Percival Everett - Big Picture - Stories

“Dad,” Hiram said as they topped a ridge. “Can’t we just scare the wolf away?”

Hiram’s father laughed. “You mean like reason with him?”

“What about getting one of those tranquilizer guns and relocating him?”

Hiram’s father shook his head. “Where would we get one of them guns? Besides, we can’t afford it. Nah. Anyway, a wolf ain’t nothing but a big, evil dog.”

• • •

The caked blood was still flowing slowly from the cuts across the backs of the palomino’s hind feet. Hiram let go of the leg and stood away, perspiration dripping from his face. The woman holding the horse’s halter stroked his nose and settled him down, making soothing sounds, the kind of sounds one reserves for animals. The horse had gotten tangled in some barbed wire.

“I could just shoot myself,” the woman said.

Hiram shrugged. “Accidents happen to animals, too.”

“It’s my fault though.”

“The wounds aren’t too bad,” Hiram said, coughing into a fist. “The worst part is across his fetlocks. I’m going to give him a shot of antibiotics and leave an iodine solution with you. Just dab it on twice a day. Might sting him a little.”

“He’s such a big baby,” the woman said.

“Yeah, I know. It’s because he’s a male.” Hiram reached into his bag for the antibiotic and syringe. “You can’t blame yourself,” he said. “What good does that do?” He filled the syringe, stood, and quickly stuck the horse’s flank, pressing the plunger in. He saw the woman flinch. “Better him than you.” Hiram had known Marjorie Stoval since she and her husband moved down from Colorado Springs six years before. He was used to seeing mainly her during his calls. The last few times Mr. Stoval had been conspicuously absent; the toy sports car that never seemed to go anywhere was now gone. He looked past the horse at the rolling pasture and the steep foothills behind it, ochre and red in the heat of early summer.

“You’ve got a sweet place here,” Hiram said.

Marjorie nodded, stroked the blond horse’s neck, pulling his mane with each pass. She seemed lost in thought. She was an attractive, young-looking woman, but Hiram believed from previous conversations that she was about forty-five, although there was not much gray in the dark hair she wore pulled back.

“Well, I guess I’m done.” Hiram closed his bag and picked it up, yawned, and as he did, realized that it was a tick of his that surfaced when he was nervous.

“Tired?” Marjorie asked.

“I guess.” As they walked back toward Hiram’s truck, he said, “Other than the scratches, Cletus looks pretty good.”

“My husband left me,” Marjorie Stoval said abruptly.

Hiram swallowed and looked beyond his truck at the two-story log house. “Yeah, well, I suppose these things happen.”

“He moved in with a young woman over in Eagle Nest. They live in a trailer. Can you imagine that?”

Hiram shook his head. At the truck he put his bag in the bed, pushed forward against the cab wall, cleared his throat, and turned to the woman. “My wife and I are pretty decent company. Why don’t we call you and arrange a dinner over at our place?”

Marjorie paused as if considering whether the offer was some kind of mercy dinner, then said, “That sounds nice,” in a noncommittal way as she smoothed the hair back from her face.

Carolyn was painting a metal chair set on spread-out newspapers on the front porch. Hiram stopped and looked at her. He reached forward and wet his finger with the blue paint streaked across her forehead.

“I’m glad this stuff is water-based,” she said, setting the brush across the open can and standing up straight. She stretched her back and smiled at him.

Hiram smiled back, remembering a time when they would have kissed, a time when he would be gone most of the day and would miss her badly and she would miss him, too. They used to talk a few times during his work day, but not now. Now, he simply came home, Carolyn smiled at him, and he smiled back.

“Anything interesting today?” she asked as she stepped back to scrutinize her work. “I don’t know if I really like this blue. What do you think?”

“Blue is blue.” Hiram stepped past his wife and into the house, putting his bag on the table just inside the door and walked into the den where he fell into the overstuffed chair in front of the woodstove. He glanced at the coffee table where there was a stack of journals he had been meaning to read, needed to read.

Carolyn came in and sat on the sofa. She was sighing and still stretching her back.

“Is your back all right?” Hiram asked.

“It’s just stiff from squatting.”

“Would you like me to rub it for you?” he asked, but he didn’t really want to do it. He would have liked a back rub, but the offer was not forthcoming from Carolyn. He leaned his head back, briefly studied the ceiling, then closed his eyes.

“Maybe later,” she said, her voice sounding far away. “I found a lump on Zack’s belly this afternoon.” Her voice was closer now. Zack was a one-hundred-twenty-pound mutt Hiram had brought home from the shelter about five years ago. “It’s kinda big.”

“Where on his belly?”

“Just above his tallywhacker,” Carolyn said.

Hiram chuckled at the term. “How big?”

“Golf ball.”

“I noticed it a couple of weeks ago. It’s an umbilical hernia. I decided to leave it alone. It was about the size of a gumball then.”

“Well, it’s bigger now.”

“I’ll fix him up tomorrow. It’s going to be a slow day. Yep, I’ll just cut the ol’ boy open and fix him right up.”

Carolyn left the room. Hiram listened as she started to get dinner together in the kitchen. He went to help, the way he helped every night. The accounting firm where Carolyn once worked had folded and she hadn’t found a new job. It had been two years and she’d pretty much resigned herself to not finding anything, so she had stopped looking. Hiram didn’t care. They had enough money. They didn’t do much traveling. But he hated her periodic complaining about being a housewife. He would respond by saying that he didn’t think of her as a housewife, but rather a full-time gardener/painter/wrangler/everything else. He’d point out how much money she was saving them by doing what someone else would charge a bundle to do. But she still complained while doing nothing about it. He walked to the kitchen cupboard for the dishes.

“I was over at the Stoval place today,” Hiram said. “Did you know that Mr. Stoval just up and left?”

“Really?”

“Mrs. Stoval told me. I guess she doesn’t have many people to talk to, being out there all by herself.”

“She was lucky you were there, wasn’t she?”

Hiram set the plates on the table and looked at Carolyn. “Anyway, I mentioned that we might have her over for dinner.”

“How nice.”

“What is it with you? If I were talking about Mitch Greeley or old Mrs. Jett, you wouldn’t sound like this.”

Without looking away from the pasta on the stove, Carolyn said, “I don’t guess we’d be having the same conversation about them.”

“We don’t have to invite her.”

Carolyn turned off the flame under the pasta, then drained off the water in the sink before turning to Hiram. “I’m sorry. I’m tightly wound today. I think I’m feeling cooped up or something.”

“Want to go out? Drive to town and take in a movie?”

Carolyn shook her head.

“What about an early morning walk up to the falls?”

Carolyn smiled in weak agreement.

An hour after dinner someone rang the bell. Hiram and Carolyn were reading in the den. Hiram was just beginning to nod off; the journal was resting on his lap. Carolyn looked at him as if to say, who could that be? and didn’t move. Hiram got up and went to the door, opened it, and found Lewis Fife, all three hundred pounds of him standing on the porch.