Percival Everett - Half an Inch of Water - Stories

“Is that it?” Emma asked.

“Help me up.”

Benjamin got onto his good leg. The only good thing was that the break, if it was a break, was not compound. There was no blood. But there was plenty of pain. It quickly became clear that Emma was not going to be able to support him. “I need some bigger sticks,” he said. “Crutches.”

The snarl of the cougar sounded in the arroyo again.

“He’s still here,” Emma said.

“Big sticks.” Stay on task, he told himself. “Focus,” he said out loud. “Focus.” He scanned the ground above him. “There!” He pointed.

Emma found the limb. “This one?”

“Yes, and find another like it. With a Y, just like this one.”

She did, but it was a couple of inches shorter. Benjamin put the short crutch on his good side. He felt his way down the hill, keeping himself in front of Emma. He told her that if he fell he didn’t want to take her out with him. And he did fall. Twice.

“Daddy, this isn’t working,” Emma said.

“We’ll be on ground that’s less steep soon. And we’ll be off this hard stuff, too.” The ground did level off a little, and under the canopy of trees, away from the exposed edge of the trail, the floor was more a mat of plant matter.

“See,” he said. “Easy-peasy.”

“I hate that expression.”

“Noted.”

“How is it?” she asked.

“Hurts like hell.” Benjamin was sweating crazily. His T-shirt was drenched and he was starting to feel cold. He wondered if he would notice himself becoming disoriented if he started to suffer from hypothermia.

“Daddy, I’m sorry,” Emma said.

“You have nothing to be sorry about,” he told her. “It’s your old man who has to grow up. I’m sorry.”

Father and daughter stopped together on the trail. The cougar was not fifteen yards in front of them, facing them, sitting like a dog.

“So much for easy-peasy,” Benjamin said.

The cat growled.

“What do we do?” Emma asked.

“We don’t run, I know that,” he said. He almost laughed as he considered his ankle. He was sorry to see that the animal was thin. That meant that it was probably hungry. But that was all he could see. The lion was backlit and so there was no face to see. That made it worse, Benjamin thought.

“Dad?”

“How loud can you scream?” Benjamin asked.

“What?”

“I want you to scream as loud as you can while we walk forward, slowly forward. I’m going to scream, too, so don’t be startled by how loud your old man can get.”

“Really?”

“Now start screaming.” And they did. Emma screamed, her voice child-high and shrill. Benjamin put a little weight on his left leg and reacted to the pain, yelled at the lion. They clung to each other and made as much noise as possible. After three small dragging steps the cougar had seen and heard enough; it ran off the trail and up the mountain.

Emma started to cry and laugh at the same time.

Benjamin started to buckle.

The girl tried to catch him and then he caught himself. “I’m okay,” he told her. “Let’s keep this train moving before our friend decides to come back.”

“You’re shivering.”

“Let’s go. At least it’s downhill, right?”

It took them three hours to make it to the car, looking over their shoulders the whole way. Benjamin was scared to death, much of him numb. He felt he was barely lucid. His shivering was out of control. He was suffering from exposure or he was in shock. Maybe he had hit his head in the fall without knowing it and had sustained a concussion.

“You’re going to have to drive,” he told his daughter.

“I’m fourteen.”

“I know and so I know you can do this.”

He had Emma move the passenger seat all the way back. He had to be in the front to help her, to calm her, if he could. He got into the car, pushed away his crutches, and Emma closed the door. She fell in behind the wheel. She started the car and looked at her father.

“Thank god I bought an automatic,” he said.

“What do I do?”

“You know what to do. First, turn up the heat.”

She did.

“Now you move it to D and go.”

“Just like that?”

“Go slow,” he said. “Go slow.”

Emma moved ahead.

“Good,” Benjamin said. “Slow.” He closed his eyes. He was starting to drift. “You can do this, sweetie.”

“Daddy?”

“I’m fine. Daddy’s fine. Just drive.”

The big red mule backed out of the trailer as calm as anything. This was in stark contrast to the wide-eyed, on-the-muscle beast that Jake Sweeney had seen in the backyard of a trailer house just outside Dubois. He’d agreed to buy the animal without a vet check, something he’d never done before, though he was pretty good at judging equine qualities and soundness.

“I took him in,” the tall woman standing next to him had said. She wore thigh-high wading boots. “There is this horse and mule rescue outfit down around Lone Pine and they brought him to me. Said he was abused.”

“How so?” Jake had asked.

“Don’t know. He’s big and skittish. That all I’ve got on him. I haven’t even seen him run. Not enough room here, as you can see. He’s got feet like steel, the farrier said.”

Jake should have backed off, found out more, but he’d fallen in love with the palomino mule at first sight.

And now here the mule was, at his place. Jake led the animal across the yard to the big pasture. Adolph, his best hand, walked ahead, opened the gate, waved the other three horses away, and closed the gate once Jake had the mule inside. Jake removed the halter. The mule stood still for a long second, then turned and broke into a wild extended trot toward the center of the pasture. The other horses trotted to and around him. He galloped away, then bucked and danced himself into a pronk. He leaped like a gazelle, all four feet together as he cleared the ground. He appeared to look around at the top of each leap.

“Wow,” Adolph said.

Jake nodded. “He’s pretty athletic.”

“You mean scary.” Though Adolph worked around horses all day, every day, he would never ride. He didn’t trust horses even a little bit. He thought mules were demons.

“Why do you say that?” Jake asked.

“Well, he scares me, anyway.”

“Scares me, too, Adolph.” Jake thought it would be foolish not to fear a twelve-hundred-pound animal.

“That Daniels woman is down by the arena,” Adolph said. “Probably has her horse out of the trailer by now.”

Jake nodded. Sarah Daniels had been bringing her fancy Hanoverian to his place for several months now and he was, frankly, tired of seeing both of them. The horse was over half a ton of brainless muscle, and the woman, nice as she was, eager as she was, could not admit that she was afraid of horses. She heard what she wanted to hear, not unlike most people. Of course Jake had never accused her or even suggested she had any fear of the horse. At hopeful moments, he imagined she would break through and become the horse person she wanted to be.

Jake took a short path through the garden. When he looked at the flowers, all he could see was work that needed doing. At the other side of the house he headed down the hill to the arena. Sarah had the horse tacked and was checking the cinch as he approached.

“It’s a beautiful day,” Sarah said. She scratched the horse’s belly. “I see you got yourself a new horse.”

“Mule.”

“Mule,” she corrected herself. “Well, Wynn here won’t pick up the turns,” she said. She had a habit of abruptly getting down to business. “And he’s picking up the wrong lead a lot.”