gallop than walk up our dirt road. I could not see clearly after I fell. For days I could not see whatever was to the side of me, as if I were a horse wearing blinders. It was ironic, falling off a horse and then walking around like a horse with blinders on. Jen said I was not missing much, but still, I would have liked to have known what was about to come up from behind.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Can we drive to see Sam again?
WHAT I SAY: No, we have been there once already today. Nothing has changed in him. The only thing that might have changed is his sheets, maybe, and the angles of the shadows on the fucking tiles of the floor.
WHAT MY WIFE CAN DO: Make me angrier than I have ever been.
WHAT OUR NEWFOUNDLAND DOGS DO: Never make me angry. Sneeze when they’re on their backs. Drink out of the toilet. The other day Bruce drank out of the toilet and then stood by the woodstove and shook his massive head and sprayed water so far that it hit the woodstove with a fire in it and the spray of water popped and fizzed on the woodstove like a greasy spoon’s griddle.
CALL: A woman needs her horses’ teeth floated.
ACTION: Ate a big breakfast. Floating teeth is hard work. Drove to farm.
RESULT: Filed down the hooks in the back of the horses’ mouths. Told the woman they were very polite horses, which they were, and let me float them without giving them any tranq.
THOUGHTS WHILE DRIVING TO HOSPITAL: How do the animals survive in the winter? I mustn’t cut the milkweed I left to grow in the field for the monarch butterflies, because now I am sure the stand of milkweed I left is home to mice and voles. I could keep driving. Where would I go? I have already been west. I have walked the streets the nights filled with the smell of palm trees, dusty with car exhaust particles caught in the tapering fronds in the dry desert wind. The streets slick on nights of a fast rain that ended quick, the mornings a blooming rose color in the sunrise.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID AT HOME AFTER WE WALKED IN THE DOOR, AFTER WE HAD BEEN TO THE HOSPITAL AND HAD SEEN HOW SAM WAS IN EXACTLY THE SAME POSITION HE WAS IN THE DAY BEFORE, HOW NO NIGHT NURSE OR DAY NURSE HAD BOTHERED TO MOVE HIM: What about Ecuador? Tell me again about the surfing?
WHAT I SAID: No, Ecuador is out of the question.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Bali, then?
WHAT I SAID: No, not Bali, not Fiji, not Maui or Palau. Here, right here, where we live is where we’ll stay.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: This is not an island, we’re surrounded by trees, not water, and then she stood at the window looking out over the parking lot.
WHAT I SAID: Then that makes it some kind of island, and the trees some kind of danger, a thing to drown in, the crowns of pines so thick no daylight passes through to the forest floor below, no air visible to breathe. Panic is just steps away. Feel better now? I asked.
WHAT THE HOUSE SAID: I have let the mice come in for the winter to live in the walls, for if I don’t they will be cold and hungry and I am not that kind of house to shut them out.
CALL: A man with an old Appaloosa he wants to put down. (See, I told the wife, how now there are so many of these calls.)
ACTION: Drove to farm. Tranqued the horse so the owner could walk him calmly alongside the hole that had been dug with a backhoe.
WHAT THE OWNER SAID: I want him in the hole facing east.
WHAT I SAID: East?
WHAT THE OWNER SAID: Yes, east.
RESULT: The owner turned the horse facing east and held on to the horse’s halter. Did the horse love the mountains facing east, did he go for trail rides there his entire life? I wondered. Or was it something Asian, something feng shui I had never heard of before that the owner believed in. I thought how if I hadn’t myself seen an object with bright lights floating in the sky, I would have thought feng shui was bunk, but now feng shui quite possibly contained a kernel of truth. I felt ready to accept feng shui, and maybe even the yeti. I looked behind my shoulder, into the woods, but there wasn’t anything nine feet tall crashing through them. What was crashing down, more dangerously, was the horse. After I gave the series of shots, the horse started to fall, he was going down, but the owner was standing too close to the horse. The owner was going to fall in the hole with his horse because he forgot to let go of the horse’s halter. The owner was old. He had white hair and gray stubble. I did what I had to do. I pushed the owner back with a swing of my arm. The horse then turned his backside, he swung his hips so that instead of facing east, he was now facing west. He was going in the hole the opposite way. After he fell in, I turned to the owner. He was on the ground. He was just looking up. His name was Jack. Did Jack know the man who shot my son? I looked around. What clues were there to tell me that he did know? It did not seem the old man hunted, himself. It did not seem the old man could even see so well. It did not seem the old man had the strength to even raise a shotgun in the air. Jack, I said, I am going to give you a hand up. I held out my hand to Jack, but he still looked up. I looked up, too, thinking there was something other than the sky to see. I grabbed on to Jack’s arm and pulled. When Jack was standing he took his cap off his head and put it on again. Then he looked down into the hole. He nodded when he saw his horse, as if to say even in your moment of death you have done what was contrary to what I wanted you to do. And I thought on these mountains facing east, on these trails his horse so often rode, was Jack the one who had to yank his horse’s reins hard, get him going where he wanted him to go? Was Jack’s horse that kind of stubborn mule?
THOUGHTS ON RIDE HOME: If my levels get too high, if they talk too much, then put me out of my misery and burn me on a pyre, that’s how I want to go. Don’t bother with a backhoe to try and dig the hole. Take down the trees to build the pyre off our land. Let the Newfoundlands have my bones. Let them walk the property drooling with my femur between their massive jaws. I am renewable energy.
WHAT THE WIFE COOKED FOR DINNER: Meat loaf with sweet pickle.
WHAT SARAH AND MIA SAID: We love sweet pickle.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Sweet pickle is so sweet I might as well put candy in your meat loaf instead.
WHAT THE HOUSE SAID AT NIGHT WHILE WE LAY IN BED: I am just made of wood. I can
