RESULT: I was getting ready to leave, but the spaceman wanted to stay and help Dorothy find her doctor’s telephone number on her refrigerator. There were a lot of cards on her refrigerator door hanging there by the use of magnets and we looked through all of them. There were magnets so old they were cracked in half and some of the magnets had words on them advertising stores that had once been in the area, but had long since gone out of business. When we found the right card, the spaceman called the doctor for Dorothy and made the appointment. You’d think that Dorothy would be able to go to a doctor’s appointment any day, but the only day she wanted to go to the appointment was on a Thursday, so the appointment was made for a Thursday weeks from then. Before we left, Dorothy asked if I wouldn’t mind driving her to the appointment because her leg hurt her and she didn’t think she could push down on the gas pedal. Oh, and, Alice, too, she’s coming with me to the appointment in the back of the truck, Dorothy said. Okay, both you and Alice to the doctor’s, I said, and then the spaceman made sure that I wrote it down in my book.
One last thing, the spaceman said to Dorothy. Did you know about the doctor’s son? No, don’t answer that. Of course you knew. This is a small town, everyone knew. Dorothy lowered her eyes to her linoleum floor. Yes, the poor boy, Dorothy said. Isn’t that right, Alice, she said and she reached out for Alice so she could rub Alice’s head. Well, said the spaceman, the police have said they’re getting closer to finding out who that man was. They’re very close. He doesn’t stand a chance now. No one can help him now. It’s almost water under the bridge, the spaceman said. Dorothy kept rubbing Alice’s head. Who was that man anyway? He couldn’t have been a churchgoer like you. You probably never saw the likes of him across the pew, did you? the spaceman said. Dorothy looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. Your son’s all right now, isn’t he? Tell us he’s all right? Dorothy said, and I knew that when she said “us,” she meant Alice and herself. I nodded my head. My son is fine. He’s perfectly fine now, I said. It’s time for us to go, I said to the spaceman, all of my excitement about finding the hunter who had shot my son gone now.
WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID WHEN WE WERE BACK IN THE CAR: I think she knew. Everyone in this town knows, your Arlo with the ghost cows knows, this Dorothy knows. Hell, the sheep probably knows. It’s pretty sickening, what they’re doing to you, he said. You may not be from here originally, but still, you should be treated fairly. You live here and work here. You’re nice to these people. You’re probably not even going to charge her for that call, are you?
WHAT I SAID: She is so poor. I wanted to open her refrigerator to make sure she had food in there.
WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID: You’re not good for your own business, are you?
WHAT WE LISTENED TO ON THE WAY HOME: The bit on the CD about Gisela talking about how she did not want to go play chess or table tennis or go to the movies or go lift weights or go in-line skating or go on a hike. What is the matter with Gisela? the spaceman said after I translated for him. Why doesn’t she want to go out? I don’t know, I answered the spaceman. I guess that’s strange, I said, but I think I knew why she didn’t want to go out. I didn’t want to go out, either. I didn’t want to visit any more farms. I was very tired. I thought it would be nice to go home and sit by the fire and have my children read aloud to me. Sarah was now reading A Separate Peace, and I wanted to hear the description of the stately old school, and how even a thing like the hard stone steps could change and become worn from all the students over the years that had walked on them.
WHAT THE WIFE WAS COOKING FOR DINNER: A rib roast with baked potatoes and a salad.
WHAT THE SPACEMAN DID: Went up to Sam’s room and played his race car set with him.
WHAT I COULD HEAR: The high-pitched insect sound of the race cars going around the track, and the spaceman and Sam laughing and yelling every time the race cars crashed and flew up into the air when vying for the single track around the turn.
WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID TO SAM: That’s the fun of this game, isn’t it? The race cars crashing?
WHAT SAM SAID: Oh, yes. That’s the best part.
WHAT I COULD ALSO HEAR: How both their laughter and their yells sounded almost the same. The spaceman sounding as young as Sam.
WHAT THE SPACEMAN AND I DID NOT EAT: A rib roast with baked potatoes and a salad. We had a call instead. We would grab food on the road, I told Jen. She nodded while slicing carrots on a bias while we walked out the door, leaving the roast on the table with the aroma and steam floating above it toward the rafters.
CALL: An owner, one I’ve seen before, thinks her horse has choke. It’s the family that is so poor, the one where the boy sat on the tractor that looked like it had been driven up through the ground, the one where the mother sat in her car seat to talk to me, because there was nothing else to sit on outside, no lawn chairs or even rock walls.
ACTION: Drove to farm with the spaceman beside me. I asked him how he found me. Finding out who you were and where you lived was not so hard. There are places now that keep your information on file if you’d ever donated a sample of your DNA, the spaceman said, and a relative of yours had done that, and it was through him I found you. It was a process of elimination, the spaceman said. I drove with the spaceman saying how he was glad, after all, that he had discovered who I was. In fact, you’re more than what I had hoped for in a real father, he said. It’s funny, but I wanted to meet you so I could see what I myself could become. You’re like a benchmark for me, and I’m happy to see you’re someone I can really admire, he said. We passed the fields at night where a coyote trotted by a tree line. I slowed the truck so we could see his yellow eyes in the headlights.
The boy was there and so was the mother. There was no barn, there was no electricity. The mother held up a kerosene lantern. The smell of the kerosene was strong. Maybe it had a leak, or maybe when the kerosene had been poured into the base, it dripped. I have a flashlight, I said. It might make it brighter. I was glad when the mother blew out the kerosene lantern and left it on the porch of the house, far away from where I could smell the kerosene. The boy held the horse while I took out my stomach tube. After I easily passed a stomach tube through him, I realized the horse did not have choke. If it had choke, I wouldn’t have been able to pass the stomach tube through him. But it was too late. The spaceman had already touched the nose of the horse because it was a good-looking horse, with a blaze in the shape of a moon. Stand back, I told the spaceman calmly. This horse might have rabies. The horse was salivating. The horse was tilting his head back and to the side, the moon blaze looking like the moon being jerked by a string in the sky. The horse was not eating. He had gone over to his feed, but he had just lifted the hay in his mouth, and was not chewing it and was not swallowing it down.