The Dark Dark

by Samantha Hunt

  When I was growing up the land around here was different. Mostly there were a lot of soybean farms, hog farms, and wide, wide tracts of government-owned land where every now and then you’d see men digging with bright lights late at night, looking for natural gas. Sometimes the gas diggers would wake me up when I was a girl. Their lights were so bright it was easy to imagine they were coming from an alien’s spaceship. The gas-well sites were all connected by long straight roads on the government land. These roads went on forever and, driving down them, it became easy to imagine the roads were closing up behind my parents’ car, sealing us in. No one could follow us. Or no one else existed. My brother, sister, and I would stare out the back window watching where we’d once been disappear.

  It’s not like that anymore. As soon as they didn’t find much gas, the government sold the land off to developers, makers of strip malls.

  When we were young, there was a man named Pete who lived around here. Pete kept a wild deer as a pet. Everyone said that Pete had done things with the deer, though I don’t see how they could know that. It was a small town. Rumors spread. Soon people started saying even more. They said that Pete had done things with his own daughter also, and there might have been some truth to that. She had been taken away by the state. People didn’t know why but they guessed why. The spookiest part of the whole story, and the reason people suspected him, is because Pete named the deer after his daughter, Jennifer. He’d call the deer, “JENNIFER. JENNIFER.” You could hear him at night. “JENNIFER. JENNIFER.” Slowly. And the deer would come when called, as if it were a dog and not a wild creature. She’d come to him.

  I’ve been thinking about Pete lately, about how messed up people are by sex, by other people, because despite his failings as a human being—I liked Pete. He knew a lot about the woods, about nature. He knew which kind of mushrooms you could eat and which would kill you. He collected the old seed pods of water chestnuts. They looked like hard black stars. He told me when deer are young they have no scent. That way, before the deer can walk, their mothers can hide them in the tall grass, and as long as the mother goes away, no predators will find the babies. Some divine plan. Almost. Pete found Jennifer when she was just a fawn. He’d stumbled onto her in a field. Her mother must have been killed by a construction truck, because the fawn was about to die from hunger. She’d been waiting in the tall grass but her mother didn’t return and so Pete found the fawn, picked her up, carried her home, and made her a bottle of milk. He raised her in his barn after he lost his own daughter to the state. And then, when the deer was old enough, the rumor was that he treated the animal in a similar manner.

  * * *

  Eventually I fall asleep and, when I wake in the morning, I am a woman again. My husband is just starting to move, making a smacking noise with his lips.

  Maybe Pete just thought, Well, I’m no better than this deer, am I? I don’t know what happened to the deer, but Pete is dead now so I feel like I can say it here under the covers with my husband still asleep: I always thought there was something romantic about the way he named the deer after his daughter. Even if it was messed up.

  * * *

  When I tell my husband what is happening to me at night, which I’m going to do, very soon now, he’ll want to know how, and then, after that, he’ll want to know why I am becoming a deer. That’s the most troubling part and the reason I’m having trouble telling him.

  * * *

  “My name’s Erich. With a ch,” clarifying.

  I thought: He is lying because liars use detail. Married, I thought, and I was annoyed he would lie so I told him my real name. I even told him where I worked. I even told him I was married.

  When, later that night, my husband asked, “Did you have fun with the girls? What’d you all end up doing?” I used details. I told him we went to Akron, to a new, fancy nightclub that had a bouncer at the door and a velvet rope. I told him Sarah bumped into a cocktail waitress carrying a tray of three drinks. I told him Vicky had been getting religious lately. And I told him Meghan had gone out on a date with Steve Perry, the singer from Journey. I told him she said Steve Perry was nice, but the whole time she couldn’t stop singing, “Don’t stop! Believin’!”

  “Sounds good,” my husband said. “Steve Perry. That’s cool.”

  In an evening filled with that many details there wouldn’t have been time for me to meet Erich, or whatever his name was, in the line for the bathroom. There wouldn’t have been time for him to follow me into the ladies’ room, where, with his hand up my shirt, he started biting my neck and chest like he was lost in some fever, like he was going to eat me with his lips that were thick and filled with blood.

  * * *

  “I’m going to call in sick to work,” I tell my husband.

  “You don’t feel well, hon?”

  “No. I’m fine. I just can’t go to work today.”

  In the living room, I call my boss. It’s early enough that I can just leave a message. “You’ve reached Sachman’s Real Estate Agency. No one is here to take your call. Kindly leave your name, number, and a brief message and one of our agents will get back to you. Thank you.”

  I tell her I have Lyme disease. I tell her I won’t be coming in. I cough into the phone and say goodbye. I get back in bed. The cough might have been overdoing it.

  My husband is getting ready for work. He’s wearing socks, boxers, a T-shirt, and a flannel. He comes into the bedroom eating a bowl of cereal, looking for his pants and shoes. “You don’t feel well?” he asks again.

  “I feel fine.”

  “Then why are you staying home from work?”

  I stare at a blank spot above our bureau. “I hate it there.”

  “You do?” He’s surprised.

  “I started to yesterday.”

  “Oh.”

  He shakes his head. I lie back in the bed. I hear him open his dresser drawer. He has arms and legs that move perfectly. He pulls ticks off me. He came from his mother and nothing is wrong with him. He went to elementary school, where probably, one day, someone wasn’t nice to him. Maybe they called him jerk. Under the covers, I hate these kids who might have said that to him because I didn’t mean to cheat on him. It was an accident like a car crash. Except I’d tell him if I had crashed the car.

  I pick up the paper from off the floor where I dropped it last night. Insurgents and Rebels. Genocide and Corporate Malfeasance. American box stores in Manchuria. Manatees in Florida. I open to the center spread. It looks a bit like the periodic table of elements. The photos are tiny, crammed onto the page. The images of all the local soldiers killed last year. The dead stare out from their enlistment photos or senior high school portraits. They’re arranged alphabetically. They are young. Some soldiers share similar last names, as if entire families were wiped out, but of course they’re not family. They probably didn’t even know one another. Anderson. Brown. Clark. Davis. DeBasi. Green. Hall. Kern. All those young people and all my head can think about is what I’ve done and all my body wants is to do it again.

  Erich’s lips surprised me because how could someone new, someone I’d just met in a bar, have spit that tasted familiar? They were a little salty like we’d all really come from the ocean once. Huge lips and watery eyes. That’s about all I ever dreamed. Erich told me, like a cut in my ear, “I’d fuck you to death,” and for the past five days I’ve been hearing him say that over and over again. Touching the scab. “I’d fuck you to death. I’d fuck you to death.” Each time it feels like getting punched in the stomach, only lower, deeper than the stomach, like I can’t breathe in my legs. Then for the past five nights I’ve been turning into a deer.

  The phone starts to ring. It is probably my sister. I lie in bed listening to the ring.

  When my sister had her second baby a couple of months ago I told her, “That’s weird.”

  “What is?”

  “You just made another death in the world.”

  “Fuck off,” she said. I guess she thought I was referri
ng to our brother.

  “All right,” I told her. “Okay.” But she’s been a little angry at me ever since. She’s been a little mean, as if I were responsible for the fact that we all have to die sometime.

  My husband and I both just let the phone ring. It’s too early, and soon enough, after five rings, it stops. I hope it wasn’t my boss calling me back.

  I’ll tell him. Any minute now I’ll say it. “Imagine what it’s like to lose your opposable thumbs, to have them bone up into hard hooves. It was scary at first,” I’ll say. “How do you think deer open doors?”

  “I don’t know. How?” He’ll imagine I’m telling him a joke.

  “They don’t.”

  If I tell him, maybe he can build a special door for me. He’s handy like that. A door that doesn’t require opposable thumbs. Still, he’ll want to know where I’m going at night. And what would I say? Out with the other deer? He wouldn’t like that. The deer around here have been forced out into the open by the new construction. They get hit by cars all the time. He won’t want me to go out with the deer. So where would I go? Back to the nightclub? The bouncer would be surprised to find a deer trying to enter a club as nice as his, but he’d let me in. “It takes all kinds,” he’d say, throwing open a velvet curtain on the room. Just knock three times and whisper low. The song says something about castanets and silhouettes. I’d scan the nightclub for Erich. Couples would sit around small cocktail tables snapping their fingers in time to the rhythm of the song. A scent would hit me and I’d turn into it just like a movie star slapped across her face. Beautiful with a fever. I’d rev my hoof across the dance floor. I’d smell thick lips. I’d smell the blood of an animal the kitchen staff’s preparing. I’d lick my lips, slowly, letting my pink tongue dangle out of my black mouth a little just like some animal waiting by the side of the road for the driver who killed it to come back one more time and kill it again.

  * * *

  I sit up in bed and spread out the skin of my stomach. The hole the tick made swelled up into a bead, a pink bead of skin, like some new growth. I pick at it but it is hard and I can’t get much purchase. I rest the tip of one finger on the spot, as if my finger is a stethoscope. I try to hear what is happening underneath. There is something going on, a rumbling. Maybe he didn’t get the head out. It’s not his fault. It’s hard to get the head out and he’s squeamish when it comes to hurting me. Even when I ask him to.

  “I wonder if I have Lyme disease,” I finally say to him, but this is actually a minor fear, a made-up fear compared with what I am really thinking about: my tail, my hooves. He turns to look at me. I try again. “I mean, I’ve been thinking a lot about deer.” He has a seat beside me on the bed, raising his eyebrows. But that is not quite what I mean, and so this time I try to be honest with my husband. I say it. “I mean, I think I’m becoming a deer.”

  “You think you’re becoming a deer?” he asks.

  * * *

  Erich called me at work yesterday to tell me what he wanted to do to me. He said he wanted to see me. He said he wanted to eat my roast beef pussy. One thing very general, one thing very specific. It made it difficult for me to breathe hearing those very specific words. No one had ever said that combination of things to me before. I was shocked by how powerful those words were. I started to think that maybe he actually wanted to kill me. Thus, the reference to beef. Thus, “I’d fuck you to death.”

  After he hung up I thought about Becky and Tom Sawyer in the cave, though I haven’t read that book in twenty years. I don’t think Tom would ever talk that way to Becky. And I couldn’t actually remember what happened to them down in the cave or why they were there, but danger was nearby and Tom was keeping Becky safe. There were bad men in the cave, bad men who filled the cave with the stench of their badness. I bet Becky could smell it. I bet it made her think differently about Tom. Maybe she would have been interested to hear the things those bad men wanted to do to her.

  This morning I can see through the living room into the kitchen. I can see the mailboxes waiting by the edge of the road. Lust makes room, the way a bomb exploding makes room, clearing things out of the way. I listen for a moment, trying to position my ear near my heart. I can’t get my head very close. Ticktickticktickticktickticktick. I don’t actually hear any bombs ticking. I’m just worried for my husband.

  “You’re becoming a deer?” he asks me again.

  My husband is looking out the window. He is wincing. Maybe he is thinking about something else, something that happened at the heavy machinery plant, maybe he is thinking about another woman, perhaps one we knew in high school who didn’t have problems like this.

  We sit in silence. I don’t want to say anything more just yet. I want, for a moment, to let it be.

  “Will you show me?” he asks and doesn’t wait for an answer before telling me what to do. “Show me.”

  That’s not what I had thought he’d say.

  “Okay,” I answer very quietly. “I will tonight.”

  “A deer,” he says.

  “A deer,” I repeat.

  “All right,” he says. “All right,” and then he leaves without kissing me goodbye.

  “Bye,” I yell.

  He grabs his coat and the front door slams shut, not because he’s angry but because the wood has swollen and in order to get our front door to shut one has to slam it closed. Or maybe he is also angry and he is just disguising his slamming in the swollen door.

  I stay home while he’s at work, as if I really am sick. In the bed I feel something foreign bloom between my husband and me, an intruder, a mold. I see my husband with eyes that don’t know him, as if he quite suddenly became a man from Brazil, or grew a beard, or started speaking in a southern accent. As if after eleven years of marriage he somehow had all of his secrets returned to him, made secret again.

  * * *

  We don’t talk about it at dinner or even after dinner when we’re watching TV, brushing our teeth. Instead he tells me a story about a guy at work who’d been running a credit card scam and got caught. “You never would have suspected this guy,” he says. “Older fella, balding and stooped. He didn’t seem smart enough. He didn’t seem like he cared enough about being rich to become a criminal.”

  I climb in bed to read the paper, but can’t concentrate on the words there. The nervousness inside me is messing with my thoughts, getting ready to blow. The newspaper says something about the Peking Opera, something about a volcano in Indonesia, something about a government cover-up, but it’s all the same to me.

  My husband has stopped talking. He takes off his clothes without my even asking him to and stands in front of me, pulling on one ear like there’s an honesty tonight, a bright rawness I’d never seen before. He is beautiful to look at. I slide the newspaper to the floor and he shuts off the light. We don’t say good night to each other. I’m too nervous. We don’t say anything, and the air is rigid between us in the dark. I wait, blinking my eyes, seeing nothing. I worry. There’s no guarantee anything will happen. Just because something has happened doesn’t mean it will continue to happen and then he will think I’m crazy and then he will call some girl we knew in high school, one who doesn’t have problems like this. One who doesn’t have a dead brother. I listen for him to fall asleep, for his breath to change, but it doesn’t. Instead he clears his throat. I hear him stay awake, imagining his eyes blinking open against the dark like mine. I wait and wait, listening. America at night, a couple of cars, some wind, a plane overhead, a blue jay or a crow—one of the birds with an ugly voice is upset about something outside. I wait and listen until I can’t wait any longer. The blanket is up around the back of my neck. My eyes shut as a woman, and I am asleep before it happens.

  * * *

  When I wake it is still night. I can tell because there is a small knot of unknown fear in my lungs and a soupy proximity to every memory I’ve ever had. Something is rousing me, something wants for attention. A poke, a sharpness dragged across the fur of my back. I seize
up the muscles in my neck. The barrel of a gun.

  Though the room is dark I can see in the light of the alarm clock’s blue digital numbers, 12:32. I can see my hooves. I am too scared to move, too scared to turn around. The newspaper is lying on the floor. The brother in Minnesota is probably still at his security job after having worked all day at the chicken plant. I wonder if his sister is home asleep or if she is out at the bar with her college friends. It seems important to know. It seems important to understand whether or not it is worth it to sacrifice your life for someone else.

  I feel the poke again. It is sharp. There’s no mistaking it. I let my breath out, resigned. I get all four legs underneath me. They tremble as I turn, prepared for what I might deserve.

  The digital clock changes to 12:33. There is no gun.

  He has his front hoof raised. A buck, almost twice my size with nearly eight points of antlers, is waiting, his leg raised. The light of the clock reflects dully in the curve of his worn antlers. My front knees loosen and shake. I stumble. My head dips away from him. There is a deer in my bedroom, one besides me, and I am terrified, more terrified than I would be by all the guns in the world. I know what a gun means. I haven’t any idea what a deer means.

  I lift my eyes to him. He winces again when we meet. He lowers his hoof down to the rug and, turning his back on me, walks from the bedroom. It is then I pick up his scent. His mother gave birth to him. High school. A tire plant. Akron. Heavy machinery. The dinner I made him just hours ago. Mine.

  I follow him out into our living room. “How?” I want to ask him, but we are both deer now and deer cannot speak. His neck is bent and he is maneuvering between his antlers, working on something. He has the front doorknob in his mouth, in his jaws. He twists his head, opening the door as if he’s done this a hundred times before. The door sticks with the humidity but he shoves it open with his neck. He’s really good at opening the door with his mouth, practiced. I feel the night rush in and he stands back from it, looking up at me. I can’t be sure what he is saying. Either “Get out” or “Come on.” His deer eyes are dark and hard to read. But he is waiting for me to do something. I nudge the screen door with my nose. I walk out in front of him, scared to leave because will he follow or simply lock the door behind me, kick me out?