Percival Everett - Half an Inch of Water - Stories

“Damn. What happened?”

“Beats me. Failure to thrive. They looked good, real good. I can’t believe both failed. Twins are difficult.” Innis sipped his coffee. He handled the information like someone used to death.

Oliver was shaken by what he’d just heard. “I can’t believe it,” he said. He sat at the table, too. “They looked good.”

“I’m going to do autopsies on them, but nothing is going to turn up. It just happens.”

Oliver looked out the window at Tuck sniffing at the vet’s tires. “George must be pretty disappointed.”

“I think he is, but who can tell with him.”

They drank for a couple of minutes without talking.

“It’s a tough thing, all right,” Innis said. “Twins are a complicated business. Complicated.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Well, gotta run.”

“Thanks for bringing the meds over,” Oliver said.

Oliver checked the tractor and the plow blade. He would apparently be needing them soon. The sky had become fat and gray. Like a city pigeon. That was how his father had described a snow sky. He’d told Lauren the news about the foals and her eyes had welled up, but she didn’t cry. She’d seemed more worried about him. Then he’d started talking about Billy White Feather again. She hadn’t laughed at him, but she did stare at him with concern. She’d watched him unfold and fold the piece of paper with the Denver address.

Now he walked into the house to find on the kitchen table a paper sack and a tall thermos bottle standing next to it. Lauren was sitting, drinking tea.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Some sandwiches, some cookies, some coffee.” She looked him in the eye and offered a weak smile. “How long have we been married? That was a rhetorical question.”

“I thought so.”

“I know you, Oliver Campbell. Go to Denver. Figure this out. Otherwise you’re going to drive me crazy.”

“I thought I did that anyway.”

“It’s a long drive, so stop for the night in Laramie.”

“You’ve got this all figured out.”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, bolt the doors. I’ll put the twelve gauge by the bed.”

“You’re scaring me again. I won’t need it.”

“Humor me.”

Lauren nodded.

“Want to ride with me?” he asked.

“And who’s going to take care of this place?”

“Just what am I looking for?”

“Billy White Feather.”

“And why?”

“Beats me.”

Oliver started toward the stairs, stopped. “He came to our home, Lauren. Stood on our porch.”

“I know.”

The drive to Denver, though long, was a familiar one. He knew when he promised Lauren he would stop for the night that he would not. It was only two in the afternoon when he reached Laramie and with only three more hours of driving it made little sense to lay up for the better part of a day. He grabbed a hot dog at Dick’s Dogs, a place he could never visit if he were with Lauren, then continued on. He reached Denver just about in the middle of rush hour.

Sitting in traffic turned out to be better for his thinking than the driving. He looked at the faces of the other drivers. Any one of them could have been Billy White Feather. He had decided that Billy White Feather was actually a middle-aged, wheelchair-bound Filipina. Or a tall black man with a disfiguring scar down the center of his face.

If he found the man, what was he going to say? “Hey, why are you leaving me notes?” Or maybe “Stay out of my yard.” Being there felt suddenly stupid. He had half a mind to turn around and head back to Laramie for the night. But it was only half a mind, after all. The rest of his mind wanted to see what Billy White Feather looked like.

Was he a Native guy or was he white? Oliver knew he wouldn’t be able to tell by looking. Maybe everybody had him wrong. Maybe he was an Indian, but he sure wasn’t Arapaho or Shoshone. Maybe he was a white guy with dark skin and a ponytail, going around telling all the wasichus that he was an Indian. None of this thinking answered the question of what he was going to say if he found the man.

He got off the freeway and made his way through town. He found the street and the address. It was a dingy neighborhood, made dingier by the fact that it was dusk now. Oliver parked in front of the small white house. A couple of teenagers eyed him as they walked by. He decided that sitting in his truck like that might get him into trouble, so he got out and walked to the door.

No one answered his knock. He walked around back, feeling uncomfortable as his head passed windows. He expected a pit bull to come running at him at any moment. In the back was a poorly maintained rectangle of grass, one of those circular clothes drying racks, and a partially disassembled motorcycle under a cheap aluminum cover. He tripped a motion-activated yard light over the peeled-paint screen door. His hands were shaking, but once he realized it, they stopped. He knocked on the back door and still there was no response. He sat on the concrete steps and looked at the battered Honda bike. It was fast becoming dark now. He looked again at the door.

Oliver got up and went back to his truck. He found some paper, the back of something on the floor, and wrote a note. He walked around to the back of the house again. As he attempted to wedge his note between the screen door and the jamb, the back door opened. A woman in a dingy yellow terry cloth robe stood rubbing her eyes.

“Who the fuck are you?” she asked. She was tall and extremely skinny. Oliver thought she looked like a user of some kind of drug, but decided he didn’t know enough to tell. She had small features set in a narrow face with a sharp nose that was pointed at Oliver.

“Is this where Billy White Feather lives?”

“It’s where he’s supposed to live soon,” she said.

“I was leaving him a note. Are you his girlfriend?”

“I’m her roommate.” She sniffed like she had a cold. “What do you want with Billy?”

“Billy left me a note at my place up in Wyoming,” Oliver said.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know this Billy and I want to know why he left me a note.”

“You drove all the way from Wyoming for that?”

When she said it, it did sound sort of crazy.

“I’m calling the cops if you don’t leave,” she said.

“Do you know Billy?”

“Suppose I do?”

“Is Billy White Feather white or Indian?”

“What kind of question is that? You’d better get away from here.”

“He put a note on my door and I don’t know him. I just want to know what he looks like. Tall? Short? What?”

“Fuck you,” she said and slammed the door.

Oliver left the note wedged inside the screen. He walked back to his truck and fell in behind the wheel. The teenagers noticed him again and walked back in his direction. He heard a siren in the distance. Billy White Feather might or might not be coming back to this house, but it hardly mattered. Oliver had left a note. Oliver had been on his porch.

Harold Beaver leaned over the engine and shook his head. “I don’t know about this,” he said. “I just don’t know.” He played with a torque wrench, spinning it around on his fingertips. “What if you’ve got a leak from the cooling system into the oil? I think you might.”

“I don’t,” Donnie St. Clair said. “This motor is perfect.”

“Then why are we working on it?”

“There’s no leak. I have an exhaust tick. Let’s just do it.”

“Okay, listen, I’m telling you one more time,” Harold said. “I pour this liquid glass in there and there’s no taking it out. If there’s even a tiny leak, that’s the end of this engine.”