For years, doctor after doctor had said, “We have to do something about your headaches,” and let that pass as treatment. Finally, failed drug after failed drug, and one neurologist’s insipid question, “Are you sure they’re headaches?” led Michael to give up and admit that the pain was a part of his life. Evidently the headaches were not going to kill him, a lamentable thought, so he decided to get to know them, to feel them, to accept them, to, in what he thought was the Zen way, become one with them. He didn’t mention them, just endured them. He didn’t miss them when they left, and was not surprised when they returned: different headaches with disparate associative symptoms, which located themselves in various parts of his head, where they moved, pulsed, or sat immobile for hours behind an eye or ear like cheetah watching gazelle.
Michael drove north on Interstate 25, then west toward Fort Collins. Clouds were already collecting over the front range, just a few then, but soon there would be many, and he was glad to be out of Denver where the weather was always sudden and extreme: hail and tornadoes or clear, blizzards followed by sunny days of sixty degrees with gentle breezes from the south. He made his way through Fort Collins and stopped for breakfast at a diner on US 287 that sported stuffed animals everywhere he looked: heads of deer, elk, and moose were hung over the tables of booths, and bobcats, coyotes, and badgers marched along a mantle that separated the dining area from a little store with cold drinks, doughnuts, and sundries. The headache he nursed was a sharp, needling pain behind his left eye that spread toward the back of his head like smoke, becoming duller, but fingering out with a scratching at the base of his brain. He cataloged it as he fell into a booth beneath the head of a wild boar with a conspicuously missing left eye. The brass plate under the trophy read, “Javelina, Dicotyles tajacu, taken July 1967, Red River, NM by C.C. Wilcox.”
The waitress, a plump woman, looking to be near thirty, was wearing off-white nurse’s shoes and a too-short navy skirt and holding a pot of coffee. She said, “You can sit somewhere else, if you want.”
Michael looked at her.
“If the Dicotyles tajacu bugs you,” she said. “You can move to another booth. The Odocoileus hemionus is available. So is the Antilocapra americana.”
Michael looked at the other dead animals over the empty booths. “I’m okay here,” he said, turning his cup mouth up for the coffee.
“A lot of people don’t like the Dicotyles tajacu,” the woman said as she poured. “That missing eye.”
“I see.”
She pulled a menu from the large front pocket of her apron and set it on the place mat in front of him.
“You know all of these animals?”
“They’re here every day, all day long. I’m here every day, all day long. You hunt?”
Michael shook his head.
“I’ll come back for your order.”
Michael studied the pig. At that moment, Gail was probably in bed with Bob having her skin examined. He recalled when he and Gail had first met: she had claimed to understand his pain, claimed she wanted to be near it, and wanted to watch him at work. They were standing in front of a canvas of Michael’s at an exhibition of his in Santa Fe.
“There’s so much pain in it,” Gail said from behind him as he faced the painting.
Michael turned and looked at her. “Where?” he asked.
“Everywhere,” she said.
“I don’t see it,” he said.
Gail was confused, but pressed on. “Here,” pointing to a sweep of maples edged with Indian Yellow across a field of pthalo blue. “Here, this looks like acute pain to me, like intense loss.”
Michael looked where she pointed, got up close, and touched the paint with his fingers. “You don’t really believe that shit, do you?” But when he looked back at her face he saw she was near tears. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right about the pain.” A lie only because he believed that indeed he was lying every time he attempted to articulate how painting made him feel. In the middle of putting the paint on the canvas, when the desire to slide a razor across the arteries of his forearm was large and explicit before him, he recognized the urge as indulgent and decided it was made up, thought no one really had such feelings and so would sit down, leaving the work alone and rub his temples until he forgot his bad mood. But as Michael said to Gail that she was correct about the emotion she saw in his picture, he felt pleased to be able to share the pain. He was genuinely interested in this woman and what she was saying, but he also experienced considerable guilt because he knew that he was viewing this conversation as a hasty way to get her into bed.
“I’m Gail Lybrand.”
“Michael Lawson.”
“I know.”
They had sex that night and continued to have sex for eight years and in that time Michael had sex only with Gail, although he was tempted once to be unfaithful with an anthropologist whom he’d met in the hills south of Santa Fe, but didn’t because the thought of sex with another woman made his head hurt more and more and he took the pain as a sign. And so he went home to his wife of seven months and found that his headache didn’t go away, but in fact got worse, and then Gail became angry with him because he was too sick to make love.
“What’s this?” Michael said, looking at the chocolate-covered doughnut the waitress put on the table. The doughnut had been microwaved and the brown veneer had become thin on top and formed a series of puddles around the circle.
“On the house. Because you don’t hunt.” The waitress pulled her pad from her apron pocket and took the pen from behind her ear. “What’ll it be?”
“How much for the pig?” Michael asked, surprising himself.
“Excuse me?”
“The head.” Michael pointed up. “I think I’d like to buy it.”
“The Dicotyles tajacu?”
“Yes.”
“You want to buy the Dicotyles tajacu?”
“I believe that’s what I’m saying.”
The waitress tapped her pad with her pen and looked at the boar’s head as if for the first time, then turned and walked away across the room and into the kitchen. The single door swung after her with a barely audible squeak. The bearded face of a large man suddenly appeared from the kitchen and disappeared just as quickly. Then all of him appeared, dressed in white or what was once white. Michael liked the stains on the man’s clothes, ochre and Permanent Rose and a deep green like an avocado’s skin.
“Waitress tells me you want to buy the Dicotyles tajacu,” the cook said.
Michael nodded, but felt a little afraid sensing the man’s displeasure.
“Why?”
“Because I like it,” Michael said.
The cook sat across from him in the booth and looked absently across the room and out the window at the highway. “I’ve never had anybody wanting to buy one of the animals before. What would you do with it?”