VINNIE WILHELM
In the Absence of Predators
Driving north. I’m driving north, and I feel fine: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire. Little towns drift past, charming, colonial places, saltbox architecture. I admire the church steeples and simple buildings—their wholesome austerity, their right angles and straight lines—but I don’t stop. The miles fall away. Rolling hills, deep woods, an ocean of trees. Snow begins falling, then falling harder, but I keep moving and I feel fine until the accident.
The accident happens like this: crest a rise on the highway and there she is, no avoiding her. A doe. She begins to move just before the collision, but I catch her in the flank with the right side of my grille, spinning her onto the shoulder. The Buick’s back end skids out of control in the opposite direction. I take my hand off the wheel and allow the car to turn 180 degrees, plowing backwards into a snow bank, headlights pointing back at the prostrate animal. Quiet, wind, snow falling, no other cars. The deer isn’t making any hasty moves.
I open the door. Cold stings my cheeks and the silence seems to grow louder as I step out into it. My legs are unsteady as I approach the motionless animal. Neck twisting at a strange angle, limbs bending in unusual places, entrails spilling from the point of impact, snow stained red like Italian ice. The doe is extremely dead. Snowflakes fall into the primary wound and melt there immediately. The eyes, of course, stare wildly into nothing, frozen in anticipation. The strain of terror animates the doe’s face in a way no taxidermist could ever duplicate. She is, in a word, beautiful, and her beauty seems to bring the night alive.
I stand there looking at the body for a long time.
There’s an electric tingle in my extremities and behind my eyes when I return to the car. Like the deer, the Buick has no intention of going anywhere. One of its wheels is caught in a ditch and there’s no getting it out. I find, oddly, that this does not upset me. On the contrary, as I begin walking down the highway, I’m struck by a sense of good fortune, a conviction that I am under the guidance of some benevolent force. The blizzard steps itself up, imposing a new topography of drifts and valleys on the landscape. The snow devours any sound. My feet stop crunching and the wind loses its whistle, but I can still feel it on my face and it feels good. Now we’re getting somewhere, I think. Now we’re on our way.
How far do I walk? Miles, I would say, but it might be less, it might be more, it might be anything. No cars pass in either direction and the diner is the first thing I come to, the first outpost of civilization in the forest. My socks are soaked, my ears are numb. The mucus is frozen inside my nose. Twin Pines Diner, the sign says, Open 24 Hours. The snow is deep now. There are four cars in the lot and they look like ruins being reclaimed by the desert’s shifting sands. It takes all the strength I have left to pull the door open through the drift piling up against it.
There are four people inside—three men and a boy, an adolescent. One of the men stands behind the counter in a white apron and paper cap, and the others sit on stools, bellied up to the Formica countertop. The place smells of coffee and breakfast meats. It has a certain anachronistic feel: mini juke boxes in each red leatherette booth, the accordiondoor phone booth in the corner, the checkerboard tile on the floor, the Formica, the paper hat. The rotating vertical pie case reminds me of vacations in the family station wagon when I was young—young enough for the sight of meringue glistening beneath a naked bulb to stir powerful desires.
The three men and the boy are all staring at me with their mouths open, as if I were a tabloid celebrity or an amputee. They form an odd group.
The boy wears a blazer with some sort of crest or coat of arms on the pocket. He has red hair, and it’s difficult to tell if he’s short for his age or just short. He might be the son of the man in the houndstooth jacket, though they don’t occupy adjacent stools.
The potential father is surprisingly tan. His build suggests membership in a health club, perhaps the services of a personal trainer. He sports an olive turtleneck beneath the jacket.
Between him and the boy is a slightly younger man, maybe in his middle thirties, whose face somehow suggests the presence of grizzly scars beneath his clothing. Is it the hunch in his shoulders? The narrow cast of his eyes? He wears a navy pea coat and a two-day beard.
The man behind the counter is the oldest of the bunch. He looks to be pushing sixty, with a deeply lined face and large eyes. Like many large-eyed people and veterans of restaurant work, he projects a certain worldweariness, a sense of sadness and wisdom. He uses his rag to wipe down a sugar dispenser without looking, as if the action has become automatic.
“Didn’t see your car pull in, Mister,” he says, putting down the sugar and picking up the salt.
“Trouble with the car,” I tell him. “Had to walk a ways.” The words come out a little sloppy. My lips are numb from the cold.
The old man beckons me to come sit, and I do. He pours me a cup of coffee. I wrap my hands around the warm mug, moving my face into the path of its steam. Closing my eyes, I can still feel everybody watching me. A nebulous tension fills the room, but I decide that it’s only curiosity—the kind that attaches itself to any group of stranded travelers, that special force of boredom responsible for the moral lassitude of airport bars.
I take a couple sips to thaw my mouth and say, “I hit a deer.” I perform a crude reenactment on the countertop; my coffee mug plays the Buick, and a thimble of non-dairy creamer is the doe. The creamer topples, rolling awkwardly. I pick it up, peel back the lid, and dump the contents into my cup. “My car is stuck in the snow.”
There is a general nodding.
“Like every damn car in the state tonight,” says the turtleneck guy. He claps me on the back in a way I don’t necessarily like. Real chummy, as if we’re old yachting pals, or classmates from Andover. “All of us are up shit creek.” He laughs, but nobody else does. His chuckle has a nervous pitch. I shoot him a look and the hand drops away. His eyes, I see, are small and shifty, jumping around inside their bronze sockets. “I don’t think the tow trucks are running tonight,” he adds, looking away, jabbing a thumb into his mouth to chew the nail.
“No,” I say, observing the smoky swirl of cream in my coffee, “I don’t suppose they are.”
“The phone is out,” says Pea Coat, “even if there were someone for you to call.”
Does he speak with some kind of foreign accent—something Eastern European, some fiefdom of the Russian mob? Difficult to tell; the hard edge in his voice is faint. It might simply have been caused by a past dental misfortune, like a blow to the mouth from a crowbar. His eyes are bright and not jumping anywhere. “And where were you going on a night like this?” he asks me.
I pause over the question. Going, I think. Going going going. “I’m going to Charlotte,” I say, “to be with my family.”
“Long trip,” Turtleneck points out. He gives a low whistle.
“My family needs me,” I say.
“Well you’re lucky then,” says the old man. “And in the meantime, it’s a good thing you found us. You could’ve died out in that storm.”
A brief silence follows; his words hang in the air. The coffee is thick and acidic, like coffee in a diner ought to be.
It’s the boy who speaks next. His voice is high and nasal. “The human body has the capacity for extraordinary endurance. In 1978 a Norwegian man survived the crash of his prop plane, but was stranded on the beach of a deserted fjord for five nights. This is up around the Arctic Circle. He had no food, no source of warmth. An oyster boat eventually rescued him, but nobody could explain how he’d stayed alive that long. Some considered it a miracle, in the literal sense.” The boy pauses to sip his coffee. “That’s ‘literal’ with an ‘e,’ not ‘littoral’ with an ‘o.’”
“All the same,” says the old man, “I’m glad you made it here. Name’s Frank Maxwell. I own this place.” Frank Maxwell offers his hand and I shake it over the counter. The hand is cold, cadaverous, strong.
This starts up a round of formal greeting. Pea Coat says to call him Martin, but it’s not clear if this is a first, a last name, or just what I should call him. Turtleneck, meanwhile, introduces himself as Howard C—— and his surname is immediately familiar to us all by virtue of the international manufacturing conglomerate that’s been operating under it for more than a hundred years. When I ask if he belongs to this corporation’s founding (and still controlling) family, Howard responds with a curt nod. “I do,” he admits. Anxiety haunts the edge of his voice, as if this might be a burdensome, dangerous fact. The boy, on the other hand, is no relation—despite his age, he is, like the rest of us, apparently traveling alone. The boy’s name is Lewis Fountain and he claims to be fourteen years old.
Another lull in the conversation. Outside, the storm intensifies. Snow presses against the windows of the diner. The cars in the parking lot have almost disappeared. But the eerie quiet persists, lending the blizzard a silent-film quality, an element of the unreal.
“My friend,” says Martin, perhaps following my eyes, “you will not get out of here anytime soon. Relax, have a drink. Settle in.” He produces a pewter flask from inside the pea coat and slides it along the counter.
I pick the flask up and observe the inscription, etched on its front side in a looping script: To Our Daughter, Good Luck. Unscrewing the cap, I inhale a pleasantly familiar odor.
“Thanks,” I say. “No place I’d rather be.”
I take a healthy swig and pass the flask to Maxwell, who does the same and passes it on to Howard. Howard swallows his sip and pauses, but then goes ahead and hands the whiskey along to Lewis Fountain, who dumps a shot into his coffee and removes a package of French cigarettes from behind the coat of arms. The polished chrome of his lighter catches the shine of the lamps overhead, flashing like a mirror in the sun.
“Gauloises?” he offers, holding out the pack.
Martin extracts a smoke and sticks it in the corner of his mouth. He leans in to accept a light from the boy and then turns back to me. “I would like to ask you something more,” he says, exhaling through his nose. “If you don’t mind, I would like to ask what happened to the deer. In your accident, I mean.”
For a moment I’m struck by the strange feeling that the question is intensely personal. The mangled deer carcass lies misshapen in the snow of my short-term memory. Martin stares at me with fixed intensity, more expectant than overtly threatening. “She died,” I say.
“Yes,” he replies, nodding, looking down at his hands. “She died. I suppose she did. It is not a surprise.”
“They usually do,” Lewis Fountain interjects, tapping his cigarette on the edge of an ashtray. “Ninety percent of all collisions with an automobile are fatal for deer. Read that someplace. Strange animals,” he says. “Strange animals.”
“Yes,” Martin agrees, “and interesting as well. To me, they are quite interesting.” He pauses, and something about the way he does so gathers the room’s energy around him. When he begins again, his voice is measured, its cadence nice and slow.
I am a drifter. I have no home. When I was eleven I stowed away on a merchant ship to Japan, and this was the last I saw of my parents. Also of my brother and two sisters. I have been without a family since that day.
I have seen death. I have seen more of it than I care to remember, more than a man should. I have seen men shot, hanged, trampled, drowned at sea, consumed by fire. In Turin, I watched a drunk climb into the bear cage at a carnival for a joke.
I have been many places, and I have seen death.
It was very cold where I grew up. Long winters. Father wanted us to be hockey players, and we skated before learning to walk. He took my brother and me out to the lake each afternoon. He dreamed that we would play for the national team, but of course we never did.
One day, when we had finished our practicing, I skated off alone. I was six, maybe seven. Quite young. I skated off alone to a little cove in the lakeshore, an inlet at the mouth of a stream, and there was a buck in the water there. It was huge—ten point, twelve point, maybe more. I know that memory causes things to grow larger, but its head was the size of my entire body. It was standing in the water almost up to its neck, very still. Perfectly still, even as I got close.
I was a fearless, stupid child. I got very close. And then I saw that it was dead. I do not think I even knew what death was until that moment, but suddenly I understood that the buck had died, and I also understood what this meant.
It sounds curious, I know, but the force of this revelation sticks in my head to this day: life is a thing with a beginning and an end.
It seemed like a miracle to me. The buck was frozen in the ice, hard to the touch. Its fur was frozen, its mouth. I put my hands all over the animal’s body. Icicles hung from the nostrils, the antlers, the lips.
The Lord knows how this could have happened, how it could have died standing up like that, but nobody can tell me it is impossible.
Nobody can tell me this.
But there is one part—one part that seems as if I must have dreamed it, although I swear that I did not. Who knows what tricks the memory will play. Still, what I recall more vividly than anything is the blood, which was suspended in a cloud just beneath the surface of the ice, like frozen red smoke.
Can you imagine?
A suspended explosion, right beneath my feet, trapped in the ice. I remember kneeling down, pressing my face close to look. The color of it. It was the first I saw of death and caused me to think, from that very young age, that death is beautiful.
Martin finishes and stabs his cigarette out in the ashtray. He smiles—sadly, I think, the way a man smiles when he looks back on a life filled with terrible mistakes. Shaking his head, he puts the flask back to work, swallows, puts it to work again.
What does this story mean? It seems like a gesture of sudden, bizarre intimacy, and each of us is left to consider separately the altered dynamic of our marooned group. I stare into my mug and the dregs of my coffee stare back. Maxwell tugs his rag along the counter, bobbing his head faintly to some internal rhythm or thought. The coffeemaker goes: drip-drop, drip-drop.
Then Lewis Fountain says, “But it’s not.” We all turn to him. “Beautiful, I mean. A lot of things are beautiful, but death isn’t one of them.” He looks away. “Or, at least, I sure as hell don’t think it is,” he adds, fumbling now for the Gauloises, flashing a shy smile.
I watch Martin eyeing the boy through those narrowed lids. He runs the back of his fingers up one cheek, against the grain of his beard. “Go on,” he says.
Lewis Fountain lights his cigarette with a hand cupped around the flame, as if there were a breeze in the quiet room. He closes the Zippo with a deliberate motion and squints at us through haze. “Look at me,” he says. We look. Red hair, freckles. A face we’ve all seen in our school yearbooks, staring out from group photos of the debate team, the Quiz Bowl squad, the chess club.
I’m fourteen years old. What do I know about death? All four of my grandparents are still alive. But there was an incident at my school not long ago. St. Delamore Hall. You probably know the name.
Our campus backs up on the woods. When I say that deer are strange animals, I speak from experience. They come around all the time. Hunting’s not in style anymore, and most of their natural predators were driven out a long time ago. So there’s too many of them. Rats with antlers—that’s what the townies say. They chew up gardens, get into trash.
And they spook easy. Anything can set them off: a siren, a dog whistle, sunlight on a windshield. We were in the dining hall at lunch one day, and there was a deer out on the rugby field. It was acting strange, running back and forth, hyperkinetic, unnatural. There was something real unnatural about the way that thing moved.
The dining hall has a bank of windows at the south end, and we were all watching this deer. You couldn’t look away—like a car wreck, I guess, although I’ve never seen a car wreck except on TV. A doe. Its head was twitching, its ears, its nose. Real crazy. Back and forth, back and forth, and then it turned and stared in the window. It stopped running around and looked directly into the dining hall. Almost like it had realized we were watching. Like it could feel us watching.
And then it started running toward us.
You should have been there. At first people were laughing, but then the whole room got quiet. Real quiet. And then it came through the window. It jumped straight through the window and landed in front of the salad bar.
Wonder the deer didn’t die right there, but it didn’t. Lots of blood, but it got up and ran out into the hallway. You could hear it going berserk out there. Created a hell of a stir, and none of the teachers knew what to do. They just closed the doors and told us to stay put.
I got out through the service entrance.
You want to talk about beauty? I’ll tell you what that hallway looked like. It looked like it was bleeding. The floor, the walls, the lockers. They were all bleeding.
That doe must have run through four times in each direction, looking for a way out. There was so much blood that it was hard for me to follow the trail. She had gone in and out of the chem lab and Dr. Kroft’s Latin classroom, made circles in the front lobby. The panic must have been insane.
Totally insane.
I found her in the girls’ locker room, collapsed in the shower. She was cut to ribbons, not dead but getting there. Too weak to move, shivering from the blood loss. There was so much blood the drain gurgled with it.
It was one of those big group showers, twenty nozzles on the wall and three drains in the middle of the floor. She was lying in the corner, so I sat down next to her and waited. Everybody else was still locked in the dining hall and the Animal Control people weren’t there yet.
Gurgle, gurgle—that was it. That and the doe trying to breathe.
I don’t know how long I was in there. Ten minutes, an hour. The guys from the county showed up eventually with their tranquilizer guns, but there wasn’t anything left for them to do. I spent the rest of the day with the school psychologist, talking about how I want to fuck my mother or whatever. Goddamn two-bit quack.
Smoke rings. Lewis Fountain blows four of them, then shoots a miniature fifth ring through the last one’s center.
Martin holds out the flask. “When did all this happen?” he asks.
The boy takes a slug. “Yesterday,” he says. “I stole one of the school vans this afternoon and started driving.”
Interesting. Maxwell takes the coffee pot off its burner and pours us all another round. “That storm doesn’t look like it means to let up,” he says. “I don’t suppose the cops’ll find you. Not tonight, anyway.” He smiles at the boy. His smile is thin, touched by a certain complexity.
“They’ll never take me,” says Lewis Fountain.
Installing a fresh smoke in the corner of his mouth, he wrist-flicks the lighter open and rolls it smartly on his thigh to spark the flame. Leaning back, he empties the remainder of the whiskey into his coffee.
“Jesus,” Howard says, standing up, “we need more liquor.” He gestures to Lewis Fountain, tapping two fingers against his mouth. “Gimme one of those.” The boy holds out the Gauloises, shaking the pack until a single filter protrudes. Howard snaps it up, stabs it into his mouth, snatches the lighter, and clicks three times before the flint catches. He puffs twice, sneering slightly, but you can tell by the way he smokes that Howard is no smoker. He holds the butt a little too stiffly in his hand and places it too much in the center of his mouth. He is sweating. Droplets collect in his eyebrows and bead on his nose. “I’ve got a story too,” he says. “I’ve got a story of my own.” He begins pacing the aisle in front of the counter. We have to turn all the way around on our stools to face him. We wait. His penny loafers slap the tile, slap, slap, slap.
Last year. This was last year, in Vermont. I was driving back from Stowe and it was late and snowing. A night kind of like this. Not a blizzard, I guess, but it was snowing all right, snowing plenty.
I was on a little two-lane highway outside Irasville, totally deserted. I hit a deer—just like you, friend, I hit a deer. Only the car was fine. The SUV, I should say, and I didn’t even hit the damn thing square, but I stopped to see if it was dead or alive. It seemed like the right thing to do.
Look, you can all guess the kind of money I grew up with, but that doesn’t make me a bad person. Morality has nothing to do with class. My family is well known, powerful, and subject to a great deal of scrutiny. This brings with it a certain set of pressures and challenges, but I’m not asking for sympathy. I’ve always done my best to fly right and be my own man.
So I stopped to see about the deer and, in fact, it was still alive, but I had crushed its back legs. They were trailing after the damn thing like a couple of neckties. Totally limp. It had dragged itself off the road using only the front two, and was trying to get back to the woods that way, but it was no go.
Disturbing as hell to watch. It didn’t look real. The way those animals move—it never looks real to me: jerky, quick, and then they glide. I don’t know. They look like fucking string puppets or something, and this hurt buck even more so. It was scary, but I couldn’t leave the damn thing that way. Just didn’t seem right.
There weren’t a lot of other cars out there at that hour—not that there ever are—but I flagged down the first one that came by and told the guy to call the cops when he got to town.
Then I sat down to wait. I mean I went right out and sat down in the snow beside that buck. I don’t know why, but that’s what I did. He had stopped trying to move. It was cold, but I had my ski jacket, and I decided just to wait until the police showed up. Like it was the least I could do or something. But those cops took their sweet time—an hour passed, two hours. And the buck wasn’t dying either. It just couldn’t move.
I didn’t know what to do, so I started talking to it. I started telling it things. I just said whatever came into my head—about my life, about how I was sorry for hitting it, about whatever. I know it sounds strange, but I had to pass the time some way. People will do weird things in a spot like that.
So I’m talking to this deer. I’m talking and talking. And then it starts talking back. The damn deer starts talking back to me. I mean it wasn’t actually talking, but it was blinking its eyes—like Morse code or something.
And what’s more, I started to understand what it was saying. Not directly, but I started to get this idea in my head of what the deer was trying to tell me. I can’t explain it—you’re all gonna think I’m nuts, but there was this idea in my head, and I hadn’t put it there myself. I’m telling you, that deer was talking to me. It was inside my fucking head.
The damn thing was telling me to kill it.
I tried. There was a crowbar in the back of my Navigator, so I went and got it. I went and got it and stood there over that goddamn buck.
Hell of a thing to kill.
Hell of a thing to kill.
I took a swing—a good swing. Hit it dead in the face. But that didn’t do the trick. Set the thing twitching and freaking out, but didn’t kill it. Snapped its jaw—the bone was hanging out with a few teeth flapping in the wind.
But I couldn’t finish it. The way that blow felt going up my arms, the sound of its bones cracking. I just sat back down in the snow and watched that fucking deer twitching and flopping around with its jawbone hanging out.
Cops got there after a while. They just walked right up and shot it like taking out the garbage. No ceremony whatsoever. Told jokes while they did it. Like taking out the fucking garbage.
Is Howard crying? He hands his butt to Lewis Fountain, apparently for disposal, and bites his finger like a child. Nobody says anything. It’s hard to distinguish tears from sweat, but the quiet jerking of his shoulders touches the place in my memory occupied by a thousand moments of domestic pain. We all look away.
Maxwell is wiping down the napkin dispenser. We wait. He stops wiping and examines his reflection in the polished chrome. Howard blows his nose. Lewis Fountain lights another cigarette. Martin is rubbing his hands together slowly, back and forth, back and forth. The old man sighs and takes off his paper hat. His forehead is large, giving way eventually to sparse gray hair. “Shit,” he says, drawing a bottle out from underneath the counter. Scotch—and not the kind they drink in Bridgehampton. We pass it around, and the stuff goes down easy as a clump of steel wool. Maxwell drinks last and longest. He does it like a man who knows his way around a bottle of bad Scotch.
“Sometimes it feels like I’ve been alive forever,” he says, “forever and a goddamn day.”
His eyes stare out over our heads, as if all that time might be visible in the distance, silhouetted against the horizon. “But I was only in love once. Maybe one time is all anybody really gets. I don’t know. I was young and full of shit, and I was in love.”
“And was she beautiful?” Martin asks.
“Sure,” Maxwell says, “sure, why not. Very beautiful.”
“What did she look like?” Howard wants to know. He dabs at his cheeks with a linen handkerchief.
“Close your eyes,” Maxwell tells him, and we all close our eyes. “Now picture the first girl you were ever in love with,” the old man says. But that’s not what I do. I do not picture Veronica Phipps glossing her lips in the back row of trigonometry class, lovely and pliable as she was in the matinee balconies and cow pastures of forever ago. I picture my wife instead: Helen building castles with our children on a sun-drenched strip of Carolina Beach; Helen in the window of a French restaurant, laughing at the joke of some greasy waiter, flashing her open-ended smile; Helen with that coffee mug raised above her head, cocked to throw; Helen in the glare of my headlights in the snow; Helen behind the wheel of a late-model Buick, cresting a rise on the highway, bearing down on me at a high rate of speed. “Looked about like that,” Maxwell says, “only he wasn’t a girl. He definitely wasn’t a girl.”
The old man pauses for two beats and a shadow moves across him, a faint darkening of the features, those big eyes wandering off into the snowstorm night.
This was a long time ago, a long way from here. Northeast Ohio, what they now call the Rust Belt, and you better believe they call it that for a reason. We were just finding out back then. Hard times. Hard to explain, too, the way it felt.
Our mill had just closed down. Wasn’t much left after that. A lot of people were leaving, but the ones who stayed were leaving too. Every week another car would drive into the river. Or an old woman who couldn’t pay the utility would freeze to death. Or somebody else would hang himself in a barn.
Some just disappeared.
I guess hard times are like that anywhere. Same thing happened sooner or later to all those factory towns—happened to Pittsburgh, even—but it was strange enough to watch. Everybody looked older than they should have, like the whole damn place was turning into a ghost of itself.
My father sold shoes, but people stopped buying shoes. He hit the bottle and it hit him back. This boy, this boy I had, his father shut himself in the basement the day after the mill closed and didn’t come out. He’d been a shift foreman, doing pretty well for himself. Had a big Brunswick pool table down in that cellar, and what I remember best about their house is the sound of the balls clicking against each other underneath you.
It was always there, soft, so you might not even notice it exactly. But it was always there, even late. Any time of the night.
His wife had to bring the money in, so she started a little business hand-making these special dolls. Fancy ones, real life-like. Sold them to high-end toy stores in Cleveland. God knows where she ever learned to do a thing like that. I can see her like yesterday, sitting at the dining room table with a pile of horse manes from the knacker’s yard. That’s how she did the hair. Damn house was disturbing as hell, and I never liked to go there.
You can imagine what it was to be in love in a place like that, especially the way we had to hide it. Nowadays you can’t turn on the television without seeing faggots on parade. They’re everywhere. Things were different then.
Had a place in the woods where we’d go to be alone, a hunting cabin I knew. Just a lean-to, a falling down shack. No heat, no way to make a fire. This was winter and we would hike in from the road with a sleeping bag. I’m sure there was someplace easier we could have gone. Always snow on the ground in those days, and the walk was at least a mile. But that cabin was our spot and we went there. Couldn’t say exactly why. I guess it was partly the silence of the woods in winter.
Nothing else like it in the world.
But that wasn’t the strange part. Biggest window in the cabin was on the western wall where the sun came in in the afternoons. It went right down to the floor, and that was where we always spread the bag out. And that’s how I started noticing the deer. Or how the deer started noticing us.
Through the window.
Sometimes it was just one or two, sometimes more. Once I counted six. At first I would only hear them moving away when we had finished, but then I started looking. As soon as we began, they’d be there, standing and watching.
Just standing and watching.
The four of us are sitting and watching, bodies perched on the edges of our stools. We wait to see if Maxwell will say more, but he falls quiet.
“Were you afraid?” Howard asks, looking afraid himself.
The old man shakes his head, a slow and definite motion. “Not of the deer. Maybe at first, but after a while it seemed to make sense.”
“But it doesn’t,” Howard protests. “It doesn’t make any damn sense.”
Maxwell opens his hands and spreads them apart, palms up. “It seemed to at the time,” he repeats.
“And this boy?” Martin inquires. “What became of this boy?”
Maxwell’s eyes return to the room. They make a full circuit of it, not in any kind of rush.
“We got found out.”
He begins to fold his hat on the Formica, first one way, then the other. That noise of paper rustling, like wind kicking up dead leaves. “I guess it was inevitable. Some things happened that weren’t very pleasant.”
“And you left,” I say. It’s the first I’ve spoken in a long time. The sound of my voice is sudden and strange, spilled out in a jumble on the countertop.
“Yes,” Maxwell answers. His lips curl briefly into a smile, but not the happy kind. “And I never went back.”
Never, I think, turning the word over in my brain, examining it from various angles. Never never never never never.
“What was his name?” Lewis Fountain asks, speaking through his lovely blue cloud.
“Theodore,” Maxwell says, not very loud. “His name was Theodore.” The sound of these words drifts away—I feel that I can see it drifting, dissipating into the night like coffee steam, cigarette smoke. Like anything that floats off and dissolves.
Silence descends on us again, like a bird of prey, silence like death itself. I become aware, as the quiet intensifies, that my feet are itching and my head hurts. My mouth is a little dry. That liquor hasn’t done me any favors, and neither has the burly coffee. I can’t remember the last time I ate or had a shower. But none of this alarms me; it all just seems to be part of the situation, like the weather, the checkered floor tiles, the stale smell of smoke, the way Martin sits with one palm pressed against his temple and his dark eyes closed. Looking down, I see that my clothes are disheveled. My shirt is half untucked, my shoes both untied. My pricey wristwatch is no longer on my wrist. Looking up, I see Maxwell staring hard into the middle distance again.
I begin to wonder how I got here.
Fear gets inside of you, I know, and eats away the best part of what you have. Sitting there on my stool in the Twin Pines Diner, I’m struck by a force of nostalgia so powerful that it makes me shudder, and this, too, I think, is a kind of fear, an apprehension that the best of life is already behind you.
You see it all the time. Does anybody remember, says the old woman on the bus, when they gave me a tiara and made me queen of the strawberry festival? Nobody does. The other passengers turn away, pretending not to hear. She must be crazy, senile, ineffectively medicated. But her emotions are not unfamiliar—all she really means is that her happiness ended too soon, like happiness always does, and she wants to hold onto the memories. So why not offer a little sympathy?
But then again, why are you all alone on this bus, Strawberry Queen, babbling to yourself in a foul-smelling housecoat? Where’s your family, with all your blue-eyed grandchildren, who wrestle each other for the right to sit on your knee? What have you done to drive them away?
My own memories are simple, or at least they travel in simple images—Helen in the shadows of our porch, the children playing in our yard. That kind of thing. I think back to summertime vacations down at the shore, all of us piling into the station wagon and arriving by evening at the carnival there on the promenade, which seemed at the time like an extension of our hopefulness, our faith in life: the smell of cotton candy, the arc of the Ferris wheel, the spinning teacups on the teacup ride. Gaudy colors, giddy music, the laughter of euphoric kids. Standing on the boardwalk at night, the lights were like a magician’s trick, throwing strange shapes on the ocean, designs that would shimmer and shift. Concentrating on the seductive power of these recollections, I can almost feel the light breeze that would come up off the water, stirring an ancient sense of possibility in the soul, something from the depths of our cultural subconscious, from somewhere far back in the seafaring history of man.
But maybe it wasn’t that way at all.
Maybe my son threw up on the tilt-o-whirl, and a clown scared my daughter half to death with his balloon animals, the suggestiveness and obscenity of their shapes, and we eventually found ourselves standing there, Helen and I, drenched in the rancid water of the log flume, arguing over which one of us had locked the keys in the car, while the children wailed like air-raid sirens at our feet.
Or maybe we never really went to the shore at all, and I’m just thinking of some movie I’ve seen, some Disney thing about a square-jawed hero and his obedient, adoring family, or else maybe a slasher flick in which the clowns all carry butcher knives in their oversized red shoes.
“I lied,” says Howard, very quiet now. “I lied before about what that deer was telling me. It wasn’t telling me to kill it.”
He tilts his head back, fixes his eyes on the ceiling. “It was telling me to kill myself.”
The words settle in the room like snow.
I don’t know who sees them first. It seems, although I know this is unlikely, as if we all see them at exactly the same moment, emerging from the darkness outside the diner’s lights, a disparate movement in the nighttime at first, coalescing into a throng of shadows advancing in unison, as if possessed of a single consciousness. There are hundreds of them: bucks, does, little knock-kneed fawns. There may be thousands, coming forward, their outlines gradually gaining faces, their dark eyes becoming visible, but still in perfect silence.
“Teddy,” Maxwell whispers. “Teddy, Teddy, Teddy.”
There is only that, and then finally the sound of the velvet of their antlers tapping on the glass of the windows slowly, slowly, gentle at first.
