The sun still shines like it did back then, back when I was a child. It’s as if I’m living in the husk of then, the new world a fungus that sprouts from its decaying memory and covers the rotting corpse of my Midwestern 1980s. But it’s still there, I can see it, like a ghost of a small town haunting me. And now, as I write this, it feels like I’m there amidst the trees and the blue skies. As if I am watching over my past like some grand eagle, soaring above it all as I sit at a small desk, and I swear I can hear the sound of burnt umber leaves crackling under my father’s worn boots as he hunts the cool forested floor for a trail of warm blood. His Red Wing boots, which he has had since before I was born, are heavy with mud and dew and pull at the muscles in his strong farming heritage legs. He steps gingerly over fallen branches and avoids ankle-breaking foxholes as he attempts to pick back up the trail of a deer he shot with his bow and arrow only a few minutes ago. His eyes search the camouflaged forest floor for specks of wet crimson glistening against dulled hues of brown and orange, plus fading bits of green left over from a wet and bountiful summer. He stops momentarily, his right ear turned against the faint wind, trying to catch any sounds piggybacking on the brisk gusts winding through the maze of trees and bushes. He hears a stirring of leaves and the tell-tale crack of a tree branch. The branch falls along with a few sullen leaves from a tree before him. My father’s gaze turns upward to a crow’s black form, flapping its large wings and moving away from him. His brow furrows, his shoulders hunch down, and he continues to trudge through the wilderness alone. Coming to a blackberry bramble, he stops to pick a handful of its late-season berries, shoveling them into his mouth, their overly ripe, bulbous forms oozing indigo juice; the black, bluish-red liquid slides into the deep grooves of his hands and become one with his calloused palms. These hands far too often cannot hold and console his two young sons, for they are frequently preoccupied with the shapely glass forms of alcohol bottles. He smears the murky juice on his old, faded Levi’s denim and continues searching for his crimson breadcrumbs.

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     A bleating in the distance cuts through the rhythmic crunch of my father’s footsteps. He stops and crouches on the ground, one knee wet against the musty dirt. He hears the distinct cry of a wounded deer in the final throes of its body giving up. The deer’s failing internal organs send electrical signals up through its body, telling its brain the end is near. My father’s eyes widen, accompanying an upward toothy slash across his face. He rises back to his feet and scurries through the wet autumn leaves. The melodramatic vocalizations of the deer grow louder as he runs past swaths of crimson-spattered forest floor. His heart quickens in pace, much the same, I am sure, as the deer’s as it runs along the same path. The only difference is that my father’s heart and lungs have not suffered a fatal blow. He is not fighting against a highly engineered arrowhead that violently cuts through his heart or lung membranes as he runs the path. 

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     A shadowy hint of brown catches my father’s eye in the distance as he traverses the running path walled with peeling white birch trees. The light starts to come in and the anorexic trees give way to a clearing. The deer’s fear-soaked body is drenched in the morning light. Its long, muscular neck and sullen head turn to witness the arbiter of its demise—my father, standing at the edge of the clearing. The deer attempts to get up and run away from my father, who approaches its prone body with haste, but its weak knees buckle. The deer lets out a fearful, long bleat from its black and brown muzzle. As my father sharply stops at the deer’s side, it looks up at him with large, dark eyes. Its pupils seem to hold all the universe as it stares knowingly at the blade my father unsheathes from his belt. As he kneels there in the cool dirt and leaves, my father sees that he has made an error and accidentally shot a doe, which is illegal that time of the year. Still, knowing there is nothing he can do to save her, he holds to his resolve and, without much hesitation, makes one fast, long, cataclysmic swipe along the base of the deer’s neck. Deep, almost black-red spills instantaneously, pooling around the once majestic beast, filling in around leaves, dirt clods, and white-capped mushrooms. It is a scene that has come to pass many millions of times on this land far before my father or any of his ancestors set foot here, and to his credit, he will not waste any part of this animal—a fact he prides himself on.

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     It was early morning, fall, at some point in the mid-1980s and I was wistfully asleep in a hand-me-down, twin-size bed. My brother lay next to me, his angelic hair—yet to turn the same deep brown as mine—poking out from under the covers of a bed of similar size and make. We slept under antique woolen Pendleton blankets, their coarse fibers providing much-needed warmth in a cramped room off the back of my father’s dilapidated, drafty cabin. As the early morning bled into our world, its wakeful rays illuminated the small space, knives of light cutting through a small, horizontal single-pane window above my bed. I was not quite awake, and my tiny legs stirred under the heavy wool blankets as they tried to lull me back to sleep. A subtle tapping at the window, TAP…TAP…TAP… above me creaked my right eye open a sliver, exposing it to the morning light. I pulled the scratchy blankets over my young, smooth face to hide from the day a little longer. The tapping came again, sharp against the thin glass. TAP…TAP…TAP… My boyish hands threw the red, green, yellow, and black striped Pendleton past my stomach. My small fists slammed against the thinly veiled metal springs of the mattress with young rage. TAP…TAP…TAP… Turning over in the bed, I rose to my knees and walked my palms up the cool, wooden walls towards the window. TAP…TAP…TAP… the glass was foggy with our warm breath, rendering the tapping figure in a shadowed milky haze. TAP…TAP…TAP… “HOLD ON! I’m working on it,” I said in a groggy voice. My still-growing fingers plucked at the aluminum lock on the window frame. I grabbed the lock with both hands and pushed with all my boyhood might. The window unlatched and sprung forth into my face, throwing me back onto my bed, and letting out a horrendous cacophony of metallic noise. Looking up from my feet splayed out in front of me on the bed, a smallish brown deer poked its antlerless head through the window, and a cartoonish voice sprung forth from its thick deer lips.

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     “Well, hi there, kiddo!” the deer said with an upbeat Southern drawl, its head bobbing as it talked.

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     “Umm, hello?” I said, staring at the talking deer in disbelief. Now, it must be noted that I was old enough to know that deer do not speak. Even if they did, I imagine that at this time, I would have figured that they had their own language or only talked to one another in shadowed areas of the forest far away from the ears of man. Certainly, deer didn’t rap their hooves against the windows of little boys’ bedrooms to greet them on sunny fall mornings and tell them about the daily happenings of forest creatures.

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     “So, what’s your name, little boy?” the deer said as its head bobbed about, its thick pink tongue slightly protruding from its loose mouth.

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     “Levi,” I said, rising from my seated position to my knees again, the bed creaking gently under my petite frame.

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     “Oh, that’s a great cowboy name, little boy. You got a pistol and a horse to go along with that name?” the deer said.

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     “Ummm, no. No, I don’t think so,” I replied as I sat with my calves folded under me, my legs naked and cold in the musty old room. 

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     “Well, that’s a shame, Levi; I guess you’ll have to ask your father for a gun and horse for Christmas, won’t you? So you can be a real cowboy and live up to your Wild West name.” The deer stared at me from its perch. I stared back at it, admiring its flat yellow teeth and the subtle tan hues cascading along its thick neck. We talked for what felt like hours. Time seems to move slower at that age, and you want it to move like lighting. You want time and people’s childish perceptions of you to move at the speed of your heart and little boy’s soul. You want to be perceived with the fullness you feel in the world. It’s a credit we often don’t give young children how they feel the world so wholly. We usually smash their ideas and dreams down to the size that someone smashed ours to when we were that age, forever limiting the fullness and complexity of the human condition. Why shouldn’t random deer strolling about the forest want to wake little boys from their slumber, inquiring about their shooting abilities and rope-handling skills?

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     I’ve thought about this many times since this day passed. Who’s to say that people before Westernized “logical thought” didn’t have deer friends who roamed the Great Plains of the Americas or Northern Europe with them? Who’s to say that they didn’t lay together in dry, thicketed grass beds watching herds of bison, each devising their ingenious plan for how best to pluck off one of the outside stragglers from the herd and take it down? Maybe it was just one small-minded early homo sapien who believed his peers were insane talking to these animals outside of their genus. A single forebearer who lacked the gene that helped with multispecies communication and multidimensional perception. A mutation that forever left its indelible mark on our forefathers. 

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     I sat there, talking to a deer, clearly a direct descendant of the few original peoples who managed to avoid this horrific mutation of the human spirit. Our morning of animal-human musings passed, and the deer pulled its furry head from the window and went, I could only assume, on its way to eat grass, leaves, and berries, plucking them with those flat, yellow teeth and large, pink tongue. I, on the other hand, readied by myself, as my parents being around was never guaranteed during that time. I donned tight denim that bore my namesake on a leather patch on the waist and again on a red tab on the right pocket. I dressed my brother, throwing one of my old sweatshirts on him, its threadbare cloth more hay-colored than its once-glorious bright orange. It had a black print of a stegosaurus, which still staved off the passage of time, much to my enjoyment, for the sweatshirt had been my favorite for years before my brother could ever fit into it. Dinosaurs were a particular interest for much of my childhood. They both embodied the real world and the fanciful one allowed for little boys. I was allowed to read as many books about the enigmatic beasts as was pragmatic. They somehow fit within the outdated masculine confines my father was raised within. I was also interested in goblins and fairies, but I certainly had to hide that fact from my father. I wasn’t able to engage so deeply because it would have threatened my father’s more straightforward midwestern sensibilities of masculinity. He never understood the positive aspects of daydreaming for his very artistically minded child.

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     My brother and I stumbled our sleepy bodies into the old makeshift kitchen, our feet clad in thick socks to protect us from the coming winter. I threw a few pieces of firewood on the wooden stove, which heated the majority of the house, and the wood crackled and popped as bits of bark and sap exploded excitedly. I pulled two camp-style bowls with white and blue enamel from the cupboard, setting them on the wooden kitchen table before my brother and tossing a mismatched spoon in each. The spoons clanked and rattled against the thin metal. I opened several cupboards trying to find where my father had put the cereal, hoping he’d remembered to buy us our favorite brands or anything at all, along with some milk, as he often forgot wholly, or ate what he did buy for us in a drunken late-night snacking binge, trying to fight off the next day’s hangover. Three cupboards down, and still nothing. 

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     “Sorry, Ty. It’s not looking good,” I told my brother apologetically, which he mirrored back to me with saddened eyes.

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     I opened the fridge to see if there was milk for us and there sat a family-size box of Cap’n Crunch next to a half-drunk container of milk. Shaking my head, I grabbed both from the fridge and slammed them on the kitchen table. My brother, who had an insatiable hunger for all things cereal, grabbed the box of Cap’n Crunch and poured a heaping mountain of its golden-yellow, square crisps into his bowl. He doused the mountain of sugary goodness with milk and proceeded to devour the heap with leaping strides of his spoon. I sat poking at my much more petite mound of cereal, still thinking of my deer visitor that morning. I hoped she was somewhere nearby, roaming the thick forest right outside my father’s cabin, and we would resume our talks of harrowing adventure and how I might convince my father to buy me a gun for Christmas. 

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     In the meantime, I watched as my brother devoured his ever-diminishing bowl of Cap’n Crunch in record time, and the room seemed to melt around me: wooden walls turned into bleachers with screaming fans, a bare light bulb that hung above us now a gleaming midday sun. I imagined myself standing close by with a white and black striped shirt and a stopwatch, the crowd around us cheering him on. I can see my eyes darting from my brother’s Olympic-sized bites, taken in measured synchronicity, as the small hand of the stopwatch keeps the time of his undoubted new record. “DONE!” 

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     I record his time, my small thumb slamming against the metallic watch. My brother can be heard shouting with joy and excitement as he swiftly pulls back in his chair, his hands raised above him to show they are no longer touching the spoon or bowl, his mouth still slightly chewing, the crowd’s roar growing behind us. 

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     “A NEW RECORD LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!” a voice that sounds like Jimmy Stewart over a bullhorn says. Red, white, and blue streamers explode from air compressors and fall around us. A young blonde wearing an American flag one-piece bathing suit comes over, places a gold medal around my brother’s neck, and kisses him on the cheek. 

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     "What will you do now that you have won the world title, young man?” the Jimmy Stewart stand-in says as he shoves a large metal microphone in my brother’s face. My brother can be seen pondering any and all things he could possibly do with the fame and prize money and ultimately repeats a line that we heard so much from sports stars of that era: 

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     “Well, Jimmy, I think I’ll go to Disneyland!” The crowd laughs and applauds, and I, in my mimeish referee outfit watch as the rowdy cereal-eating contest fans wistfully carry away my brother, he and them disappearing into the sunset-lit American landscape. The movie fades to black; the credits roll. 

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     My brother and I sat again at a wobbly table as I stared at a light bulb hanging from an exposed wire dangling above us.

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     “Any more left?” my brother asked, craning his small neck and head forward across the table.

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     “Na, but you can finish mine. I’m not that hungry.” I pushed my meager bowl of cereal, which was mostly milk, across the worn surface of the kitchen table.

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     “What are we going to do today? Where's Dad?” my brother asked through a mouth of milk and Cap’n Crunch.

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     “He’s probably still sleeping. I’ll figure out something fun,” I replied with a reassuring smile I needed to force with all my preteen might.

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     “Okay. Can we play Guys, you think?” 

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     “Of course,” I said. I gathered up the bowls and spoons, placed them in the sink, and rinsed them. I tossed the empty Cap’n Crunch box into the trash, which was overflowing with beer cans and Chinese take-out boxes, and put the last bit of milk back in the refrigerator behind an open case of Coors Light, hoping my father would choose the beer, as he most often did, rather than the milk. 

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     I went over to the cabin’s living room, if you could call it that, and pulled out a few old shoe boxes from under a laminated wood TV stand. The boxes contained an assortment of broken, aging toys that my father had taken from his parents’ house, left over from his youngest brother, and a few more modern toys that looked as if they were purchased from truck stops and southwestern Native American roadside catch-all tourist traps. I pulled out a few pieces of Hot Wheels track and a couple of dented and rusting cars. I put the track pieces together and balanced them against the side of the TV stand, making a death-defying Evel Knievel-style car jump that would hopefully entertain my brother for an hour or more.

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     “Hey Ty, check out this jump I made!” I said with smiling eyes as I turned to my brother. My brother was preoccupied, thumbing through an outdated newspaper’s crumpled and disordered pages. His face was bright as he skimmed through the funny pages. 

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     I stared at him in all his innocence, his young meaty legs dangling from the cheap wooden chair he sat in. He was so upright that he looked like a doll at that moment. Like someone had placed his cherub porcelain face and body in the chair as a joke or was lonely and thought the doll would give life and a little levity to their house. He almost seemed real in the morning light. I could see him shivering slightly in the chair, breaking the veil of my daydream. I looked over to the wood-burning stove. The two small logs I’d put on when we got up had burned down to smoldering ash. I shuffled my woolen-socked feet to the fireplace and saw the empty wood pile. My young shoulders slumped with the added weight of yet another adult task to perform this early in the day. I shuffled again toward the front of the house and slipped on my father’s Sorel boots that stood like tan skyscrapers next to the front door. Throwing on a striped puffer jacket, I opened the door and cupped a hand around my mouth, yelling to my brother.

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     “Hey! I gotta go cut more wood for the fireplace. I’ll be right back!” The door shut behind me, pushing a gust of autumn air in with its force. I slugged the hefty winter boots step by step, making my way around the side of the house where my father kept the spare firewood. As I ran my right hand along the cabin’s caustic, chipping green paint, my fingers galloped like superhuman legs striding over loose nails and pulled-up bits of wood. I pretended the abraded surface was an alien world full of heroic trials for my fearless fingers. They jumped, dashed, climbed, and slid along dirty window glass as we approached the house’s westernmost corner. My heroic fingers took one final leaping stride off the side of the house and as we rounded the edge we were met with my father standing in the carport. He stood beside a deer, strung upside down by the hooves from the carport rafters. I stood there frozen, staring at her mottled brown shape before me. Was it indeed my deer friend, or could it be another doe? Surely, my father did not contain that much malice to kill the friend I had just made. Still, there he stood, my father with a thick-handled buck knife dripping dark crimson, which hung loosely in his hand, and my deer friend—I could see it was her now—next to him with an expansive vertical slash that went from her anus to her throat. I screamed out a high, prepubescent cry, and my father turned to see my large eyes pooling with tears. I turned in an instant and ran off into the woods. The clunky winter boots kicked up mud and goldenrod leaves as I breached the tree line. My small body shifted through trees like a trout moving upstream. I could hear my father’s weighted footsteps not far behind me. I turned, looking over my shoulder, and he was a shadowed mass lumbering through the tall, thin birch trees. I thought I still saw the bloodied knife hanging from his right hand. I felt he was getting closer, but I didn’t dare look back again. I made a left, then a sharp right, hoping to throw him off my trail. I ran further, pitched myself down a small ravine, and tumbled down the hillside, coming to a rolling stop at a small creek. I looked up the hill, the dirty denim of my namesake soaking up the creek water as I stared up the sharp hillside, and there he was. Thick and shadowed by the canopy above us. 

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     “Leave me alone!” I yelled out as I pushed myself to my feet, losing one of the Sorels in the mud at the creek’s edge. The shadow said nothing and seemed to disperse into the forest’s depths. I ditched the other Sorel and clambered up the other side of the ravine, clawing my way up the hillside away from where I last saw the bladed shadow. I couldn’t hammer through the forest, now only wearing wet wool socks that slipped down my tiny calves with each flopping stride. I found a giant bramble of blackberries and crawled into its dark green belly. Its thin wooden fingers poked and tore at my striped puffer jacket, making an awful racket. Reaching an opening near its center where no doubt an animal made its home once, I clutched my arms around my knees and tried to be as still as possible. I was measuring my breath so as not to be heard by the darkness that was my father. I listened to branches snapping in the distance and my father’s calling voice.

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     “Levi! Where are you, son? Levi! C’mon out, I’m not gonna hurt you!” My father’s voice ricocheted through the trees, making it hard to pinpoint exactly where it came from. I was quiet as I could be, but my teeth began to chatter from my frigid wet jeans that clung to my legs as I sat in the cold dirt. I heard rustling leaves. The light through the woven blackberry branches dimmed before me. I could hear small branches snapping as strong arms reached through the bramble and forcefully grabbed my tattered jacket. As I was heaved from the stomach of the blackberry bush, I shielded my eyes from the light and the shadow, waiting for the thick-handled blade to sink deep into my stomach and gut me the same as my deer friend. But the arms pulled me in closer. I beat my own against the wall of a man who held me captive. He crouched to his knees and tightened his grasp, squeezing me against his chest as my face buried deep in his neck and long hair, the same brown as mine. My fists weakened and as my screams turned to sobs, I gave into his embrace. I could feel his tears running down the cool skin of my chubby, boyish cheeks, mixing with mine. My father’s working man’s arms pulled me out of his embrace and I looked into the tear-soaked eyes.

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     “I’m sorry you had to see that. I know it wasn’t pretty, but why did you run away like that?” my father asked, his blocky hands on either side of my petite shoulders.

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     “You…you killed my friend,” I said as a stream of snot flowed down my nose and over my lips. My father held there for a moment, looking perplexed at my statement. And then he laughed out a loud, long belly laugh, dropping his hands to his stomach as he did so.

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     “Oh, right…the window…your friend,” he said, placing his hands against the moist ground and looking deep into the mirror that was my face.

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     I’m sorry. I guess I forgot about that.” He grinned slightly. “Maybe it wasn’t the nicest thing to do.” At that moment, the whole morning clicked. I could see clearly how my father must have been standing outside the window, propping up the deer, puppeteering her head with the silly high-pitched southern drawl, asking me questions, and filling my head with wonder. What an asshole! I’m sure I thought at that moment. What kind of monster does that to a young kid? I think now: the kind that didn’t know his children—and who never will.

 

     My father pushed against one of his knees and stood up. He grabbed my jacket’s shoulders, lifted me to my feet, and dusted me off. “C’mon, let’s go find those boots and get back home,” my father said, never wanting to linger too long in a place where real emotions might be shared. We shuffled through the trees, collecting the boots and making our way back to the cabin. 

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     Peeking around my father’s frame as he opened the faded green door, I saw my brother seated next to the television, playing with the death-defying car jump I had made him. The old square television was on and playing a rerun of Hogan’s Heroes, the only program somewhat worth a damn that time of day. I made my way to the back of the house, closing the door to me and my brother’s room. I stared at the dewed window above my bed as I peeled off my wet jeans. I put on the only other pair of dry clothes my mother had packed for me for the short weekend, returned to the living room, and sat next to my brother as he played amid the bad German accents blaring from the TV set.

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     My brother and I spent the rest of the day watching random episodes of old TV shows while sitting far too close to the small Sears television. The thoughts of my harrowing morning washed away in the monotony of canned laughter and the colorful toys and junk food ads, the contents of which we would pester my mother for when we got home. 

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     We sat at the kitchen table as the day wound down and the sun set early through the tall trees. My father laid out the same bowls and mismatched spoons from our morning cereal, and we hungrily waited for dinner. My father brought a pot full of stew he had been making all afternoon to the table and ladled two heaping bowlfuls for my brother and me and then for himself. He sat down and started to eat, as did my brother. I looked up at my father and back to the stew, poking at the haphazardly-cut chunks of brownish-red meat. 

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     “What kind of stew is this, Dad?” I asked meekly.

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     “Venison. Your favorite,” he replied flatly, shoveling another spoonful into his mouth. And the sun shone through the windows in hazy bolts of golden light, just as it does now.

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