ACTION: I drive to town hall. The clerk is named Jean and she’s sitting at her rolltop desk wearing sheep fleece slippers. Do you know John Bennett? I ask.
WHAT JEAN SAYS: I know everyone. I’m the town clerk, remember?
WHAT I SAY: What’s he like?
WHAT JEAN SAYS: He pays his taxes. He buys dump stickers. He put an addition on his house in ’89. His dog’s name is Howie, a sweet collie mix that has seizures. He takes two pills a day for the seizures, but sometimes they still don’t work.
WHAT I SAY: How do you know?
WHAT JEAN SAYS: I take care of Howie all winter while John’s in Florida.
WHAT I SAY: All winter?
WHAT JEAN SAYS: He’s a snowbird. He leaves before Halloween frost.
WHAT I SAY: That’s before hunting season.
WHAT JEAN SAYS: Yes, before hunting season. He doesn’t buy a hunting license. The only license he buys is a dog license. You’re barking up the wrong tree with John Bennett.
WHAT I SAY: Who do you suggest I search out?
WHAT JEAN SAYS: I don’t suggest that kind of stuff. I can tell you what your taxes will be next year, though. I can tell you what the taxes were on the place in the 1800s. I can tell you if you add a twenty-by-five porch to your place what the taxes will be. But I can’t tell you what I don’t know.
WHAT I DO: I walk behind her. I look at the town map hanging above her desk. I look at all the houses that border my property. I see a house in the northeast corner I didn’t know was there before. Whose house is that? I ask.
WHAT JEAN SAYS: Anne Thompson’s. She’s the daughter of Sleeping Mary.
WHAT I SAY: Sleeping Mary?
WHAT JEAN SAYS: Yes, she would go into a trance and tell the future. If someone wanted a session with her, they would go down to the library on Friday afternoons.
WHAT I SAY: Does she hunt?
WHAT JEAN DOES: Pulls out a book of every licensed hunter in our town. She copies the page for me. No, these are the people who hunt in this town, but anyone could have been walking on your property that day who had a hunting license. That’s all you need is a license, and some people don’t even bother to get one.
WHAT I SAY BEFORE I LEAVE: What about Howie? Did he bite the neck of a sheepdog?
WHAT JEAN SAYS: Howie’s a kitten. That sheepdog got his head cut up trying to limbo a barbed-wire fence on John Bennett’s property.
WHAT THE HOUSE SAYS AT NIGHT: “David,” it wakes me up, calling my name with a huge creak of its timbers. I look over at Jen, who is sleeping. It was not she who called out my name in her sleep. It must have been the house. What? I say in a whisper, but the house doesn’t answer.
WHAT GISELA SAID WHILE I WAS DRIVING: David, check your levels. When I listened to the CD again, she was talking about taking a visit to Tubingen. She was talking about buying more coffee because she had run out. She was talking about where to buy sweet bread. Now she was telling me to check my levels. Repeat after me, she said: Check your levels.
WHAT I THOUGHT ABOUT DOING: Checking my levels because both the house and Gisela had told me to.
WHAT I THOUGHT WAS FUNNY: That my wife and a doctor had told me to go check my levels, but I didn’t want to do it, and now that a house and a German language CD are telling me to do it, I am considering it, especially if it means I might see the spacecraft again.
WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM RABBITS: That wherever you are, you must look for a place where you can run to and hide.
WHAT I TELL THE WIFE: Have you thought anymore about where we can live when we can no longer afford the taxes here?
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: I’m not leaving this place. I already told you that.
WHAT THE FLIES SAY AT NIGHT: David, David, David.
NUMBER OF RESIDENTS IN OUR TOWN: 600.
NUMBER OF PEOPLE WITH HUNTING LICENSES: 100.
NUMBER OF FLIES IN OUR HOUSE: Probably 6,000.
NUMBER OF FIELDS ON OUR PROPERTY: 5. The front field, the field to the pond, the middle field, the fern field, the back field. The pond is frozen now, but it is spring-fed and still the water bubbles up from it. We have told the children to stay off it, but Nelly, the Newfoundland, sometimes walks across it and we hold our breaths, scared she will break through the ice and drown. We had a beaver in our pond, and he chewed down seven of our trees that surrounded the pond. In the warmer months, the trees that the beaver felled are visible as they lay submerged at the bottom of the pond. I have put on my wet suit from my days of riding ocean waves and waded into the pond and tried to pull out the trees that I could-the small, thinner ones, but the larger trees I have had to leave where they are, with brown algae growing on their bark.
NUMBER OF TIMES I’VE LOOKED AT THE LIST OF ONE HUNDRED NAMES OF LICENSED HUNTERS: 60.
NUMBER OF TIMES MY WIFE HAS TOLD ME TO PUT IT AWAY: 10.
NUMBER OF MARKS WHO HAVE LICENSES: 3.
NUMBER OF JASONS: 3.
NUMBER OF CALEBS: 1.
NAME THAT ISN’T ON THE LICENSE LIST: Greg Springer.
WHAT NELLY TELLS BRUCE, WHO IS TRYING TO MOUNT HER: Not yet, you brute!
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: If we really want puppies we have to hire someone who helps breed dogs and this someone has to masturbate the dog.
WHAT I SAY: I am not spending money on hiring someone to come masturbate my dog. I know how to masturbate, for Chrissakes. I’ll do it for him.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Oh, that is soo disgusting.
WHAT BRUCE LIKES: Me masturbating him wearing rubber surgical gloves and holding a Ziploc freezer bag nearby to catch what I can whenever it comes spurting out, reminding me of my own days when I donated sperm.
WHAT DOESN’T GET HARD: Bruce.
WHAT STARTS TO REALLY HURT: My arm.
WHAT MY WIFE AND I DECIDE IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN: Nelly getting pregnant.
WHAT NELLY IS: Still in heat, but now she wanders. Bruce is not man-dog enough for her. She wants to find someone who can do the deed. Bruce, though, follows her when she wanders. They head down the driveway, Bruce trying to mount her the entire time she is trotting away over the frozen road.
WHAT THE NEIGHBORS DO: Call us to tell us our huge black New foundland dogs are on their back porch and that the male is trying to mate with the female.
WHAT I DO AFTER I PICK UP THE DOGS: Drive to Greg Springer’s with the dogs in the back of the truck and Bruce still trying to mate Nelly. I yell for him to get off her, because every time I look in the rearview all I see is a pumping mass of black fur and my truck’s rocking side to side.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I OPEN THE DOOR OF MY TRUCK TO KNOCK ON GREG SPRINGER’S DOOR: Nelly runs out and Bruce runs after her up the road and I have to get back in the truck and chase them until they listen and get back into the truck. I am far from Greg Springer’s now, and almost home, and so I go home, doubtful that Greg Springer with the nonhunter’s license is going to talk to me about hunting, is going to talk to me about anything at all.
CALL: No call.
WHAT THE HOUSE SAYS: You could stain my windows now. You could fix your wife’s desk.