WHAT SHE SAID: I don’t drive too fast. I’ve never had a speeding ticket in my life. You, on the other hand, have had speeding tickets. Wasn’t it just the other day you were doing 39 in a 25?
WHAT I SAID: Yes, but I did not get a ticket for it. The cop pulled me over and saw I was an animal doctor. He asked if I was going on an emergency call. I told him yes, and he let me go.
WHAT SHE SAID: You lied to him.
WHAT I SAID: I forgot to tell you. This morning, after I drove the kids to school, I saw the same cop in my rearview. His lights were flashing. Scheiße, I thought. I pulled over. The cop got out of his cruiser and said, Do you know what I’m pulling you over for? My expired inspection sticker? I said. No, he said, get that taken care of anytime. I just want to know if that horse you were going to see the other night is all right, he said.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Our town cop’s a comedian.
WHAT I ALMOST RAN OVER THE OTHER NIGHT ON THE ROAD: A deer, a doe. She changed her mind halfway across and turned back into the field she had come from.
WHAT THE WIFE WANTS: I don’t know. Haven’t I given her all she should ask for?
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: You’re a prick.
WHAT I FEEL LIKE: Not a prick.
WHAT I TURN THE RADIO UP FOR: Celebration time, come on.
WHAT SHE TURNS IT DOWN FOR: Celebration time, come on.
WHAT SARAH AND MIA FIGHT OVER WHEN WE DRIVE TO VISIT SAM: Sitting shotgun, sharing gum, who punched whom too hard after a punch buggy sighting.
WHAT I TELL THE WIFE WHILE WE’RE IN THE HOSPITAL LOOKING AT SAM IN THE HARSH WHITE LIGHT: We could sell our place. We could live in Ecuador. We could surf every day. We could eat fresh fish.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: This is your levels talking. But I like the idea, change is good.
WHAT I SAY: I don’t really want to live in Ecuador. I just want to live in a smaller house way up in the woods.
WHAT I THINK: My levels don’t talk. They just go up and down. Why is my wife personifying my levels?
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: I like the part about surfing. When was the last time we dug our toes in sand? Are there sharks? Is there crime? Will our children be stolen? she said and then she went to Sam and brought the blanket up to his chin even though the hospital was roasting.
WHAT I DID WHEN I GOT HOME: I walked up the hill. I cleared the land. I threw small trees in a pile and started them to burn. Night fell. I heard a coyote close by, howling a small howl outside the circle of my fire. There was no wind, but somehow, opposite where the coyote was, the leaves kicked up. They turned in a circle, forming a cyclone that spun itself into the shape of a man, then as quickly as the leaves started up, they fell to the ground. A moment later I heard the coyote howling again, only this time he had moved, he was howling right behind where the leaves had spun themselves into the shape of a man.
THOUGHTS WHILE WATCHING THE LEAVES IN THE SHAPE OF A MAN: The man looks a little like me. The man looks like a younger version of myself. The man looks the way my son might look when he is older. Where had he come from? The sky? The spacecraft?
CALL: No call. It was another hang-up call. I said, “Jawohl! Jawohl! Ich heisse David Appleton, und du?” but there was no one there. Who are you talking to? Is it about Sam? the wife said. “Der Kapitän, das Boot ist kaputt!” I said and then I said, “Alarm! Alarm! Dive, dive, dive!” and I dove under the telephone table and then Sarah and Mia started screaming it too and the wife put her hands over her ears and the dogs started barking and the wife yelled for me to shut up. It’s not funny, she yelled. None of this is, she said, and then she started to cry. Sarah and Mia went to her. They hugged her and I stayed where I was under the phone table, noticing how thick clouds of black fuzzy Newfoundland hair had shored up against the table’s spiraled legs.
WHAT I CAN DO: I can swallow my tongue. I can swim fast and for a long distance. I can tie a cherry stem into a knot with just my tongue. I can take a nap and tell myself I only want to sleep for twenty minutes and then I wake up after twenty minutes, without the aid of an alarm clock. I cannot ride a horse. I tried riding a horse. I fell off the horse. I fell from an eighteen-hand Belgian draft horse after he decided he’d rather gallop than walk up our dirt road. I could not see clearly after I fell. For days I could not see whatever was to the side of me, as if I were a horse wearing blinders. It was ironic, falling off a horse and then walking around like a horse with blinders on. Jen said I was not missing much, but still, I would have liked to have known what was about to come up from behind.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Can we drive to see Sam again?
WHAT I SAY: No, we have been there once already today. Nothing has changed in him. The only thing that might have changed is his sheets, maybe, and the angles of the shadows on the fucking tiles of the floor.
WHAT MY WIFE CAN DO: Make me angrier than I have ever been.
WHAT OUR NEWFOUNDLAND DOGS DO: Never make me angry. Sneeze when they’re on their backs. Drink out of the toilet. The other day Bruce drank out of the toilet and then stood by the woodstove and shook his massive head and sprayed water so far that it hit the woodstove with a fire in it and the spray of water popped and fizzed on the woodstove like a greasy spoon’s griddle.
CALL: A woman needs her horses’ teeth floated.
ACTION: Ate a big breakfast. Floating teeth is hard work. Drove to farm.
RESULT: Filed down the hooks in the back of the horses’ mouths. Told the woman they were very polite horses, which they were, and let me float them without giving them any tranq.
THOUGHTS WHILE DRIVING TO HOSPITAL: How do the animals survive in the winter? I mustn’t cut the milkweed I left to grow in the field for the monarch butterflies, because now I am sure the stand of milkweed I left is home to mice and voles. I could keep driving. Where would I go? I have already been west. I have walked the streets the nights filled with the smell of palm trees, dusty with car exhaust particles caught in the tapering fronds in the dry desert wind. The streets slick on nights of a fast rain that ended quick, the mornings a blooming rose color in the sunrise.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID AT HOME AFTER WE WALKED IN THE DOOR, AFTER WE HAD BEEN TO THE HOSPITAL AND HAD SEEN HOW SAM WAS IN EXACTLY THE SAME POSITION HE WAS IN THE DAY BEFORE, HOW NO NIGHT NURSE OR DAY NURSE HAD BOTHERED TO MOVE HIM: What about Ecuador? Tell me again about the surfing?
WHAT I SAID: No, Ecuador is out of the question.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Bali, then?
WHAT I SAID: No, not Bali, not Fiji, not Maui or Palau. Here, right here, where we live is where we’ll stay.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: This is not an island, we’re surrounded by trees, not water, and then she stood at the window looking out over the parking lot.
WHAT I SAID: Then that makes it some kind of island, and the trees some kind of danger, a thing to drown in, the crowns of pines so thick no daylight passes through to the forest floor below, no air visible to breathe. Panic is just steps away. Feel better now? I asked.
WHAT THE HOUSE SAID: I have let the mice come in for the winter to live in the walls, for if I don’t they will be cold and hungry and I am not that kind of house to shut them out.
CALL: A man with an old Appaloosa he wants to put down. (See, I told the wife, how now there are so many of these calls.)