Percival Everett - Wounded

“You’re awfully quiet for an old man,” I said, my eyes still closed.

“Learned it from my grandfather,” Gus said. “He was a full-blooded Seminole Indian.”

“So, you’ve told me.” The phone rang inside. I opened my eyes and looked at Gus. “I suppose I’m going to answer that,” I said.

Gus nodded. “It’s for you. I can feel it.”

“You can feel it, eh?”

“In my bones.”

I groaned as I pushed myself to my feet. I walked up the steps and into the kitchen where I picked up the wall phone.

“John?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Howard.” Howard Thayer was a friend from college, the only one I’d managed to keep. We hadn’t been in touch for over a year.

“Hey, poke,” I said. “How are you?”

“I’m fine. You ranching it up out there?”

“You bet. How are Sylvia and the kids?” The heat of the sun through the window was making me perspire again. I grabbed a towel from the counter and wiped my neck. It was damp and felt good.

“Actually, I’m calling about one of the kids,” Howard said. “David.”

I untangled the cord and pulled the phone over to the table and sat. “Is he all right?”

“He’s fine.”

“How old is he now?”

“He’s twenty,” Howard said.

“God, that means you’re old.”

“Tell me about it,” he said. “Hey, Davey’s going to be up in Highland and I was wondering if you could look in on him. Take him to lunch or something. Just so he has a friend, you know.”

“Of course. What’s he doing up here?”

Howard paused briefly as if doing something away from the phone. “I don’t know exactly. He’ll be staying at the Rusty Spur Motel. Is that place okay? Is it a fleabag?”

“Yes, but it’s a quaint fleabag.”

“He arrives there on Friday,” Howard said. “Driving out with a friend. So, what’s it like out there?”

“Beautiful. Always beautiful,” I told him. “How’s Chicago?”

“Crowded, dirty, disgusting,” he said. “It’s hot and ready to turn cold. You should visit.”

“So, David is twenty,” I said. “Last time I saw him he was fifteen, I think.”

“Yeah, fifteen. He’s grown up some.”

“Any possibility of you and Sylvia making it up here?”

“I don’t think so,” Howard said. “John, Sylvia and I split up. We’re divorced now.”

“That’s too bad,” I said, not knowing if I thought that or not. “Are you all right?”

“Everybody’s okay,” he said. “These things happen. What can I say? Listen, I’d better run. Thanks for looking in on my boy.”

“Sure thing.”

“Talk later,” Howard said.

“Bye.” I hung up.

Gus came in and snatched the damp towel off my shoulder. “What are you, some kind of heathen? I’ll bet you were going to put that right back on the counter, weren’t you?”

“I hadn’t thought that far,” I confessed.

“Well, of course you hadn’t. Heathen.” He sighed. “Who was that on the telling phone?”

“My friend Howard. You remember him. I went to college with him. His kid’s going to be in town this weekend.”

“Are you hungry?” Gus tossed the soiled towel onto the big pile in the laundry room.

“Not yet. I’ve got some more work to do.”

I went out to the barns and checked all the animals. I probed around the corners and between the stacks of bales of hay trying to flush out any late-season rattlesnakes. Then I made sure the extra chain was fastened onto the paddock gate where I kept Daniel White Buffalo’s mule. The damn thing was an escape artist. Fortunately, he hung around and never did anything more than nibble at the hay and visit the other horses and get them agitated.

I went back into the house and told Gus I didn’t need dinner.

“That’s fine with me,” he said.

“I’m going to ride up and camp in the cave.”

“You’re an odd fellow, John Hunt.”

“See you in the morning.”

I saddled the Appy and rode out. Zoe went with me. Gus didn’t mind not cooking. He was always happy with just cereal.

At the cave, I unrolled my bag and got a fire going. I cooked a couple of hot dogs, tossing a couple pieces on top of Zoe’s dry food. “I don’t know,” I said to her, “this might make you a cannibal, a dog eating a hot dog.”

Zoe didn’t laugh.

The fire threw light and my shadow against the wall.

I put on my headlamp and walked deeper into the cave. Zoe was good to have along because I trusted her to be able to find her way out, even if I couldn’t. Still, I used light sticks every thirty yards or so and at every bend. I had a sack of thirty. I didn’t plan to go exploring deep into the unknown parts, only to visit the big cavern. The room was big relative to the rest of the cave, about the size of a small church, not that I had had much experience with churches. It was nothing like the big caverns at Carlsbad or the ones I’d seen in photographs. It was perhaps forty by forty feet with a ceiling of thirty at its highest point. Zoe stayed close by my leg and that was fine with me. My lantern didn’t throw a lot of light and my headlamp threw less and only where I looked. Giant stalactites hung from the ceiling and stalagmites popped up from the floor, various shapes, sizes, and colors, yellow to red, some ghostly white. I sat and turned off my lights, keeping a hand on Zoe. The only light then was the green glow of the stick I’d broken and left near the entrance to the room. I tried not to touch the stalagmites near me. I’d read how people could damage the surfaces with oils from their skin. I listened to the quiet, interrupted only by the steady, random drips, the drips that came from the mountain above and left infinitesimal amounts of calcium carbonate to make and lengthen the stalactites. I decided I was a trogloxene, a creature that lives outside the cave, but returns frequently. I’d seen sign of small mammals near the entrance on occasion, but never deep within. I’d seen a couple of daddy longlegs, and knew there were probably other spiders. And there had to be something the spiders were eating. I imagined that there were some blind, colorless insects roaming about, but I wasn’t educated enough to find them.

What I liked about the cave, and perhaps any cave, the idea of a cave, was the place where light from the outside ceased to have any influence. That was why I liked being in it at night. I turned my lamps back on and made my way back long before any of my light sticks might begin to fade.

Back at my bedroll, I put a couple of medium-sized sticks on the embers and gave them a gentle blow until they showed orange and flared. I then added the split end of a fat log I’d dragged in earlier. Zoe trotted off outside to take care of business and I followed.

I started back to my house well before first light. I couldn’t sleep because of Zoe’s snoring and for some reason my horse would not stand easy at the cave’s mouth. As I made my way across the creek and through the south gate, I thought something looked odd near the barn. As I reached the edge of the big field I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The mule was lying on his side, trying to wriggle his body under the bottom rail of the paddock fence. I rode up slowly and looked down at him. Only his head and neck were out, but they were well out. The mule opened his right eye wide and looked up at me, but, in that mule way, he didn’t panic. He just let his head slap into the dust and lay there.

“So, what now?” I asked in a calm voice.

The mule didn’t move.

I dismounted and dropped to my knee in front of the animal’s nose. This was a potential disaster. If the mule got excited and tried to get up, he could be in real trouble. I couldn’t push him back because he might go nuts. I decided to back off and let the mule figure it out for himself. I tied the Appaloosa, unsaddled, then sat on a bale of straw and watched the mule from a distance. The damn thing lay motionless for better than half an hour.