The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors (11 page)

Deer

JANICE Y. K. LEE

T
HEY CAME IN
through the long, wooded driveway, opening the gate, struggling with their weekend bags, to find a deer at the bottom of the pool.

“What the fuck,” Charlie said.

Boxer ran around the edge, barking at the large dark shape shimmering under the blue.

It had struggled. Part of the pool's vinyl siding had come off and was bobbing in the water. There was blood too. You could see it trailing from the wooden decking to the edge and then the water, slightly tinged around the carcass.

“Jesus,” Maggie said. “It's Friday night. Who do we call?”

“Deerbusters?” said Frank, who was always making jokes that were not quite funny.

“What about 911?” Maggie said, ignoring him.

“Is this an emergency?” asked Frank's wife, Stella.

“I'll call the police,” Maggie said.

They dropped off their bags in the kitchen and Maggie called information. Information always knew everything.

While they waited for the police to show up, Maggie showed Frank and Stella their room while Charlie made vodka tonics. They greeted the police with drinks in hand, Boxer barking his head off, and watched as the men darted their flashlights across the pool. It was beginning to get dark.

“Oh, I'll get the pool lights,” Maggie said. She darted up to the house. She still wasn't quite familiar with where everything was, but she finally located the switch by the barbecue.

“Poor thing,” Stella said, when Maggie had come back down. She was looking at the deer. “What could have possessed it?”

“Deer aren't particularly smart, ma'am,” said an officer dressed in some kind of brown uniform. The pool lights had come on and the deer was illuminated. It was sprawled at the bottom, with no visible sign of injury, other than the blood that clung around it in a slight mist. Boxer, bored with the nonactivity—all these delicious strangers and no action!—went back into the house.

After some hemming and hawing, the policemen, there were three in all, who had come in two cars—things must be slow up here—decided they would have to deal with it later.

“We'll call someone to pick it up,” they said. “In the morning.”

“Glad we could provide excitement,” said Charlie. “Thanks for coming by.”

After the cars left, Maggie and the guests went inside and sat around the dinner table while Charlie hosed off the deck.

“Should we eat?” Charlie said, coming in.

“It's so late already,” Maggie said. “Let's just drink.”

She was sitting across from Stella. Tired of smudgy brows and chalky pencils, Stella had recently gotten her eyebrows tattooed and now she couldn't go into the sun without a gigantic hat. Her forehead was still slightly inflamed, puffed out like there was excess fluid underneath. Maggie wondered if she pricked it with a pin, pus would seep out. Stella was pretty in a Snow White sort of way, with coal hair and porcelain skin and lips she slathered with red lipstick every five minutes. Maggie didn't really like her. The first time they had all met, some time last year, they had had dinner at a small restaurant and Stella had made a big deal about ordering three Gulf shrimp. “Just three shrimp,” she had said imperiously to the waiter. When he had tried to explain that they only came in sixes, as in half a dozen, a dozen, et cetera, Stella had waved her heavily gold-ringed hand. “You figure it out,” she said. Maggie had jumped in, saying she'd eat three too, so then they ordered a half dozen and she'd had to eat three shrimp that she didn't want to eat. Later, Charlie got mad at her, saying that she should have just left it alone, that Stella could have just eaten three and left the others. “Why are you always butting in?” he said. “Shut up,” she said, but she knew he was right. She let people like Stella bother her.

“I like your shirt,” she said to Stella by way of delayed apology for her uncharitable thoughts of the last year.

“Thanks,” Stella said. She looked surprised.

“You're welcome,” Maggie said.

“What about Scrabble?” Charlie said.

“No,” said Maggie.

They sat in silence for a bit.

“Why not?” asked Stella cautiously.

“Oh, fine,” Maggie said. “It's just that someone always gets in a fight.”

They got out the Scrabble board and set up. Stella went into the bathroom. When she came out, she sidled over to Maggie.

“I changed the toilet roll,” she said. “I mean, so that the paper goes over instead of under. I hope you don't mind.”

“What?” Maggie said. She wondered if Stella was insane.

“It's just neater that way,” Stella said. “It's easier to pull.”

“Okay,” Maggie said.

“You know, you can't mess around with people's housekeeping,” Stella said confidentially.

“Oh, yes,” Maggie said. “My housekeeping is very important to me. And to others,” she added.

“Well, anyways,” Stella slid into her seat. “The house is adorable.”

“Shall we commence?” Frank said.

Stella was annoyingly good, one of those players who knew all the two- and three-letter words and kept racking up double digits in every turn. Maggie felt her competitive spirit kick in.

“Isn't it interesting,” she said, “that one does not need a big vocabulary to be good at Scrabble.”

Charlie shot her a warning look, but she didn't care.

“I'm not good at much of anything,” Stella said placidly. “But I'm okay at Scrabble because I figured out all the tricks.”

Frank spelled
aurora.

“Nice,” Maggie said. “That's a pretty word.” Stella spelled
xray,
decisively plunking down the
x
last, with her crimson-nailed fingers.

“Very dramatic,” Maggie said. “The way you put down the
x
last.”

Charlie spelled
tax.
Maggie put her hands on her face in mock despair.

“I have all vowels,” she said.

Charlie got her another drink.

“Take it easy, tiger,” he said.

“What is it that graphic designers do?” Frank asked. “It's one of those jobs I hear about but never really understand what the day-to-day is like.”

Maggie looked up.

“Well, it's a lot of sitting in front of Macs and fiddling around,” she said.

“What does that mean?” Frank said.

“It's all on computers now,” she said. “So it's quite different from the old days with glue and paste.”

“Oh,” Frank said. “I don't own a computer. Can you believe that?”

“No,” Maggie said. “Actually, I can't.”

Stella spelled
quick
on a triple word score.

“Sorry,” she said, looking at Maggie.

Later, the game lost, Stella decidedly the victor, they all retired to bed. It was almost one.

Charlie massaged Maggie's shoulders like she was a defeated wrestler, hopeful of rewards.

“She's horrible,” Maggie said. “And Boxer hates her too.”

“Oh, give her a chance,” said Charlie. “She's not that bad.”

“Excuse me,” Maggie said. “
Gi
is
not
a word.”

But she gave in anyways. It wasn't Charlie's fault.

Part of the reason Charlie had asked Frank and Stella up was because he needed a favor from Frank. A favor called twenty thousand dollars. Frank was a childhood friend of Charlie's and was making a bundle of money in real estate, even in the current downturn. He hadn't gone to college but straight into his father's lumber business, and then he'd bought a small strip mall, which grew into a dozen. He had moved to the city last year from Baltimore and was trying his hand at property development in the Big Apple, as he called it. Maggie was on the fence about whether that was endearing or not. They lived in an enormous postwar condo on Seventieth and First Avenue. Maggie and Charlie had been to dinner there once, and all the furniture had been black.

Maggie and Charlie had been financially stable, but they had gone a little, okay, a lot, overboard in the stock market and now they were hurting. They were behind in their mortgage payments and maxed out on credit cards and family goodwill. The rental, paid for before the big, big crash, when the market cratered on that terrible Thursday, had sent them hurtling toward actual, real insolvency, and the rental had been nonrefundable. If Frank said no, they didn't know what else they would do. Maggie was not on board for asking him, but Charlie was insistent, saying that it wouldn't be a big deal, that Frank would do it in a second, without any strings or weirdness. Maggie wanted to believe him. She liked to believe in her husband.

Charlie was easygoing, lovely. They had met six years ago—he was that rare thing, a lawyer without an ax to grind, and she was charmed. “I don't know nothin' about culture,” he drawled sarcastically on their first date. He thought her job was creative, something she hadn't thought in years. He taught her about calmness, closeness, and, often, human decency.

Over lunch the next day, Frank told them about what a good shopper Stella was.

“She can tell from the actual clothes what size it is. She never has to look at the tag!”

“Only at certain stores,” Stella said. “Like at Banana Republic, I know which one is mine, from like a distance of six feet!”

They had set up a little deli line next to the pool, with ham and turkey, white bread, pickles, and mayonnaise. A partially unwrapped Camembert was melting in the sun. Maggie was not a natural host.

“Lunch al fresco,” Charlie said. “With a view of the deer. We can go swimming after lunch—it'll be just like nature, swimming with dead things and chlorine.”

“Only after fifteen minutes, though,” Maggie said.

Everyone looked at her.

“I mean, after our food's digested? Like mothers always say?”

Frank stared at her, then continued to mayonnaise his bread.

“Is there any onion?” he asked. Charlie went in to slice some.

Maggie's jaw ached. She wondered if she had cancer. “I have a canciferous jaw,” she said to herself. Canciferous. Surely that wasn't a word. She chewed on her sandwich. Boxer came over and sat heavily in front of her. She gave him the rest.

“Frank killed somebody once,” Charlie said later, when she was washing the dishes. “Did I tell you?”

Maggie swiveled around, putting her soapy hands on her hips before she remembered, but it was too late. The lather dripped down.

“Uh,
no
,” she said. “Did you think you told me?” The pose she was in now felt fake, orchestrated, and completely silly, with her wet pants.

“No,” he said. “But I thought I'd try to slip it in.” He paused. “It was an accident though. He didn't mean to kill him. It was in high school and we were all drunk. He got in a fight with someone who had started talking to his girlfriend at a party, and then it got kind of ugly.”

“Ugly?” Maggie said. “What does ugly mean? Knife? Gun? Naked hands?”

“Bare hands, I guess,” Charlie said. “He punched him and the guy fell into a china cabinet and then the glass cut him up and he bled to death on the way to the hospital. It was awful.”

“Oh, was it?” Maggie said. “I thought it might have been rather pleasant.”

“Don't start,” Charlie said. “Just don't start.”

Maggie pointed a soapy finger at her husband.

“Don't you ‘don't start' me,” she said. “Don't you dare.” She thought. “Did he do
time
?”

“No,” Charlie said. “He was a minor so he had to do some community service. But it was awful. His parents moved away and I didn't see him for many years.” He paused.

“But the weird thing was, after the guy was taken away in the ambulance, and the police were there, Frank never looked sorry. I mean, he was drunk off his ass and barely coherent, but even after, when he had sobered up, he never looked like he was sorry he had done it. That's what disturbed people in the community and I think why they had to move, because people began to say he was a sociopath.”

“So, he's a hardened criminal … ”

Frank and Stella came in.

“You are melodramatic,” Charlie said to Maggie with a meaningful stare.

“I believe in law and order,” she said.

“Do you think we should call to remind the police about the deer?” Stella said. “It's kind of ominous to have it out there.”

“Sure,” Maggie said.

No one did anything.