Yannick Murphy - The Call

WHAT VIDEO WE RENTED FROM THE LIBRARY:How we love the library and leave it with armloads of books and movies, even if the service at the library is slow, and the librarian who has been there for years always looks at the scanner gun for a few moments first before he uses it on our books’ labels as if he’s never seen the scanner gun before. And I know this librarian and he is also on the master’s swim team and I have seen him in his swim trunks, and there is a huge scar on his belly that even pulling the waistband of his trunks way up past his navel does not hide and I wondered what part of him was surgically removed or rearranged. He is a very slow swimmer, and it seems as if he goes backward instead of forward in the water, or that he goes nowhere at all. It was the librarian who recommended the video to Mia. The video was about mammals and Mia had watched it first and then wanted me to watch it with her. The cheetah, I learned, will let one of her offspring share her kill with her even years later, even when the offspring is an adult she will remember it, but she will never let any other adult share with her. Isn’t that amazing? Mia said.

WHAT I SAID:Yes, it really is amazing, and I hugged Mia on my lap while I said it and I smelled her hair that smelled faintly like our house when we walk into it after we’ve been away for a few days. It smells good, like wood smoke and meringues made with cocoa, and it smells earthy, too, maybe of the small pine needles the dogs trail in with them on their fur after hiking with us in our woods.

WHAT SAM WANTS TO KNOW:What the wife and I were fighting about.

WHAT I SAID:Fighting?

WHAT HE SAID:Yes, you know, her crying on the toilet with the lid down, the way she always does when she’s upset with you.

WHAT I TOLD HIM:Everything. How the spaceman wanted my kidney. How the spaceman knew the name of the man who shot him by accident. How I had seen the spaceman bribe my client’s son, and the son had whispered the name of the man in the spaceman’s ear. Sam looked outside when I talked. Was he looking at our pond, noticing the snow beginning to melt on the surface? When I was finished talking, he nodded his head. What if it were me, he said? Would you have given me your kidney? Of course, I said. Then you should give him yours. What happened to you while you were in a coma? I wanted to ask him. Had a part of him changed? Had he been visited by a higher being? This wasn’t the boy who called his sisters jerkface and cheesebutt. He sounded older. He cleared his throat. He’s your son, too, he said. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t raise him here with us. You can help him, that’s all that matters, he said. Besides, it’s cool. How many kids have dads that saved a man’s life?

WHAT I SAID:What about your mother?

WHAT HE SAID:She should learn how to cry sitting on the toilet seat without the lid down. At least that way she could pee and cry at the same time and be more efficient.

WHAT I SAID:What about the name of the man who shot you. Do we want to know that?

WHAT SAM SAID:I don’t want to know. I don’t care. You make mistakes while hunting. It happens all the time. Did you know there was a kid who shot an old man sitting on a tractor because he thought he was a deer? What are you going to do anyway, shoot the guy? I’d rather say my dad saved a life than took one away.

WHAT I WANTED TO DO:I wanted to take Sam everywhere with me, I wanted to put my hand on him the way Arthur put his hand on the horses and had them talk through him. I wanted everything I said to be what Sam said because he said it so well, no matter his speech was slightly slurred.

WHAT SAM SAID WHEN I HUGGED HIM:I bet now is a good time to ask for the new computer I want.

WHAT THE HOUSE SAID AT NIGHT:Give the spaceman a kidney.

WHAT SARAH SAID IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT:Poppy! Poppy! Did you hear that?

I thought that she too had heard the house telling me to give the spaceman a kidney. Hear what? I said. The house, it’s falling apart again, she said.

WHAT I SAID:No, it’s not. This house will never fall apart. Go back to sleep now. In the morning you can come with me to see the lambs.

RESULT:The bat was dead in the morning.

WHAT SAM SAID AS HE LOOKED AT THE FLATTENED BAT IN THE PLASTIC CONTAINER THAT ONCE HELD FANCY GREENS:He looks like a wilted lettuce leaf.

WHAT I SAID:Really, I thought he looked like a kidney, curled the way he was.

WHAT THE RABBIT SAID WHILE I LAY ON THE FLOOR AND SHE WAS SNIFFING MY HAIR, SNIFFING MY EARS:Give the spaceman your kidney.

CALL:Yes, there were sheep I had to go see. Their lambs were there, too. Over sixty of them hopping in the fenced-in pasture. Sarah and Mia walked into the field with them and ran with them, sending them this way and that way like a school of fish, only there was no body of water, just the new grass on the ground, a strange bright green that would not last. It was only this unusual color now from the snow it had been buried under for so long and that had suddenly been exposed to warmer currents, the displaced air from flapping tips of newly arrived robins’ wings. The next week it would be a greener green, already older and closer to the dull, tough grass blade summer green it would soon become. The girls’ rubber boots looked so big on them, gaping around their thin legs as they ran with the flock that moved like a school.

ACTION:The sheep’s mothers needed shots and I looked into their eyes and told them hush, to keep their bleating down, while I injected them.

RESULT:Mia and Sarah came out of the pasture with the lambs following behind them, asking me if we could take one home. Just one. How about the littlest one, Mia said, and pointed to what was surely the littlest one, who was so little even the short new blades of grass reached high above his dainty hooves.

THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME:With the melting of the snow appeared beer cans that had been tossed onto the side of the road during winter and now protruded from roadside mud. If deposits for cans were raised to twenty-five cents, the problem might disappear. Who would throw away twenty-five cents so easily? And if they did, there would be more people out looking to collect the cans and make money.

CALL:The spaceman saying on the phone how he hadn’t much time now. He had wanted to come back and visit me again, but there were problems with the battery of his electric car, so he had let weeks pass, and now, he said, he was flat on his back in the hospital with the doctors and nurses hovering. I pictured his spacecraft parked in a space at the indoor garage of the hospital, its lights not blinking and not moving at all. I could hear, in the background, the sound of ambulances and fire trucks. I could hear the wheeling of a cart and the closing of a door. I thought he might also remember to tell me the name of the man who shot my son, but he never did. Of course he’s not going to tell me now, he’s worried about his own health, I told myself, and so I told him, Here’s the good news-that horse never had rabies, it was just moldy hay, I said. Oh, yes, I remember that horse now, the one with the moon on his head. That is good news, the spaceman said. The spaceman coughed. It did not sound like a cough from a respiratory infection. It sounded dry and I thought of fallen leaves when I heard him cough and I thought of Ed, the town cop, and how he said the fallen leaves were as flammable as paper and I pictured the spaceman, my son, up in flames on his hospital bed, the pillows puffy behind him, the white bedsheets taut around the mattress burning, leaving shattered-looking holes from the scorch. I’ll give you my kidney, I thought. I can live with just one.