“I’m an artist. I just like it. I wouldn’t do anything to it,” was what he said, but he wanted to say that he was unsatisfied, agitated, desolate in heart and entrails, sick with pain, and sickened by curiosity, of all things, and that the Dicotyles tajacu had become an object of that sickness. “I’m not going to hurt it.”
“He’s got an eye missing,” the cook said. “The left one.”
“I realize that,” Michael said. “I think that’s why I like it so much.”
The cook scratched his thick neck and pulled up at the back of his shirt collar. “The Dicotyles tajacu has been here since 1967.”
“Taken by C.C. Wilcox,” Michael said.
“You know, business has been pretty rough, what with the freeway and all those fast-food places in Fort Collins. A breakfast burrito. An egg McNuthin’. It’s hard for the little guy to make it now.”
Michael nodded. “Are you C.C. Wilcox?”
The cook shook his head. “Kirk Johnston.”
“My name is Michael Lawson.”
The cook stared off into space.
“I can see you’re attached to the pig …”
“Dicotyles tajacu,” the cook corrected.
“Dicotyles tajacu,” Michael said. “How does one-fifty sound?”
The cook looked up at the head on the wall and his eyes seemed to well with tears, the meaty fingers of his right hand were wringing the meaty fingers of his left. “Business has been awful slow.” But the cook was speaking more to the taxidermied head than to Michael.
“One seventy-five,” Michael said.
The man was openly weeping now. His big head fell forward to his hands; his big sides were heaving under his short-sleeved white shirt. The waitress had come out of the kitchen and was walking across the room, tossing them a sidelong glance but not approaching. A man with blond hair and his blond wife, who were seated across the room in a booth beneath a moose, stared and whispered.
Through his tears, Kirk the cook managed to say, “Would you consider the Ovis canadensis?”
“No, I want this one,” Michael said. The idea of owning it was getting all twisted inside him. He didn’t want to hurt the cook, but the head, the head, the idea of the head was calling to him. “Two hundred.”
The cook let out a loud wail. His sobs caught in his throat, choking him; tears were glistening in his beard.
The blond couple from across the room climbed out of their booth and scurried out. The bell hanging from the door was slapping against the glass.
“Two hundred dollars.”
“Waitress,” the cook called. When she came he said, still crying, “Wrap up the Dicotyles tajacu.”
The waitress began to sob as well, her mascara streaking quickly as she turned her face from the stuffed head. Her crying voice was higher pitched than her talking voice and Michael paused to observe this.
The cook stood. “Wrap it nicely, waitress.”
Michael counted out two hundred dollars onto the lacquered wooden tabletop. The cook picked up the bills along with a paper napkin and, without counting, stuffed the money into his breast pocket, then walked on unsteady legs back across the room and through the swinging door of the kitchen.
Michael moved his coffee to the next table. Then he and the waitress stood on the maroon vinyl seats of the booth, on each side of the boar’s head, and took it down from the nail on which it was hooked.
“I’m going to miss you, Dicotyles tajacu,” the waitress said. “I’ll get some newspaper.” She stepped back and looked at it there on the table before walking away.
Michael was able to examine the head more closely now. The hair was worn away on top of the skull between the eyes, and the tusk on the right side was broken. The surface of the protrusion was Indian Red and mustard. The hole where the left eye had been, and later whatever kind of glass ball had replaced it, was full of caked dust and cobwebs. He imagined the pain when the wind blew through an empty socket to the exposed nerves.
The waitress returned with a stack of Rocky Mountain News and spread a few sheets out on the floor. She made a mat using masking tape to secure the seams. Michael regarded how carefully she worked, as she kept adding more paper. Her hot-pink-painted nails sliced the tape precisely; the palms of her small but fleshy hands pressed the adhesive flat as the plane of paper grew into a rug. Michael stood, lifted the head from the table, and set it down. The two of them stepped back and studied the head.
The waitress got back down on her knees and brought the opposite edges of her newspaper rug up to meet at the bald spot between the eyes. She taped it closed, then proceeded to fold shut the gaps by using more paper until finally the Dicotyles tajacu was securely wrapped.
“I never did get anything to eat,” Michael said, looking at the waitress. “I don’t imagine it would be a good idea to order something now.”
The waitress didn’t say anything, nor did she move her head or any other part of her round little body, but she made it clear she was in agreement.
Michael picked up the head; the newspaper crackled in his arms. “Okay, then. Thanks.” He left the restaurant struggling with the door; the bell hanging from the door handle hushed as it caught between his thigh and the glass. Michael put the pig on the passenger seat of his truck. He left it wrapped in spite of his urge to open its one-eyed face to the world. He put the truck into gear, released the brake, and rolled away, listening to an exhaust tick in his engine that he had not previously noticed.
Michael stopped in Laramie outside a pawn shop to use a pay telephone. First he checked the answering machine at what used to be his home, noting with some disappointment that his action betrayed a failure to completely disengage. That failure was underscored by his feeling of deflation on not finding any messages. He placed a second call to his agent in Santa Fe.
“Hello, Gloria,” Michael said. “I’m on the road and I can’t be reached for a while.”
“What’s the matter now?” Gloria asked.
Michael imagined the stout woman sitting in the overstuffed chair in front of her television. “Nothing’s the matter. My wife is having her pimples cured by the handsome Dr. Bob; I’ve left the house; and I burned all the new paintings.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. Like I said. I can’t be reached. I’ll call you soon. I never loved her anyway.”
“When you loved her, you became despondent and tried to kill yourself. Now, you claim you never loved her and so you destroy your work.”
The head of the Dicotyles tajacu was wrapped in newspaper, sitting on the seat of the truck, dead for twenty-five years, but still breathing. Michael could hear it. He left the boar while he went into the deli near the train tracks for lunch since his stomach was complaining and feeling tight. He sat alone, undisturbed, and ate a vegetarian sandwich from which he pulled out the cucumbers and heard the waitress say, “I don’t like those either.”
Outside, the air had turned crisp and Michael found himself stepping quickly toward his truck. He was struck suddenly by the distance, not the physical distance, not the miles, nor the change in landscape, but the remoteness from the life he had known just a few days before. He was still a painter: he could buy oils and brushes and canvas and make pictures and there were paintings in the world bearing his mark, but he was no longer a husband, no longer a lover, and he no longer resided in that house in Denver with the detached studio and pool he never wanted.
“Michael?” the voice found him just as he was opening the door of his truck.