Going Home Again by Howard Waldrop

Author:Howard Waldrop
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466884502
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Why Did?

Now me thinks on a sudden I am wakened as if it were out of a dream, I have had a raving fit, a phantastical fit, ranged up and down, in and out, I have insulted over most kinde of men, abused some, offended others, wronged myself: and now being recovered and perceiving my error, cry Solvite me! pardon that which is past.

— Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621

Leonard:

For a long time he did not remember anything. The moon was just rising. He must have come from the river because his footprints led from it to where he stood. His head hurt.

He walked for a very long way and he was hot. He wished he hadn’t left the water; now he needed a drink. He felt something heavy on the top of his head. He didn’t think it was his cap. He reached up and his hand came away with something dark and something gray and blue in the moonlight.

“Ahhh!” he yelled. “Ahhh!” He began to run, falling down twice, flopping around in the dirt until he could get up. His left arm did not work. He ran and ran, then he passed out.

When he came to again he was walking and it was either just after sunset or just before dawn, he did not know which. He walked and walked. His head was pounding now but he was afraid to reach up and touch it again. He was so tired and so hungry but he could not stop. He knew that if he stopped he would die.

It was morning.

He hobbled onto the edge of a field. It stretched away forever with the stubble of some crop. There was a man far away on the other side doing something with a tractor. There was a truck parked there, too. He walked toward the man at the tractor and the man heard him coming and looked up. The man’s eyes got wide and bright behind his glasses and he put one hand up over his face a second.

“Holy Mother of Christ!” the man said.

“Unhh! Unhh!” he said, holding his right arm out.

“Jesus! You’re really hurt? How did that happen?”

“Unhh!”

“Hold still. Don’t move.” The man went to the truck and came back with a flour sack covered with grit. “It’s all I got. Let me put that on your head.”

He held still.

The man made a strange noise behind him.

“I don’t know how you’re walking, buddy,” the man said. “It … it looks like you been shot in the back of the head and the bullet came out the top. That’s brains hangin’ there.”

“Unhh! Unhh!”

“Easy now. If you come this far you ain’t gonna die yet. Ease over into the truck here—I’ll take you over to the hospital in Salinas. Watch your head gettin’ in. There’s more of it on top than you think…”

He got into the truck. Soon they were bouncing along the road and the gravel was flying in a big V out behind. His head hurt more and soon he was asleep.

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