The Language of Elk by Benjamin Percy

Author:Benjamin Percy [PERCY, BENJAMIN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781455529612
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2013-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Late at night the phone would ring. Sometimes it was a rancher—calling about a fevered colt, a fresh heifer bleeding from her udders—and sometimes it was not. Sometimes it was Gordon’s father, his voice carrying across two hundred miles of cable, dripping from the pores of the receiver to the floor, where it slid across the kitchen linoleum, the living room hardwood, finding Gordon on the couch, his makeshift bedroom until he and his mother could afford their own place, something better.

Gordon pictured his father sitting on their kitchen counter back in Salem, surrounded by dirty dishes, crumpled beer cans, empty bags of potato chips—fruit flies swirling everywhere—his mouth pursed as he waited for the rhythmic purr of the call to be broken by a “Hello?” He would not say, “What’s up?” or “I’m sorry.” He would scream. A forked vein would leap across his forehead and he would beg them to come back, promising to love them if they did, threatening to kill them if they didn’t. Did Pamela not realize she had embarrassed him at work, where all day people pointed and spoke her name from behind cupped hands? Did she not realize she had effectively kidnapped his son? His son.

Pamela would have kept listening, let him pump her full of poison, but Verna gently took the phone from her and set it in its cradle and unplugged it.

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