You Only Get Letters from Jail Page 19

  “What did we hit?” Charlotte asked, and she rubbed the back of her hand under her nose and the blood smeared across it, and in the weak light, the blood was more black than red, just like in the movie, and I thought about what Lenny Richter had said, nothing but corn syrup and food coloring, and that maybe he could have been wrong.

  “We didn’t hit anything,” I said. “Did we?”

  “I saw it,” she said. “I just couldn’t stop.”

  The engine was still on, the radio picking up the end of Kiss doing “Christine Sixteen,” and I turned around in my seat and looked out the back window at the rise of ditch behind us, tall grass and weeds pressed against the bumper, and I realized that the car was still in drive and Charlotte’s foot was on the brake, because the slope of ground was lit bright and red.

  “Turn off the car,” I said.

  It took her a moment to cut the engine and then there was a different quiet with only the headlights telling us nothing except that we were off the road and looking at the stars. I opened my door and I could smell the grass torn up where the back end had swung around when we spun, and there was the sharp burn of fresh rubber on asphalt hanging in the air, but I could not remember Charlotte hitting the brakes at all, and the wind had died down, or we were far enough in the ditch to be out of the gust, and I could hear crickets, a million of them in all directions around us, and the sound of something on the road just over the soft shoulder above where I stood, something ticking out of sync with the noise of the engine cooling, something struggling to get its legs under it, something trying hard to get up and walk.

  I heard Charlotte’s door open and the angle of the ditch forced her to put her weight into it so she could swing it wide enough to get free, and then she was walking up the short incline toward the road, and I stood there watching her, listening to the crickets, and trying to make sense out of the sound.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said. And there was a sadness in her voice that made me want to get back into the car and shut my door and slide onto the floor, let Charlotte deal with it and wait it out, because Charlotte was older and had always been the one to take the brunt, but I wouldn’t do that this time. I couldn’t do that anymore.

  My eyes had adjusted to the dark, which had settled and thinned on the road, and even the smallest detail was defined and clear—the broken asphalt where shoulder met road, the yellow centerline, the metal fence posts set back on both sides, leaning and loose with rusted wires marking acres. Behind me, the wide, shallow ditch ran along the roadside, full of nothing more than dense grass gone to seed, trash, and my parents’ Dodge Royal Monaco, nose up and cooling quietly with both lights shining into the air. The bugs had already come, gnats and moths in greedy clusters, so that the beams held their movement like dust. The deer was lying in the center of the road, one back leg still kicking out for grip, and Charlotte was standing over it, hands squeezed tightly in front of her, watching the struggle, and from where I stood I saw its head rise up from the pavement, watched the panicked white of its eye roll around and see nothing, and then the deer dropped its head and the back leg tucked in, and all of it went still.

  Charlotte crouched down and reached out and touched the deer, and part of me wanted to stop her, tell her not to, yank her back to her feet and down to the car, but I knew that if I had been closer, I would have done the same thing, reached out and touched it, too, and I watched her run her hand over it, ribs to thigh, and I watched the way her hand lifted over the slope of its side, the stomach distended and pulled tightly back from the ribs.

  “I can feel it,” Charlotte said.

  “Feel what?” I asked. Everything around us had gone quiet; even the crickets had slunk back into the thicker grass and the night was still and the air felt warmer than it had before, the breeze now barely strong enough to bend and ripple the fields. I looked at the sky above us and there were a million stars, and all of them seemed as if they were arranged in patterns that I was supposed to understand, but I couldn’t recognize anything except that they were brighter and closer than I had ever remembered them to be.

  “There’s a baby,” she said. “I can feel the baby inside.” I walked up next to her, careful to keep my footsteps quiet, and then I realized that the deer was maybe dead and there was nothing left to startle. I squatted down next to Charlotte and reached out my hand. I wanted to touch it, let myself feel the hair, stiff and coarse, and I knew I would be surprised by how warm the deer would feel, her skin radiating heat, and I would rest my hand against her rough side and hold it there, waiting for something to happen. But I could not touch the deer. I just stood there with my hand holding air.

  “Is she dead?” I asked. I stood up and pushed at the deer with my foot, hooked the toe of my tennis shoe under her ribs and tipped her side up and off the asphalt. Charlotte grabbed my leg and pushed me backward, hard, so that I lost my balance and fell onto the warm road.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said.

  “I was seeing if she was dead.”

  “She’s dead,” Charlotte whispered. From where I sat, I could see around Charlotte to the deer’s head resting on the ground, one eye open and fixed and staring up at nothing and her jaw slack, widened just enough that her tongue lolled out and over the darkness of her lips. There was something on the road underneath her, spreading around her shoulders and neck.

  “The baby’s still alive,” Charlotte said, and she started rubbing the deer’s side in small, tight circles. “I think we can save it.”

  The asphalt was comforting and warm, and I was surprised at the way that it held the heat from the day despite the wind and the dark. I could feel small rocks biting into the palms of my hands and I reached forward and rubbed them clean on my jeans and I looked over the deer and down the road, looked in the direction that we had been going before we found ourselves spun into the ditch, and I looked for a pair of lights that would signal the approach of a car, the intervention of someone else to help us pull the Dodge out, move the deer, and get us back on track toward town, someone to interrupt the things that my sister was saying and gently tell her that what she wanted was an impossibility that should not even be thought about, let alone said out loud. But there was nothing around us in any direction, not even the promise of lights, no cars, no more barking dog in the distance, no houses with porches cast in a soft yellow glow, no gravel driveways, no mailboxes marking homes.

  “We have to go, Charlotte,” I said. “We have to tell Dad.”

  At the mention of our father, Charlotte stood up and walked back to the edge of the road and down the incline to the driver’s side of the car, and I thought for a minute that she might just get in, start it up, and leave me stretched out on the ground, but she pulled the keys from the ignition and kept walking and I could hear them rattling, knocking back and forth on the ring, and then the trunk lid popped up and there was light from the small bulb inside and I could hear her moving things around.

  “Dad’s tools are in here,” she called to me, and I stood up and went down to watch her.

  In the light from the trunk I could see the blood drying on Charlotte’s face, a cracked thin smear across her upper lip and over one cheek, but there was no fresh blood and she looked all right to me. Our dad was pretty organized and not one to carry anything that he didn’t need, but the contents of the trunk had been tossed around and nothing appeared useful and there seemed to be too much and too many of everything, screwdrivers and wrenches, spilled nails, bolts, and washers, drill bits and sockets, some flannel shirts, a water jug, and a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam.

  “Perfect,” I said, and I pulled the bottle out, unscrewed the lid, and took a long drink and it felt good, and I realized I was thirsty and my mouth was dry and I swallowed all I could before my throat closed up against it.

  Charlotte was picking up tools, holding them up for inspection under the trunk-lid light, and setting them back down again. “What about this?” she asked. It was a twelve-inch flat-head screwdr
iver, and I thought about her bent over the deer, cutting it open with a screwdriver, and how much effort it would take to punch through and saw into the skin, and then I remembered the movie at Billy’s, and how they had started with box cutters, the two men who tied the girl to the bed, and how she had been facedown and struggling, but not really, and maybe it wasn’t real, or maybe she didn’t actually know what was going to happen to her, didn’t possibly think it was going to get as bad as it eventually did when they started with the box cutters and they were not kidding around.

  “I have a knife, Charlotte,” I said. It was a little three-inch Smith & Wesson single combo-edge blade, smooth and serrated, a gift from our dad on my thirteenth birthday, and my mother had been against it, but in the end she had given up and made me promise not to hurt myself or use it on anything that I wasn’t supposed to, and mostly since then I had used it to carve my name into picnic tables at the park and once to gut a fish that Lenny Richter and I accidentally caught on an empty gold hook out at his grandpa’s pond.

  “Give it to me,” she said. She reached out her hand and I dug it out and handed it over to her, the black handle scratched and worn down over the past couple of years, and she took the knife and shoved it into the back pocket of her jeans and held her hand out toward me again, waiting, and then I gave her the bottle and she smiled for the first time since she had pulled into the parking lot to pick me up. In the dim light she was pretty, and the shadows made her cheekbones dark and defined, and her lips were full and red, and with her straight blond hair tucked behind her ears, and her face holding colors in a way that I had not seen before, I realized that Charlotte had changed and I knew why our father worried.

  “Are you going to help me?” she asked. She took a drink from the bottle and I noticed that its level was dropping fast and I wished there was more.

  “This is crazy, Charlotte,” I said. “You do know that? You really think you can cut a dead deer open and save its baby?”

  Charlotte picked up a flannel shirt from the trunk and used it to wipe her nose off. “I’m going to be in advanced biology next year, Shane,” she said. “I’ve seen movies. I’ve read books. People do this all the time. Emergency C-sections. It’s not that hard.”

  Above us, on the road, I thought I could hear a car coming in the distance, the drone and shift of an engine rounding a bend. I walked back up to the top of the ditch and looked in both directions, but the road was open and clear and dark for as far as I could see.

  “There’s no cars out here,” Charlotte said. “I learned to drive on this road at night. I was out here for hours and never saw anybody else. It’s weird,” she said.

  “I didn’t know Dad took you out here.” I tried to think of our dad doing anything after the sun went down, anything that didn’t involve the TV and his chair, or the tool bench in the garage, and a drink half full of something named after somebody else.

  “I wasn’t with Dad,” she said.

  I walked back toward the deer and looked down at her. From that angle it was harder to see how pregnant she was, if her sides were actually wide enough for her to be carrying something more than herself.

  “Come here and help me,” Charlotte said, and I went back to the trunk of the car, where she loaded me down with the flannel shirts and a dirty blue tarp and she carried the bottle and a flashlight and we went back to the deer and she lined everything up like a doctor would.

  “What are you going to do, Charlotte?”

  She spread the tarp out onto the road and tucked it under the side of the deer. I didn’t like the sound it made when she moved it on the asphalt, a stiff and artificial scraping noise that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

  “We’re going to deliver the baby,” she said. “We have a chance to save it. We killed its mother but maybe we can still give it a chance to live.” She took my knife out of her back pocket, opened the blade, held it up toward what little light hung in the air from the headlights that neither of us had thought to turn off, poured some Jim Beam on it, and wiped it clean on one of our dad’s flannel shirts.

  “I don’t think you have to sterilize it,” I said.

  Charlotte looked up at me. “It’s not for the mother,” she said. “It’s for the baby. Just in case I go too deep.”

  “Charlotte, what are we going to do with it?” I felt warm inside, maybe a little bit drunk, and the air felt good against my skin and I could hear plants rustling, settling back and forth together in their even rows in the fields, and when the wind died, nothing moved around us, nothing shifted, nothing bent or made noise, and I could feel the stillness like something I could touch.

  She laid the knife down near her on the tarp and started ripping the shirts, first one and then another, into long neat strips like rags, and the last one she spread open and wide beside her. The crickets had scattered and were suddenly loud and distant and the only sound that was clear and close was the noise of Charlotte moving around on the tarp.

  “Dad can build a pen in the garage,” she said. “I can raise it and feed it from a bottle. I can take care of it just like its mother.”

  A bird suddenly called from somewhere across the road, somewhere deep in a field, and it sounded big and close but I could not see it.

  “Nothing works out like that,” I said. “You do know that, Charlotte. This isn’t Bambi. You can’t just cut a baby deer out of its mother and take it home and call it your own.” Our dad had never even allowed us to have a dog because he hated pets. He said he hated the noise and the smell and the responsibility to look after something else in the house, and even when we begged and promised that we would do all of the work, he said that it was impossible, that he had been young once, too, and he knew that kids failed, and it would become his dog and he didn’t want one.

  The headlights behind us had become so much of a presence that I had almost forgotten about them and then the left one sputtered and the hideaway window folded it in with a soft pneumatic sound, a hush like an automatic door closing, and we were cut down to one weak beam staring up at nothing and the darkness filled in. I could hear Charlotte breathing through her nose and the sound was heavy and thick.

  She tucked her hair behind her ears, sat back on her heels, and looked up at me standing over her. “You know Dad hates me,” she said.

  I thought about the way he yelled, the way he put his hand on her arm when she walked in the door sometimes, the way he yanked her around in the kitchen where have you been?

  “That’s just Dad,” I said. “You know how he gets. He worries.” I felt like our mom, softening my father, making excuses like she always did—he was just tired, you were just too loud, you have to try harder, you know how much your father works.

  “It’s not worry, Shane,” she said. “He hates me. He wishes I would just move away and never come back so he could say that he just has a son.”

  When I saw the girl in the film for the first time, I thought that the men would be younger, that they would be in high school, that for some reason they would be boys, and I hadn’t thought about them being anything else, but they had been men our father’s age, or maybe even older, and they had tied the girl to the bed and her spine had stood out in a rail of bones and I had seen the shadows of the men first, saw their shapes moving across her white skin like clouds, and she hadn’t seemed scared at all, and Lenny Richter had whispered to me this is gonna be the good part.

  “He loves you,” I said. “He’s just weird about showing it.”

  “You know he caught me one time,” she said. “He caught me making out in front of the house. It was late and we were parked on the street and I thought everybody was asleep—the house was dark—and I didn’t want to come in. You don’t understand what I’m talking about, I know, but someday you will, I can’t really explain it and it doesn’t make any sense, but I just couldn’t stop even though I knew I needed to go in. I just didn’t.”

  I tried to imagine who Charlotte had been with and I couldn’t. I
had never seen her sit with anybody other than girls at school, had never heard her talk to a boy on the phone, had never heard her mention a name, or act strange, or get nervous. I had never known Charlotte to pay attention to anybody except for her best friend, Macy, and with as much time as I knew that they spent together, there didn’t seem to be much of a chance for Charlotte to be making out or driving these roads at night with somebody else.

  “It wasn’t Pete Holbrook, was it?” I asked. He was the only one that I could think of Charlotte liking and that was only based on the fact that I knew that he had liked her the year before, had followed her around at lunch all of the time—I had seen him in the cafeteria, trying to get next to her in line, sit by her and Macy at a table—and I knew he had asked her to a dance once but she had said no.

  Charlotte laughed. “Pete? God no,” she said. “Not even close.” She moved onto her knees and I could hear the tarp shift underneath her and I could hear her take a deep breath and hold it and then exhale. “Hold the flashlight for me, okay?” She clicked it on and handed it up to me and the unexpected heaviness spun the light backward toward me, blinding me for a second.

  I pointed the beam down at the side of the deer and I thought I was still seeing spots from the light, but then I realized they were ticks, standing out like blood-filled moles, and I wanted to look away, but Charlotte was pushing on the deer’s stomach with her hand, running her fingertips over the brown skin, pulling the back leg so that she could see the entirety of the white belly underneath. I was shaking badly and I tried to hold the light steady, but it kept jumping around and landing everywhere except where Charlotte was pointing the knife.