He landed perfectly, which didn’t make any difference because two of the springs suspending the horse in its frame snapped and the belly of the horse hit the ground, and his mouth banged into the horse’s flowing plastic mane, and then he bounced off the horse to one side and his mouth, though immediately flowing with blood, didn’t hurt much because very possibly, he thought for the moment he had before the pain occluded all thought, he had broken every bone in his butt and his back. After a moment, he lay in the cool grass in what was now once again the gloaming, and began to scream.
The youngest brother began to scream, too, out of his own terror. He ran in a tight circle for a moment, screaming, and then he ran around back of the house and up the steps and ran smack into the sliding glass door, on the other side of which their mother and Dr. Hornegay looked up from the dining table in surprise.
Good God, Dr. Hornegay said, standing up. Their mother had already dashed over to the sliding glass door, frightened but angry, with the incredulity of one who has suffered too often, too long, the reckless, mindless behavior of boys. She muttered, What in the world, What in the world, over and over to herself. She knelt beside the youngest brother, who, stunned from running into the sliding glass door, lay on his back on the patio with his eyes wide open. But when the mother leaned over him and said, Are you okay? he began to scream again and point frantically in the direction of his brothers around the side of the house.
When the mother and Dr. Hornegay came around there, the mother holding the youngest brother in her arms, the oldest brother said, He jumped off the roof onto the rocky horse. I told him not to.
The oldest brother stood off to one side in order to detach himself from any semblance of blame.
The mother screamed, then, and set the youngest brother down hard enough in her haste to set him crying, too, and she began to shout to Dr. Hornegay, Help, help! Has he broken his back? Oh, my God!
Don’t move, son, Dr. Hornegay said, just lie still there, now. Can you feel this?
After a moment, having managed to stop screaming, himself, the middle brother began to come back into the world, into the shooting, searing pain in his butt and his back, the throbbing pain in his mouth, into the frightening vision of Dr. Hornegay’s horrible nose just inches from his own face, into the hot, overwhelming odor of the whiskey and cigarettes on Dr. Hornegay’s breath, and finally into the strange and tickly sensation of Dr. Hornegay’s fingers wiggling and pinching at one of his toes. He nodded his head.
Then Dr. Hornegay was feeling at his neck and along the bones of his spine, and saying, He’s going to be all right, I believe, and he could hear the sounds of his mother weeping and saying, Oh, when will it stop? And then, kind of like in the distance, a car pulling into the drive, headlights glancing against the whole odd scene, and then there was their father standing above him, seeming impossibly tall, and saying, I got a message over in Vicksburg, said it was something from Rosie? He looked from the middle brother, to the busted rocky horse, to the mother, and to Dr. Hornegay, standing upright now a little wobbly and attempting to straighten his jacket and tie. The father said, What in the goddamn hell is going on?
The middle brother started to cry as if his heart were broken, as indeed it was, and he burbled out, We were supposed to get a sackful of hot tamales. And then the youngest brother began to wail, and the oldest brother broke into choking sobs he was trying to hold back.
The father looked around at all of them strangely.
Dr. Hornegay said, Your son attempted, apparently, to leap from the roof onto this contraption. However, after what I concede was merely a superficial examination, I do believe the boy will be fine, aside from bruises, a busted lip, and possibly some slight injury to his tailbone. And now I’m sure you’ll have no more need of my attentions, so I should get back to the house and check on my beloved Eustice, who as I’m sure you know has not been well for some time.
Holding himself fairly erect, Dr. Hornegay made a little bow with his head, adjusted his eyeglasses. He turned and walked into and through the deepening twilight of the neighbors’ yard, a listing specter, emerged on the other side, and followed his grainy shadow from the streetlamp flickering out front of their house, up the hill toward his own.
The father carried the middle brother into the house and laid him down on the sofa where the boys had been sitting all afternoon, and he said a proper hello to the other two brothers, and then he kind of hugged their mother, who was sniffling but getting ahold of herself, and the two of them spoke quietly together for a few minutes. But soon they began to speak in normal-volume voices, and then, when the father noticed the bottle of Old Crow on the table with two glasses half filled with melting ice, their words got louder, and the father was saying things about What was she doing down here drinking whiskey with that old pervert while his boys were outside with No Parental Supervision and They Could Have Been Killed, and she was saying things how He Had Some Nerve Lecturing Her About Responsibility, and then he was making himself a tall drink from Dr. Hornegay’s bottle of Old Crow and they continued to argue, and at one point finally the father slammed his empty glass down on the kitchen counter and said, Well, I’ll be damned if that pathetic son of a bitch is going to come sniffing after my wife, separated or not, and he stormed out the carport door, and the mother stormed through the den into the back of the house saying not quite under her breath, Oh, my fucking God.
The oldest brother and the youngest brother immediately ran out of the house to see what their father was going to do to Dr. Hornegay, and though he didn’t feel very good and was very sore in his back and butt, the middle brother got up off the couch and limped after them up the hill, calling, Wait for me.
Up at Dr. Hornegay’s house, from the light of the streetlight at the edge of the yard, they saw their father in the Hornegays’ carport pounding on the door to Dr. Hornegay’s den and shouting, Open this goddamn door, Hornegay! And then he came out of the carport and stepped into the shrubbery in the bed beneath the picture window that looked out from Dr. Hornegay’s living room and pounded on the glass with the same fist and shouted some more for Dr. Hornegay to Get His Ass Out There Right Now. When Dr. Hornegay still did not come out, their father walked to the street and dislodged a piece of asphalt from its edge and stepped back into the yard and was about to heave it toward the picture window when the front door from the living room opened and Dr. Hornegay stepped out into the shadow of the little stoop there with a rifle of some kind in his hands.
You step back, sir, he called to their father. Their father, the piece of asphalt in his hand, did indeed step back a step, and stared at Dr. Hornegay with the gun in his hands.
Run home, boys, their father said to them, but they only scurried out into the street and then across the street into the Harbours’ yard and stopped there.