Beast #933: the Deer

[Parental advisory: some strong language, but nothing your kids haven't been hearing on the playground since third grade.]

Last week at the writing table Anne said, "More people are killed by deer than any other animal."

"You mean from hitting them with their cars?" someone else asked.

Then things went on.

Really there are several species of deadly deer out there, and that's not including mooses, the deadliest member of the deer family.


Deadly deer no. 1: The Bambi-eyed razor deer.

Looks cute. All spotted. Has these big eyes like Bambi in the cartoons. Each eye takes up a third of the head.

The Bambi-eyed razor deer raises its head up from grazing. Bats its big Bambi eyes at you.

"What a cute little deer," you say. "I wonder how close it will let me get to it." You approach slowly. One foot carefully in front of the other. A twig snaps. You say, "Fuck!" The deer looks up, startled. Dips its head back down to the blueberry bush and continues stripping the leaves off.

You get closer. Closer still. Hold out your hand, palm up, because someone said you're supposed to do that with dogs.

"Hello, little deer," you say in a low voice, quiet voice.

The big-eyed deer looks up again. Braces its legs to run away, you think. Another twig snaps under your foot. You look down, and it's not a twig. It's the metacarpal bones of a human hand, bleached white. The grass all around is full of bones, all down where you can't see them. The corner of a pelvis. A curved spine. Half of a skull, the rest sheared off in a straight line.

You look up, and the Bambi eyes are staring right into yours. Black, all black, and down inside, a tiny, orange, dancing flame. You stare, still, like a chicken hypnotized by a squiggle drawn in the sand.

You hear, "Look out!" at the same time that something hits you hard in the side, right at the bottom of your ribcage.

There's a whistling noise as the deer's silver-tipped, razor-edged hind hoof slices through the hair at the top of your head in a roundhouse kick.

You land hard, crunching down on a skeleton's ribcage, and someone heavy lands on top of you. "Run. Now," she says. And you run. Now.


Deadly deer no. 2: The November mist deer.

You're out hunting. You and your friend Clem set up camp. Drank some beers, got a good night's sleep. Out at the crack of dawn. You and Clem split up to try your luck in different spots. It's damn cold. Your breath swirls out in big clouds. The morning's coffee hits your bladder, and you stop to take a piss. Lean your rifle up against a tree trunk. Set your gloves down in the snow. Unzip your two layers of pants. Your pee splatters down into a deepening yellow hole in the snow. Steam rises up.

You look up, and there, not thirty feet in front of you, is the biggest buck you've ever seen. Ten points on the rack, head turned toward you like a Hartford Insurance commercial.

You're still pissing. At the same time, you reach out slowly, slowly for the rifle against the tree. Just reach it with the tips of your fingers, and it tips right into your hand. You're not sure whether you've pissed on your boots, but you don't care.

You raise the rifle slowly. It's a little awkward with the deer straight in front of you there, but you don't want to move too much. You get the rifle up to your shoulder. Get a nice bead right on the buck's chest.

In the instant that you squeeze the trigger, the November mist deer thins, dissipates, and vanishes like the clouds of your breath. There, facing you, is Clem. With his dick hanging out of his pants, aiming a rifle at your heart.

There must have been a lightning instant of hesitation—one of those reflexes that goes in a circle through your reptile brain without ever reaching the mammal part. So you're still alive, and so is Clem, but now both of you have to sit down to pee.


Deadly deer no. 3: The carnivorous flypaper deer.

There's not much to say about this one that's not already there in its name. There was a bad incident when one of them ended up in a petting zoo. They'd filed off its fangs so it couldn't hurt anyone, but every kid who touched its fur got stuck there.


Anyway, be careful. More people are killed by deer than by any other animal.

Cautionary tale #439

There was a kid once. He had a name like Billy or Bobby, because that's the kind of name kids had back then. Now he'd be named Trevor or Hunter, and if he were a girl he'd be Madison or Riley.

Billy never paid any attention to what his mom told him. He crossed his eyes, and they didn't stick that way. He swallowed gum, and it went right through him. He knew, because he looked. He went out in the rain without a coat, and he rarely caught a cold, but he did catch hell if his mom found out.

So when Billy's mom said, "Pick your feet up at the top of the escalator, Dear, or you might get squashed flat like a postage stamp," Billy ignored her, and nothing ever came of it.

One day Billy was riding the escalator up to the second floor of J.C. Penney's. He liked going there to wander around the lingerie department and look at the bra mannequins. They were truncated women—torsos with heads and breasts, no arms. Faces with painted-on eyes, big and blue. Wigs in different styles. But they had what counted—bras. All kinds—great big ironclad bras with rivets, like the Titanic. Tiny, lacy bras with little flowers. Black, racy numbers that you couldn't see unless you went around behind the case to look at them, so he guessed the manager had mixed feelings about putting them out on the floor. Training bras, whatever that meant. He pictured girls wearing them with long lines hooked to the back. The girls trotted around in a corral, while a trainer stood in the middle and made encouraging clicking noises with his tongue.

Billy steered clear of the panties. That would have been perverted.

This time Billy was on his way up the escalator with his hand on the rubber handrail. The rail crept forward, gaining time against the gliding stairs. He wondered: Is the handrail on a separate motor? Why doesn't it stay even with the steps?

Coming the other direction, down the crosspiece of the big escalator X, he saw Mrs. Demmons, the school secretary. She smiled as they passed and said, "Why, Billy! Hello!" And then she was gone, her back to him in a tan wool car coat, carrying a paper bag with looped string handles.

First Billy smiled. He thought, Was she up in the underwear section? I'll bet she was getting one of those Titanic bras with the rivets.

But then he stopped smiling. Felt cold all up and down his back. She saw me, he thought. She knows where I'm going. Knows I'm on my way up to the lingerie department. Or, anyway, she knows there's nothing but women's clothes on the second floor. What if she tells Miss Garrett at school? What if Miss Garrett tells Mom?

With his head twisted around to watch Mrs. Demmons step off at the bottom, he forgot to pay attention to his own feet. Forgot to pick them up where the grooved steps flattened out to slide under the sharp metal comb at the top.

He felt his foot catch. Looked down, but it was too late. Feet first, before he could call for help, Billy got sucked into the escalator. The last thing the people behind him saw was eight fingertips pulled backwards under the comb.

The thing your mom doesn't tell you, because she doesn't know, is that you don't really get squashed like a postage stamp. There's that comb, and the long, grooved treads that look like the flip-over footrest on a barber's chair. The two surfaces work together like the rollers on a pasta machine. First Billy got flattened out, sure, but then the escalator squeezed and sliced him into long strips like linguini. The strands got tangled up in the machinery. The rolling steps squeaked to a halt, and the motor burned out. The manager of the Penney's had to call out the escalator man. They charged Billy's mom and dad for the repairs.