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.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Can we go to sleep now? Close the window. It’s cold.
WHAT I SAID: Leave the window, Jen. I want to hear for their cars. I want to hear if there are more rifle shots and tires rolling on the dirt road and car engines. I am attuned to those sounds now. They make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
WHAT I HEARD WITH THE WINDOW OPEN: A whir. Could it be the spacecraft? I opened up the screen and craned my neck to look out the window. It was the spacecraft. It wasn’t circling the house this time. Instead it was hovering above it. It stayed that way for a while, and then it quickly sailed away, as if answering to the call of someone else far out in the universe.
WHAT THE WIFE COOKED FOR DINNER: She didn’t. We went out. Her idea, not mine. Chinese in what used to be a train car. Sam ordered underwater conference. He picked up a shrimp and a scallop off the platter. How do you do? he said, holding the shrimp so it faced the scallop and moving the shrimp up and down, as if it were talking. Sarah, my Sarah, fell in love with crab Rangoon. Mia learned from her place setting that she was a horse.
CALL: A Belgian cannot breathe.
ACTION: Incised the horse’s trachea, looked around for a tube of some sort to put into the trachea to maintain an airway. Asked owner if she had a plastic gallon milk container. Cut off handle of milk container, inserted it into horse’s incision.
RESULT: Belgian started to breathe.
WHAT THE OWNER ASKED: How long do I keep the handle in the horse?
WHAT I SAID: Forever.
WHAT THE OWNER DID: She was short. She was probably eye level with the incision and the handle of the milk container sticking out. She could see the wet skin around the horse’s neck where I had dunked a towel in water and wiped the blood away. She could see how even though we had rinsed out the milk jug, we did not have time to wash it, and there was still a bit of white watery fluid inside the handle. She nodded. The horse lowered his head toward her and then she put her forehead right against the white star he had there.
THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME: Leaves are just mini solar panels. The leaves positioned all around the tree’s trunk catching optimum rays all throughout the day. Photosynthesizing all day long. What if you designed a solar panel that looked like a tree? Why can’t you plug in a tree? Don’t they sell science kits to kids where you can plug wires into a potato and run a watch? Why not plug into a tree?
WHAT THE KIDS SAID TO ME WHEN I GOT HOME: And oranges, you can plug in an orange and run a watch, too.
WHAT THE WIFE COOKED: Carrot soup.
WHAT WE SAID: What else is there to eat?
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: What do you mean what else? She shook her head and looked at us trying to understand.
WHAT I COOKED: Fried eggs and bacon and peanut butter and mayonnaise and lettuce and tomato sandwiches made with toasted bread.
WHAT I SAID TO SAM WHILE I COOKED: Sam, are you ready for youth deer weekend tomorrow?
WHAT SAM SAID: My Mauser and I are ready.
WHAT I THOUGHT: What a lucky boy to already have an attachment to his hunting rifle, as well he should, it being a German Mauser that belonged to his grandfather.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Don’t wake me up in the morning.
WHAT SARAH AND MIA DID: Ran outside.
WHAT SARAH SAID: I’m going to barf.
WHAT MIA SAID: I’m going to barf.
WHAT THEY DID: Barfed. One in the driveway, one in the flower bed.
WHAT I DID IN THE MORNING: Woke the wife up, looking for pants that would keep out the rain while I hunted with Sam.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Fuck, do you have to fucking wake me up in the morning? Can’t you find your own fucking pants? How old are you, anyway?
CALL: My son. I can’t get to him fast enough. He has fallen from the wooden tree stand on our property. The stand is an old stand whose supports are wooden boards nailed into branches of maples growing close together. This is not the stand I have purchased with the warning labels all over it. This is a stand that has been on our property for years. This is a stand that you climb up to by stepping on slats of gray worn wood nailed with nails now rusty, into the tree. This is a stand where there’s a milk crate sitting on its rotting platform, and you sit on the milk crate and you wait for your buck to come out and show his face while you notice how sore you are from sitting on hard plastic for so long.
ACTION: From my store-bought tree stand set up fifty yards away, I see him fall. I see him and I do what every hunter safety manual would tell me not to do-I throw my rifle to the ground beneath me so that I can go down the footholds more easily and quickly, but nothing is quick with all the gear on. I am a tangle of canvas straps and plastic buckles that are fastened around my legs and by my crotch. My son is on the leaves, the rain has stopped but now there is a brisk wind, the leaves have already blown over him and there is a bright yellow one on his cheek, as he lies still, his eyes closed. Oh, Christ. There is no bute or Banamine or injection I can give him. There is nothing I can do. There was another hunter in the woods. He was not out for deer. He hunted with a shotgun, firing off into the sky at the grouse he had flushed while walking through our woods. These two seasons overlap, grouse and deer. My son fell twelve feet, on his head. He fell from the force of the shot hitting his shoulder. I did not see the hunter. The hunter is gone now, the grouse in more northern woods where I have seen some cedar waxwings also head, and my son is unconscious with gunshot peppering the flesh of his shoulder. I can see the holes in the cloth of his coat, and the goose feathers sticking out from them, wavering in the wind.
I look around. Where is the hunter? Where the hell is he? But I do not hear anyone coming toward me through the fallen leaves. It’s quiet now, except for the sound of a squirrel chattering at me from a few trees away. I put my son over my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. I am surprised how fast I can run down the hillside and back to our house. I am surprised the door is already open to our house. Did the house know what happened and was it ready and waiting for me? There is no one else home. I put Sam on the kitchen table. He is breathing, but he is not awake. I take off his coat and wrap towels around his wound. There is blood, but not a lot of it. There are leaves on the table, too, from when I scooped him up to carry him home and the leaves are mixed with the mail, the bill from the gas company and the catalog from a store that sells seeds and tulip bulbs for spring.
An ambulance isn’t smart, not where we live anyway. What is smart is if I put him in the backseat of the truck and drive him to the hospital myself. I will get there that much faster.
On the windy back roads, I reach out behind me, only one hand on the wheel. I make sure he’s not going to slide off the seat and onto the floor, I am driving so fast. I drive fast past the Bunny Hutch preschool, even though there are signs everywhere telling me to slow down, telling me there are children at play.
RESULT: My son is being cut out of his camouflage clothes by nurses and I’m standing beside him, my canvas straps from my tree stand safety harness dangling on the hospital floor. I have not had time to take it off, and if I did, I do not know where I would put it. There are no hooks on the wall for coats, nor for the safety harness of a deer-hunting tree stand. He is scanned and there is no sign of brain damage. And a coma, the doctor says, can be, and he knew it sounded strange, not such a serious thing. The body has the opportunity to rest, the doctor says, and on the Glasgow scale, he’s scoring high, the doctor says. His chances are good. Ah, the Glasgow scale, I say and look at my son. His face appears pale and yellow, and I wonder if the yellow fallen leaf that had lain on his cheek had somehow left some of its yellow color on his skin, and what comes to mind is the way my girls have played with dandelion flowers, rubbing them on their cheeks because they said the yellow dust was like their mother’s blush.
The gunshot is taken out while I sit in the waiting room, head in my hands, thinking of calling my Jen, then thinking to wait until I know more, until maybe he wakes up from his coma and I can tell her how he’s better now, how he was unconscious, but that’s over. I look up. People walk by, a few men in camo. Is one of them the hunter? I think. I feel the blood rush to my face. Is one of them the one who mistook my son for a bird? Has he come to
