The Deer

by Tim Raymond

It started because Dad hit the deer on the bend on Paradise Drive and said it was fine when actually it wasn’t. But what was I going to do? Then a few days later I was walking by the river to skip rocks and found the deer mangled and weak on the mattress in the thicket where the older kids had sex with each other or smoked stuff. I mean, I went up to it and thought about putting it out of its misery. But I didn’t have a knife or anything. I was about to go tell Dad about it, but that was when the deer communicated with me. I get it, no one thinks deer can communicate, but that’s how it all started. There was a humming in me, and then suddenly I could picture Jason, who’d said once that his dad was a dipshit, too, so don’t worry about it. I followed the humming to Jason’s house, where I pretended to be there for a friendly reason, when in reality I was there for a purposeful one. I left some of the deer’s blood in a very specific place, and then a week or so later both Jason and his dad were dead. Officially, it was a car accident, but differently officially, it was me doing the work of the deer spirit, whose humming became word-like. The deer said it was capital-D death, even though its still-beating heart was alive. It remained hobbled. The work needed to be done, it said.

I didn’t want to be putting blood on people I knew or strangers, but the deer was right, I thought, there was work and it needed to be done. It was like what I learned in school, because if there are too many deer in Yellowstone, the trees die and also other animal species do. So, I did it, like the deer told me, and the people died. And me, I was wolf, which is a feeling like no other. Again, I didn’t want to be hurting anybody, but to have a place in all this, in the ecosystem, in the human thicket, when before all anybody asked of me was to stay small—well, what feeling is like that? None are.

The deer and I put a dent in our small little town, which was not so small that there weren’t problems with people not having enough. But the deer didn’t hum about anybody who was homeless. Instead, it chose the Produce Manager at the Smith’s and the woman who sold tickets at the Iris 8. Sometimes it was hard because I had to convince Dad to take me to the places I needed to go, like the animal shelter, for example, or the west-side Taco Bell. Dad would get mad, and I’d have to throw a fit until he agreed. And then other times it was easier, but hard in a different way, like when I had to slip blood into the sandwich of this girl who started to like me, and whose name I don’t like saying out loud anymore. She wanted to be my friend because suddenly I was confident, she said, like she wanted to be, though I couldn’t tell her why I was. I didn’t want to do it, but the deer assured me that the work was everything. A spider bit her, went the story at school, and her body was too weak to fight back. Hence those bruises and her arm falling off.

It got to be late-spring, and then I found some older kids messing around by the mattress, like poking the deer and so on. I tried to stop them, but they just kidded me like so many of them did, like here was dipshit trying to say things. Go on, dipshit. But instead, confident me became wolf person and I punched the biggest of them right in his penis, and then started screaming and yelling and chasing him with blood on my hands. I didn’t wipe the blood on them, because the deer hadn’t commanded it, but I freaked them out, nonetheless. Anyway, that was how it happened, then, that the deer was discovered and I had to start answering questions.

All these people calling me crazy, but it’s not like there are no other wolves around. It’s not as if people are choosing on their own to freeze to death on the streets in the winters that are so much worse than before. But I’m young and stutter and stuff, so I don’t know, I have to be penned in. Small dipshit, small again, in the small town, with the doctors with the giant trucks and shiny watches. But I don’t hate them at all, because I never hated anybody in my whole life, except for maybe just that brief period, when I told them I almost drowned in the river once and really wanted to see it one last time, that’s it, before they were going to do whatever. But no, they wouldn’t let me. They said yes and okay, even, but then never put together a trip. If I hate anything, it’s that, really, that they say they’re listening when they’re not.