The vet’s answering service delivered the message and she called me a few minutes later. I described the wound.
And as I deliver such facts, having assumed this status of firstperson narrator, not a distinction of honor, am I still in a position to dispatch such facts that might be about myself, standing away from and outside the persona of the narrator? Where did the fat drug brothers go? Where are we, son? Father? Father along. We’ll know all about it. And what about that dream? There was a dream speech. Or is that to come? Nat Turner and all that? Am I or is the story (stories) seeking to mesh racial formations or standards, and blech! What is your racial formation? Well, I start with a racial foundation and work my way up.
I’ll come over now, she said.
It is almost dark, I said. I listened to the rain pounding my roof, beating like fists instead of drops.
But I’m really not that far away. It will be better than driving three times as far tomorrow.
I couldn’t disagree with her, though I was feeling tired and probably lazy and didn’t really want to trudge back out into that downpour and all that mud and manure. And I didn’t want to lace up my boots once more.
Laura arrived pretty quickly. It was darker and the rain was falling, if possible, harder. I met her at her truck with a flashlight. I thanked her for coming out.
Probably not the swiftest of ideas, she said.
Well, he’s inside now.
Well, that’ll make things a little more pleasant. The doctor followed me through the long foaling shed and into the small barn. The rain was deafening on the old metal roof.
I switched on the light but nothing happened. Rain. I grabbed another battery-powered lantern from the wall and switched it on. It flickered. I hope this is bright enough. I held the light in the stall and caused the horse to start. He’s always spooky, I said.
He’s a horse.
I pointed to the gelding’s neck.
Ouch, she said, looks nasty. Laura walked into the stall, talked to the horse soothingly. Let me have the light. She took it from me and leaned close, studied the wound. I bet that hurts like the devil. And I think it’s in there, too.
What’s in there?
The bullet, she said. That’s my guess.
Bullet?
I think somebody shot this animal.
Well, that ain’t good, I said. What I meant was, Oh fuck. What do you mean by shot this animal ?
You know, bang, bang. I’m going to give him some antibiotics and some phenylbutazone for the pain. Tomorrow morning I’ll sedate him and we’ll fish around in there and see what we can find. Can’t do it tonight. Too dark and messy out here. Boy, I bet that hurts.
Somebody shot my horse? It was less a question than a statement of fearful disbelief.
Somebody, she said. She shined the light on the wound and took another look. Yeah, we’ll numb him up real good and then get him dopey.
Somebody shot my horse, I said again.
Happens, she said. There’s a lot of muscle here to penetrate. That’s the good thing. It could have been somebody shooting way off at something else. Bullets travel for a ways, don’t they.
How often does this sort of thing happen?
She shrugged.
I looked out into the smoky darkness and the easing rain, over the pasture. I couldn’t see the distant hills, but I knew they were there. I also knew there was a stand of cottonwoods about a quarter mile away. I knew there was a house just beyond those trees. But I didn’t know what else was out there. The bullet could have come from a innocently fired rifle, if such a thing were possible. She was right, a bullet could fly for miles until something stopped it, gravity, a hillside, a barn wall, my horse. Me. Or some idiot could have drawn a bead on my horse and squeezed off a round. Either way a new dimension was added to just standing in my yard.
I can be here at eight fifteen, Laura said. She was washing her hands in Betadine. Will that work for you?
Yeah, that’ll work. Do I need to do anything tonight?
No, I gave him a bit of feel-good, so he’ll be all right for a while. You could come out and check on him a couple of times throughout the night, make sure he’s still standing.
And if he’s not?
Call me, I guess.
I nodded. Eight fifteen.
Have some coffee made, she said.
Okay, Doc. I saw her to her truck and watched her fishtail away along the muddy track.
One Meek Yellow Evening
The muddy track. Are these stories, any stories, your stories, mere neurotic repetition, perhaps a function of the resistances discovered or exposed through the transference space? The madman on the playground? Histories converge as serendipitous overlap, a pamphlet and a book, a folk song and a speech from a fascist ruler? You all know well, it will begin, suggesting how reluctant I am to speak and all of it will sound frightfully familiar, as I cite a hundred cases of being wronged, of being slighted, hundreds of instances where we were taken for granted and merely taken and I will speak to you of the power of our solidarity and our steadfastness and of our polished and pointy bayonets at the ready, repeating my lie, our lies, over and over and over until they are true, as true as anything can be.
And why are we here?
Having bones to pick is not the same as picking over bones. Son, have you ever had sex with someone you don’t love?
I’m afraid I have.
Good answer.
in point of fact
some things start in very odd places, like tertiary mud, instead of the primordial kind, like the middles of charred and discarded 23 bodies, not necessarily bodies that once lived, but that’s where you went, isn’t it, read here a question mark, isn’t it, and the peninsula on which we hide is pocked with craters from the bombing or should be, if we weren’t so safe in our cozy pajamas and fuzzy slippers, with our bowls of green grapes and fruit candies, very odd places indeed, and there’s my first teacher over there, she’s waving, beaming, strolling backward toward the sea, but dead, dead, dead because things don’t go on forever, things go on for thirty-eight years, eight months, a week and three days and then it’s something else, an interest in dinosaur skulls or in monkeys or Thomas Paine and time to light new fires and if any of the others have seen my fire, they haven’t tried to approach it and I would know because all I’m doing is sitting here watching, letting my beard grow, wearing a dungaree shirt and dungaree pants and a dungaree hat, hell, I’m just dung, in dung, overdung, sitting here watching the animals go by, the badgers and wolves, the ants and gulls, the capercaillie and the tarantula hawks, the peregrine falcons and the marmots all parading to the whining music of bagpipes, if you can call that music, all parading in a circle to help me wait for the end of the next thirty-eight-year-eight-month-one-week-and-three-day cycle and the rest of them can sit cross-legged on a hillside eating bread and link sausages for all I care, but the cycle is the cycle and nobody can stop it, not even you, not even I
in point of fact
Slow Rolling Under Its Mountain
Back in the house, I tried to get dry. I kicked off my boots and peeled off my wet socks in the mudroom. I stepped into the kitchen and dried my head with a dish towel. I switched on the radio, listened to some pitiful pleas for donations, and then killed the sound. My house was stone quiet. The drone of rain on the roof made it feel even more like a tomb. The spaces that had been filled by my wife before she left were still there. Sight of her was gone. Her sounds and smells were gone. But her spaces, where she’d lean against a doorjamb, her end of the sofa, her bathroom sink. She’d left me and that was fine. It seemed clear that we had run our course. I’d have left her months earlier, I just didn’t have the sense or maybe the guts to leave. What I hadn’t anticipated was the loneliness, that I would be so affected by the quiet. I wasn’t as tough I’d thought, but then who is? I never quite cried in the shower, but I thought about it, and perhaps that’s the same thing.