Monday, Monday: A Novel (37 page)

Nicholas couldn’t stand the sound of the whimpering and put his hands over his ears. “Stay calm,” he told the dog. “Stay calm.”

Delia took the pliers and put on reading glasses, Jack tucked Ranger under his arm, and Madeline clamped her hands tightly around the dog’s head, flattening down his ears. Ranger rolled his eyes around, watching the pliers and tossing his head whenever they touched a quill.

“I’m afraid I’m crushing his skull,” Madeline said, wrestling to keep her grip.

Ranger nipped at the pliers, darting his snout like a snapping turtle at Delia. He growled and stiffened his legs, trying to shove away from the table. Madeline wrapped a dish towel under his chin and over his eyes and ears. Blindly, he flung his head, lunging and nipping ferociously when he sensed the pliers in front of his face. In rapid, successive jabs, Delia extracted a few quills, laying them out on the table.

“He bit me,” she said, pulling her hand away.

“He’s fast,” Jack said.

Nicholas had started to cry. “It’s hurting him!” He looked at the quills on the table. “Two of these are whiskers! You’re pulling out his whiskers! Let him go!”

Jack took over the pliers, but he was less efficient than Delia. “We need Carlotta or Wyatt. Someone with manual dexterity.”

When Carlotta and Shelly came in, Madeline said “Porcupine” before they had even asked. “We can’t get the quills out.”

“Maybe Wyatt and I can do it,” Carlotta said. “He’s on his way in.”

“Ever pulled porcupine quills?” Jack said when Wyatt walked in.

Wyatt enlisted Nicholas. “Where’s your dog happiest—inside or out?”

“Out,” Nicholas told him.

“And who does he trust the most?”

“Me.”

“So if you hold him in your lap, he might relax.”

“Maybe not,” Nicholas said. “He’s pretty upset.”

“Give it a try. Take him outside and sit with him in your lap at the top of the porch steps, and Carlotta and I can sit on a lower step so we can see what we’re doing.”

Nicholas gathered the dog in his arms and carried him outside and sat where he had been told. The dog was docile but thrust his tongue from the pain of the quills and made coughing sounds.

Madeline and Shelly stood at the far end of the porch. “Where’s Andy?” Shelly asked.

“I guess driving around in the golf cart.”

“You haven’t called him to say we found him?”

“No.”

“Oh, honey,” Shelly said.

Madeline was unhappy to be so angry and disillusioned and yet to suspect that she still loved Andy. She feared she might forgive him and use Nicholas for the excuse. Why hadn’t she fallen for someone like Jack, or Wyatt? They seemed to be faithful husbands.

Carlotta looked up from the step. “Bad news. I think I see quills in the back of his tongue.” Wyatt wrestled the dog’s mouth open so she could look farther in. “Yep. In the back of his throat,” she said. “I’ll have to call Emmett Johnson. He’s a mobile veterinarian and can probably come pretty fast.”

She went inside to make the call. Shelly went in and made sandwiches, which everyone ate on the porch steps. Madeline sat in the swing. She noticed that Wyatt seemed to look at her mother attentively as he talked and ate his sandwich and that her mother always seemed to be looking off in the other direction.

44

EMMETT JOHNSON, MOBILE VETERINARIAN

Madeline was with Nicholas in the swing, holding the dog, when a large white truck rolled to a stop in the speckled light under the trees,
EMMETT JOHNSON
and a phone number painted in red on its side. A man got out and lifted a tackle box from a hatch in the rear, and as he came toward them, Madeline realized she had met him years ago, when she was fourteen or fifteen and he had come to see Carlotta. Most of Carlotta’s friends had never paid any attention to Madeline because she was so much younger, but he had sat with her on this very porch and talked about his A&M classes in immunology and pharmacology. She had not seen him since then, but the encounter came back to her now as she watched him climb the steps in his dusty work boots, his eyes on Ranger.

“Well, the dog did get into it,” he said. He paused when he looked at Madeline. “Hey, I know you.”

“I think we met when I was about fifteen,” she said.

“Must have been about then. We had a conversation right here on the porch.” His build was stocky and solid; he had blue eyes and sandy blond hair cut very short.

“Yes, we did.” She smiled at him. “This is my son, Nicholas.”

“Well, Nicholas, let’s take a look at your dog.” He leaned to examine Ranger, who growled, showing his teeth, his lips like a pincushion, the quills sticking out.

“What’s his name?”

“Ranger,” Nicholas said.

“Is Ranger a pretty good dog?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s a tough dog, too,” Emmett said, sitting down beside Nicholas for a closer look. “Can you hold him still while I give him a shot? It’s going to put him to sleep for a while so we can get these quills out. Otherwise he’s going to take a chunk out of my hand.”

Nicholas locked his arms around Ranger while Emmett Johnson got a syringe and needle out of the tackle box, inserted fluid from a vial, and injected it into the dog’s foreleg.

Carlotta came out and greeted Emmett and turned the ceiling fans on, creating a lazy breeze. Ranger began to look loopy and closed his eyes. “He’s all right,” Emmett assured Nicholas, moving a tall plant stand into the light and settling Ranger, stomach down, on top of it. “Here’s our operating table.” He looked into the dog’s mouth. “Okay, Nicholas. Hold him steady. My son usually helps me out, but he’s not here, so you’re my guy. To get these out, I’m going to have to give some pretty strong yanks, and that’s going to tug at your dog’s head and jerk him a little. You hold him still.”

“Could he have swallowed any quills?” Madeline asked.

“If he did, they’ll go the usual way. It’s the ones he didn’t swallow we have to worry about. Nicholas, you look concerned. If you put your fingers here, you can feel his heartbeat. See? He’s all right.”

Nicholas felt the heartbeat, then took hold of Ranger’s head again while Emmett propped the jaw open with a metal device and used surgical scissors to snip the ends of the largest quills inside the mouth.

Delia pushed open the screen door. “Emmett. Hello. Turkey or ham on a sandwich?”

“Turkey sounds great. Thank you, Mrs. Stone.”

“Coke?”

“Do you have any Diet Coke?”

“Diet Dr Pepper.”

“That’d be great.”

Delia went into the house, and Emmett probed inside the dog’s mouth, clipping quills and pulling them out by the blunt ends with a pair of small forceps. He paused to look at Nicholas. “If you need a break, I bet your mom would fill in.”

Nicholas went inside, and Madeline took his place, her head so close to Emmett’s chest she could smell his sweat.

Angling the dog’s head in the sunlight, Emmett studied the floppy tongue. From the way he leaned down, Madeline saw the perspiration in the small wrinkles on the back of his neck. “If he had a bigger mouth, I could get in here better,” he said. “No need to hold him that tight. He’s not going to go anywhere. I just don’t want him to flop over.”

“So you said you have a son?”

“Two girls, one boy.” He pulled the rubbery lips back and examined the gums. “You might want to get these teeth cleaned at some point. The good news is, I think we’ve got all the quills.” A cell phone rang, and he pulled it out of his pocket. “Emmett here.” He listened. “I could get there in … oh, fifteen, maybe thirty minutes. I’m at the Stones’.” He paused again, flicking his eyes toward Madeline and continuing to look at her while he talked. “Naw, it’s not a problem. I’m out and about anyway.” He closed the phone and put it back in his pocket. “Friend of mine got drunk and banged his horse up trying to get him into a trailer.”

“Oh.”

“I guess Nicholas’s dad is around here somewhere?”

“Somewhere. Are you always this busy on Saturdays?”

“Pretty much always on call. I like the work, and there seems to be plenty of it. Must be the charmed life I’ve been living.” He ran his thumb over Ranger’s chin, checking for hidden quills, and looked in the dog’s ears and between his toes. “And my good luck.”

“Your good luck?”

“You bet. My wife walked out on me two years ago, and if I were an unlucky man, that would have been for no reason at all.”

Madeline was trying to figure out what this meant, when Carlotta came to the doorway and told Emmett his sandwich was ready. “You want me to bring it out?”

“I’m afraid I’ll need a rain check on the sandwich. I got a call from Gus Reeves, and he needs some help with his horse.”

“I’ll wrap it up for you,” Carlotta told him.

“You planning to be at the rodeo tonight?” he asked her.

“You know my opinion about rodeos.” She went inside for his sandwich.

“So there’s a rodeo tonight?” Madeline said.

“The Big Bend Ranch Rodeo.”

“Are you going?”

“Wouldn’t miss it. Actually, I don’t have that option. They have to have a vet there, and Alpine’s only got two of us. It’s my turn.” He chewed his bottom lip and settled his eyes directly on hers. “I bet Nicholas would like it.”

“That’s true. It might cheer him up.”

“Oh, look here,” Emmett said. “Somebody’s coming around.” Ranger’s paws had started to twitch.

“Is that a breeze, or just the fans?” Madeline asked.

“That’s a breeze. We’re supposed to have wind coming.”

“Do you think it might bring any rain?”

Emmett shook his head. “No. Not likely. Just dust.”

45

THE TADPOLE’S FUNERAL

When Andy had returned, and he and Nicholas had gone back to digging the tadpole’s grave, Jack and Wyatt retreated to the cozy library alcove of the parlor where Jack kept his collection of history books. “I found this one at McMurtry’s place in Archer City for twenty-five dollars,” Jack said, taking down an old clothbound volume called
The Men Who Found America
and handing it to Wyatt. “It’s a kids’ book, but I couldn’t resist, because look at the cover. And this one … it’s new. You should read it. It’s a biography of Hopper and has a lot of background on the paintings. I thought of you while I was reading it.”

Watching Jack pluck one volume after another from the shelves, speak a line or two about each, and then push it back in its place, Wyatt toyed with the idea of putting a stop to the small talk about books and asking Jack how he was really doing—how he was handling his concerns about Carlotta. They were certainly concerns the two of them shared.

But the mechanical way Jack kept pulling out one book and then another, offering some terse comment about it and then placing it back on the shelf, was evidence enough that he was not in a mood for hashing over a thorny situation that both of them already understood. It reminded Wyatt of the evening at Brackenridge Hospital all those years back, when Jack had told him, while deflecting any discussion or pity, the exact nature of his gunshot wound.

Jack had rarely even spoken of that injury since then, in spite of the glaring fact that it had changed his life in untold ways. If not for the injury, he and Delia probably would have had three or four kids of their own instead of adopting Carlotta. They might have stayed in Austin or moved to San Antonio to be closer to Delia’s large family, with all her nieces and nephews. But Jack never mentioned any of those things that might have happened differently, and Wyatt never asked about them, knowing that the intimacy between them depended on letting Jack keep his thoughts to himself. This didn’t prevent Wyatt from knowing instinctively what those thoughts were, but it often stopped him—as it did now—from bringing them up.

He was about to say a few optimistic words of encouragement about the situation with Carlotta, but Nicholas burst into the room, shouting, “It’s time for Jerry’s funeral!” He held a dirty spade at his side, and looked happy and excited. “Me and my dad finished digging the grave! My dad said not everybody would want to come, but I told him everybody would! We need to leave Ranger inside, though.” Ranger, to Wyatt’s knowledge, was still shivering under the kitchen table from the aftereffects of the anesthesia. “See you in a minute!” Nicholas turned and ran upstairs to alert the others.

And then Andy appeared at the door, looking apologetic. “Sorry about this. I hope you don’t mind. I think Nicholas wants everyone out there. Apparently, I’m officiating.”

*   *   *

The grave was under Shelly’s bedroom window, between the wide trunk of the towering cottonwood and the rattling compressor of an air conditioner. It was a foot across and deep enough for the olive jar that contained the tadpole to sit in upright. Wyatt made an effort to stare down at the hole instead of across at Shelly, who was facing him from the far side, the hump of Lizard Mountain rising off the sunny landscape behind her. He scanned the company around the grave while Andy recited a prayer of some kind in Hebrew. Jack, he noticed, looked impatient and had started to sweat in the heat. Madeline’s bra strap fell from under her skimpy tank top. Nicholas stood so close to the grave the tips of his tennis shoes hung over the edge, but he seemed over his grief. Delia’s flip-flops and cutoffs looked too young for her. She was older now. They were all older now. Carlotta, he thought, looked upset about something—obviously not the tadpole. Something else. She had a frown on her face as she stared down at the grave. Was she starting to suspect that his visit was more than a casual drop-in?

He doubted that anyone understood what Andy was saying in Hebrew—he certainly didn’t. Andy was a patient father to take his son’s loss so seriously, but to Wyatt he looked like he was enjoying the role a little too much.

Wyatt stole another glance at Shelly, who stood with her arms folded, the injured arm concealed by her blouse. Watching her there like this, memories poured over him and he felt a wave of tenderness, recalling how she had loved Roger Miller’s songs and how she would sing along with the Temptations to “My Girl.” He had halfway hoped that seeing her after all these years, in a new light and with the advantage of hindsight, he would notice things that would have doomed their chances after all.