The Fiction of Owen Thomas

A Better Place (“The Calling”)

A Novella

Excerpt D

At the dining room table, listening to the hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen and to the rows of ice, one by one, calving off into a frozen bucket of bodies, he wondered whom he should tell. A list of accountants and estate lawyers, the custodians of his assets on paper, scrolled through his mind. He would need to advise the Shoofly Studios Board of Directors, of course, and the various officers. He saw each of their faces reacting to the revelation. He heard each of their thoughts. Watched each of their silent contingencies rerouting themselves.

He had his thinning white hair cut once a month from a Korean man who liked to tell him knock-knock jokes that were difficult to understand through the accent. There were six to eight more of those sessions in store; no more than maybe twenty-four more knock-knock jokes.

He saw a dental hygienist every four months. Lydia. She smelled like citrus, bending over him, in up to her elbows, asking him questions he physically could not answer. She liked to talk about her son, deployed in the Middle East. Lydia was no stranger to the sound of the scythe out in the dark, making its way. Only one more visit with her. Would he tell her? Would he go through the pretense of scheduling the next appointment?

And what about Maria, the woman who supported her three kids by cleaning houses, including his own? When did he tell her that he would have no further interest in a clean house?

What about his ex-wife? He and Rachael had not been on speaking terms or physically within a thousand miles of each other in ten years. Of his three ex-wives, she was the one who had survived the others. Didn’t that status confer some rights of notice? Was it wrong to simply let her read an obituary? Were there rules of etiquette about such things?

And what of Kevin? How does a man tell his son such a thing?

Of course, all such questions were purely an exercise in hypothetical thinking; not hypothetical because pancreatic cancer was still only a possibility rather than a fact – in Tyler’s mind, try as he might to resist it, the cancer was already calcifying as a hard, immutable reality, so dense in his consciousness that it was distorting everything in his spirit the way a black hole warps the fabric of space – but hypothetical because if he could not find the strength to share the fact with Grace Bell, then the idea that he would tell anyone else first, his son included, was a delusion.

At four o’clock he shuffled back upstairs to his bedroom and dressed himself in the dark. He might have turned on the light and looked for a new suit, shirt and tie. Instead, he dressed from the pile of clothes heaped into the chair in the corner and grabbed the tie from the doorknob that he had unnoosed from his neck only hours before. He slipped it over his head and cinched it up again. These were now his cancer clothes and it was not a new day.

He drove to the studio. He made small talk with the guard about the trial and about how one could get so much more work done in the early morning as the world slept.
“Bet with this case goin’ on you’ve probably got to get a full day’s work done in the morning just to keep up, don’t you Mr. Freeman?”

Tyler went up to his office and closed the door and sat behind his desk in the dark and looked out the window at the lights of a city oblivious to the fact that he would be gone in eight months time. Maybe six months time. The lights would be there, burning for other eyes, and he would be gone.

He turned on his desk lamp and then stood, crossing the room to the bookshelves. Tyler extracted the second volume of Conrad Lindstrom’s Signs of Passing, a collection of stories about people living in a fictional swath of the old American West called Winchester County. The book was so well read that the title had nearly washed away, the cursive letters like fading trails in the leather dust. The binding was half separated from the spine and the cover was starting to tatter.

He flipped through the book idly, spot reading here and there, reveling in the familiar. Loose pencil sketches separated the stories. He stopped at a drawing of a horse and rider, lasso in the air, black bull at the other end of the page, head down, one hoof up. Tyler studied it a moment and turned the page. The next story was The Horns of a Dilemma. He remembered it well and could not help but smile a little.

Sheriff Hank Winchester was out on a cattle drive with his oldest son, Luke, and a bunch of cattle hands. Luke had his own ranch and his own life and had moved out of Winchester County many years before up in the high country where winter came earlier and stayed later. Luke was a good man, even if rough around the edges and not everyone’s favorite Winchester. He was stubborn to a fault and quick to fight, but all of that was wrapped tightly around a solid goodness that came with his last name.

Luke and Hank failed to see eye-to-eye on most things in the world, including how to bring a herd of cattle out of a box canyon during a thunderstorm. Luke would not have been along at all were it not for a request from his Aunt Kitty—Miss Kitty to most—who was concerned that his father was getting too old to be out on a drive without someone to look after him.  Like any Winchester would have, estrangement or no estrangement, Luke stepped up for his family.

Hank Winchester, of course, resented the concern and found no shortage of opportunities to show his son that he could still out-shoot, out-ride and out-rope every last one of them. At night, when most of the hands were lazing around the camp fire talking about the places they’d go and the women they’d court if they weren’t hard-working ranch hands, either Luke or Hank would be off tending to the herd lowing discontentedly up into the night. It would always be one or the other. If Luke was at the fire then Hank was off patrolling the herd. If Hank was at the fire, then Luke was out walking around in the dark with a rifle slung over his shoulder, pulling from a flask of whiskey.

It was the presence of death that brought them together. It took Luke physically pulling his father off of the pointed end of a thousand-pound Texas Longhorn to get Hank to see his son in a different light. Hank, who had stupidly allowed himself to become cornered up against the canyon wall with his rifle still back with his horse, had shouted for help. When no one came and the bull began its charge, he began screaming for Luke.

And Luke did come. He came in a hard gallop through the sagebrush calling his father’s name in terror of the inevitable, steering his horse with his knees and aiming his rifle. He shot the bull dead with one squeeze of the trigger, but not before it had skewered Hank cleanly through the rib cage and out the back.

Much of the story was about waiting for death. As one of the hands left as fast as a horse could carry him for Doc Chisolm’s place just outside of town, the others set up camp right there in the canyon. Luke did his best to dress his father’s grievous wound and held him tightly in his arms beneath a stack of saddle blankets as night came and the fire hissed and popped up into the dark, dry air.