Wounded Deer

This piece is an autofictional seed for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call. It inspired this other piece.

Buck is drinking Budweiser as he drives his kid home after Easter dinner at his mom’s trailer down in Lexington. Buck is lucky, he is very lucky that these roads are almost always completely empty, nothing but Confederate ghosts and mists and deer around here. He and his kid Shelly live in Blair, which is an hour away from Lexington. And Lexington is nowhere really, so Blair is even less of a place up in rural parts of South Carolina above Columbia.

The fruity smell of beer mixes with the stink of Marlboro Red butts overflowing the ashtray in Buck’s crappy Toyota truck. Shelly leans hard against the passenger door like she’s trying to phase through it. She presses her cheek to the window. It is cold on this Easter night and the woods are extra dark, spookier than usual. Something about Easter always gets to her. Resurrection is so weird. The window fogs up from her breath and she draws a cross in it.

Shelly is bloated and bleeding like Jesus. Well, Jesus wasn’t bloated. But cramps and crucifixion don’t seem so different to her at the moment. She’s not father-forsaken like Jesus, but her body has forsook her for three years now. It started like any other girl’s puberty when her right boob bud popped out. She felt the lump and the ache one day while she was taking a bath. She was certain she had breast cancer. She was always reading her mom’s magazines unsupervised and worrying about things like cancer and abortion. Or malaria for some reason. Bodily functions being gross and mortifying, it took Shelly a while to break the news to her mom that she was dying of breast cancer. Her mom laughed at her, told her she was “developing” and took her to K-Mart to buy an ill-fitting training bra. Within a year Shelly got her first period and both Buck and her mom started simultaneously hitting their respective bottoms. So it was all Shelly’s body’s fault. Her approach to oestrus had somehow psychically dismantled her parents.

Buck looks over at her with sad Paul McCartney eyes. If she was twelve it wouldn’t be like this, she wouldn’t be like this. Shelly reminds him so much of her mom, who broke his fucking heart all to hell. Her mom was fifteen when they met, same age Shelly is now. Shelly has the exact same voice as her mom. If Buck isn’t looking directly at her, and hard, he can’t tell if it’s his kid or the love of his life talking to him. But lately, Shelly hasn’t been talking at all. When she does deign to speak to him, she’s meaner than a snake.

The biggest problem with Shelly’s body is that it’s real. And not just because of the gross stuff, the things that come out, the smells. Shelly wants to be perfect and beautiful, like the models in her mom’s Cosmopolitan magazines. She spends a lot of time trying on thrift store jeans and dresses, turning around and around in front of a dusty full-length mirror propped against the wall in her room. She would go out to the living room where Buck sat on the couch drinking white Zinfandel which he didn’t mind sharing with Shelly. He’d pour some wine in a little jelly jar for her and she’d ask him what he thought of her clothes. He would invariably say, “It’s enough to make a grown man cry.” She stopped asking his opinion of her outfits after a while, but she never refused the wine.

Buck lights a cigarette and cracks his window. He sighs out smoke enough to fill the cab. Shelly coughs and cracks her window. Buck turns up the tape deck. The Beatles blast clean and clear out of bespoke speakers, the only quality part of this shit vehicle. Shelly sings along with The Beatles, loud, but doesn’t look at Buck or pick her face up off the passenger side window. The smell of Budweiser and Marlboro Red smoke reminds her of her Grandpa Joe, who died when she was too little to know what a bastard he’d been. It was like no woman in Shelly’s family could pick a man that wasn’t an alcoholic or an asshole or both. The smell of Budweiser and Marlboro Reds is what a man’s supposed to smell like. It smells like love and safety and Shelly breathes it in deep because it makes being here a little less horrible.

She never had a choice about being here on this black country road with her drunkass dad. Almost a year ago her mom and Buck packed up all her shit one day while she was at school and Buck drove her away to live in this fucked up redneck nowheresville. Before that unholy day, she had not seen Buck for three years. She used to spend summers with him before he went to rehab for his coke problem, before her mom went off the rails in an extended manic phase that will go undiagnosed for years.

Buck says he can’t afford to pay city rent, so he and Shelly live in a hunting cabin. Buck’s best friend Byron owns the cabin and doesn’t keep it up. The floor is just bare plywood. They don’t have any neighbors, a telephone, or a proper roof so when it rains hard enough, it rains on Shelly’s bed. There’s only one bedroom. Buck let her have it when they moved in, thinking he was being gallant by taking the couch. They didn’t know about the leaky ceiling until the night a hurricane blew through. Buck tried to get Shelly to cuddle with him on the couch. She sat up all night in an armchair instead. Buck kept one of his many guns stashed under the cushion of that armchair. Every time Shelly woke from dozing that night, she’d reach under the cushion to make sure the gun was still there. She was like a broody hen sitting on this thing that could hatch a bullet. And neither of them knew who was gonna get it when the thing cracked.

During hunting season men Shelly does not know string deer up by their hooves from the trees behind the cabin. They cut the deer open and skin off their hides.

Shelly’s mood was blackened tonight because her grandma sewed her a new Easter dress she didn’t like and refused to wear. Grandma got all butthurt about it and Easter dinner was basically ruined. Buck drank the whole time and made jokes, trying to kid his mom out of feeling bad because Shelly wasn’t twelve anymore. She didn’t want to wear things her grandma thought were nice, which made sense to Buck. Shelly appreciated him taking her side but felt weird about it too. Like now she has to be nice to him because he stuck up for her. All she really wants is to go home, back to wherever her mom is because that’s her true home. But nobody knows where her mom is. So she is stuck in this stinking truck with Buck.

She does not mean to rhyme so much but sometimes she can’t help herself.

Buck starts singing along with the Beatles too. He actually has a good voice but Shelly rolls her eyes at him.

No, she will not need him, she will not feed him when he’s sixty-four.

She watches the husk of a burnt-out plantation house blur in the night as they speed by it. Buck swerves as he finishes his beer, throws the empty can out the window, and cracks a fresh one.

The truck’s headlights beam into a patch of thick forest. As they enter it Shelly doesn’t notice, but a deer darts out of the woods and starts running alongside the truck. The deer is stunningly fast, keeping up with the truck and who knows why a deer would want to run apace with a shitty primer-patched truck anyway? Could the deer not smell the dried blood of her brethren that stained the bed of this heap? If it weren’t so dark the deer would see the truck is mostly the color of blood except for the parts that are gray.

The deer catches up to the passenger side window. Buck nudges Shelly like holy shit, do you see that?! She scoffs, like duh. He guns the engine, taking the lead. He’s actually racing a fucking deer. The truck slips and slides around the curves of the long and winding road. Buck takes this race against nature and reason and what was once reality in stride with the confidence and security only a drunk man behind the wheel can conjure. Shelly grabs the oh-shit bar above her window. She thinks of her mom and Grandpa Joe and doesn’t mind that maybe she’s about to die, that her dad is just drunk and stupid and crazy enough to kill them both tonight. The deer is leaping over the curves, practically flying. Just another goddamn thing to normalize out here, racing a flying speed deer on Easter night. Maybe Buck will kill Shelly when he crashes, which he is certainly going to do. He’ll have to live with the guilt for the rest of his life. She wonders if Grandpa Joe still smells like Budweiser and Marlboro Reds even though he’s probably in hell. Hopefully, she won’t go there to find out. Grandpa Joe probably smells like rotten eggs now.

Buck and the deer race for miles, for hours it feels like. Shelly lets go of the oh-shit bar. She relaxes into the velocity of the truck. Buck spins the steering wheel around like it’s the helm of a ship on rough seas. He’s laughing so hard, yipping and yelping and almost, but not quite, belting out rebel yells. Shelly thinks she must be already dead because clearly this is eternity and she’s pissed because Buck is still fucking here in her afterlife. She looks out her window and watches the deer run so fast it can’t be real. Then everything slows down like the deer and the truck have hit a warp speed. It feels like they’re not moving anymore, like they’re in a tunnel of red and white light boring through the woods, taking them toward inevitable conclusions. Then for no good reason, the deer suddenly turns into the cliche of the truck’s headlights.

The normal laws of time and space fall back into place. Buck hits the deer with a thud that will make Shelly sick to her stomach for the rest of her life. Shelly will hear the thud and feel Buck’s arm fling across her chest to keep her from flying through the windshield because, of course, she is not wearing a seatbelt. Of course, the seatbelt is broken. The back of Buck’s hand lands on the soft pillow of his daughter’s right breast, the one she thought was going to kill her when it sprouted. Shelly will feel that for the rest of her life too, the way his backhand smacks and burns her.

It isn’t hunting season so the gun rack in the truck’s back window is empty. Buck unlatches the glovebox by Shelly’s knees and reaches in to grab the pistol he keeps there. Shelly recoils from his hand, from the gun. The dim little light in the glovebox illuminates a small aerosol can of English Leather cologne, a Christmas gift Shelly got for him when she was like eight.

Buck opens his door and climbs out, a little wobbly from all the beer and excitement. The Beatles are still blasting and Shelly is not prepared for what her dad’s about to do. She looks at him standing in the bright beam of the headlights. Mist swirls around him. The black woods that surround them are alive with crickets and frog song. The Confederate ghosts feel active and close. The impossibly black sky is impossibly full of billions of stars above them. Some of the stars fall every few minutes. She can see the Milky Way. A yellow egg-shaped moon hangs over the split in the forest cover over the road. She has to pee and she can feel the makeshift pad she’s using is starting to fail.

“Dad. I’m cold,” she says.

She closes her eyes, puts her hands over her ears, and waits. Nothing happens. Buck is taking too long. She opens her eyes and sees her dad still standing there, looking down at the deer on the road. He is wearing a green beanie over his stringy black hair and his dress-up flannel shirt and his army surplus jacket. He is an elegant man despite his very country drunken dumbassery. She loved him when she was twelve. She wore the stupid dresses her grandma made her then and she loved them too, she loved the way little pieces of all her Easter and Christmas dresses would end up in patchwork quilts that kept her warm.

“What’s happening?” Shelly yells over the Beatles. She reaches to click the tape deck off. Buck doesn’t answer. He just flaps his wrist, gesturing for her to come out. But she doesn’t even open the door.

“Dad. What’s going on?”

“Get out here and look,” he says.

The door creaks as Shelly pushes it open. “Be quiet!” Buck stage whispers.

“Ok! God!” she stage whispers back.

She walks to the front of the truck and looks down though she doesn’t want to look down.

The deer is lying on her side, shuffling her hooves against the road. Shelly counts nine arrows sticking out of the deer’s body, through her neck and her flanks and her sides, everywhere. The deer turns her head and looks up at Shelly and she has the face of a human woman, the face, in fact, of Frida Kahlo. Shelly and Buck have never seen or even heard of Frida Kahlo or her paintings so it seems highly unlikely that this wounded deer that just raced Buck and then lept in front of his truck is actually Kahlo’s Wounded Deer. If a painting nobody in this scene has ever seen comes to life does it really exist?

The wounded deer never breaks eye contact with Shelly. She struggles up on her hooves and says, “Vamos.” But Shelly just stares and counts the arrows again. Nueve. Every arrow is for a reason, Shelly understands that, but the reasons are all in Spanish and she’s taking French. So she doesn’t understand.

The wounded deer says, “Vamos,” again and there are thousands of fathoms of sorrow and pity and pain and love in her eyes.

Shelly understands and she doesn’t understand so she stands there frozen in the intersection of her great teenage confusion.

The wounded deer turns away, arrows quivering in their wounds. The white reflection of the deer’s tail flickers like a candle and fades as she runs into the cursed woods of this terrible state.