Free Big Picture: Stories by Percival Everett

ochre and Permanent Rose and a deep green like an avocado’s skin.
    “Waitress tells me you want to buy the Dicotyles tajacu ,” the cook said.
    Michael nodded, but felt a little afraid sensing the man’s displeasure.
    “Why?”
    “Because I like it,” Michael said.
    The cook sat across from him in the booth and looked absently across the room and out the window at the highway. “I’ve never had anybody wanting to buy one of the animals before. What would you do with it?”
    “I’m an artist. I just like it. I wouldn’t do anything to it,” was what he said, but he wanted to say that he was unsatisfied, agitated, desolate in heart and entrails, sick with pain, and sickened by curiosity, of all things, and that the Dicotyles tajacu had become an object of that sickness. “I’m not going to hurt it.”
    “He’s got an eye missing,” the cook said. “The left one.”
    “I realize that,” Michael said. “I think that’s why I like it so much.”
    The cook scratched his thick neck and pulled up at the back of his shirt collar. “The Dicotyles tajacu has been here since 1967.”
    “Taken by C.C. Wilcox,” Michael said.
    “You know, business has been pretty rough, what with the freeway and all those fast-food places in Fort Collins. A breakfast burrito. An egg McNuthin’. It’s hard for the little guy to make it now.”
    Michael nodded. “Are you C.C. Wilcox?”
    The cook shook his head. “Kirk Johnston.”
    “My name is Michael Lawson.”
    The cook stared off into space.
    “I can see you’re attached to the pig …”
    “Dicotyles tajacu ,” the cook corrected.
    “Dicotyles tajacu ,” Michael said. “How does one-fifty sound?”
    The cook looked up at the head on the wall and his eyes seemed to well with tears, the meaty fingers of his right hand were wringing the meaty fingers of his left. “Business has been awful slow.” But the cook was speaking more to the taxidermied head than to Michael.
    “One seventy-five,” Michael said.
    The man was openly weeping now. His big head fell forward to his hands; his big sides were heaving under his short-sleeved white shirt. The waitress had come out of the kitchen and was walking across the room, tossing them a sidelong glance but not approaching. A man with blond hair and his blond wife, who were seated across the room in a booth beneath a moose, stared and whispered.
    Through his tears, Kirk the cook managed to say, “Would you consider the Ovis canadensis ?”
    “No, I want this one,” Michael said. The idea of owning it was getting all twisted inside him. He didn’t want to hurt the cook, but the head, the head, the idea of the head was calling to him. “Two hundred.”
    The cook let out a loud wail. His sobs caught in his throat, choking him; tears were glistening in his beard.
    The blond couple from across the room climbed out of their booth and scurried out. The bell hanging from the door was slapping against the glass.
    “Two hundred dollars.”
    “Waitress,” the cook called. When she came he said, still crying, “Wrap up the Dicotyles tajacu .”
    The waitress began to sob as well, her mascara streaking quickly as she turned her face from the stuffed head. Her crying voice was higher pitched than her talking voice and Michael paused to observe this.
    The cook stood. “Wrap it nicely, waitress.”
    Michael counted out two hundred dollars onto the lacquered wooden tabletop. The cook picked up the bills along with a paper napkin and, without counting, stuffed the money into his breast pocket, then walked on unsteady legs back across the room and through the swinging door of the kitchen.
    Michael moved his coffee to the next table. Then he and the waitress stood on the maroon vinyl seats of the booth, on each side of the boar’s head, and took it down from the nail on which it was hooked.
    “I’m going to miss you, Dicotyles tajacu ,” the waitress said. “I’ll get some newspaper.” She stepped back and looked at it there on