Christian Kiefer - The Animals

Then comes the day when you happen upon the wreck. It is dusk and you see the smoking car first and then the animal and you pull to the side and before you can think you are running up the center of the road. What lies before you is a deer, a white-tailed doe well into adulthood who drags her paralyzed hindquarters across the asphalt, her voice coming in crazed high bleats like a child’s screams cut short over and over again.

The man there calls to you: What do we do? He is dressed, incongruously, in a jacket and tie, eyes wide and breath coming in shallow gulps. Behind him his car steams, the gold hood crushed into a V.

There’s not a lot we can do, you tell him.

Ah jeez, the man says when the animal’s cry starts up again. Don’t you have a gun or something?

Why?

So you can put it out of its misery, the man says. We have to do that at least. His voice is high and keening and when the doe cries it is so loud that it obliterates his words.

Hang on, you say.

You do not know it yet but you will see this scene many times: deer, elk, raptors, squirrels, and of course the moose. The long black slaughterhouse of the road. Now, you stand on the asphalt before the animal, the yellow line stretching out into the misting forest beyond its struggling shape. It lurches forward again, tries to, its backside already dead, rear legs dragging, draining urine and a wet discharge of fecal matter and blood. You think she is at least two years old. Maybe three or four. Perhaps older than that. You try to study the color of her fur, the long line of her head, her dark and rolling eyes. But you cannot answer your own question, cannot tell if she is the same doe you raised, the same that you bottle-fed, the same that saved you, four years ago, from who you were. Could it be? Could it be her, returned to you in this last moment?

Ah jeez, the man says. Look at my car. Holy shit. My wife’s gonna kill me.

You do not know how long you stand there. The animal continues to struggle, to bleed and to cry, a long line of mucus hanging in a thin rope from her jaw.

When you turn to the truck, it is a motion nearly automatic. The old Savage 99 rests in the gun rack across the rear window, placed there by your uncle without comment at least a year before. As if he knew. As if he could have seen that it would be needed. And perhaps this was true.

You pull the rifle from the rack and lever the chamber open and see that indeed there are cartridges within. The sight of them fills you with dread.

The man has wandered over to his crushed car and now stands before it in silence. Another vehicle has stopped, a pickup, and its driver rolls down the window and calls to you: Hey, you need some help?

That guy might, you say.

You can hear the door open and close again and the man’s voice calling to the driver of the smashed car: Hey, hey, you all right?

But you are not listening now. You have come to the doe. She has stopped moving and lies sprawled on the asphalt in exhaustion. You pray that she is already gone but then she starts her crying again, that explosion, that shriek of sound, so close now. Could this be her? Could this really be Ginny, who you pulled from the fence wire? Who you cared for? Who you named?

She is looking at you now. Her eyes roll.

You raise the rifle to your shoulder and aim. You wish you could say her name one time but your voice does not come and when you sight down the barrel at the hard cap of her skull you can say nothing at all.

YOU DO not sleep that night, so completely is the image of that blown skull burned into your mind. You bottle-fed her and learned that to help her excrete her waste you needed to wipe her anus with a baby wipe and so you did, many times a day, and she came to you and you held her and fed her and when she was a year old your uncle told you what you already knew, that you needed to release her back into the forest, and so you did. So much effort and care, and then there she was — if not the very same animal then one so much like her — and all your work has been for naught. You saved her and then you were her executioner. You wonder, in such moments, what Bill would tell you about living and dying, about what is right and what is wrong, but there is only you, alone. In your mind, pickup trucks blow past with gun racks, and mustached men brandish firearms that spark and kick white smoke into the trees. And you see the animals. How they leap into the air, twisting upon a fulcrum of blood, their bodies blowing apart over the snow. Marmot and muskrat. Black bear and grizzly. Beaver and raccoon and snowshoe hare. The great cats whining and hissing as they go down. Mountain lion, lynx, bobcat. See how their claws cut the empty air, how their teeth snap on the ice. And the deer and the moose and elk. And from the sky the first few faint red daubs of blood marking the paperwhite cold of the earth, each a meltwater crater lined with red like a bullet hole. Then heavier droplets, the torrent constant and unceasing once it has begun and all of it smelling of death. The first of the birds is a small dark shadow that ricochets through the tree branches and falls at last to the snow almost without sound. A faint puff like a quick exhale of breath. A tiny green hummingbird barely as long as your finger. You hold it in your hand but already it is too late. For this bird. For them all. Now come the woodpecker and the kingfisher and the warbler. And then at last the falcon and the hawk and the owl and the eagle. How their wings flutter backward over their curved bodies, as if trying to pull that last scrap of sky from the blood rain that surrounds them. Everyone a killer and so everything killing. Death coming into snow, into the fallen needles, into the frozen earth under our feet. Everyone a killer.

Even you.

IN THE late evening a few nights later, you find yourself at the Northwoods Tavern again. You can think of nothing else to do, of nowhere else to go, and you realize that your brief conversation with the bartender the week previous is the only real conversation you have had with anyone since your uncle’s heart attack. Or perhaps you return because what the bartender said and what you have now done cannot be reconciled in your mind. So you return, and this time the bar is full, nearly to capacity, with a live band in the corner of the room busily wrecking the Eagles’ “Take It Easy” and a few couples gamely attempting to swing dance to the faltering rhythm.

The big bartender you spoke with earlier in the week is talking to a group of flannel-shirted, bearded men farther down the small bar, but he comes down and says, Welcome back, and you nod and order a Budweiser and then try to find a place where you can stand in the crowded room. The band has shifted into a slow country ballad now, a song you do not recognize, and the dancing couples collapse together in various states of embrace. Behind the bar, the poster for the football pool hangs, a few more of its squares marked in with names.

Hours later you still have not added your own. It seems somehow less important now. You are in the full drunk of the evening and you find yourself amidst the animal heads, staring up at them, one after another, with a mixture of awe, horror, and confusion. A few feet away a group of men and women talk in loud voices about a planned hunting trip. They laugh and debate what they will bring and how big the animals are and what constitutes the Canadian wolf-hunting season and what kinds of weapons they have and do not have. They are young men, perhaps younger than you, but not by much. You think of Rick, of those nights at Grady’s and all the other clubs up and down the strip, at first with the fake ID and later with the real one, of those last five months after you turned twenty-one and before everything totally turned to shit. The winter of 1984. They look like boys to you, although they must have been at least twenty-one, and you are only twenty-five. And yet it feels, somehow, as if you have aged in animal years, that you are somehow older than you are, a sensation that you cannot quite pin down and yet which is there nonetheless.