by Kevin Wilson
“We have to get in there, Jackson. We have to wade out there and get that deer. Then we’ll take it somewhere else. Hell, we’ll just toss it on the side of the road if it comes to that, but we need to get it out of your pond. That’s why you called me.”
Jackson looked at Mackie’s feet again, then back at the deer. “Maybe we should call animal services or something,” he offered. “It might be diseased. We should get an expert out here.”
“Son, they’re not going to come on a weekend. This housewarming you’re having for your friends? It’s tomorrow. If you don’t want them to see this deer in your pond, we’re going to just get in the water and fish it out. Now take your shoes off, so they don’t get wet.”
Jackson kicked at the ground. “Let me hear the rest of the plan first.”
“It’s pretty simple. We’ll wade into the pond, and I’ll take this stick and move away from you. Then I’ll direct the deer toward the shore and you get ahold of it and then you drag it in. Then we’ll both pull it onto land and get rid of it.”
“Maybe I should be the one with the stick,” Jackson said.
“Son,” Mackie said quickly, a flash of irritation striking his voice, “just take off your shoes and let’s go get the damn deer.”
Jackson had last been in Raleigh, painting houses or working at a guitar store. Mackie had received a postcard. Got a job and a girl, it read, and my probation for the dog thing is done. A few weeks later, his son called. Mackie had been slightly shocked to hear his son’s voice, “Hey, Dad,” without the usual mechanized voice intoning the particular jail where he’d been locked up, which usually opened any phone call he received from Jackson. “You okay, son?” Mackie asked. “Better than okay,” Jackson answered. “Much better than that.” Mackie was glad to hear it, but he still would not allow himself to believe it was true.
“Amy’s pregnant,” Jackson said.
“Who?” Mackie asked, worried again.
“Amy. The girl I told you about in the postcard,” Jackson said, his voice rising. “She’s pregnant. We’re going to have a baby.”
“Did you marry her? Are you already married?”
“You don’t have to be married to have a baby,” Jackson answered, the connection fading and then coming back.
“I know that,” Mackie said, feeling stupid for having asked, complicating things. “I just wanted to know if I’d missed anything. Congratulations.”
“If it’s a girl, we’re going to name it Carla, after Mom.”
“That’s a nice name,” Mackie said, remembering his wife. His son was just a boy when she died, and it made him happy to hear that he still thought of her. “What about a boy?”
“Jackson Junior,” Jackson said. “Jackson Junior for sure.”
Mackie asked to speak to Jackson’s girlfriend, but she was taking a nap. “I’ll wake her,” Jackson said, and before Mackie could stop him, the phone was set down and there was silence, humming. Less than a minute later, a voice, barely a whisper, a sore throat, answered. “Jackson said you wanted to speak with me?”
“I just wanted to say hello and to tell you congratulations.”
“Thank you,” the woman said, her voice still quiet. When she didn’t offer anything, Mackie continued, “And I want you to call me if you need anything. If you need anything at all, you give me a call, okay?”
“I’ll do that,” she said, and then hung up.
It wasn’t working. The branch he’d found, substantial enough to steer the animal toward Jackson, was too heavy and Mackie couldn’t control it, the water up to his armpits, the shock of the cold taking away every other breath. Jackson was shivering, waist deep in the water. “I’m gonna have to get out of the water soon,” he shouted, and Mackie understood that he hadn’t planned this well. He felt the situation falling out of his control, into a place where Jackson’s anger would surface and take over. Mackie tossed the stick into the water and began swimming toward the deer, kicking his legs under the water, his clothes weighing him down. “I’m going to push it toward you,” he shouted to his son over the sound of the water splashing around him. “Wade out a little farther and grab it.” He finally reached the deer and touched its fur, which was unexpectedly colder than the water. It was heavy, but he’d anticipated the weight of this dead animal. The bad things he’d carried in his life had always been just as heavy as he’d expected, always measuring up to his worst expectations.
“Keep swimming,” his son instructed. “Just swim a little farther to me and we’ll be done. C’mon, Dad.”
Jackson’s girlfriend called Mackie three weeks later, at two in the morning. When Mackie answered, he immediately said, “Jackson?” anticipating another phone call from jail, another thing to fix. “It’s Amy,” the soft voice replied. “Jackson’s girlfriend?” she offered helpfully. “What’s wrong?” Mackie asked. “I lost it,” she said, crying. “I lost the baby.”
“Oh God,” Mackie said. “I’m sorry, honey.”
“And Jackson,” she continued, “he thinks I did it on purpose. He says I did something wrong. He keeps hitting me.”
Mackie sat up in bed, felt his neck stiffen and jerk to the left, a tic he’d had since childhood, as if the danger was just over his left shoulder. “He hit you?” he asked, to be certain.
“He hits me,” she answered.
“Put him on the phone.”
“He won’t talk to you. He doesn’t want to talk to anybody.”
“Amy, you need to go to a motel, or go to a friend’s house. We’ll figure this out, but you cannot have him hitting you. That’s got to stop.”
“I don’t want to call the police, but I might have to.”
“Amy, call them if you need to. Let me think and I’ll call you back.”
“I don’t want him here anymore,” she said. “I don’t love him now.”
Mackie hung up the phone and was already out of bed, putting on his clothes, grabbing his keys off the dresser. Before he knew it, he was in the car, on the interstate, going to see his son.
I’ve got it,” his son announced, the weight of the dead animal shifting from father to son. He watched Jackson tug the deer by its legs toward the shore, a tiny wake trailing behind it. He watched the white tail of the deer and then saw a jerk in the movement, a hesitation, and then there was a splash. Jackson was under the water, flailing, the deer spinning just slightly, and Mackie waded through the water to reach his son.
Jackson was thrashing around in the water, his feet and arms surfacing and then submerging, splashing water everywhere. When he realized how shallow it was, he stood up again, soaking wet, the leg of the deer in his hand. “The fucking leg fell off,” he screamed. “You told me to just drag it in,” he said, staring at Mackie, “but it’s decayed.”
“Let’s get it to the shore,” Mackie said. “Then we can get angry at each other.” Jackson stared at his father a little longer and then turned and threw the detached leg onto the shore. “I’m grabbing the antlers this time,” Jackson said. “Pull his damn head off.” Mackie pushed the hind end of the deer toward the shore. “Let’s just get it out of here,” he whispered.
Eight hours and he was in North Carolina, staring at his son’s house, the car idling on the street in front. He saw his son look through a window and then quickly close the blinds. A few seconds later, Amy looked out the window, shaking her head. Mackie thought about what he would say to his son, how he could fix the situation. He felt foolish for driving this far without having a plan, some way to help. His son was now coming down the steps of the porch, pointing at him. Mackie still couldn’t think of anything to say. He got out of the car.
“Go home, Dad,” Jackson said. “I’m sorry Amy called you and that you had to drive all this way, but go home.”
“Could I talk to Amy?” he asked. He could see her in the window, but her hand was shading her eyes.
“Go home, Dad. Please go home.”
“Did you hit her, Jackson?”
“She lost
the baby, Dad.”
“Did you hit her?”
“Please go home”
Mackie punched his son in the mouth and then placed his intertwined fingers behind his son’s head, pushing Jackson’s face into his own knee. Jackson fell to the street, and Mackie was already pulling him into the car, placing his body across the backseat. His son was unconscious, his mouth bleeding, and Mackie slammed the door and walked up to the house. He knocked on the door and Amy opened it.
“I need some rope,” Mackie said.
“He really did hit me,” Amy said. Her throat showed pale purple fingerprints where he had grabbed her, and there was a deep cut above one eye. She looked so young, barely out of her teens, and Mackie felt sick all over again.
“I know,” Mackie finally said. “I’m going to take him back to Tennessee. Is that okay with you? He won’t come back here and bother you.”
She thought about this and then nodded. “I’ll get you some rope,” she said.
He drove ten miles above the speed limit, his son tied up in the backseat, groggy, shouting obscenities. He stopped only for gas, pissing in a bottle, letting his son wet himself rather than untie him. His son kept struggling against the ropes, lying on his stomach, his ankles tied to his bound wrists, but Mackie had fashioned the knots well, the added pressure only cinching the knots tighter. “Well, I’m gonna shit in my pants, you asshole,” his son yelled from the backseat. “I’m your son and you’re going to let me shit in my pants.” He let his son shit in his pants.
After five hours, his son fell asleep and Mackie had the rest of the drive to think about what he’d done. He thought about it for five minutes and then focused on the road, counting billboards, watching for highway patrol cars. He knew when they reached Tennessee, he couldn’t keep his son there. He couldn’t keep fighting his son, knocking him out and hoping he’d awaken a better person. He’d do what he could, help him find a job, get him an apartment. He’d fix his son and then hope it stuck.
Back home, in the garage, when he dragged his son out of the car, reeking of sweat and piss and shit, Mackie told him about his plan. “You stay here and we find something for you to do and you get yourself straight.” His son fell into a corner of the garage. “I don’t do drugs,” he said. “It’s not like that.” Mackie shook his head. “I know that. I wish it were that easy. You’re a good boy, Jackson; you just get too angry. You need to understand that things happen and they’re usually bad, and you just figure out how to deal with it without beating somebody up or killing their dog or setting their tree on fire. Do you understand?” Jackson slid a finger into his mouth and spit blood. “One of my teeth is loose.”
“Will you try?” Mackie asked his son. Jackson nodded and went inside to take a shower while Mackie climbed back into the car, pressed his face against the steering wheel, and kept himself from crying.
Fucking deer,” Jackson kept saying. “Fucking dead, three-legged, no-account deer.” They were on dry land now, both cold, getting colder in the wind. They had stripped out of their wet clothes, father and son now in their wet boxer shorts, shivering, their hair dripping cold water down their bodies. Neither had thought to bring a change of clothes. “This,” Jackson said, “is getting worse.”
The deer, sans leg, was still beautiful. It was an eight-point buck, the cold having preserved the skin except for a small wound at its chest and the exit wound near its right back leg. A hunter must have shot it and chased it into the pond, then decided it wasn’t worth the effort, or perhaps never even found it. Either way, it was here now, dead, glassy-eyed, lying in the grass between Mackie and Jackson.
“We should bury it,” Jackson said. “Cindy said to bury it.” It was a nice idea, but the ground was too cold for that. The county dump was closed until Monday. “Well, we can’t leave it here,” Jackson shouted. “Fucking deer.” Mackie thought if they could get a tarp under the deer, they could drag it to Jackson’s truck and dump it on the side of the highway. “Someone from the city will come get it,” Mackie told his son. Jackson seemed reluctant to agree. “Fucking deer.” He finally nodded and Mackie went to find a tarp, to wrap up this deer, and to get through the day, freezing cold, soaked to the bone, but otherwise undamaged.
Two months after he brought Jackson back home, his son now servicing and setting up video poker machines at strip clubs and gas stations, the phone rang again in the middle of the night. It was Amy, her voice as soft as the first time he’d talked to her.
“Is he okay?” she asked.
“Are you okay?” he asked her. “I want to know that first, because if you aren’t, I’ll go make him worse.”
She started to cry. “I’m okay, I think,” she said. “I’m better without him here.”
He told her that Jackson was trying harder to be a good person.
“I had hoped that he would turn out to be a good person,” she said, “but I couldn’t stay with him long enough to find out.”
Mackie couldn’t think of a response that would help anything and so he stayed silent.
“I wanted to thank you,” she said, still whispering, as if concerned that Jackson might be listening to them. “You helped me and I wanted to thank you for that.”
Before he could answer, she hung up the phone. He kept the receiver against his ear, listening to the dial tone, waiting for her to come back on the line.
Mackie was in the shed, nearly naked, looking for a tarp, when Cindy nudged the door open. “This must not be going well,” she said, avoiding eye contact with Mackie.
“Do you have a tarp?” Mackie asked.
“We have extra clothes,” Cindy said. “You don’t have to use a tarp for that.”
“No, I need a tarp to wrap up the deer. Extra clothes would be nice, though.”
“You can’t bury the deer?”
“No.” He felt unable to explain any further and she didn’t push the issue. He found himself liking Cindy more and more.
After he located an orange tarp, wrapped up like a sleeping bag, Cindy waved him into the house, and he stepped into the warmth, a fire going. She handed him some clothes for both himself and Jackson and he put on an ill-fitting shirt, pants that were too tight and left unzipped, and squeezed his feet into shoes two sizes too small for him. “How is he doing?” she asked him.
“He’s doing fine. We just got a little wet trying to get the deer.”
“Anything could set him off, I’ve learned,” she said. “The smallest thing; you never know.”
“He’s fine,” he said. “I’ll take him the clothes and he’ll be fine.”
* * *
At his son’s wedding, waiting off to the side of the altar, groom and best man, Mackie rehearsed his toast in his head. Jackson put his hand on Mackie’s shoulder and said, “Thank you for all this. You made this happen.” Mackie shrugged. “I didn’t do much,” he said. “You knocked me out, tied me up, brought me back here, and helped me get a job. You did a lot.” Mackie told him that he didn’t want any thanks, that he was just happy he’d cleaned himself up, had found a nice woman, was settling down.
“You saved me from that woman,” Jackson said.
“You mean Amy?” Mackie asked.
“Yeah, she was a bad influence. She made me think things would always be happy, nothing but good times, but that’s not reality. She really had me off the rails, and you came and got me away from all that, and I want to thank you.”
“I don’t want any thanks for that.”
Jackson pulled the flask out of Mackie’s coat pocket, his gift to his father for being the best man. He took a swig of whiskey. “I filled it before I gave it to you,” Jackson told his father. “So that’s two gifts I gave you.”
When Mackie got back to the pond, Jackson was beating the deer with his raised boot, shouting curses, now totally naked, his strikes stripping wet chunks of fur from the animal’s body. Mackie dropped the tarp and the clothes and charged after his son. “Stop,” he shouted. “Jackson, that don’t help a godda
mned thing. Just stop.” Jackson pushed his father and kept hitting the deer with the boot. “A perfect day before this fucking deer showed up,” he screamed. Water was dribbling from the deer’s mouth, its eyes wide open. “Calm down, Jackson,” Mackie shouted again, pulling his son away from the deer. Yanking his arm free, Jackson whirled around and punched Mackie, catching his right cheekbone, which caused Mackie to wince and release his son. Jackson ran away from Mackie and the deer, through the woods, making sounds that seemed like sobbing.
Mackie lay out the tarp and rolled the deer onto it, the water still deep in the deer’s body. He knew better than to wait for his son to return. He pulled the corners of the tarp together and dragged the deer as best he could through the woods, stopping every few minutes when his hands got too sore. He thought to leave the deer on his son’s front lawn, but realized it would be cruel to the deer, the further abuse Jackson would inflict upon it. Mackie knew he would just have to take responsibility for this dead thing, until he could find a way to put it to rest.
He could see Cindy through the window of the house. She was frowning, continually looking over her shoulder at what Mackie imagined was Jackson, hiding until he was gone. He lifted the deer into the backseat of his car, shoving it into the spaces that it would go, trying to make it fit. The passenger seat was now folded forward to accommodate the head and neck of the animal, the mouth of the deer now peeking out from the tarp. There was still frost on the deer’s whiskers. He waved to Cindy, who did not wave back, and drove down the mountain, the air conditioner on to keep the deer from thawing out too much, to keep the smell of decay away from his senses.
Back home, in the garage, Mackie tried to think of what to do about the deer. The options were just as limited as they were at Jackson’s house. He did not want to bury this deer, the hours upon hours of breaking through the frozen earth, no matter how much better he thought it would make him feel. It wouldn’t change anything. He would dig a hole and fill it back, and everything would be the same.
