Dogfight
The deer is dying in technicolor in the backyard, some serious circle of life stuff happening in real-time. I am drinking my coffee and wondering if blood stains grass. I am wondering if deer ticks are real or something the government has convinced us to be afraid of. I am wondering why this all feels so stretched at the edges, thin in the middle. I am so far outside my body that I am about to hit the ceiling.
The dog attacked the deer. If I was a betting woman, I could have made some money off the whole thing. He’s not a bad dog. That’s what David says. Not a bad dog, not a bad day, not a bad deal. Nothing is bad in his world. I believed it, once.
David wanted the dog, so we got the dog. I suppose if I wanted to take some personal accountability, I would say that I had only voiced my doubts once or twice and that I chipped in for the deworming and neutering and whatever else it is you do for a dog that David found in a parking lot behind the gas station.
David brought the dog to the back porch. He had been gone a while, just supposed to get gas and maybe a Powerball ticket or whatever it is he decided to buy. Pack of gum, Zyns, Dr. Pepper. Things we don’t need, things we can’t afford. No use telling him no. David suffers from a condition shared by all the men I’ve known. They want more and more and more and it’s never enough, whatever you give.
The dog was maladjusted. Naturally. What else was it supposed to be? Heap of bones with tan fur connecting its joints. Had a slinky kind of walk to it, the physicality of each step visible. David named him Bones to be funny.
David gave Bones his first meal. Cut up steak he had seared on the grill. Kind of raw in the middle.
“Dogs like it like that,” David told me. I shrugged.
Bones ate all of it, threw it up later. Watching the deer in the backyard now, I wonder if it gave him a taste for blood.
David is on the porch, hands twined behind his head. He is also looking at the deer. I wonder if he is seeing what I am seeing. His hands are big. I know without looking that his fingernails are all bit off. He’s wearing the plaid jacket he’s had as long as I’ve known him.
Bones is nowhere to be found. I was standing at the sink and looking at the backyard and saw him go after the deer, chase it to the tree line. He stalked it, kind of, lunged at it when it tried to go into the woods. Snapped at the leg. When the deer went down, Bones stopped, suddenly. Then he backtracked, ran off into the woods. Spooked, I thought, by his own cruelty. But that’s probably giving him too much credit.
David was at the kitchen table, saw me staring out the window as I washed dishes.
“What is it?” he asked. He was annoyed at me. Not sure why. Hands not moving fast enough, using too much dish soap, wasting water.
“Bones just got a deer,” I said. I reached up to the faucet and turned it off.
“What?”
“Got a deer,” I said. “Looks like it’s bleeding out there.”
“Where’s Bones?” David asked, standing up.
“Ran off into the woods.”
“And you didn’t say anything?” he asked.
I turned to look at him. “Just happened,” I said. “Caught me by surprise.”
“Fuck’s sake,” David said. He walked to the back door, pulled it open, walked outside.
I met David when I was 22 years old. Working the front desk at the dentist. I didn’t like it, but no one likes anything when they’re 22. David came to the wrong office, somehow. I was there. He always jokes that it was a mistake that we met. I call it fate.
“Mistake makes it seem like something is wrong,” I tell him.
“It’s just a word,” he says. “Mistakes can be fate. Just depends on the context.”
Everything is contextual with him. It all depends on how you look at it, he says. He pulls things apart, holds them up to the light. I used to think that he saw everything as it is, not how it was supposed to be.
After Bones threw up that first night, I cleaned his bloody vomit out of the carpet with a stain cleaner and a damp rag. Bones shivered in the corner, looking at me. David was sitting in his chair, stewing.
“Goddamn dog,” he said. “Can’t do nothing right.”
“He got sick, David,” I said.
“I know,” David said. “Dogs aren’t supposed to get sick after a meal. He’s a disgrace is what he is.”
“He’s a dog,” I said.
“I know he’s a fucking dog,” David said, gaze snapping to me. “If you keep doing what you’re doing, that stain is never going to come out.”
“I’m following the directions on the bottle.”
“You’re useless,” David said. “You and that dog.”
I straightened up, sat back on my heels, looked at him. Brown La-Z-Boy recliner, thick socks, grass-stained blue jeans. Prissy little reading glasses perched at the end of his nose. The dingy gray-white carpet, the laminate coffee table, the squashed love seat with a painting we bought in New Mexico above it. Everything seemed pitched at an angle to me.
“If you’re going to be an asshole, you can do this yourself,” I said.
David looked at me, took the reading glasses off his nose. He seemed like he was going to say something. Just stood up, cast a glowering glance at Bones, walked out past me, out the door.
Bones whined, tail between his legs. He had backed himself up under the end table next to the couch.
“Well, this is your fault,” I said. I threw the rag down, took a deep breath.
David and I got married in a whirlwind. Spent our first summer ping ponging around different states. He had a dirty blue car that we covered with bumper stickers. Proof of where we were, where we had been. A collection of Best Westerns and side-of-the-highway tourist traps. Biggest ball of yarn, smallest violin. I was giddy to be anywhere with anyone who wanted me.
I wrote my parents post cards. Blue ballpoint penned sentiments of love. I stopped after a while. David said that they probably got the point. Having a good summer, etc.
We chain smoked cigarettes in the front seat of his car, atlas spread open on my legs. I’d light one, pass it to him, trace the highway with my finger. Figured out where we should stop for food or gas. We’d kiss, open mouthed, tongue to tonsil. David would set the cruise control and steer with his knees. It was a dare, seeing how long we could go without hitting something. I guess we thought we never would.
When I think of that summer, I think of myself in the mirror of a motel somewhere in the Mojave. Thick brown hair curling down to my collarbone, eyes wide. I am smiling, I am brushing my teeth, I am running away.
We’ve been in this house for almost ten years now. One day we stopped driving and that’s where we landed. David said that’s what most people do, although perhaps not in such a literal sense. He got work at a life insurance company. He quit after a few years. Couldn’t really blame him. Too eventual, he said. He didn’t want to be around when people called to collect.
I worked at an elementary school as a librarian’s assistant until the funding for that dried up. Then I worked at the gas station for a bit, and then as the receptionist for a mechanic, now back at a dentist’s office. More wizened for wear. Everything is a circle, David says.
I took up painting. All I painted were pictures of the desert. Tumbleweeds, cactuses, faded blue roads. Everything slowly became colorless. No heft to any of it. Had to stop after a while.
Then David found Bones and brought him home. Now there is a deer dying in the yard. I am pouring myself a bourbon at 11 AM.
David is still standing with his back to me. I see his wedding ring on his finger, thick silver. I wonder if this is how it was supposed to be. Mistake; fate.
The vet said Bones was abandoned as a puppy and had probably been living as a stray for about a year when David found him. David used this as an opportunity to act as patron saint for lost dogs.
“Took a lot for this dog to trust you,” the vet said to David.
David was beaming. “Dogs are the best judges of character,” he said. “I am just glad he judged me as trustworthy.”
Seemed to me that a stray dog is a ship in a storm. David was offering to be a port.
When David and I met, he had a broken tooth. He was barely able to speak. He gestured, I nodded, we figured it out. He filled out the form in his cramped handwriting. I read his name out to him. He once said it was the sweetest sound, hearing his name from my mouth. Been a while since he said anything like that. But he did, once.
I can’t pinpoint when it all went sideways. I wish I could. I trace over the years, looking for it. I wish I could hold the time in my hands. Untangle the yarn.
David is still looking at the deer. His hands are in his pockets now. I am drinking the bourbon out of a plastic souvenir cup from some godawful amusement park in Myrtle Beach. This vinyl house, everything all gray.
The deer has stopped moving so much. Head on the grass, legs splayed. Spindly little thing, laid out like that. Seems to be dying, not sure how. Bones didn’t grab on for that long. Wounds can heal. They do every day.
I feel sick, watching the deer, watching David watch the deer. I want him to do something, but I don’t know what.
We got married in Vegas. I was young enough to think irony was a worthwhile pursuit. He wore a brown suit, I wore jeans. Barefoot, giggling. It felt right, I have to say. Never been so happy. I told David that later that night. Feels right. My head on his chest, scratchy comforter over both of us. He said that your brain drugs you. Releases stuff to make you feel like that. Not real, he said.
“Not real?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“So why do it then, if it isn’t real?”
He kissed my forehead. “You do it to make it real,” he said.
I am thinking of that now, looking at the deer. Back then, I didn’t know what he meant.
I finish the bourbon in the cup. David has walked off the porch, gone somewhere I can’t see.
After Bones threw up all the blood on the carpet and David left, I sat with the dog in the living room. The house is hideously small. We kept cramming furniture in, hoping it would fit. Every room feels like an overcrowded mouth.
Bones wouldn’t stop shaking, wouldn’t let me come near him at first. He emerged from under the end table bit by bit. I sat on the floor, let him come to me.
“I know,” I said, looking at him. Every part of him was sharp. Looking at him straight on hurt.
He whined, thumped his tail.
“Should’ve just given you regular dog food,” I said. “Or he should have just let you be.”
Bones sighed, laid down on the ground.
I didn’t touch him. I didn’t want to. I let him lay on the ground next to me, and I sat there, felt the night accumulate. When I went to bed, Bones did nothing. He watched me leave, and I was thankful for it.
When David was a small boy, he fell off his bed. He smacked his head on a dresser on the way down. He has a scar, small as can be, on his jaw.
“I’ve always wanted a scar,” I said.
“No, you don’t,” David said. We were at the Grand Canyon. This was years ago. Sitting knees to chest, side-by-side. We’d spent the entire day looking at things.
“Scars tell a story,” I said. “Where you’ve been.”
David was looking away from me. I can see it so clearly. His hair, gleaming and silver in the light. He was so beautiful then. Sharp line of his jaw, the curve of his nose. When I think of him, I think of him in profile. A Roman coin.
“So not having a scar makes you ahistorical?” he asked.
“Kind of,” I said.
He laughed. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.
“Why?” I asked. I was wearing his flannel shirt, too large. The sleeves covered my hands. We were having lunch. Turkey sandwiches we had thrown together the night before. We were at an overlook on the North Rim, the car parked thirty feet behind us. Hiked all day, and now we were here, stopped on the way to the motel for the night.
I can see it all now: the scrubby trees, the parking lot, the canyon, the wide yawning of it. I didn’t know what to expect when we got there. I was confused when the canyon wasn’t just a hole in the ground. You can count the layers. Each one is an eon, a collection of ancient leaves and dead animals and blood. The particles of life. I had dreams for years afterwards that we never left. I would be wandering the canyon floor and hear David’s voice just around the bend, and I’d chase after him to find nothing. I would wake up in tears, trying to go back, trying to find David. I would tell David that, and he would say I’m right here, I’m right here. But it wasn’t like how he was in the dream. I could never explain it to him.
“Why would having a scar make you have history? It’s just a reminder,” David said.
“They’re a map,” I said.
“Maps show you where you can go,” David said. “Scars just tell you what you already know.”
Bourbon finished, Bones and David gone. I am steely eyed facing the deer. Bones leaping, the deer trying to run. Letting itself fall.
After I cleaned up Bones’s mess, David returned. He set his keys down on the counter, took his shoes off by the door. I was lying in bed, lights on, face to the ceiling. He sat on the edge of the bed, knees toward me.
“Look,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
I nodded.
“I don’t know why,” he said. “I don’t know why I get like that.”
“I hate this house, David,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
“I hate this house and the dog, and I am the one cleaning up.”
“It’s a good house,” David said. “Bones didn’t mean to do that, either. I know it. You know it.” Pleading tone at the end of his sentences.
“Sure,” I said. “No one ever means to do anything.”
“That’s not what I was saying,” David said. “Don’t twist my words on me.”
“I wanted to go places,” I said.
“We have.”
A pause. I looked at the overhead fan, watched the blades spin around.
“I don’t think you should have taken that dog, David,” I said.
“He’s a good boy,” David said.
“No,” I said. “He’s not.”
It occurs to me now that David has gone off in search of the dog. I set the cup down in the sink, lean up to the window. I peer out the corners. No David at the end of the porch. No Bones, either.
I walk to the back door, press my feet into my boots. I pause, turn around. I take stock of the living room-slash-dining room-slash-kitchen. One room filled with the detritus of a life spent looking. Overfull china cabinet parked behind a flimsy wooden table, bookshelf full of yellowing secondhand mysteries and crumbling hardcover classics, secretary desk piled with AARP catalogs and restaurant flyers and voter guides. The bowl of keys and loose change on the kitchen island, the novelty salt and pepper shakers stuck to the counter, the wall calendar tracking the due dates for the water and electric bills.
There is no David in any of it, far as I can tell. No me, either. Just things.
I open the back door, ease myself outside. It’s cold. The deer seems much closer from out here on the porch. It watches me from where it lies. I can see that it’s taking quick little breaths, in and out. I wonder if animals feel pain the same way humans do. If pain is so all consuming to them, or if nature has programmed a survival instinct to ignore the feeling. And then I think that the deer wouldn’t have laid down if it had very much of a survival instinct. It would have run away faster from the thing that hurt it.
Wild things should know how to run, I think.
I step off the porch, into the grass. It’s stiff, cold. The world is dying. Rigor mortis setting in for the season. Fall in West Virginia. Can’t say it isn’t beautiful, though. The trees turning golden. Their decay is glorious; their death colorless.
I walk closer to the deer. We are looking at each other. I feel certain of that. My nightgown swaying around my ankles, my sweater gathering at my wrists. I can see my breath in the air. The deer grows smaller and smaller as I get closer. Can’t be much older than a season or two. No heft to it.
I stop about twenty feet from the deer. The deer is looking at me, unblinking. It makes no attempt to stand up. Our wooden fence is to our left. The woods is right behind the deer. I can see the blood from where Bones sank his teeth in. The back right leg, fur matted down.
“Was it really that bad?” I ask. “So bad you can’t run?”
David was 37 years old when we met. Had an ex-wife and a teenaged daughter who spoke to him on his birthday and Christmas. He paid alimony in cash. Tooth had been broken during a bar fight. He told me this on our second date.
“I’m not a bad man,” he said.
“Well, sure,” I said.
He fiddled with the label on his beer can. “You make me nervous, being so young.”
“I can’t help that,” I said.
“Of course not,” David said.
“How’d you break your tooth?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said, rubbed the side of his head. “Got in a fight a few weeks back.”
“And you’re a good man now?” I asked with a nervous laugh.
“Yes,” he said. “I met you.”
We got married when he was 38 and I was 23. My parents didn’t respond to any of my letters about it. I thought that was what adulthood was. Letting go. I listened to David, let him tell me about how the world worked. Let him love me, let myself love him. Surrendered to it, let the waves carry me where they would.
And he was right. He wasn’t a bad man.
“Get up,” I say to the deer. I raise my arms. “Get up.”
The deer does nothing.
“Please,” I say. “Get up.” My voice rises. “Please get up.” I have entered a crescendo, my voice spiking to the ends of my sentences.
The deer blinks at me, cocks its head.
“You need to get up,” I say.
The deer moves its head, breaks our gaze.
“Oh,” I say. “You don’t want to.”
I look to the left, following the deer. The ramshackle wooden fence we had to put in a few years ago. New neighbors wanted privacy. A metal shovel leans against it.
The sun dapples through the emptying tree branches. The world is on fire. Chestnut brown and copper red and shrieking golden yellow. The last gasp before gray and white winter. I am venturing further out than ever before. Shovel against the fence. Supposed to be put back in the garage. Spot for it and everything. David left it out on accident. Mistake; fate.
I grab the wooden handle of the shovel. It’s heavier than I thought. Metal spade attached at the end.
I look at the deer. The deer looks back. I close the space between us, each step crunching on the grass. You do it to make it real.
Shivering, delicate ankles. Large eyes, velvet nose. The deer doesn’t move as I approach. White speckles across its back and face. Camouflage. Something nature does. From far enough way, deer look like nothing at all.
I pick up the shovel and I slam it into the deer’s head. I feel the crunch. I close my eyes. I raise the shovel again and bring it down harder. I don’t want it to feel pain. I bring the shovel up and down again.
I open my eyes. White bone, dark red blood, the light brown of fur. The deer’s head has smashed open, brain matter leaking out. Chipped skull scattered like a halo. Blood sinking into the soil.
I kneel, touch my fingers to the blood and the dirt. I looked at my hands. My fingerprint, outlined in dark red. I sit down, bring my knees to my chest. The deer, dead before me. The woods spread open like an invitation behind it. Bones lost somewhere inside.
I sit and I wonder if this will leave a scar.
Katie Leonard is from Asheville, North Carolina, and currently based in New York City. Her work has been featured in Redivider, Nowhere Magazine, and The Cellar Door. Katie enjoys reality television, extolling the virtues of public transit, and paint-by-numbers. You can find more of her work on her Substack, @relatablegirl.
