Fuck it, Deardra was saying, we need to move on to Phase Two before it’s too late. If we wait for this goddamn assessment, then the project will get all clogged up in the permitting process because John fucking Mackintosh never works during the holidays. John Mackintosh, he’s the fucking building inspector. Fuck. We need to launch Phase Two next month at the latest, Deardra was saying. Next fucking month, she was saying into her phone when the deer stumbled into the road.
It was not that lively, vaulting explosion that comes from the trees like the very spirit of the earth, crossing a lane, two lanes, the whole road to strike your car, as if you’d been chosen among the many to be the one, the one who touches the flighty essence of nature, only to drag its red lifeblood along the black tar. It was not like that.
Nor was it the pale, spectral, unmoving stare of eyes that appear in the night to eat up your headlights and turn them back on you, spilling out the luminous horror of your mechanical existence, waiting patiently as you swerve and screech toward the inevitable. It wasn’t like that, either. No. The deer tottered, lurched, floundered in the lowlight, as if its knees were not joints but clefts, the bones only held together by sinew and cheap magic. It bungled from the shoulder of the road, spilled over that white line, and collapsed like a chair giving out.
Deardra clipped the deer. She turned the wheel in a panic and the car drifted onto the shoulder, plowed through the soft barrier of snack packages and beer cans and piss-filled water bottles and finally nestled in a grassy divot.
Fucking fuck, Deardra said into her phone. I’ve got to call you back. I just. Fuck. Just get the ball rolling with John Mackintosh. Phase Two, next month. Got it? She hung up and looked into the rearview mirror. There was the glow of the city on the horizon. There were no other headlights beaming around the curve. But there, on the road, she saw the lump, eking out some final anguished squirms.
Deardra killed the engine and opened the door and smelled the burnt rubber and heard the hiss of the bugs who lived in the trees, which rose up on either side of the state highway like a great, knotted forest but which were, in reality, only a thin veneer between the humans in their cars and the other humans in their stripped malls and plastic homes. She could see her breath. She went to the front of her car and saw no dents, no steam erupting from the hood. She ran her hand along the headlight. All was intact. She heard the gasps of a doomed mammal behind her. She wasn’t going to look at it. It was clearly a sick, deteriorating being, bound for death long before her arrival. She wasn’t going to, but then she was moving toward it because the cricket song and the moonlight and the bacteria in your gut can conspire to strip you of your free will and press you into the service of another, dirtier and older, appetite.
As she approached the animal, she saw a thin slab of meat, an ear perhaps, strewn in the grass. It smelled, but it was not the metallic, hormonal stench of ripe death. There was a half-digested current in the air, rotting fruit or a burst colon. There were more small bits about, a piñata’s curdled candy.
Deardra came upon the central hunk of parts. One limb jutted out, performing a meaningless, staccato dance of abject pain. The deer’s nose was nudging toward the sky, as if to get the air’s attention. It was all wrong, though. All wrong. The foremost limb had too many joints, and inside the broken skin she could see another skin. Underneath the dead eye of the deer, another eye, wet and raving.
What the fuck, Deardra said, turning on her phone’s flashlight. The fuck is this? No, no. Fuck. Fucking shit, she said. Are you? What the fuck? This is bad, she whispered under her breath, because she could see that it was a man.
He was wrapped in the skin of the deer, its spotted back draped over his torso, its skulless face stretched over his like a mask, a jawbone full of teeth hanging off at a precarious angle, revealing the man’s lips, smeared with blood and mucus. He held a metal pole in each hand to elongate his arms into hoofed forelegs. These, too, had been wrapped in deerskin, though the whole disintegrating getup was in tatters, exploded over the pavement on impact. Deardra could see now that the deer’s twitching limb was the man’s left arm, which was fractured, the bone protruding through the skin at the elbow. The man’s legs were strapped with belts so that they stayed bent at the knees, where more prosthetic poles were attached with little cups and an intricate harness. The stomach of the deer hide had ripped open, and she could see the man’s genitals hanging there, the tip of his penis just skimming the asphalt. The overall effect was not of a man in a deer suit but of a man held captive by roadkill.
What the fuck, Deardra repeated. Are you okay? He clearly was not. His blood was forging river channels in the cartography of the asphalt, flowing toward the trees. She looked at the man in the single eye that peeked out from below the deer’s mangled jaw. It was glistening, accusing her of something with its witnessing. The fuck is this? she said. I was just driving. I was just . . . what the fuck were you doing out here? she asked. What the fuck?
The man vocalized. It was a kind of kazoo sound, all from the throat. The noise meant nothing to Deardra, but the man was also lifting his chin up and thrusting his throat out in a communicative way. She saw that there was a black collar on his neck, beneath the deer hide, with a little case on it. Deardra reached out, the smell so strong now that she could feel her hand pushing through it. She opened the plastic case and pulled from it a tiny, rolled up slip of paper.
She unraveled the scroll and read it. It said, i have chosen to live as a deer. this is a spiritual and scientific endeavor that i am engaged in of my own accord. in all legal matters, treat me as wildlife. please do not intervene.
She looked at the man, and he was sort of nodding and making more kazoo noises. The night was stronger than ever. It could almost snuff out the distant blush of the city. It would be easy to believe in anything now, to let the lines between all things muddle, to slip into your body and its superstitions, to let the road be a path and the trees be the woods and the man be a deer and the collision be a prophecy and the swell of life be its own swift and fathomless mystery. You could blend into the hash of shadows without anyone’s permission, without even trying, in a moment like this.
But no. Deardra was sharp. She would not disintegrate into that other world.
Fucking idiot, Deardra said. So you want to be a deer? I don’t give a shit, she said to the man. You can frolic and . . . I don’t know, do whatever the fuck you do. But why the fucking road? Don’t you know what happens to deer?
Kazoo noises. His arm was still flittering, the blood still pooling. Still, no more cars appeared on the road.
You know what, fuck you, Deardra said. This isn’t my problem. I’m calling an ambulance. I’m sorry, but this is your fault, she said.
No, the man said. Please, he said. His voice was thin from pain or disuse or, perhaps, the blood pooling in his throat. His eye was locked on her, and he was repeating his words weakly. No. Please.
Deardra paused for a moment, her finger on the phone, ready to dial. Please do not intervene. But had the man considered her before he stepped out into the road? Had he read the laws about vehicular manslaughter? Had he weighed the fact that someone might be on the cusp of launching a new phase in a very important project? Why should he get away with this bullshit? Deardra thought. What gives a man the right to put on the rotting hide of an ungulate and wander through the semi-urban landscape, knowing full well that there are cars speeding along the roads with people inside who are trying very hard to just get on with their lives?
Seriously, fuck you, Deardra said. Look what you did. You went into the road. Everyone knows what happens to deer in the road. Why did you try to cross the fucking road? Deardra asked. Why? Tell me, she screamed.
The man coughed and then he said, better grass. Deardra looked at him, and he was staring across the road with a crooked smile on his face. She started laughing. She shook her head and laughed and dialed 911.
Better grass, she said. You fucking joker. You can’t eat grass, buddy. I hate to break it to you. I don’t even think deer eat grass, she said. They eat like . . . plants.
Someone picked up her call and asked Deardra about the nature of her emergency.
I hit a deer, she said. I mean, it wasn’t a deer. It was a man, she said.
As she answered the operator’s follow-up questions, she realized that this was going to be a long and complicated affair. And she noticed the man moving. He was hoisting himself up with the pole, using the strength of his one unbroken arm, trying desperately to lift his back legs high enough to get the prosthetic hooves planted on the ground. There’s no way, thought Deardra. She couldn’t see how he had ever walked like this, even with four good limbs. He kept collapsing like a soggy, broken tent until, finally, he started dragging himself with his one good arm, through the loose gravel and broken glass and plastic refuse, toward the trees.
Deardra watched the man struggle and heard the voice of the 911 operator echoing through the telephone. Many thoughts blossomed in her mind about police and lawyers and her grown daughter and deadlines and money and John Mackintosh. Would he get her permits done in time?
She saw headlights appear on the road, slicing up the world. She was sure it was the ambulance. No civilian would be allowed such lustrous LEDs. She hung up the phone and held out her arm, hailing the blinding apparition. The lights didn’t slow down, but she kept her confident hand raised. It was not her fault. She was not the guilty party. She would project authority in all interactions with the coming officials. She would be the dominant animal.
Deardra felt the suction as a girthy pickup truck whooshed past her, slurping the air from her lungs.
The darkness fresh in her eyes, she stumbled away from the road. Fucker, she called out half-heartedly in the direction of the taillights. She went and sat in the grass, not too close but not too far from the man. She felt the bumps on her skin rubbing against her clothes, the bulb of despair climbing up her throat. Only now did she hear sirens in the distance and see the blue and red lights dancing on the evergreen spires. Only now did she feel the length of her exhaustion.
Hey, she called out to the man. He had nearly reached the thin woods. Hey. Hey, I want to ask you something, she said. The man didn’t stop. He crept his conglomerated body forward with another arduous heave.
What’s it like, then? she asked. What’s it like to be a fucking deer?
The man didn’t answer. He pulled his mess one more inch through the landscape. His breaths were heavy, his kazoo noises faint. Gently, the man laid his deer head on the root of a highway tree.
***
Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen
