Big Picture: Stories

by Percival Everett

“Maybe later,” she said, her voice sounding far away. “I found a lump on Zack’s belly this afternoon.” Her voice was closer now. Zack was a one-hundred-twenty-pound mutt Hiram had brought home from the shelter about five years ago. “It’s kinda big.”

  “Where on his belly?”

  “Just above his tallywhacker,” Carolyn said.

  Hiram chuckled at the term. “How big?”

  “Golf ball.”

  “I noticed it a couple of weeks ago. It’s an umbilical hernia. I decided to leave it alone. It was about the size of a gumball then.”

  “Well, it’s bigger now.”

  “I’ll fix him up tomorrow. It’s going to be a slow day. Yep, I’ll just cut the ol’ boy open and fix him right up.”

  Carolyn left the room. Hiram listened as she started to get dinner together in the kitchen. He went to help, the way he helped every night. The accounting firm where Carolyn once worked had folded and she hadn’t found a new job. It had been two years and she’d pretty much resigned herself to not finding anything, so she had stopped looking. Hiram didn’t care. They had enough money. They didn’t do much traveling. But he hated her periodic complaining about being a housewife. He would respond by saying that he didn’t think of her as a housewife, but rather a full-time gardener/painter/wrangler/everything else. He’d point out how much money she was saving them by doing what someone else would charge a bundle to do. But she still complained while doing nothing about it. He walked to the kitchen cupboard for the dishes.

  “I was over at the Stoval place today,” Hiram said. “Did you know that Mr. Stoval just up and left?”

  “Really?”

  “Mrs. Stoval told me. I guess she doesn’t have many people to talk to, being out there all by herself.”

  “She was lucky you were there, wasn’t she?”

  Hiram set the plates on the table and looked at Carolyn. “Anyway, I mentioned that we might have her over for dinner.”

  “How nice.”

  “What is it with you? If I were talking about Mitch Greeley or old Mrs. Jett, you wouldn’t sound like this.”

  Without looking away from the pasta on the stove, Carolyn said, “I don’t guess we’d be having the same conversation about them.”

  “We don’t have to invite her.”

  Carolyn turned off the flame under the pasta, then drained off the water in the sink before turning to Hiram. “I’m sorry. I’m tightly wound today. I think I’m feeling cooped up or something.”

  “Want to go out? Drive to town and take in a movie?”

  Carolyn shook her head.

  “What about an early morning walk up to the falls?”

  Carolyn smiled in weak agreement.

  An hour after dinner someone rang the bell. Hiram and Carolyn were reading in the den. Hiram was just beginning to nod off; the journal was resting on his lap. Carolyn looked at him as if to say, who could that be? and didn’t move. Hiram got up and went to the door, opened it, and found Lewis Fife, all three hundred pounds of him standing on the porch.

  “Well, they did it,” Lewis Fife said quickly. He was out of breath, panting.

  “You didn’t walk over here, did you?” Hiram asked.

  “Are you crazy? Of course not. I drove, but I took your steps two at a time,” Lewis Fife said.

  “There’s only four steps, Lewis.”

  “Give me a break, man. I weigh a ton. You try hauling this shit around.” He grabbed his stomach and showed it to Hiram. “Are you going to let me in?”

  Hiram stepped aside and called back to Carolyn as the big man entered. “It’s Lewis.”

  Carolyn came and stood in the doorway to the den. “Good evening, Lewis,” she said.

  “Ma’am,” Lewis said and tipped a hat he wasn’t wearing. “Well, they’ve done it,” he said again.

  “Done what?” Hiram asked.

  “They killed that cat. Trevis Wilcox and his boy shot him up in Moss Canyon and just now dragged him down. They’re down in the village at the grocery-store parking lot. I thought you ought to see it.”

  “Why?”

  “Christ, man, you’re the vet around here. Not that you can help the beast now, but take a look at it and tell us if you think it’s the right cat.”

  “The right cat? I never saw it.”

  Lewis Fife bit his lip and said slowly, “Well, the Newton kid said the cat he saw was a lot bigger and, you know, when you’re scared everything looks bigger, but still.”

  “Okay, I’ll come down.” Hiram turned to Carolyn. “Do you want to come with me?”

  “I don’t need to see a dead lion. I don’t think you need to see it either.”

  “Probably not, but I’m going anyway.” Hiram looked at Carolyn’s face. She disapproved, but he could see that she was not up to an argument.

  “Please don’t get all upset.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I’ll take care of him,” Lewis Fife said.

  • • •

  Hiram and his father searched all day, went home, and then returned to the woods the following morning. Hiram watched his father’s face as they rode, his chin and cheeks darkened by a thick stubble. He didn’t much like his father, not because he was a bad man, not because he was mean, but because he never seemed to want more for himself, never opened books, and seemed afraid when Hiram did.

  “So when we find him, Hiram, I’m going to let you have him,” his father said.

  “I don’t want him, Dad.” Hiram sucked in a deep breath. “You know, Dad, there’s probably not ten wolves left in these parts. We shouldn’t be killing them.”

  “You’re gonna shoot him, all right. It’ll be kind of a rite of passage for you.”

  Hiram didn’t say anything, but a chill ran through him and he felt like crying.

  From up high they could look down to the beaver pond. There were no animals around and Hiram got a bad feeling that the wolf was near. They rode down the slope slowly. Hiram’s father carefully pulled his rifle from its scabbard.

  And there it was. The wolf was trotting along the near side of the pond, moving upstream. His coat was dark gray and he was carrying his bushy tail high. It was a big wolf. Hiram guessed that the animal weighed over a hundred pounds. It was beautiful, moving effortlessly. He loved the wolf. And when he looked at the smile on his father’s face he was filled with hate. He was embarrassed by the hatred, afraid of it, sickened by it, feeling lost because of it.

  “Come on, boy,” Hiram’s father said.

  Hiram followed reluctantly. They rode down across the meadow and past the pond and then circled wide away from the creek and back to it. The wolf was standing in a thicket, just thirty yards away. Hiram could see his eyes, the rounded tops of his ears.

  “He’s all yours, boy,” Hiram’s father said.

  “I can’t do it,” Hiram said.

  “Shoot him,” the man commanded. “Shoot him or you ain’t no son of mine.”

  Hiram looked at his father’s unyielding eyes.

  “Shoot him.”

  Hiram raised the Weatherby and lined up a shot. The wolf didn’t move; his eyes were as unyielding as his father’s. He squeezed off the round and watched as the startled animal had only enough time to change the expression in his eyes. The wolf looked at Hiram and asked why, then fell over dead as the bullet caught him in the chest with a dull thump. A shockingly small amount of red showed through the fur.

  Hiram turned to his still-smiling father and said, “I hate you.”

  “Fine shooting.”

  “You didn’t hear me,” Hiram said. “I hate you.” He stared at his father until the man looked away. Hiram turned his horse and stepped off in the direction of the pond.

  “You had to do it, Hiram. That wolf was threatening our welfare, your family,” the man called after. Then, more to himself, he said, “He was killing our stock. He had to be done away with.”

  Hiram rode home alone, feeling scared of what his father would do when he arrived, feeling scared by wh
at the lost spirit of the wolf was going to do to him. Tears began to slide down his face and he wished that his father could see them.

  As he rode down the steep ridge above his family’s home Hiram saw them in the pasture. Six dogs were chasing a small ewe, sliding on the wet grass as she made her sharp turns. Hiram was filled with such anger that he couldn’t breathe, his hands mindlessly raised the rifle, and he found himself drawing a bead on one dog and then another. He fired and missed badly, but the dogs went running away. He looked up the ridge and saw his father staring down at the dogs, staring down at him. Hiram gave his horse a kick and trotted home.

  He didn’t speak to his mother as he stormed into the house and he felt bad because he could tell he was frightening his younger sister, sitting there at the bottom of the stairs, stroking the border collie. He marched up to his room and slammed the door. He paced from the window to the door, his hands closing and opening, closing and opening, and all he could see was the face of the wolf, indifferent and unsuspecting, the amber eyes boring into him. He wanted to scream. He heard his father’s horse outside and he looked through the window to see him tying up at the post.

  “I hate you!” Hiram shouted, but his father didn’t look up. “I told you it was dogs! I told you!” Still his father did not raise his eyes to the second floor, but walked onto the porch and into the house.

  Hiram could hear his mother asking what had happened as he threw open his bedroom door and stepped to the top of the stairs. “He’s what happened!” Hiram said. “He made me shoot that wolf.”

  “That’s enough, Hiram,” his father said.

  “No, it’s not enough. You made me kill that beautiful animal because you’re too stupid to listen to anybody.”

  Hiram’s father started toward him, up the stairs. It might have been the perspective, but Hiram realized that he was larger than his father. He looked down at the man and moved to meet him on the stairs.

  “Hiram,” his mother complained.

  His sister was crying and that was the only sound which seemed to filter through his rage.

  “I said ‘enough,’” his father said.

  “Bastard.”

  Hiram saw the rage in his father’s eyes and ducked his swinging fist, heard his mother’s scream. Hiram grabbed the man and felt how weak he was. He now understood that his father had been profoundly affected by the death of the animal, and felt his father’s chest heaving with sobs. Hiram fell to the floor holding his father, both crying, neither letting go.

  • • •

  It was true that Lewis Fife didn’t look comfortable seated in the driver’s seat of an automobile. His stomach pressed against the steering wheel, which he held with both of his fat paws, the seat belt idle beside him since it would not accommodate his girth. “Been driving for thirty-five years and not one accident,” Lewis Fife would say, taking a steep curve on two wheels. Hiram sat beside him in the monstrous mid-seventies Lincoln Town Car, squeezing his nails into the armrest, believing, as did everyone else, that Lewis Fife was long overdue for a vehicular mishap. But that night the fat man didn’t take any curves on two wheels, didn’t drive well above the limit, didn’t crowd the center line, didn’t fumble with a bag of chips set on his shelf of a stomach. Lewis drove steady and slow from Hiram’s house all the way to the village with his eyes stapled to the highway; the silence about him suggested reverence. Hiram was taken over by a similar quiet mood. All he could imagine was the large, majestic, dead face of the lion.

  Lewis Fife pulled into the parking lot of the grocery store and parked in a space well away from a large huddle of people. They were standing around the bed of a black dually pickup with yellow running lights.

  Lewis Fife pointed but didn’t say anything.

  Hiram grabbed the handle, opened the door, and got out. He walked toward the truck, feeling the muscles in his stomach shaking as if he were freezing cold. Beyond the crowd and the truck was the market, all lit up; people inside were pushing carts and standing in the checkout lines. He looked at the people inside, trying to distract himself, trying to tell himself that there was other business in the world. He recalled the look on Carolyn’s face as he left the house and repeated to himself that he wouldn’t cause a scene.

  Hiram heard someone say, “Hey, it’s Doc Finch.” And the crowd of men peeled away from the truck and watched him. He got to the bed of the big pickup and there it was. Nothing could have prepared him for the face of the animal. He was large, his head about the size of a big boxer dog’s, and the front legs were crossed in a comfortable-looking position as he lay on his side. But the face. The mouth was open, showing pink against white teeth, and the tongue hung crazily out along the metal of the truck. The ochre eyes were open and hollow and cold and held a startled expression. Hiram looked up at the faces of the surrounding men, one at a time until he saw Wilcox and his son. The two were not quite smiling.

  “We got him, Doc,” Wilcox said.

  Hiram swallowed. “Yep, I guess you did.” Hiram touched the fur of the lion’s neck and stroked it.

  “Big one, ain’t he, Doc?” someone said.

  Hiram felt Lewis Fife standing beside him. He walked away from him, circled around the open tailgate of the truck, and studied the cat. “He’s a big one, all right. I hope he’s the right one.”

  “He’s the right one,” Wilcox said.

  “Got him in Moss Canyon,” the Wilcox son said. “I shot him,” proudly, a little too loudly.

  Hiram looked up, caught the boy’s eyes, and saw the fear in them.

  The silence was then broken by a scream and the breaking of glass. Hiram turned with the others to see Marjorie Stoval a few yards away, with dropped sacks and broken bottles at her feet, looking at the lion. She screamed again and then sank to her knees, crying. Hiram went to her, as did the Wilcox boy. Hiram supported her while the boy gathered her groceries. They helped her away from the pickup and to the line of stacked wire carts in front of the store.

  Hiram talked to her. “Mrs. Stoval, are you all right? Mrs. Stoval?”

  The Wilcox kid backed away and rejoined his father. Hiram stood with the woman and watched the crowd disperse, watched the black dually pickup drive off down the street.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that,” Hiram said.

  Lewis Fife came over. “Is she okay?” he asked Hiram.

  Hiram shrugged.

  “I’m sorry,” Marjorie said, trying to stand up straight, but keeping a hand on the cart. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “I know. Where’s your car?” Hiram asked. Marjorie pointed across the lot toward a small station wagon. “Listen, I’m going to drive you home.”

  “I’ll follow you,” Lewis Fife said.

  The headlights of the Lincoln faded and grew large, but stayed in sight the whole way. Hiram had failed to adjust the driver’s seat of Marjorie Stoval’s wagon and so he was crammed in behind the wheel; his knee raked his elbow every time he shifted. Marjorie was no longer crying, but sat stone-faced, staring ahead through the windshield.

  “Are you okay?” Hiram asked.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” the woman said.

  “Why should you be embarrassed? I think your reaction was the only appropriate one out there. I told them not to, but they did it. They say they did it to protect their stock. They say they did it to protect their families. But none of that is true. They did it because they’re small men.” Hiram felt how tightly he was holding the steering wheel in his hands, and when he glanced into the mirror, he noticed that Lewis Fife’s headlights were white dots well off in the distance. He eased his foot off the accelerator and tried to relax.

  “You’re really upset, aren’t you?” Marjorie said.

  Hiram didn’t answer, but did look at her.

  “That was a beautiful animal,” she said.

  “Yes, it was.”

  “I saw a lion near my place once.” Marjorie rolled her window part way down. “He was on the ridge about three hundred
yards from my house. I couldn’t believe it. It was about nine in the morning and I had just finished my tea and there he was. Or she. I don’t know. I got my boots on as fast as I could and went hiking up there, but it was gone. I can still see the white tip of its tail.” She closed her eyes.

  Hiram looked over at her face, the curve of her nose, then down at her hands, large for a woman her size, but they fit her. “They’re magnificent creatures, all right. Felis concolor.”

  “I’m sorry you’re having to do this, drive me home, I mean.”

  “It’s no trouble.” Hiram glanced behind them. “Besides, Lewis is here to drive me home.” He felt a cramp start in his leg and tried to stretch it out.

  “You’re kind of wedged in there.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Marjorie laughed.

  “I like you, Dr. Finch,” she said.

  Hiram nodded and smiled at her.

  “I’m sorry I unloaded my baggage on you earlier.” Marjorie’s voice didn’t sound frail anymore. “I mean, about what’s-his-name.”

  “Eagle Nest, eh?”

  “In a trailer.” She shook her head. “Did I mention that she’s twenty-three? I saw her. Dwight and I were shopping and we ran into her. She saw him and said hello and then she saw me and they pretended not to know each other. That’s how I found out.” She sneezed out a laugh.

  “That sounds awful.”

  “Have you ever had an affair?”

  “No.”

  “Ever thought about it?”

  “No. I guess I’m pretty boring, huh?”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Marjorie said. “I wouldn’t say that at all. In fact, I’d say you are anything but boring.”

  “Why, thank you kindly, ma’am.”

  Hiram turned off the road into Marjorie Stoval’s yard and killed the engine. They were out of the car when Lewis Fife came to a complete stop. The fat man waited in his car while Hiram helped Marjorie with her groceries. He held the ruptured sacks and stood next to her on the porch while she looked for her keys. Once inside he put the groceries on the table in the kitchen.

  “Well, I guess I’ll see you around,” Hiram said.

  “I guess.”