Percival Everett by Virgil Russell Read Online Free PDF

talked about the increasing amount of traffic and about how rarely we made the drive all the way into Los Angeles.
    All this concern about the evenness of things, the weight cast forward or back, to this side or that, the flow, the wash, the balance. Alluvial patterns etched into the cheeks of old people, really old people. Now that’s an appetizing image, wouldn’t you say? Channels for what? I want to know. Tears? Traffic? Wisdom? The uncontrolled, incontinent plastic buckets of stale piss that I seem to have stored up in myself for the past seven decades; because no one apparently ever completely empties his bladder?
    She looked at her watch. He ought to be feeling pretty silly by now.
    Let’s do it.
    This shouldn’t take long, but it won’t be pretty.
    As we walked back across the yard I looked up at the broken clouds. We stopped at her truck and she collected her equipment. The sun was doing little to make the day warmer, but it was good to see the end of the rain. We found the horse with his head hanging low and his eyes glassy.
    Oh, yeah, she said.
    I held the lead rope, though I probably didn’t have to. She pulled a little battery-run razor from her pocket and shaved the hair away from the wound. She then washed his neck with a Betadine solution. She probed into the wound with a long forceps and came out empty.
    It’s in there, but I can’t find it, she said. I’m going to have to cut him. She made a vertical incision across the bloody hole, and the horse neck spread open as if being unzipped. There was less blood than I expected, but his meat lay pink and exposed. She found the slug. There it is. What do you say? She held it up for me to see at the end of the forceps. A twenty-two?
    I shrugged. I wouldn’t be able to tell.
    Me neither, she said. She irrigated the gash, the stood back to look at it. She began to pack up.
    Aren’t you going to sew him up? I asked.
    No, let’s leave him open. Irrigate it the next couple of days with the Betadine, but not too much. Let it granulate over. It’ll be ugly for a while. But he will heal up right nice.
    Healing up right nice would be a good thing, don’t you think, son? Or should I have you think that I think it so, your old man? Your old man posing as you in a voice that is at once yours and at once mine and at once neither? Your hands are my hands are my wands are your magic. And where is Meg Caro? Where is my daughter that I never knew I had?
    Thanks. What do I owe you?
    I’ll tell you at the truck.
    I can’t believe somebody shot him, I said.
    Hey, would you like to have dinner sometime? she asked.
    I laughed. Yes, I think so.

Natural Kinds
    You look at me. Why the ranch life?
    Why the ranch world, Dad?
    And to me he says, Why not?
    The ranches are not mine, he says, the ranches are not mine.
    But they would be, I tell him. In a different world and time. Imagine the horses. Imagine the landscape. Imagine Murphy. Be Murphy. For one extended breath, be Murphy. Or let me.
    Why the ranch world, Dad? For now, you say, for now.
    But first:
    There are no realities that are more real than others, only more privileged. Often the presence of my own body comes back to me like a sort of electric thrill. I would say that my spine is tingled, though that is a feeling I have always sought after, never achieved, but sought after. Who knows, perhaps I have felt the tingling spine and was just too distracted, oddly self-absorbed (how self-absorbed must one be to forget one’s self ?), or simply too stupid to recognize it. I had a friend once who so immersed himself in the study of quantum field and string theories that he might as well have hanged himself. He would talk endlessly about particles absorbing this or that and things spinning this way or that way, of polarizations and 31 symmetries, of photons and fermions and space-time and curvatures, that he failed to realize that his wife was fucking everybody in town and taking what money he had. I think her final words to