The Call

WHAT I DO AFTER CLASS: Stop and see the counselor to see if the student ever made it to see the counselor. The counselor wasn’t in. I noticed how the waiting room was huge. It had paintings on the walls and carpeting, and enough cushioned chairs for thirty kids. It was nicer than my doctor’s office. I remembered my own counselor’s office in school. It was next to the closet where the buckets and mops were kept. It was a tiny room, with no window. There was only one counselor at my school, but this school had four counselors, all with their own offices, and they all had their names on the doors. I felt like I was inside a hospital instead of a school. And maybe, I thought, this is what schools have become, hospitals, and the teachers are really just hospital staff, making sure the students with problems are taking their meds. And maybe, if I just see one of these counselors they can help me with my levels. Maybe that’s all I need is a little Ritalin, a little fix for my ADHD, my ADD, my IEP status. And maybe they’ve got something for Sam in one of their esk drawers, a smooth coated pink or robin’s egg blue pill that will make his eyes flash open and his foot start jumping.

Part Three

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Still Winter

WHAT I TELL SAM THAT I’M TRYING TO FIGURE OUT: Gravity. I’m not sure it’s a constant. I think it changes. I’m reading books about it, but I’m not any closer to knowing. I think it’s like light. You don’t see light bend. What you’re seeing is space bending around light. I’d like to see gravity. I’d like to try, I said, and then I looked out the hospital window at the moon rising yellow over the mountains.

WHAT THE WIND SAYS AT NIGHT: If I wanted to I could rip your roof off. I could break every goddamned tree next to your house. I could send your truck up over and into the next town. Gravity? I laugh in the face of gravity, the wind says.

WHAT I HEAR AT NIGHT: The rabbit. I am convinced she has escaped out of her cage. I turn the light on in the hall and check on her, but she is fine and still in her cage. When she sees me she sits up, thinking I’ll open the cage for her and maybe give her some food. She is so cute, I have to reach in and pet her, because after all, she is a rabbit and there is no comparing her soft fur to anything else. I tell her not to worry about the wind, the wind is out there and we’re in here and just listen, I tell her, to the flies gently buzzing. Go back to sleep, I say. All is safe here.

WHAT SOME PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW: If I keep my bullwhip in my bedroom.

CALL: No call. I have to go to a conference. The other vets and I sit at a table. We tell each other stories. One vet, he tells the story about the very first call he had.

WHAT I TELL SAM IN THE HOSPITAL: The vet’s story. How a horse grazed on a vast field. There were no trees on the field, no trees except one. The owner had recently trimmed the branches on the tree, and one of the branches was only partially cut so that its point was now sharp. The horse had run straight into the tree and straight into the branch, where it plunged through his forehead and then broke off. The horse then had a branch, larger around than the handle of a broom, stuck through his head. The vet was able to pull the branch out, and the wound healed. To this day he refers to it as the case of the unicorn.

WHAT THE NIGHT NURSE SAYS: She has not seen Sam’s foot move lately at all. She has seen another boy down the hall come out of his coma, though, and I want to hear everything about it. I sit down in a chair. Tell it to me the way Leopold Bloom of Ulysses would, I say, and she does. She leaves out nothing. I know the blond-haired mother wore snow boots and the snow from the bottom of the boots melted on the hospital room floor and that was the first thing the boy saw, and then he looked into everyone’s eyes and the mother held his hand and cried, and the boy, even though weak, tried to move her aside, he wanted everyone to move aside, because he wanted to see more clearly a painting that was on the wall of the ocean, with a killer whale breaching and the sun setting behind him. The doctor then took the painting off the wall and held it up close to the boy so he could see it better, and so now the painting sits propped on the seat of a chair, right beside the boy’s bed, so he can see it more clearly.

WHAT I SHOWED SAM: The flight of the spaceship, my hand flat, moving through the air of the room that smelled of rubbing alcohol and urine.

WHO WALKED INTO THE HOSPITAL ROOM WHILE I WAS MOVING MY HAND LIKE THE SPACESHIP: The night nurse, holding Ulysses to her chest.

WHAT THE NIGHT NURSE ADMITTED TO: Sometimes reading Ulysses out loud to Sam because it helped her to understand it better if she read it out loud.

WHAT I ADMITTED TO: Making my hand into a spaceship.

WHAT THE NIGHT NURSE SAID: I hope you don’t mind.

WHAT I SAID: Can you read some now? And I sat on the edge of Sam’s bed, his huge feet with the dirty nails next to me, and I put my arm over his two feet and I held them close to me while the night nurse read through her red-rimmed glasses.

WHAT NELLY PROBABLY IS NOT: Pregnant. She is no bigger around the abdomen than she was four weeks ago.

WHAT I ULTRASOUND: Nelly. She’s very calm and I lay her on her back and she stays there, with her long legs splayed out even while I apply the cold gel all over her abdomen.

WHAT THE ULTRASOUND SAYS: Nothing. There are no pups in here. Here is a full bladder, maybe. Here is a blood vessel, maybe. But there are no pups.

WHAT THE NIGHT SAYS: Here, here is your snow you have been waiting weeks for. I will cover the yellow stains from your dogs on the old snow in front of your house. I will cover the gray snow piles on the side of the roads. I will sit in the trees again, frosting the branches.

WHAT THE CHILDREN DO AT THE TABLE: Compare an actual cheese cracker to the photo of the cheese cracker on the box to see if they are being cheated. The actual cheese cracker turns out to be larger than the photo on the box of the cheese cracker.

CALL: One of Greg Springer’s horses is colicking.

ACTION: Drove to Greg Springer’s farm thinking how maybe it was fate that made his horse colic, and now it would be easy for me to meet him and easy to see if he were really the man who shot my son. Maybe he had even wanted to meet me and confess, and his horse having a colic was just an excuse to call me and talk to me in person. It was late. I used my flashlight when I got out of the truck to see my way to the barn, but I didn’t really need it. The moon was so bright it glowed yellow, like a flame from an oil lamp. I could see Greg Springer’s house. I could see his basement light on, where I had heard he kept his cows nice and warm by the water heater. Greg Springer came out of the barn to meet me. The bottoms of the legs of his overalls were soiled with horse manure. He saw me looking at them and said, “I’ve been lying next to my horse and praying while she’s in pain.” I nodded my head. As I walked to the stall, Greg Springer walked ahead of me, waddling side to side because of his girth. A man that size walking in the woods would have made a huge crashing sound, I thought. I walked into the stall, and I looked at the straw beside the horse. The imprint didn’t clearly show where Greg Springer’s legs or arms had been, it just showed a hollowed-out place in the straw, a dip where something heavy had been. It could have been anything, it could have been the spacecraft that had been sitting here instead, I thought. I knelt down in the place. I could feel the warmth that was left there and then I started to work.

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