Percival Everett - Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

He’s a horse.

I pointed to the gelding’s neck.

Ouch, she said, looks nasty. Laura walked into the stall, talked to the horse soothingly. Let me have the light. She took it from me and leaned close, studied the wound. I bet that hurts like the devil. And I think it’s in there, too.

What’s in there?

The bullet, she said. That’s my guess.

Bullet?

I think somebody shot this animal.

Well, that ain’t good, I said. What I meant was, Oh fuck. What do you mean by shot this animal ?

You know, bang, bang. I’m going to give him some antibiotics and some phenylbutazone for the pain. Tomorrow morning I’ll sedate him and we’ll fish around in there and see what we can find. Can’t do it tonight. Too dark and messy out here. Boy, I bet that hurts.

Somebody shot my horse? It was less a question than a statement of fearful disbelief.

Somebody, she said. She shined the light on the wound and took another look. Yeah, we’ll numb him up real good and then get him dopey.

Somebody shot my horse, I said again.

Happens, she said. There’s a lot of muscle here to penetrate. That’s the good thing. It could have been somebody shooting way off at something else. Bullets travel for a ways, don’t they.

How often does this sort of thing happen?

She shrugged.

I looked out into the smoky darkness and the easing rain, over the pasture. I couldn’t see the distant hills, but I knew they were there. I also knew there was a stand of cottonwoods about a quarter mile away. I knew there was a house just beyond those trees. But I didn’t know what else was out there. The bullet could have come from a innocently fired rifle, if such a thing were possible. She was right, a bullet could fly for miles until something stopped it, gravity, a hillside, a barn wall, my horse. Me. Or some idiot could have drawn a bead on my horse and squeezed off a round. Either way a new dimension was added to just standing in my yard.

I can be here at eight fifteen, Laura said. She was washing her hands in Betadine. Will that work for you?

Yeah, that’ll work. Do I need to do anything tonight?

No, I gave him a bit of feel-good, so he’ll be all right for a while. You could come out and check on him a couple of times throughout the night, make sure he’s still standing.

And if he’s not?

Call me, I guess.

I nodded. Eight fifteen.

Have some coffee made, she said.

Okay, Doc. I saw her to her truck and watched her fishtail away along the muddy track.

The muddy track. Are these stories, any stories, your stories, mere neurotic repetition, perhaps a function of the resistances discovered or exposed through the transference space? The madman on the playground? Histories converge as serendipitous overlap, a pamphlet and a book, a folk song and a speech from a fascist ruler? You all know well, it will begin, suggesting how reluctant I am to speak and all of it will sound frightfully familiar, as I cite a hundred cases of being wronged, of being slighted, hundreds of instances where we were taken for granted and merely taken and I will speak to you of the power of our solidarity and our steadfastness and of our polished and pointy bayonets at the ready, repeating my lie, our lies, over and over and over until they are true, as true as anything can be.

And why are we here?

Having bones to pick is not the same as picking over bones. Son, have you ever had sex with someone you don’t love?

I’m afraid I have.

Good answer.

in point of fact

some things start in very odd places, like tertiary mud, instead of the primordial kind, like the middles of charred and discarded 23 bodies, not necessarily bodies that once lived, but that’s where you went, isn’t it, read here a question mark, isn’t it, and the peninsula on which we hide is pocked with craters from the bombing or should be, if we weren’t so safe in our cozy pajamas and fuzzy slippers, with our bowls of green grapes and fruit candies, very odd places indeed, and there’s my first teacher over there, she’s waving, beaming, strolling backward toward the sea, but dead, dead, dead because things don’t go on forever, things go on for thirty-eight years, eight months, a week and three days and then it’s something else, an interest in dinosaur skulls or in monkeys or Thomas Paine and time to light new fires and if any of the others have seen my fire, they haven’t tried to approach it and I would know because all I’m doing is sitting here watching, letting my beard grow, wearing a dungaree shirt and dungaree pants and a dungaree hat, hell, I’m just dung, in dung, overdung, sitting here watching the animals go by, the badgers and wolves, the ants and gulls, the capercaillie and the tarantula hawks, the peregrine falcons and the marmots all parading to the whining music of bagpipes, if you can call that music, all parading in a circle to help me wait for the end of the next thirty-eight-year-eight-month-one-week-and-three-day cycle and the rest of them can sit cross-legged on a hillside eating bread and link sausages for all I care, but the cycle is the cycle and nobody can stop it, not even you, not even I

in point of fact

Back in the house, I tried to get dry. I kicked off my boots and peeled off my wet socks in the mudroom. I stepped into the kitchen and dried my head with a dish towel. I switched on the radio, listened to some pitiful pleas for donations, and then killed the sound. My house was stone quiet. The drone of rain on the roof made it feel even more like a tomb. The spaces that had been filled by my wife before she left were still there. Sight of her was gone. Her sounds and smells were gone. But her spaces, where she’d lean against a doorjamb, her end of the sofa, her bathroom sink. She’d left me and that was fine. It seemed clear that we had run our course. I’d have left her months earlier, I just didn’t have the sense or maybe the guts to leave. What I hadn’t anticipated was the loneliness, that I would be so affected by the quiet. I wasn’t as tough I’d thought, but then who is? I never quite cried in the shower, but I thought about it, and perhaps that’s the same thing.

As I brushed my teeth I considered again the horse’s nasty wound. My thinking covered the same terrain. An intentional shot from a deadly weapon? An errant bullet of someone shooting at a ground squirrel on a fence post? Neither thought was comforting. The rain let up a bit. I sat up in bed and opened the novel I’d been trying to 25 plow through, reading having become my new attempt at dealing with the repetitive, empty nights.

The following morning the rain had eased up only slightly. A shift in the wind brought colder air and the effect was basically miserable. I was in my boots and jacket waiting at the back door when Laura rolled up and stopped near the foaling shed. I stepped out into the yard and met her at the back of her truck, where she pulled open a cabinet and grabbed a vial and a couple of syringes.

I looked at the sky, at the expanse of gray. Very far to the west there was a bit of bright blue. So, we’re going through with this, I said.

She regarded the rain and sky as well. I’m here anyway.

That you are.

She followed me through the shed and to the barn, where the gelding was still standing, in spite of my failure to come out in the middle of the night to check on him. While she prepared the shot I attached a lead rope to the halter, rubbed the horse’s nose, talked to him.

All right now, buddy, she said to the horse. This is going to make you pretty stupid, and then we’ll fix you up. She administered the injection. That should have him drooping in thirty or forty minutes. She looked at her watch and then at me. You got that coffee?