The Hanging Tree

four

Look,” Gracie said. “Is it dead?”

She had spotted the white-tail lying beneath the boughs of a Scotch pine in the woods near Jitters Creek. July sun dappled the deer’s back but the trees were thick enough away from the creek bed that most of the animal lay in shadow. It held its head up straight, its eight-point antlers reaching into the branches above its head. Its eyes were closed. I’d never seen a deer with its eyes closed.

“No,” Darlene said. “It’s sleeping.”

Gracie took a step toward the deer. I grabbed a fistful of the back of her T-shirt. “Don’t,” I said. “It might be hurt. Dad said never mess with a hurt animal.”

“It’s just a deer,” Gracie said, yanking herself away. “What’s it going to do?”

“It can put a hoof right through you.”

“It’ll never catch me.”

“Yes, it will,” Darlene said. “Deer are fast.”

“They run like deer,” I said.

Gracie sneered. At eleven, she was a year older than Darlene and me, and she thought she was a lot smarter.

“Ha-ha-ha, booger face. I’ll just go jump in the creek. I’ll bet he can’t swim.” She started toward the deer again. This time Darlene grabbed her by the arm. “Wait.” Darlene bent and picked a dead tree branch off the ground. “Let’s test him first.” She took two tentative steps toward the deer and tossed the branch at its back. The deer didn’t budge.

“See, he’s dead,” Gracie said.

“Let me try again.” Darlene found a bigger branch lying on a bed of pinecones. She threw it end over end and it glanced off the deer’s neck.

The deer opened its eyes. All three of us jumped back.

“Oooooh,” Gracie cried. We scrambled behind a tree and watched. I felt my heart pumping hard. The deer’s head swiveled slowly in our direction. The rest of him did not move. His eyelids drooped.

“He’s hurt,” I said.

“Poor thing,” Gracie said. Again she started to move toward the animal and again I grabbed her. This time she didn’t try to pull away.

“Gracie. That deer will kick your butt.”

“But we have to do something.”

“We should call the ranger,” Darlene said.

“What ranger? There’s no ranger.”

I let go of Gracie.

“Your mom’s is closest,” I said. “We can mark the spot and go tell her.”

Our bikes waited back on the two-track road that wound down through the woods. We had planned to do some bike-diving into the creek, flying down the hill over the bank into the water. But Gracie had insisted on seeing if we could find a new path through the trees. “We can slalom,” she had said.

Now she looked at me, then at the deer, at Darlene, at the deer again.

“No,” she said. “Let’s leave the deer alone.”

“Leave it alone?” Darlene said. “A minute ago you wanted to go right up and pet it. We can’t leave it alone. It’ll die.”

Gracie shrugged. “Everything dies. I don’t want to tell my mom.”

“She’s not going to know we were bike-diving,” I said. “We’re not even wet yet.”

“She doesn’t give a crap anyway,” Darlene said.

“No,” Gracie said.

“We can’t just leave it here to die. Somebody might be able to help it.”

“Not my mom, or her-just leave it.”

“Her what?” Darlene said.

“This is stupid,” I said. “We should tell someone. You’re going to be bragging about it anyway.”

“Just wait, Gus,” Darlene said.

I waited. The girls stood there watching the deer. Its eyes were closed again. Finally, I said, “I’m going to count my steps back to the road so the police can find it.” I turned and started walking back toward the bikes.

“It won’t be the police,” Gracie said. “Gus.” She shouted it as I took big running steps up the hill.

After I told Mrs. McBride that the deer was twenty-eight steps down Jitters Trail, twenty-three steps to the right, and fifty-three steps down through the trees, she picked up her phone. When Gracie heard her say, “Bucky boy,” into the phone, she punched me in the ribs.

“Ow,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Butthole. I told you.”

I looked at Darlene. She looked away.

Four hours later, the deer was hanging antlers up from a joist in Gracie’s mother’s carport, dripping blood onto an oil-stained piece of cardboard. The fur around its neck was matted, and some had been worn away so that patches of pink skin showed through. One of the deer’s hind legs jutted out from its body at an unnatural angle that made me think of the day the winter before when my friend Jeff Champagne lost a skate edge and slid into the boards and broke a leg.

I didn’t know what the smell was in the carport, but I knew I didn’t like it.

A man named Ringles stood looking the gutted animal over. Blood smeared the “Matilda” tattoo on his left arm. He turned to Shirley McBride, who was leaning against a garbage can sipping a longneck bottle of Drewry’s.

“See where he got me?” Buck Ringles said. He fingered a tear in the rolled-up sleeve of his flannel shirt. “Fucker jumped up like he was coming for me. Goddamn leg’s broken in two places, but the fucker would not give up.”

“Buck.”

“Oh. Sorry.” He grinned at Gracie, Darlene, and me. “Bastard would not give up.”

“You going to try to get a license?” Shirley said.

Ringles rubbed the gray stubble on one of his sunken cheeks. He was two heads taller than Shirley, skinny but for the belly that sagged over his belt. He and a cousin made their livings cleaning out septic tanks. Shirley had dated them both, off and on. For the moment, she was with Buck.

“Don’t know,” he said. “You know, you can get a license if you hit one with your car. My ex-brother-in-law did it when that doe run into him up on M-32.” Buck touched the deer’s skewed leg. “This one looks like he got hit himself.”

“Maybe your car hit it,” Shirley said.

Ringles grinned. “Maybe.” Then his eyes brightened. “You think the DMV’ll let me have a license for strangling a deer in self-defense?”

They both laughed.

We had overheard him earlier telling Mrs. McBride how the deer had died. Buck Ringles had taken his hunting knife into the woods-“just in case,” he said-but was afraid that he might inadvertently cut himself in a struggle. He crept up on the deer from behind. When the deer suddenly turned and raised itself up on its front legs-“lurched,” as Ringles put it-Ringles clambered atop its back, removed his belt, and quickly looped it around the deer’s neck, pulling one end through the buckle and yanking with all of his strength.

When the deer lost consciousness, Ringles jumped off and found a tree branch. He brought it down on the deer’s head again and again until he heard something crack and the head lolled over, limp. My stomach went queasy as we eavesdropped from Gracie’s bedroom, hearing Buck’s voice rise as he described himself swinging the branch.

Now, as we stood marveling at the garroted deer in Mrs. McBride’s carport, Ringles reached beneath his potbelly and whipped off his belt. “Look here,” he said. We saw specks of blood and short gray hairs stuck to the belt buckle. Ringles stepped back and whacked the deer on its rump. “That’ll last to winter,” he told Mrs. McBride. “Stew, steaks, chops, a whole damn smorgasbord. All free. And a nice little rack for over the fireplace to boot.”

“You owe me,” Shirley said. She was smiling.

Buck Ringles winked at her. “Don’t worry, baby. You’ll get everything you’re owed and more.”

“Oh, I will, will I?”

Gracie turned and stormed out.

“Where you going?” Buck Ringles called after her.

“She don’t know,” Shirley said. “She’s always pissed off about something. It’ll pass. How about another beer?”

Darlene and I found Gracie in her bedroom, sitting on the edge of her bed, clutching a pillow to her chest.

“It’s boring here,” I said. “Let’s go back to Jitters.”

Gracie gave me a look filled with anger. She turned to Darlene. “Tell him to go away.”

“What did I do?”

Darlene sat down next to Gracie. “He didn’t mean for that to happen.”

“But it happened,” Gracie said. “Tell him to leave.”

“So the deer’s dead,” I said. “Everything dies, remember?”

“Get out of here.”

I turned to Darlene.

“What?” she said. “It’s not my house.”

“What if it was?”

“Tell him.”

Darlene looked at Gracie, then at me. “You better go.”

“What? No. No, I’m not going. This is dumb. Come on, let’s go down-”

“Get out,” Gracie said. “Do you hear me? I hate you.”

I heard her say it again, louder, as the kitchen door banged shut behind me.