Untaken (6 page)

Back in my room, I sat on the bed, my hands screwed up into fists. I wanted to break something, but there was enough broken junk in this house without me adding to it.

Dad got home just before sunset.

I ran out of the house to meet him as soon as I heard the splutter of the Dodge’s engine out in the street.

“You hungry?” I asked him as he threw the truck door open. “I was gonna fry up some hot dogs.”

“We ate at The Tap,” Dad said. “And I wouldn’t want no tired-ass hot dogs if I hadn’t. Not when we got ourselves fresh venison.”

He winked, and jerked his head toward the flatbed of the truck, where there was a lumpy shape covered over with a tarpaulin.

A little runner of dark blood dripped from the trail hitch, adding to the black oil stains on the bare earth.

“Deer?” I asked, cautiously.

“My son, the genius,” Dad snorted.

“Funny sort of fish, a deer,” I said, trying to make a joke out of it.

“Don’t get smart with me. Bob and his damn fish. Who the hell wants to sit on their can all day, staring at a damn lake?”

I glanced around. I thought a curtain twitched over at the Biedermann’s, but it was likely just my paranoid mind.

“Need some help getting it in the shed?” I asked.

“What’s the rush? Gonna have a beer and rest my feet a minute, if that’s okay by you.” He stared at me; his pale green eyes looked like they was lit up with laser beams from the inside. However successful his “fishing” trip had been, it didn’t seem to have calmed him down any.

I followed him back into the house, trying to convince myself that no one was even going to see that illegal, out-of-season deer.

Dad had no sooner gone inside to shuck off his dirty hunting gear, than Tom Biedermann was striding up our path to bang on the door like he wanted to bust right through it. Seems that the lazy summer wind had lifted the tarp up to reveal the whitetail, with its belly gaping open from neck to asshole. The Biedermann girls had caught an eyeful and were now in the process of having a meltdown in the middle of the Biedermann lounge.

“It’s barbaric,” roared Tom Biedermann, as Dad opened the door. “What you choose to do with your weekends is none of my business, but I will not have my daughters exposed to your disgusting blood sports.”

It was never a great idea to bother Dad just after he got back from a trip. He’d need a couple of beers inside him and a good long soak in the shower before he was in anything like a talkative mood, and that was when he wasn’t in the grip of the mean reds to begin with. I fully expected Dad to haul off and smack Tom Biedermann right in the kisser, but Dad just stared at him a second or two, then closed the door in the man’s face. He didn’t slam it, just closed it real soft, like there had been no one there in the first place.

He went to the kitchen and pulled a beer out of the fridge.

That was good.

After he killed the beer, he chased it with a shot of Wild Turkey.

That was bad.

Dad used to get real mean on bourbon.

“Hey, Dad, why don’t we get that deer in the back shed?” I asked him. “I’ll help out. Nothin’ else going down.”

I didn’t usually like butchering the animals Dad brought home, although I liked eating them well enough. The guts and all the really sick shit had already been taken care of, but I hated the blood stink that lingered on my skin for hours after we were through cutting and wrapping the meat.

Still, Dad was pleased when I did stuff with him like that, just us men, and I was hoping that by the time we’d finished, he’d have forgotten about that blowhard Tom Biedermann, and wouldn’t do anything crazy.

Not that my dad was crazy. Sometimes, though, he could
act
kind of crazy.

Dad stared at me a long minute without saying a thing, the way he had at Mr. Biedermann, until I grinned widely out of nerves, then he turned on his heel, muttering something about “an eggsuck dog” and stalked off to his shed where there was a big chest freezer and the bench where Dad would butcher his kill.

I figured that Dad was set to shrug off what Mr. Biedermann had said, and the worried knot in my chest loosened up some.

By the time I’d pulled on my Converse and made it out the back door, Dad was already leaving the shed, and I got a real bad feeling when I saw the big Poulan chainsaw in his hands.

Dad hauled the whitetail down off the flatbed without waiting for me to help him. Instead of taking it back to the shed, he dragged it around the side of our house where the Biedermann’s lounge windows overlooked the scrubby strip of yard there. I caught up to him just as he started up the chainsaw.

Mrs. Biedermann stood in the window, her face white and angry. Mr. Biedermann appeared at her shoulder, his skinny rabbit’s face all blotchy with rage.

“Dad, come on now, this isn’t such a good idea.” I was trying to speak calmly, which is a hard thing to do over the noise of a chainsaw, and it didn’t do a lick of good anyway, because Dad set right to work cutting up that deer. He didn’t do it neatly, with the purpose of separating the meat into cuts, he just laid into it like the animal had done him wrong.

He cut off the legs and tossed them aside, where they lay scattered on the lawn like yard sticks.

“Come on Dad,” I tried again. In truth, I was scared.

Dad, the fence, and the side of the house were soon covered in a sick mist of gore and deer hide. He sliced almost at random into the body, little shreds of fur and meat flying, the chainsaw groaning and coughing smoke when it hit bone, until what had once been a good kill was just a vaguely animal-shaped heap of hide and blood and bone.

Finally he cut off the doe’s head, which was missing an ear and most of the flesh of the left side of its face, and set it on top of the woodpile, where it was the ideal height to stare right in through the Biedermann’s window.

“Come on, Dad,” I tried again, but my sentence was cut off by the crunch of car tires on gravel, and when I looked up, a cop car pulled in front of the house.

Lou Carrigan, a good pal of my dad’s, climbed out of the cruiser. His presence made me feel a little better, but not much.

All around us, curtains twitched in windows as the neighbors gawked. I felt my face going red, and hoped Dad wouldn’t notice.

“Hey there, Carl, what’s this about?” asked Lou, taking in the scene as if it were no big deal to scatter deer parts all around your yard.

“That asshole, Biedermann,” muttered Dad, “told me to get rid of it. So I did. I work hard all week, Lou. Can’t a man bring home food for his family without some snot-nose prying into his business?”

“Sure, Carl,” said Lou, “but you’re upsetting the kiddies.”

“That professor is ruining them kiddies,” shouted Dad. A little scrap of bloody deer hide drooped above his eye like an extra eyebrow and gave him a mournful sort of expression. He was out of breath from wielding the chainsaw, and looked so tired and old that I felt ashamed of him, then ashamed of myself for feeling that way.

“I guess I raised
my
boy right. Taught him the value of an honest day’s work. Is a man not allowed to provide for his boy no more?”

“Carl, you ain’t broke no laws,” said Lou, “but you might think about heading inside now.”

Dad glowered at Lou and, for a minute, I got scared he was going to get really mad, but then his shoulders kind of slumped and I could see the fight had gone out of him.

He cleaned the chainsaw off real carefully and put it away. He picked up some of the bigger deer bits and tossed them in the chest freezer without bothering to wrap them.

“Got time for a cold one?” he asked Lou, who watched him with his arms folded and a worried expression on his face.

“Never on duty,” said Lou with a wink at me, “but it just so happens, I’m due a break.” They headed inside together and soon, the sound of laughter carried outside.

I went to my room and read my guitar books for a while. Even with my guitar sold, I still liked to study the music, to make the shapes of the chords with my fingers. It was relaxing somehow.

The next day I was up at dawn. I tiptoed past Dad’s room, wincing at the creak of tired floorboards. I figured I’d cook him up some eggs for his breakfast, just the way he liked—sloppy and buried in a gallon of ketchup—but there was nothing in the fridge but a couple of beers and a dried up splat of last week’s chili, covered over with saran wrap.

Gross.

I dumped the chili onto the top of the trashcan, careful as I could so as not to cause an avalanche of stinky garbage.

I picked through cast-off pairs of Dad’s pants and jackets, looking for some cash. I could get to the corner store and back before he woke up, I was sure of it. If there was any chance of Dad being reasonable, it would be more likely if his belly was full.

The first thing I saw when I got outside was that the body of the deer was gone. The second was that the head still sat on the woodpile, forgotten by Lou, but not by my Dad, nor I guessed by the Biedermanns.

Its tongue lolled out between yellow teeth, and its glassy eyes seemed to follow me as I walked by. I thought I saw the drapes twitch over at the Biedermanns and walked faster.

I didn’t have enough money for the eggs and the ketchup, so I stuck the sauce inside my shirt, feeling shitty when old Mrs. Carey smiled and asked how I was doing.

The head was still there when I got back. A crow or something had made off with the eyes, but I still felt like it was watching me from the raggedy black sockets.

All morning I expected Mr. Biedermann to call the cops again, but I guess he’d seen Lou leaving our place late that night, laughing and back-slapping and stinking of beer. The Biedermanns were still pretty new in town and in small towns like ours, old friendships are important. Mr. Biedermann was a smart guy; I guess he understood that. He could have taken it down himself, but that would have hurt his pride, I guess.

I couldn’t help feeling bad for him. Dad had proved his point already, so why not just end things by taking that nasty old head down?

It was afternoon when I heard the slam of the bathroom door and the rattle of pipes that meant the shower was spluttering into life. I had the eggs and sauce on the table by the time Dad ambled into the room, but he shoved them aside and lit up a cigarette instead.

His bare shoulders were tan and muscled, but his chest was corpse white, and his ribs were showing.

“Gonna eat?” I asked him.

He snorted, and stubbed the cigarette out in the ketchup.

“Get me a drink,” he said.

Calories are calories
, I told myself as I cracked open his beer.

“So about that head…” I started, but the cold flash of his eyes was enough to shut me up quick.

The Biedermanns opened their drapes after lunch, but when I waved to them through the window, trying to be friendly, they looked the other way, even Mrs. Biedermann, who had used to smile at me sometimes and ask how school was going.

The stink was already getting bad. I could smell it strongest in the kitchen, but I reckoned before long the whole place was going to smell of rotten deer brains. Surely dad had made his point by now?

I put my ear to the door of Dad’s room. Nothing, then a wet, rumbling snore. Sometimes when he got a case of the mean reds, he’d sleep whole days away.

I wrapped the head up as best I could in a mess of hefty bags and rode with it on my bike way out of town, where I tossed it into a stream. As I rode, I pretended I was a Marine on a special mission to get rid of a bomb before it could go off and blow up our base, which is kind of a silly little kid thing to pretend, but I made record time and was feeling pretty good about myself as I rode up our driveway.

When I got inside, Dad was waiting for me. He’d never hit me before, so although I knew he’d be mad, I was shocked when his fist popped out and caught me below the eye. My legs kind of folded up and dumped me on the floor, and there I lay, with Dad standing over me, looking about a hundred feet tall.

“Never guessed I’d raised a coward,” he said.

That hurt worse than my eye. I wanted to say something, to explain myself, but I knew that if I opened my mouth I’d start to cry, and Dad hated when anyone cried. “Sniveling,” he’d call it. “Quit your sniveling and man up.” I crawled backward toward my bedroom door. I didn’t want to stand up in case he popped me again. I was fumbling for the doorknob when he turned and walked away from me.