WHAT THE WIND SAYS AT NIGHT: If I wanted to I could rip your roof off. I could break every goddamned tree next to your house. I could send your truck up over and into the next town. Gravity? I laugh in the face of gravity, the wind says.
WHAT I HEAR AT NIGHT: The rabbit. I am convinced she has escaped out of her cage. I turn the light on in the hall and check on her, but she is fine and still in her cage. When she sees me she sits up, thinking I’ll open the cage for her and maybe give her some food. She is so cute, I have to reach in and pet her, because after all, she is a rabbit and there is no comparing her soft fur to anything else. I tell her not to worry about the wind, the wind is out there and we’re in here and just listen, I tell her, to the flies gently buzzing. Go back to sleep, I say. All is safe here.
WHAT SOME PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW: If I keep my bullwhip in my bedroom.
CALL: No call. I have to go to a conference. The other vets and I sit at a table. We tell each other stories. One vet, he tells the story about the very first call he had.
WHAT I TELL SAM IN THE HOSPITAL: The vet’s story. How a horse grazed on a vast field. There were no trees on the field, no trees except one. The owner had recently trimmed the branches on the tree, and one of the branches was only partially cut so that its point was now sharp. The horse had run straight into the tree and straight into the branch, where it plunged through his forehead and then broke off. The horse then had a branch, larger around than the handle of a broom, stuck through his head. The vet was able to pull the branch out, and the wound healed. To this day he refers to it as the case of the unicorn.
WHAT THE NIGHT NURSE SAYS: She has not seen Sam’s foot move lately at all. She has seen another boy down the hall come out of his coma, though, and I want to hear everything about it. I sit down in a chair. Tell it to me the way Leopold Bloom of Ulysses would, I say, and she does. She leaves out nothing. I know the blond-haired mother wore snow boots and the snow from the bottom of the boots melted on the hospital room floor and that was the first thing the boy saw, and then he looked into everyone’s eyes and the mother held his hand and cried, and the boy, even though weak, tried to move her aside, he wanted everyone to move aside, because he wanted to see more clearly a painting that was on the wall of the ocean, with a killer whale breaching and the sun setting behind him. The doctor then took the painting off the wall and held it up close to the boy so he could see it better, and so now the painting sits propped on the seat of a chair, right beside the boy’s bed, so he can see it more clearly.
WHAT I SHOWED SAM: The flight of the spaceship, my hand flat, moving through the air of the room that smelled of rubbing alcohol and urine.
WHO WALKED INTO THE HOSPITAL ROOM WHILE I WAS MOVING MY HAND LIKE THE SPACESHIP: The night nurse, holding Ulysses to her chest.
WHAT THE NIGHT NURSE ADMITTED TO: Sometimes reading Ulysses out loud to Sam because it helped her to understand it better if she read it out loud.
WHAT I ADMITTED TO: Making my hand into a spaceship.
WHAT THE NIGHT NURSE SAID: I hope you don’t mind.
WHAT I SAID: Can you read some now? And I sat on the edge of Sam’s bed, his huge feet with the dirty nails next to me, and I put my arm over his two feet and I held them close to me while the night nurse read through her red-rimmed glasses.
WHAT NELLY PROBABLY IS NOT: Pregnant. She is no bigger around the abdomen than she was four weeks ago.
WHAT I ULTRASOUND: Nelly. She’s very calm and I lay her on her back and she stays there, with her long legs splayed out even while I apply the cold gel all over her abdomen.
WHAT THE ULTRASOUND SAYS: Nothing. There are no pups in here. Here is a full bladder, maybe. Here is a blood vessel, maybe. But there are no pups.
WHAT THE NIGHT SAYS: Here, here is your snow you have been waiting weeks for. I will cover the yellow stains from your dogs on the old snow in front of your house. I will cover the gray snow piles on the side of the roads. I will sit in the trees again, frosting the branches.
WHAT THE CHILDREN DO AT THE TABLE: Compare an actual cheese cracker to the photo of the cheese cracker on the box to see if they are being cheated. The actual cheese cracker turns out to be larger than the photo on the box of the cheese cracker.
CALL: One of Greg Springer’s horses is colicking.
ACTION: Drove to Greg Springer’s farm thinking how maybe it was fate that made his horse colic, and now it would be easy for me to meet him and easy to see if he were really the man who shot my son. Maybe he had even wanted to meet me and confess, and his horse having a colic was just an excuse to call me and talk to me in person. It was late. I used my flashlight when I got out of the truck to see my way to the barn, but I didn’t really need it. The moon was so bright it glowed yellow, like a flame from an oil lamp. I could see Greg Springer’s house. I could see his basement light on, where I had heard he kept his cows nice and warm by the water heater. Greg Springer came out of the barn to meet me. The bottoms of the legs of his overalls were soiled with horse manure. He saw me looking at them and said, “I’ve been lying next to my horse and praying while she’s in pain.” I nodded my head. As I walked to the stall, Greg Springer walked ahead of me, waddling side to side because of his girth. A man that size walking in the woods would have made a huge crashing sound, I thought. I walked into the stall, and I looked at the straw beside the horse. The imprint didn’t clearly show where Greg Springer’s legs or arms had been, it just showed a hollowed-out place in the straw, a dip where something heavy had been. It could have been anything, it could have been the spacecraft that had been sitting here instead, I thought. I knelt down in the place. I could feel the warmth that was left there and then I started to work.
RESULT: I put my stethoscope on the horse’s belly. I could hear a few gut sounds, which was good, but still the horse seemed in pain. She kept reaching up with her rear leg to kick at her belly, as if she wanted to kick the pain away. Greg Springer stood very close to me. I think he was trying to hear what I was hearing. So I let him listen to my stethoscope. He nodded his head after he listened for a while, and then the two of us just stared at the horse. We watched how she shifted her weight from hoof to hoof and how she didn’t seem to care whether we were standing there, her pain all that mattered. I gave the horse Banamine and Greg Springer and I just waited awhile, keeping an eye on the horse. I looked up at the sky through the open barn door and told Greg Springer it was probably going to be a cold night because of all the stars that were already showing. I told him it was too bad it wasn’t still hunting season, as the nonexistent wind would make for good conditions. He shook his head and said, With my horse the way she is I would not be able to go out and hunt anyway. Yes, that would be distracting, I said. Going out to hunt with something on your mind was a dangerous thing. You never know what you could shoot instead, I said. Once, I said, I was hunting and my mind was not on it and then I heard a deer walking toward me, but I couldn’t see it yet. Then all of me was listening for it and waiting for it to show its face. My finger was ready to pull the trigger the moment I saw it because I knew I would not have many chances to shoot it, there being so many trees in the way. Suddenly I saw a dark shape through the trees, and I almost shot, but I hesitated, and it was a good thing, because what came out into the clearing wasn’t a deer at all, but a man, another hunter, walking carefully through our woods, but it was scary to think how close I was to shooting him. Greg Springer nodded his head. The horse made a low whinny and then Greg Springer shook his head and reached out and touched the side of the horse’s neck. It’ll be all right, girl, he said. I told Greg Springer to call me in the morning if the horse didn’t show signs of improvement. I told Greg Springer it was going to be a cold night, and that he might want to sleep inside. He shook his head. I’ve a warm sleeping bag. I’ll just bring it out here and sleep beside her and pray, he said, and then I thought how maybe Greg Springer could go to the hospital. Floor 9, I could tell him, get off there, the fourth patient door on the left, that’s my son. Would he lie next to him and pray?