Snow fell in modest swirls around the Suburban, but the clouds weren’t thick enough to brighten the midnight sky; one or two stars could still occasionally be seen between rifts in the gray cumulus. Another group of white-tailed deer stumbled and skidded off the icy road before the headlights, bounding off into the shadows of the rocks where snow had drifted high enough to kiss their stomachs. Inside the Suburban the boy driving told the girl next to him, “If we hit one of these, I’m going to make you finish it off.”
“I could do it.”
The canyon narrowed as he drove further up the icy hill past empty fisheries and lonely tourist lodges with large wooden patio tables covered in slabs of snow two feet deep. The snow made stark, bold impressions against the black air and the girl found it hard not to feel sad. It wasn’t even anything really that the boy had said or done, it was mostly just the snow and the stars. Five years ago, she’d been driven through the same canyon, and the snow and stars had made her sad then, too. The cold air and the broad expanses of unblemished snow looked raw and uncompromising. She felt she could run off into it and maybe find some kind of secret sacred portal behind a large bank of snow or inside a stone cave even though she was really quite a rational and cynical girl. If it were up to her, they would never stop driving. She could sit in that passenger-side seat staring out at the stars and the flakes for the rest of her life, she thought. She could ride into the endless night and never look back as long as the engine didn’t die.
But then there was the end of the road. It appeared as a three-foot high wall of snow where nobody felt to clear the roads during the winter because there were no more places to ski after this point. The boy parked the car, but he had already made up his mind not to kiss her there. He just glanced at her, remarking about how they’d reached the end of the road. She didn’t reply because what more could be said about it?
Pulling into reverse, the boy twisted in his seat to look behind them and drove backwards a hundred yards, looking for a place to turn around. The girl continued to look ahead, staring into the black vortex of snow pulling away from her in long white stripes, like that old screen saver that looked like you were in the Millennium Falcon going point-five past lightspeed, except backwards. The road tugged away before her and above her, thinning away in the distance until she couldn’t see the end of the road anymore but just a black sliver between the perimeters of snow.
Finally, the car stopped and the boy steered them left to make their turnabout. The view before the windshield tipped and swayed until they were facing forward again, back the way they had originally come. This time he did kiss her, and for a minute, all was forgiven. For a minute, they could have stayed. Then he pulled away and said, “Parked cars are trouble.” She pulled back as well, but let him keep a hand on her knee, her other leg cocked up with her shoe on the seat, her fingers playing with the holes in her jeans. For a minute, the snow reminded her of years before, when she was just a little more naïve and just a little younger.
Three small deer at that moment stepped before the Suburban and froze. Just before making impact with the center deer, the ones to the side bolted in their respective directions, leaving their middle friend to get hit with the car’s grille against the very center of its side and belly, sending it rolling and rolling before the car, like children when they roll down the grassy side of a hill, nothing but fur then hooves, fur then hooves, fur then hooves, until the ice skidded him to the right where he broke against the bank and lay crumpled, his back snapped, his neck shot backwards, bleeding into the cold white snow.
Silently, the boy backed up the car until he could face the headlights on the deer’s dying body. The boy and girl both stepped out from the car, the boy to check the damage done to the front of his parents’ Suburban, the girl to walk carefully close to the animal in the road. Still alive, its eyes were wild, its nose breathing heavily into the snow, a line of deer snot glistening in a modest arc where the deer’s head had slid against the snow after hitting the bank. Its skin was so furry, she noted. Furrier than a dog’s. She wanted to touch it, pet it, kiss its head, but she knew she was fearsome and predatory to it, something to flee from, and she didn’t want to add to its panic and distress. The deer shook in the cold and the pain, and she shivered. She had once lived in southeastern Idaho and knew how to dress warm, but she lived in Arizona now. She held her arms beneath her thin denim jacket and shook with the deer.
Satisfied that there was no way to fix the broken headlight or the crack in the grille, the boy went back to the car and took his pistol from the bag in the backseat. He walked up to the girl and stood next to her, staring at the dying deer in front of the two of them. “Em, you better get back in the car.”
“No.” He watched her for a moment but she wouldn’t return the gaze, continuing instead to stare at the deer’s eyes. He shifted his weight. “You want to stay out here?”
She nodded her head.
He hesitated again, and asked, “You want to be the one to do it?” She shook her head and he told her to stand back. She did as told, wondering if she should have taken the gun, and right then he shot a 9 mm Luger into the snow behind the deer’s ears. The deer’s breathing grew harder, the fierceness in his eyes increased as he tried unsuccessfully to turn his head away and retreat. The boy took another shot, this time closer and lower, striking the deer in the top of its head, blowing away a piece of flesh, jarring it’s entire body. The deer’s eyes flailed one more moment, it’s front right leg shooting out stiff and jerky, but then it softened and fell, its eyes still and windless. The girl continued to stare until the boy told her again to get back into the Suburban. This time she obeyed. As he drove them away, they were silent, both of them leaving each to their respective thoughts. The snow continued to fall in subtle flurries, but they didn’t see any more deer. The girl was very aware that the next time she found herself driven through that midnight canyon again, she would still be sad. History made it inevitable.
