by Jodi Angel
“On the count of three?” she asked, and I nodded but said nothing, and she looked up at me, waiting for an answer.
“Okay,” I said, and we both took a breath and started counting in unison, “one, two, three,” and then Charlotte stuck the knife in, center of the stomach, buried to the handle, and there was blood, a darkening around where the blade went in, and I could hear Charlotte inhale hard through her nose, and she pulled the knife out and there was more blood and it flowed freely, thick and red and staining what had been clean, white, and soft-looking underneath.
I shifted the flashlight and caught the knife in the beam, and the blade was red and there were white and brown hairs stuck to it and I realized that Charlotte’s hand was shaking worse than mine and together we couldn’t hold anything in focus for more than a second. She wiped the knife clean on a piece of flannel shirt and sat back from the deer, pulled her knees to her chest and hugged her arms around them.
“What time do you think it is?” she asked.
I looked down at my watch and could see the two tiny glowing hands beneath the glass. “It’s after two,” I said.
“Everybody was asleep when I left,” she said. “Mom took her pill at seven. Dad had his drinks.” I imagined how it would be when we pulled into the driveway, nobody knowing that Charlotte had left, our parents’ windshield smashed, the tires caked with dirt, bumpers full of weeds, and us carrying a newborn deer wrapped in one of Dad’s old shirts from the trunk. Part of me hoped that everything would happen like something on TV and our mom would make breakfast even though the sun had not begun to rise and we would be inspected for injury, turned this way and that under the kitchen light, and our dad would take the fawn and come up with a way to feed it, make it a bed in a box, and he would look at the car and shake his head and be happy that both of us were fine, and we would tell the story of how Charlotte had delivered the baby on the road from the deer we had hit and our dad would be so impressed that he would put his arm around her shoulders and say, “That’s my girl!” and he would repeat the story to his friends, too proud to keep from telling it over and over again for the rest of the week. But really I knew that it would be nothing like that; it would be something that my mind did not want to imagine, and there were no pictures stored inside my head to give any kind of meaning to how it really would be, and I think that Charlotte knew it, too, but maybe she believed in her own TV version a lot more than I did, or she had more hope, or more need, and maybe those were the things that made her put the knife into the deer again while I stood there, and make another narrow gash next to the first.
“Charlotte, you can’t just keep stabbing at it,” I said. “You have to keep the knife in and cut.”
“I know what I’m doing, Shane.”
When the men in the film had the box cutters in their hands, I didn’t think that they would really do it, that they would put them against the girl and carve into her back, so that narrow lines of darkness rose to the surface of her skin in shapes almost like words, and Lenny Richter had been standing beside me, and he had put his hand over his mouth, and I thought for a second that he was trying to stop himself from getting sick, and then I realized that he was laughing. He had his hand over his mouth and he was bent forward and he was laughing.
Charlotte had the knife in a tight grip and I could tell that she wanted to drag it sideways, tear through the thin wall of skin that divided the second cut from the first, turn the one-inch slit to two inches, but just when I thought she might do it, go ahead and run the knife the distance of the belly and make a line big enough for her to open the stomach and reach in, find the baby inside, and pull it out onto the tarp, she took her hand off the handle and sat back on her heels, left the knife stuck in the skin. She wiped her hands on the thighs of her jeans and stood up. She turned away from me and started walking back toward the car.
“I need to think for a minute,” she said.
I stood there with the flashlight still pointed down at the deer, the beam suddenly steady, the knife just a small interruption in the slight curve of belly that was divided now by a thick line of color. The deer didn’t look as swollen as I had thought she was in the dark. She was just a deer, caught in the open between one field and the next, dead on the road. I clicked the switch and cut the light and turned around and followed Charlotte over the embankment.
Charlotte was sitting in the Dodge, drinking, and I wished she had the keys back in the ignition so that we could listen to the radio, but they were still hanging from the lock in the trunk. She passed me the bottle and I noticed that with the door shut the car was too quiet and too still, and I suddenly felt cut off from what I had become adjusted to.
“Would you miss me if I left town?” Charlotte asked me. She pushed the knob on the headlights and the single swath that had cut into the darkness went out and left the gathered bugs to scatter in confusion, and there were only prismed stars above us through the shattered windshield and the slope of the ditch rising around us outside the windows.
“I would miss you,” I said. “But I don’t think you’d ever do it.”
“I might,” she said. “I might surprise you.” She had a piece of flannel shirt in her hands and she was rubbing at her palm, trying to get it clean.
“Who did Dad catch you making out with in the car, Charlotte?”
I took another small drink and turned my head toward her so that I could see her face. She was staring straight ahead, staring out the broken windshield and into the darkness, and I wondered what she was looking at, since there wasn’t anything to see.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “Do you think we can get out of this ditch on our own? I don’t want to wait until the sun comes up for someone to drive by.”
I looked over my shoulder at the angle of the car in the ditch, the way the back end hadn’t slid so far that it was wedged into the slope, and if Charlotte cranked the wheel hard enough and put it in reverse, she could ease us down into the bottom of the gully and we would have a chance at punching our way up and over the incline if she was willing to wind the engine tight and hit the gas hard.
“You could do it,” I said.
She took the bottle from me and emptied it in one long swallow. “Help me gather everything, okay?”
We collected the things from around the deer, rolled up the tarp, folded it all together with the torn shirts, put them back in the trunk, and went back to the road. We both stood looking at the deer, and Charlotte crouched down and put her hand on the doe’s side and petted her.
“She’s cold,” Charlotte said.
The air around us was getting thinner and I didn’t have to look at my watch to know that somewhere over the horizon line the sun was on its approach and the darkness would begin to soften and give way to light before too long. There were more birds making noise, but they were still too far out to see, and the crickets had almost given up, and I realized that I was tired and ready to be home.
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said. For a second I thought she was talking to me, but then I realized that she had said it to the deer, and her voice was quiet and I knew that she was crying even though I could not see her face. “I tried,” she said. She kept running her hand over and over the side of the deer, and then she reached forward and slowly pulled out my knife and she handed it to me, bloody, and thick with matted hair, the handle sticky, the blade too stiff to fold.
I rubbed the knife against the hem of my shirt and was finally able to get it to close, and after I shoved it back into my pocket, Charlotte pointed me toward the front of the deer and she stayed at the back and we each grabbed a pair of legs and pulled and dragged her across the road and over the side and pushed her down toward the bottom of the other drainage ditch, away from the car, so that maybe when she disappeared from sight, she would be out of mind, too. She had settled into the asphalt so that it was hard to free her, and it took us ten minutes to get her across the opposite lane and far enough off the edge to roll. Her legs did
not bend and she didn’t make it very far down the ditch, but she was out of the way and off the road and nobody else was in danger of hitting her. We both stood on the blacktop shoulder, sweating and breathing heavy, looking at her dark body lying in the grass like nothing more than shadow.
“Why did you give up?” I asked Charlotte. Deep down, I had wanted to believe that maybe we could save the baby, wrap it up, take it home, and make things good like Charlotte said we would, that it was possible, a thin sliver of maybe.
Charlotte bowed her head and said nothing for a second and then she wiped both of her eyes and turned back toward the car. “It wouldn’t have lived,” she said. “It wouldn’t have been natural to force it like that. It wasn’t meant to be born yet.” Behind her, in the thin light, I could see the narrow stain in the road.
She did just what I told her to do—eased the Dodge into reverse and turned the wheel so that the entire car slipped back into the very bottom of the ditch and we were only at a slight angle with the driver’s side high-centered on the incline. I told her to put the car into drive and floor it, get enough forward momentum to push the car up the side and out of the ditch, and to keep a tight grip on the wheel and not let the car slide out from under her in the grass and the dirt, and she did those things, too, and we hit the top of the ditch so hard that we caught air and crossed to the other side of the road and Charlotte had to guide us into our lane without overcorrecting, and she did that, and there was a little bit of fishtailing and the sound of tires breaking loose, and then we were on our side of the road, with one good headlight pointing out the direction.
In the movie the girl had been almost naked, Lenny had said that she would be, but it had taken a while. They had tied her across the bed and she had been shirtless without a bra, her back nothing but blank skin and bone, and she had been wearing panties, white and thin, and when she twisted around on the bed, rolling up off her hips, trying to loosen her hands from where they were knotted above her head, I saw that the panties were the kind like my sister had for a while, the ones my mother used to hang out back on the line to dry, the kind with the days of the week on them, and the girl had been wearing a pair that said Tuesday.
I rolled down my window so that the air would keep me awake and I could lean out if I needed to help guide Charlotte down the road. Everything smelled wet and sharp and alive and I was grateful to watch it all fall behind us as we passed, and I knew that we were finally leaving the country, the fields, and the fence lines. Charlotte had her hands gripped tightly around the steering wheel, and she was careful and driving slowly, bent forward in her seat, and I knew that it would take us a long time to get home because it would be hard for her to see.
YOU ONLY GET LETTERS FROM JAIL
The Eberhardts’ daughter disappeared the same week they started going to the movies every night to watch the 7:15 showing of The Exorcist, and it didn’t take long for word to get around that instead of sitting by the phone and waiting for her to call, they were sitting in the dark, watching that possessed girl slam some priests around her room. Suzy Eberhardt disappearing was sort of Page 3 news for everybody—she was the kind of girl who didn’t put much stock in curfews and rules, and most of our parents defined “bad crowd” based on who Suzy Eberhardt was with. Everybody knew that she had probably taken off with some guy and would roll home when the money ran out and act like it was no big deal. I hadn’t thought much about it until Ricky Riley asked my brother to give him a ride out past the dam, him and this girl I knew from school, and I found myself down a dirt road, drinking warm Lucky Lager on a Saturday.
Ricky Riley had been to Vietnam and was fucked in the head, or at least that’s what my brother said, but my brother worked the graveyard janitor shift with him at Mercy and they hung out and were friends. Some people said Ricky hadn’t gone to Vietnam, he had just disappeared and run off up north when the draft came around, and some people said he had been drafted but couldn’t pass the competency test, and some said his draft number had never come up in the lottery anyways. All I knew was that it was ninety degrees outside and Ricky had on a jungle jacket that had somebody else’s name on it, and sometimes he walked with a limp, and he had enough money to buy beer but not fix his van, and he was older than my brother and with a girl I went to school with who told us in the car that she was with Ricky because she didn’t have anything better to do.
“Me and Suzy Eberhardt go way back,” Ricky said. We had the doors opened on my brother’s Duster and he had the hood up so he could show off his 360 and the rebuilt six-pack carb setup to Ricky, who my brother felt should have been sorry for driving a Ford. Debbie from school was sitting in the front seat, playing with the radio, trying to tune in something besides static or country, and I was on my third beer and thinking about wandering down to the lake. I thought maybe I could smell its shoreline like wet thick green, heavy and bug-filled, but guaranteed to be cooler than sitting on the vinyl seats or under the scrub oaks, which were too thin to give more than a weak circle of shade. The trunk was full of gas cans and beer and I was bored and a little drunk and tired of waiting for the sun to set so I could see what Ricky had in mind.
“Do you know where she’s at?” my brother asked Ricky. I could tell that he was only half listening because he was focused on the verbal tour of his Plymouth and I had heard his speech enough to know it by heart—he was waiting to get to the good parts: TorqueFlite 727 three-speed reverse valve body automatic, 8¾ posi axles with Mickey Thompsons front and rear.
Ricky took a long swallow from his bottle and ran the back of his hand over his mouth. He had let his dark hair grow long and when he leaned forward, he had a habit of tucking the front behind his ear so that he could see and it had become sort of a rhythmic habit—the farther he leaned, the more he tucked, like a one, two count.
“She’s dead in her house,” he said.
My brother stepped back from the open hood and I could hear his tennis shoes bend and break the bunchgrass beneath them. Everything around us was a faded yellow, miles of it drifting in soft rises broken only by the occasional grouping of trees, piled rocks, and the purple needlegrass that would give way to sheep sorrel down where the ground got soft by the water. Everything smelled like star thistle and baked red dirt.
“You’re full of shit,” my brother said.
To the west the yellow hillside fell away in a gentle decline and in the distance we could see the lake, a flat blue expanse with the sunlight rippling and breaking in hard angles off the surface. We were too far away to see if there were people, and on the wrong side of the shoreline to see boats. All of the action was somewhere out of sight. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been out to the lake, even though it wasn’t more than a forty-five-minute drive from town. There was no reason to go. We didn’t have a boat, I didn’t know anybody who did, and there were closer places to swim and fish.
“You ever met her parents?” Ricky asked.
My brother had stepped away from the front of the car and was headed to the back, where a case of beer was split open in the shade under the overhang of the trunk. Ricky had pointed the route out, directing my brother through rights and lefts and then finally down a dirt road that thinned out and became nothing more than tire tracks cutting a single-lane path until it emptied out on a crushed circle of grass by rock piles that were growing weeds in the sun. The tire tracks continued in front of the parked car for another twenty feet or so and then disappeared. There were beer bottles and faded cans and wrappers, evidence that we weren’t the first ones to hang out there and probably wouldn’t be the last, and I wondered if maybe people parked there to fish, but it seemed like an awful long ways to hike down to get to the water.
“I’ve seen the Eberhardts in town,” Kenny said. “I know who they are.”
“Total religious freaks,” Ricky said. He leaned against the front of the car and started rubbing at his right thigh, the one he favored on the times when it seemed convenient to limp.
“M
y girlfriend says they’re going to the movies every night now, ever since about the time Suzy disappeared. Summer Horror Fest.”
“They killed her,” Ricky said. “Went crazy with their religion bullshit and took it upon themselves to get the devil out of Suzy.”
The radio jumped to life through the four speakers and the sudden noise made me slop beer onto the front of my shorts. Debbie had found some distant rock station to flood the hillsides with, the Eagles doing “Lyin’ Eyes,” and she swung her legs out of the passenger seat of the car and walked to the back to pull a beer out of the case.
“Do you make this shit up all by yourself, or does somebody help you?” she asked Ricky.
“Why don’t you go sit back in the car,” Ricky said. “I like you better when you don’t talk.”
A breeze climbed up over the hillside and pulled itself across our circle and in it I thought I could smell something burning, like smoldering grass or barbecues across the lake, but I knew we were too far away to smell anything but weeds and the faint hope of water.
“Go fuck yourself,” Debbie said.
Kenny laughed and Ricky looked up from the open engine compartment and tucked his hair. “Baby, I’m trying to avoid that. That’s why I have you.”
Debbie shot him the finger and twisted the cap from her beer. She flipped it over and looked at what was underneath. “I hate these puzzles,” she said. She threw the cap into the grass and it settled against a Laura Scudder’s potato chip bag that was bright yellow and tangled in the weeds.
“It’s called a rebus,” Ricky said. Everybody looked at him.