Yannick Murphy - The Call

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.

RESULT:I asked the mother questions. I asked if she knew if the horse had recently been bitten by an animal, but the mother did not know. Has he been bit? she asked her son, who was still holding the horse. Her son shrugged his shoulders. There were marks on the horse. They could have been scratches from bushes or the fence. They could have been marks left from an animal’s teeth days ago. I told the owner we just wait a few days and if the horse dies, then we have the horse tested. Do not get near the horse for the next five days, I told the owner. Sometimes these animals, in the furious stage of rabies, will come after you. The mother shrugged. She looked like her son when she shrugged and I thought how they were two of those people who looked alike not because they share the same facial features, but because they have the same mannerisms. The mother said she had a.38 in the house and she would just shoot the horse if it came to that. I wished she hadn’t said that, because after she did, I knew that the spaceman would remember he was on a mission to find out who had shot my son. I spoke fast. I would not let the spaceman interrupt and ask her about the shooting of my son. Whatever you do, I told the mother, don’t shoot the horse in the head, because it’s the brain that’s sent off to the lab in order to determine if it’s been infected with rabies. If it is, then we know to treat everyone who came into contact with it with a series of rabies shots. Then it happened. He sidled up to the son. I could not hear what he said, because at the same time the mother was asking how much she owed me. She was holding bills that smelled like kerosene. The spaceman was whispering, and then I saw him pull out his wallet and show the son some bills. I almost ran to pull the spaceman away, but the son leaned over and whispered back into the spaceman’s ear. What was he telling the spaceman? The spaceman must have seen me watching. He turned his back to me so I could not see the son at all.

WHAT I SAID TO THE SPACEMAN WHILE DRIVING HOME:I’m sorry I brought you here. I should have had you wait in the truck before I saw the horse. I’ve been vaccinated for rabies. I don’t think I’m at risk. I’m not even sure the horse has rabies, though. It could be other things. It could be moldy hay-they may not have the money to feed it good hay-it could be botulism. Let’s cross our fingers that it’s not rabies, I said, and then I wondered when the spaceman would tell me what the son had whispered in his ear. Did the son say the name of the man who shot Sam? Would I now finally know?

WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID:I’ll be going home tomorrow. I have to get back to Philadelphia. Rabies is the least of my problems. I have something to confess, the spaceman said. I had two reasons for coming here. One you already know, because I wanted to meet you. The other is because… and I don’t know how to say this, the spaceman said. The spaceman put his head in his hands.

WHAT I THOUGHT:Oh, don’t put your head in your hands now, because look, there on the side of the road are two deer and they are looking at us, and see how beautiful they are, I wanted to tell the spaceman, but I could not interrupt his moment where he had his face in his hands. The deer ran off, leaping up the hillside into the darkness.