by Sam Shelstad
Doug fell asleep against the window again but woke up a minute later clutching his bag. He was sweating through his shirt. The worse things are, the better they will be, he reminded himself.
This Deer Won’t Look Both Ways
That sign you sometimes pass on the highway with the painted silhouette of the deer? That’s me. I won’t look both ways. It’s true, I won’t. I’ll just walk right into the road, suddenly, while it’s dark. My friends will too, so be warned. Not that it matters—you’ll hit us anyway. We want to get hit.
I’m not stupid. I can hear a car coming from miles away and I’ve been run down nine times since Christmas. Obviously, I try to avoid full-on collisions; I don’t want to die. Just a good hit to the hindquarters, something that will throw me into the culvert. One time I got smacked in the face with a side-view mirror. God that was good.
My cousin Aaron? He likes to watch from the bushes while we get struck. That’s his thrill. Not me—I crave that rush you can only get when four thousand pounds of metal knock you into a spin, that wild screech of rubber on pavement, the sudden panic that this might be the one that finally cripples you for life. I dream about this every night.
The thing I really fantasize about is that one night a driver will stop and reverse slowly over my tail. And then maybe they get out and slam one of my legs in the car door. Oh god. Maybe they tie me up like they’re going to mount me on the roof rack but instead they just douse me in windshield washer fluid. Yes.
Because what else is there for me and my friends? Do you know what we do all day? Picture one of those deer-hunting arcade games they have in sports bars with the plastic guns: you wander around a boring forest, looking at trees or at nothing until you see a stag—and then you shoot it. Kind of entertaining, right? Now imagine that instead of shooting the deer, you just look at it for a second, nod and then continue wandering around until you see another one. And then you nod again. That’s it. That’s my life. I just want to feel something other than the slow digestion of the cud I chew. So we go out at night and look for release in a pair of headlights.
See this scar on my back? A few months ago I ran out in front of this pickup and the guy who came to check on me dropped a lit cigar on the side of the road about ten feet from where I lay bleeding. I knew I had to seize this golden opportunity and I wiggled my way over to it, salivating. The driver jumped back into his truck, probably thinking I was rabid or something but I wiggled my way over and rolled onto the stogie. Jesus. It was like a blinding white light from heaven. Smoke rose in the retreating lights of the pickup and the smell was like grilled venison. My cousin Aaron was in the bushes the whole time watching and chewing on his foreleg. People see these bald patches on our legs and think it’s because of ticks or something, but no. We do this to ourselves because we can.
You know what those signs along the highway should say? This Deer Won’t Mind If You Swerve into Him.
Or: This Deer Would Be Delighted If You Were to Pull Over, Grab Him by the Antlers and Bash His Head into the Hood of Your Car Until He Loses Consciousness.
Or, wait: This Deer Wants You to Run Over His Hind Legs So He Can’t Move Away, Watch Him Writhe There in the Middle of the Road While You Drink a Fifth of Scotch and Then Piss Right on His Face While His Pervert Cousin Watches from the Bushes and Feverishly Bites into His Own Leg Thus Humiliating the Struck Deer Until He Finally Reaches the Carrot That Has Been Dangling in Front of Him His Entire Adult Life as He Experiences Pure, Unbridled Ecstasy.
But, whatever. The current signage is better than the usual bland, Deer crossing. And I understand if you’d rather obey the warning and drive with caution because hitting us is a danger to you guys too. You’ve got sports bars, malls and water parks—things to really live for. Just promise me you won’t feel bad if you happen to run us down. You’ll notice, as the headlights of your vehicle bear down on me, that this deer won’t look both ways. This deer will look directly into your own eyes. This is not fear; this is not a plea to your humanity. I am looking into the eyes of my master. Dominate me. Humble me with your awesome power, driver. Oh yes.
The Girl Who Smelled of Sarsaparilla
It began during a power outage. The TV went out one Sunday night and my dad decided to tell us a story to pick up the slack. Mom lit candles. My sister Kat and I sat on the rug. I was ten years old, my sister eleven.
Dad improvised the whole thing. It was a Western tale about a nameless girl who had her own six-shooter. She rode a horse called Poncho and went on adventures. Dad said she drank twenty bottles of sarsaparilla a day and people could smell it on her—you’d know right away when she walked into the room, he said. Some of the strangers she’d run into on the trail would laugh at her. Who was this strange little cowgirl? Shouldn’t she be with her dolls? But those who knew her by reputation would let her pass wordlessly, frightened by what she might do if they upset her in any way. The girl didn’t play with dolls—she played with bullets, throwing knives and broken sarsaparilla bottles.
Kat and I were sold. When the TV and lights came back on we begged our father to turn everything off again and continue his tale. He did. After that, Sunday evenings were story night when Dad would continue the serialization of “The Girl Who Smelled of Sarsaparilla.” We loved hearing of the girl’s adventures on the range. She was always getting into trouble. Dad would put his brave protagonist into horrifying situations—like when she fell into a snakepit, or the firepit, or the one pit that had snakes and fire and the snakes were somehow immune to the fire—but he’d always pull her out of there before Kat and I got too nervous. Dad would pace around the room while he talked. He did voices and made gestures. When the girl spit, Dad would spit too—right onto the carpet.
A few months later—mid-February, I think—Dad got laid off. The auto plant he worked for shut down and he found he had a lot of free time. In the mornings, he’d check the paper for jobs but come afternoon he occupied himself with research. He wanted to make the stories he told us better, more accurate, he said. He wanted to nail down all the historical details of the American Old West so he’d walk down to the library and come home with an armload of books. He’d plunk them down on the kitchen table and sit there in his pajama bottoms, unshaven, flipping pages and jotting notes until midnight or later. His bathrobe would be open, his gut spilled out over his lap. Sometimes he’d stay up until morning.
The stories changed after that. Dad concerned himself less and less with narrative. It became more about the details, the historical details he’d found in his books. One Sunday, Dad taped a nineteenth-century map of the American states and territories to the wall and sat us down in front of it for story time. He’d copied it from one of his books. It was covered with his own little sketches and notations, which he explained.
“Now this road here was originally a postal route but was taken over by the town of Challis when it sprang up in 1850,” he’d say. “But the interesting thing is that in 1866, Challis burned down and the road fell into disrepair. It was forgotten for decades until a new town—Saint Rose, I think—came into being. They fixed it up and now it’s part of the Texas highway system. You can still drive down that route, kids.”
Where was the girl? Kat and I wondered. What happened to the adventures? But we couldn’t say anything. The job market was scarce at the time and these American history lectures were all he cared about. I began to dread Sunday evenings.
For a month or so, all his stories began with the girl heading off to the schoolhouse and then Dad would spend a few hours describing the history lessons she was taught that day. It didn’t make sense. If the girl lived in the Old West, why would her teacher spend the entire class going on about what it was like living in the Old West? Couldn’t the students just look out the window?
Dad finally found work. He had to take a counter job at Wendy’s. It wasn’t his first choice, but it was a paycheque. He shaved for the first time since losing his job and decided to leave a moustach
e. Mom said he looked like a peeping tom but Dad kept it. He wanted a new look, a fresh start. He continued to serialize “The Girl Who Smelled of Sarsaparilla” on Sunday nights but thankfully he dropped the historical stuff. He got back to the story. During her wanderings, the girl stopped in the town of Grayhorse and found work as a barmaid in the local saloon. She was only ten years old but the other barmaids were even younger—seven, six years old. They were tykes with no worldly knowledge, never having travelled the range, but they had seniority since they’d been working at the saloon for longer. “Hurry up with them sours, slowpoke,” the precocious little brats would say. “Better grab the mop, lazy bones. Old Wesley done chucked up again.”
And the saloon’s patrons—Dad could spend a whole evening describing the saloon’s patrons and their exploits. “One night,” he’d say, “this big butterball of a man came rolling into the girl’s saloon. He ordered five rabbit stews, all to himself. Ate them right there in the restaurant. Left a big mess too. The girl had to stand there and watch from behind the bar. She couldn’t look away on account of she couldn’t believe it. And then this big boy finishes his five stews, walks back up and demands another two!”
Our hero had stopped riding Poncho around and ceased to find herself in duels. No more dangerous pits. Nothing fun, just work stories, and Kat and I saw right through his disguise. The saloon’s “trot-through” was really the drive-thru, the oversized pink stetson the girl was made to wear stood for the ball cap and headset Dad was so embarrassed of and the outlaws pushing moonshine by the stables were clearly the teenagers who sold OxyContin in the parking lot. Dad’s imagination only stretched so far, I suppose.
It was around this time that my parents started getting into huge fights. I guess Mom felt like Dad resented her for making more money than he did. She worked at the bank. In turn, Dad felt like Mom resented him for making less money than she did. They’d have complicated arguments and Mom would drive off to meet her friends in a huff leaving Dad with us. He’d tell his Western tales on these nights, even if it wasn’t a Sunday.
Soon, Poncho the horse came to represent our mother in Dad’s stories. When the girl finished her saloon shifts she’d come outside to find Poncho untied from the hitching post and nowhere to be seen. Poncho left vague notes for the girl written in the dirt with her hoof: Horsey night, don’t wait up, or Off horsin’ around, Myra got a new salt lick. Sometimes Poncho would come into the saloon with her horse friends—at this point Dad was happy to explore any ridiculous idea that popped into his head—and pretend not to know the girl. Poncho would hide in a booth near the back muttering that they never should’ve come there; if one of the other horses recognized the girl behind the bar, Poncho would just change the subject. Dad’s tales were getting tense, told with a serious expression that made me and my sister extremely uncomfortable. Often we’d pretend to fall asleep so Dad would have to take us up to bed, though there were times he wouldn’t acknowledge our fake snores; times he would get so caught up he wouldn’t have noticed if we left the room.
That summer things took a turn for the worse. Mom left. We weren’t aware of this at the time but later learned that Mom had an affair and Dad found out. Mom moved into her own apartment and we stayed in the house with Dad. The saga of “The Girl Who Smelled of Sarsaparilla” became a nightly event. And things got dark.
“One morning,” Dad said, staring into his beer glass, “the girl didn’t feel like going into the saloon. So she didn’t. She stayed in bed. She stayed in bed and she drank sarsaparillas like she always did except they tasted like puddle water and bad breath. She drank them anyway. And she didn’t sleep, even though she was in bed. She just lay there and wondered what Poncho was doing. Maybe Poncho was dead. How would she know? She looked up at the ceiling and saw shapes and all the shapes looked like Poncho trampling little girls. She put the covers over her head and cried. She only got up to use the latrine, and once she was done, she’d get right back into bed. If only I could do this every day, she’d think. But some days she had to go to the saloon and it was hard to see why exactly, but she did. She’d rather just stay in bed and look at the terrible shapes in the ceiling because even though those days were no good, they were better than the days she went to the saloon. Christ.”
He told us these stories before bed and then Kat and I would go and have nightmares. We begged our father to stop, to get back to the adventures with Poncho, but he wouldn’t listen. He had a glaze over his eyes. It was like he couldn’t hear anything beyond his own gloomy thoughts.
By the end of the summer, Dad had lost his job at Wendy’s. He’d skipped out on too many shifts and that was it. Mom moved in with Steve, the man she’d been having the affair with, and then Dad got bit by a baby racoon while he was cleaning out the garage. “The Girl Who Smelled of Sarsaparilla” stopped lying around in bed, however; Dad had her head out onto the range again. The stories became increasingly more violent, with the girl shooting and stabbing her way through the Old West. If anyone looked at her funny, she’d pluck out their eyeballs and throw them into a creek. If a beggar asked for scraps, she’d force-feed him dirt until he choked. She’d burn herself with cigars to pass the time and put rocks in her shoes for reasons that were left unexplained. And then she met Reverend Hoss.
Hoss was a doomsday preacher who travelled from town to town, setting up a crate on the main drag and climbing up to tell passersby about the coming apocalypse. The girl would follow him around and help the reverend carry his crate until Dad eventually stopped mentioning the girl altogether. He just went on about Hoss and recreated his ominous speeches.
“The frontier is a black abyss,” Dad would say in a deep drawl, arms gesturing wildly above his head. “As civilization creeps westward, we are walking right into the great jaws of Lucifer. And there’s no turning back. We’re on a slope and you’d better believe we’re sliding. No man can escape this slide. I’m talking brimstone. I’m talking heavy chains and black smoke and sharp rocks. I’m talking flames so hot it’s beyond our comprehension. Think of that: beyond comprehension. These are end days, people.”
For weeks, our father was obsessed with hell. He’d describe the underworld over dinner using his Hoss voice. It was horrifying, of course, but the most disturbing thing was that the details didn’t come from intense research, as with his earlier Old West tales—they came from his imagination. He’d go on about fountains of blood, red clouds that rained children’s shoes and sentient rivers that cried out in pain through the night. Kat and I didn’t sleep much that summer.
Word of Dad’s behaviour made it to Mom and she was able to convince him to seek therapy. He’d go in for weekly sessions and they put him on antidepressants and tranquilizers. He slept a lot. He was calm. Kat and I moved in with our mother and Steve so Dad could rest but we’d visit on weekends. He’d continue the tale of “The Girl Who Smelled of Sarsaparilla” on Sundays before Mom would pick us up. The tone of the stories changed again.
“The girl got on her horsey,” Dad would say. “The horsey was named Poncho. They were friends. They went on an adventure. They rode to a canyon. They found nice flowers and smelled the flowers. Then they were tired. They had naps in the flowers. It was a good adventure.” That sort of thing.
It took time but our father made it through this difficult period. The therapy sessions were productive and after about a year he weaned himself off the medication. He found a job at a call centre and worked his way up to a management position. He met a woman there whom he eventually married. Kat and I still saw him on weekends but he discontinued the story of the girl. My sister and I were fine with this decision.
Dad didn’t speak of the Old West until much later when I was in college. I was having a rough time—the girl I was seeing left me for a mutual friend, my grades were slipping and I injured my back falling into a ditch while drunk. Dad came to visit me in my dorm. He was sitting by my bed, listening to my complaints and then he interrupted me. He started back in on the girl as if a
decade hadn’t passed since the previous chapter.
“Poncho was having a bad day and so the girl boxed his ears and looked right into his eyes,” Dad said. I guess Poncho was me now. “And she told him to quit bellyaching because there was sarsaparilla to drink and adventures to have and goddammit if there wasn’t but one cloud in that big blue sky.”
“Easy for her to say,” I said.
“No,” Dad said. “Not easy.”
DeRosa
For the second year in a row, Ted Cohen spent his birthday in a room at the Cedars–Sinai Medical Center. The previous year, his wife was in the bed. Now it was a man named DeRosa.
“So who’s gonna sing me the birthday song?” Ted said.
DeRosa’s cardiac monitor beeped.
“Wake up and sing for me. Don’t be rude, DeRosa.”
The patient wore what looked like a white motorcycle helmet of bandages covering the wound Ted had given him the week prior when he’d brained DeRosa with a landscape painting. If you leaned in close, Ted discovered, the helmet smelled like an armpit. The rest of the room smelled like lemons.
DeRosa didn’t live in South Roberston or even Los Angeles. He came from Texas, a police officer had told Ted. They couldn’t get a hold of the patient’s family so it was just Ted there during visiting hours. He’d been there every day that week.
A nurse walked in. She had beautiful blonde curls and heavy bags under her eyes. She was new, hired within the past year. Before Ted’s wife died he basically lived at Cedars–Sinai. For two months, he watched poor Annie shrivel and fade. And here he was again, freshly seventy-two, and on a first-name basis with almost everyone who worked in Intensive Care. He watched the new girl change DeRosa’s IV drip.
“Hello there,” Ted said. “What’s your name?”