“Would you mind picking up your feet, please?” Barbara asked.
Harry didn’t hear her. He had turned the TV volume up high so he could hear it over the sound of the vacuum cleaner, pressing the volume control on the remote repeatedly in irritation at being disturbed.
Barbara wondered just when she was supposed to vacuum. He sat in front of the TV a good eighteen hours a day. And the volume was loud even when the vacuum cleaner wasn’t running. Though he never would have admitted it, insisting that the problem was due to the fact that everyone around him mumbled, Harry was a little deaf.
But even with perfect hearing, there was no need to have the sound on at all, much less at top volume. He always watched the same shows. High-speed car chases and natural disasters were his favorites, along with real-life emergency and police dramas. Sirens and gunshots, along with some commentary—always at the same hyper-excited pitch—were all the volume delivered.
Barbara despised the constant blaring. The noise was wearing her nerves to a frazzle. And there was nowhere to get away from it; the house was too small. Even earplugs didn’t work. For that matter, the constant blaring had become such a part of her life that it droned away in her head even when she wasn’t in the house.
If she had to be married to a couch potato, why couldn’t she at least have been married to someone who was addicted to golf tournaments, with the quiet, civilized voices of their commentators? But then, there was a lot to regret about being married to Harry.
It was a high-speed chase he was watching now—an aerial view of a motorcycle speeding down a palm-lined California freeway, police cruiser in hot pursuit. “The speed of the motorcycle is now in excess of one hundred and twenty miles per hour,’’ said the commentator. The motorcycle zoomed past the traffic as if it were standing still.
Barbara waited until the motorcycle hit the bus at the intersection. She had seen the clip so many times that she knew what was going to happen. Then she restated her question: “Would you mind picking up your feet, please?” she shouted. She was standing at the side of his recliner with the nozzle poised in her hand.
Harry shot her an irritated glance, punched up the volume a couple of more notches—Didn’t she know she was disturbing him? was his unspoken comment—and then reluctantly obliged her by lifting his slipper-clad feet while simultaneously reaching into the bowl on his lap for another handful of popcorn.
Bits of popcorn tumbled to the floor, and Barbara vacuumed them up. “If you put a squash in a chair, you’d get more life out of it than you do out of Harry,” her sister had said just last week. Her sister had never understood why Barbara stayed with him. Nor, much of the time, did she. It was fall, and her sister had been reminded of the huge orange squashes that are displayed at farm stands, which Harry, in the orange T-shirt he had been wearing that day, did closely resemble.
That was the trouble with Harry. He never moved. The upholstery on the arms of his recliner was worn away, the stuffing coming away in little bits, and it was only a year and a half old.
She had hoped it wouldn’t be like this. Counted on it, in fact. “We’ll get a motor home when you retire,” he had said. (He had retired two years before her.) “Travel the country. See the national parks. Go to Alaska.”
She’d always wanted to see Alaska. It was only this prospect that had gotten her through the last couple of years as an ER nurse, the years that Harry had been at home and underfoot. But all she had seen was her own backyard on the fringes of the New York suburbs.
They had bought the motor home all right. With funds from her 401k. Far be it for Harry to dip into his retirement fund. It was secondhand, but it still had enough bells and whistles to thrill Barbara: a TV over the dresser, snugly fitting natural wood cabinets, a refrigerator, stove, and microwave—even air-conditioning and its own burglar alarm! Small but perfect, like a ship’s cabin. All they needed, really. She often ate her dinner out there in the evenings with her toy poodle, Daisy, then stayed on to watch the news. She’d made curtains and throw pillows to coordinate with the floral bedspread and fastened down her knickknacks with poster adhesive to prevent them from breaking on the road. She’d even picked up a coordinating china pattern on sale— a service for four, which was more than enough for the two of them. After forty years of keeping house, she loved the sweet compactness of it—not a square inch wasted, everything fitting together as neatly as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
But they had never gone anywhere in it. In fact, she didn’t think Harry had ever set foot in it, apart from the day they’d looked at it in the dealer’s lot.
It just sat there in the driveway, arousing a welter of confused feelings in Barbara’s breast every time she set eyes on it, which was about twenty times a day, since she could see it from her kitchen sink. There was the urge to hit the open highway, despair that it would never happen, and hope that one day Harry would decide he was finally going to start enjoying life. As she was always pointing out to him, it wasn’t as if he’d been doled out an unlimited supply: there was only so much of it left.
And that was dwindling away, moment by moment, day by day, Barbara thought as she stood at the sink after finishing with the vacuuming, drinking a glass of water, and looking out at the vehicle that was to have been the agent of her liberation.
It was while she was standing there that she heard it: a squeal of brakes, a sickening thud. Daisy! Her heart leaped into her throat. But the little dog was curled up on her bed in the corner. Which meant that the car had hit a deer. It happened several times a year, and it was the only thing Barbara knew of that would arouse Harry from his vegetative state. He hated the deer that had overrun this corner of suburbia. Hated the way they ate the shrubbery, hated the way they crapped all over the yard, hated the way they stood in the driveway when you pulled in, refusing to get out of the way. “Deer with attitude,” he called them.
It was typical that the only emotion Harry seemed to feel was hate. He maintained an extensive list of categorical hates, to which he referred with tiresome regularity. Shellfish, children, piano music, New York City, green leafy vegetables. At the top of the list were incompetents, which in Harry’s eyes was a category to which most of the world belonged. Next was deer. Barbara, on the other hand, loved them: their lustrous brown eyes, their graceful leaps, their attitude of quiet repose.
“The kings of Europe spent huge amounts of money to create deer parks on the grounds of their castles, and here we have a deer park right in our own backyard!” she would point out to him when they argued about it, which was often.
“But that was for the purpose of killing them,” Harry would reply. He had done some deer hunting in his younger days, and liked to think of himself as a big-game hunter.
After calling the police, Barbara headed out to assure the driver that an officer was on the way. Harry’s chair was empty, she noticed as she passed through the living room. He must already have gone out. It looked oddly vacant without Harry in it. Many nights he even slept there; she would awake in the morning to find the TV still on. At least she could look forward to him being in a good mood, she thought. Nothing made his day like a dead deer, especially one that had met its end right in front of the house.
Warren Miller was just pulling up in the police cruiser as she reached the road. The dead deer—a good-sized doe— lay in front of their privet hedge, its entrails scattered over the pavement. The car must have broad-sided it. The driver had pulled over on the opposite shoulder; the left fender of his car was crumpled.
Harry stood at the side of the car in his slippers, probably reassuring the driver that his wife had called the police and that an officer would be there shortly.
The police were good about coming out right away. Getting the road crew out right away to clear the carcass too, before it started to putrefy. Residents didn’t like dead deer decaying in front of their houses. The dogs were also apt to get to them. Barbara would never forget the day Daisy had come home proudly clutching a foreleg in her teeth.
“Another dead deer. You must be happy, Harry,” Warren said after he finished writing up his report. “And a doe besides,” he added, sharing in Harry’s pleasure that one less doe meant one less opportunity for the despised animals to reproduce. “How many are we up to so far this year?”
Harry kept a running tally of the town’s deer fatalities, along with their locations. He gleaned the information from a combination of anecdotal accounts, empirical observation, and the Police Beat” column in the local newspaper. In the event of any confusion, he checked directly with the police department.
Which meant that Warren Miller was well acquainted with Harry’s peculiar obsession.
“This makes a hundred and fifty-two. Twenty-nine on Prospect Street alone,” he replied. His indignation at the fact that the deer population was greatest in his own neighborhood was tempered by the fact that this meant that the most deer fatalities took place there. “Thirty-four more than last year.”
Warren nodded. “At this rate, the lime pit’s going to be full before the year’s out; we’re probably going to have to dig another one.” He was referring to the pit behind the public works garage where the municipal road crew dumped the deer carcasses.
Warren had dismissed the driver of the car and was now adding a few notations to the accident report. Finishing, he closed the cover of his book and nodded at the motor home that sat in the driveway behind the small white Cape Cod- style home. “When are you planning on heading out in that thing?”
He raised this subject every time they saw him, which was several times a year. His interest was prompted by a personal dream of taking a summer off with his family to tour the country in a motor home.
“In the spring,” Harry replied. “Now that Barbara’s retired, there’s nothing to hold us back. But we’re going to wait until the weather’s better. We want to head up to Alaska—that’s always been Barbara’s dream: to see Denali National Park.”
“Like to see that myself,” Warren said as he got back into the cruiser. “That, and a whole lot else.” He started the engine. “You take care now,” he said, and drove off.
Nothing to hold us back, thought Barbara, except a remote control.
The irony was that it was the death of the doe that finally blasted Harry out of his chair. The sight of the mangled carcass had ignited a blood lust that he claimed could be quenched only by hunting. “I’m going to get my license this year and get myself a deer,” he announced.
Barbara paid no attention. She’d heard it all before. Plus, the idea of her overweight, diabetic couch potato of a husband traipsing around in the woods was too preposterous to bear contemplation.
But to her surprise, he actually did it: got the license, the grunt tubes and rattling devices, and the 30.06 with a fancy scope—the whole nine yards. And to her even greater surprise, he actually shot a deer—a trophy buck with a nineteen-inch rack—which was probably due more to the fact that deer were thicker than ants at a picnic than any hunting expertise on his part. But at nearly two hundred pounds, Harry’s buck not only kept them in venison chops, it lifted Harry out of his depression. He now devoted the hours that he used to spend watching TV to reading hunting magazines; his intimacy with the remote control was replaced by that with his shotgun; and he spent hours planning his campaign for next hunting season. As far as Barbara was concerned, if it took the life of a single trophy buck to bring about this transformation, the sacrifice was well worth the price.
Meanwhile, the motor home still sat in the driveway. But Barbara was hopeful that Harry’s newfound success as a whitetail hunter would provide the psychological boost to finally realize their dream of seeing the United States. And at Christmas, wearing the new orange vest she’d ordered from a hunting catalog, he had stunned her by saying: “I think we should head out west right after Saint Patrick’s Day. Start in the Southwest, then work our way up to Alaska. If we hit Alaska in late summer, we could be back down to Oregon for elk season. I’d like to do some elk hunting.”
Barbara’s jaw fell open. A plan at last! Then he kissed her under the mistletoe. That night, they made love for the first time in years.
In fact, she was delighted with the new Harry, even if his attire did make him look like a mercenary for a banana republic. The only aspect of their new life together that she found to complain about was, well...“Harry.”
That’s what they called the deer hide that was the souvenir of the buck Harry had taken, along with the ten-point rack that now hung over the fireplace in the family room. The hide was huge: it must have been five feet long, including the legs. And it was smelly, the odor being a product of the tanning process that Harry had been assured would fade, but had yet to do so.
It was their little joke. They’d named the hide after the old Hitchcock movie in which “Harry” was the corpse that the characters couldn’t find a place to dispose of. “Harry” had started out in the living room, but Barbara complained that it ruined her decorating scheme. Then they tried it in the family room, but it was too big to fit on the only wall that came close to accommodating it. It finally ended up in the rec room, but when they realized that the smell wasn’t going to fade, they moved it out to the motor home.
It was now being used as a coverlet in the sleeping compartment over the cab, and if that meant the motor home smelled too much for Barbara to eat her dinners out there, that was fine. She was eating dinners with Harry now anyway.
“Where’d you put ‘Harry’ now?” was the running joke. And after all those dreary years, it was nice to have something to laugh about with her husband.
The second honeymoon didn’t last. By the end of January, Harry was back in his chair, his hand in its usual death grip around the neck of the remote. In fact, the remote had become more of an issue than ever. Harry had become forgetful and would leave it around the house. But would he admit to this? No. He would blame her, bellowing accusations from the depths of the recliner. Then the search would commence, and she would find the remote on the vanity next to the toilet seat or on the counter next to the refrigerator or buried in the seat of the chair. It didn’t take a Sherlock to figure out where he had left it given the fact that he now moved for only three reasons: to eat, to use the bathroom, and to get his daily shot of insulin, for which he didn’t even leave the chair, but merely adjusted his position. He’d even gotten lax about personal hygiene, neglecting to shower and shave. Any talk of a trip had been abandoned. She’d suggested that he see a counselor, but this only provoked his ire: the problem didn’t lie with him, but with her. She was a controlling bitch; she was never satisfied; she only wanted to spend his hard-earned money; she only thought of herself. His list went on and on.
Barbara tried not to take it personally. His complaints were the same about the rest of the world; nobody could do anything right. She ate in the motor home almost every night now, which no longer smelled since the hide had been banished to a box in the garage. Once her refuge, her house had become her prison, and it was only in the motor home that she felt at peace.
After delivering Harry’s dinner on a tray, she would head out to the motor home, where she would spend the evening organizing her trip. She had bought a file box, which she had fitted with hanging files for each of the states. Into these, she put maps, travel brochures, information on campsites, and articles on tourist destinations. She also spent time learning about how to set up the vehicle’s various systems. Occasionally she even took it out for a test drive so she could practice backing up and making sharp turns. She wanted to be ready when the time arrived.
It was on an evening in early March that Harry finally pushed her over the edge. She had eaten her dinner in the motor home and was coming back for her dessert. She could hear him as she approached the house. “Come here, you stupid bitch!” he was shouting, a note of hysteria in his voice. He must have been calling for her ever since she’d left.
She presented herself at the side of his chair. He was watching a disaster documentary that he’d probably seen a dozen times already; it was about tornadoes. He was still wearing the bathrobe and slippers he’d been wearing the night before. “Where’s my remote?” he growled, his voice hard with anger. His eyes didn’t leave the screen, where two tornado chasers were speeding after a huge funnel.
“Did you look next to the seat cushion?” she asked.
Why should I look in the cushion when I know you took it?”
Never mind that she rarely watched TV in the house and, if she did, watched it in the basement rec room. It was her fault. “Can you please get up?” she asked him calmly.
He rolled to one side, as if presenting a buttock for his shot, and she reached down into the chair. As she suspected, the remote was wedged between the cushion and the arm.
She pulled it out and handed it to him. “Here,” she said. He took it without a word of thanks.
Harry didn’t know it yet, but he was about to experience his own private disaster.
She’d been thinking about it for a long time. Harry was a diabetic. A diabetic who didn’t take care of himself. He snacked on sugary junk foods; he never exercised. As she saw it, he was a goner anyway. In fact, if it weren’t for her, he probably wouldn’t even be around. It was only because of her close monitoring that he’d maintained the delicate balance between too much blood glucose and too little that was required for control of his diabetes. She would only be hastening the inevitable. Probably save him a lot of pain and suffering into the bargain.
And from her ER work, she knew exactly what to do. She even had access from the occasional shifts she still filled in on to the highly concentrated insulin used in diabetic emergencies. Such a drug was a lifesaver for patients whose blood sugar had soared out of control, but could cause the blood sugar of patients whose diabetes was under control to plummet, leading to coma and death. Her only concern was the autopsy: a sharp pathologist would be able to tell the death was due to an overdose. And although she’d read of murderers who had done so, she doubted she could pass it off as accidental. If nothing else, it was unlikely that an experienced ER nurse could claim ignorance of the symptoms of insulin shock. She would have to make Harry simply disappear, though how she was going to do this was still a mystery.
She was still pondering this question when she heard the familiar squeal of brakes. It was usually at this time that the deer collisions took place: twilight, when the drivers were returning home and the deer were out foraging. In her usual panic, she checked for Daisy, who was safely lapping up water from her bowl. Then came the sickening thud of metal colliding with flesh.
“Harry, I think it’s a deer,” she shouted into the living room.
When she received no response, she went out to the living room and announced: “A deer has been hit.” It was a testimony to the depth of Harry’s melancholy that he didn’t even look up. He had long ago given up on his count of deer fatalities.
It was then that it dawned on her what to do with Harry’s body.
She gave him the shot just before dinner a couple of weeks later, as she always did—in the butt. The thigh in the morning, the butt at night—alternating sides to keep the injection sites from becoming irritated. She went through the procedure exactly as usual: inserting the needle through the rubber lid, pushing the plunger down to force the air in, inverting the bottle to mix the contents, and finally filling the plunger with the proper dose. Then she wiped Harry’s cheek with an alcohol swab, pinched the skin between her fingers, pushed in the needle, and depressed the plunger.
It took only a half an hour or so before the drug started to take effect. She was preparing dinner in the kitchen—corned beef and cabbage for Saint Patrick’s Day—when she heard him call. It wasn’t his usual demanding bellow, but a request; it might almost have been called polite. “Barbara, can you come here?”
Emerging from the kitchen, she stood at the door of the darkened room and looked inquiringly into his face, which was enlivened only by the reflected images that flickered across the surface of his glasses. “What is it?’ she asked, paring knife still in hand.
“I don’t feel so good,” he said. “I think I need a sugar pill.”
It was a fact of a diabetic’s life that despite the most regular of routines, the blood glucose level is prone to unpredictable swings. As a result, an insulin dose that reduces the level to normal one day can reduce it too far the next, inducing the symptoms of hypoglycemia. Such symptoms can be relieved by a quick fix of a sweet snack or a glucose pill, which most diabetics have at the ready.
“I’ll get your meter,” Barbara replied. She noticed that behind the glasses and the stubble, he looked pale. Beads of sweat had broken out on his temples.
In a moment, she was back at his side with a blood glucose meter. After pricking his finger, she dabbed the blood sample on a test strip and inserted it into the device. According to the readout, Harry’s blood glucose level stood at fifty-two, with fifty being the level for hypoglycemia. She took his pulse; it was already racing.
“Yes, it’s low,” she agreed. It was a good thing his attention was riveted to the arrest taking place on TV; he didn’t see how low. “I’ll get your pills.’’
She had planned for this eventuality too. Instead of his usual glucose pills, Barbara gave him inert placebos that researchers at the medical center were using in a double-blind study on the effect of a new medication.
After handing him three, she retreated into the kitchen. No sooner was she back at the sink than he called her again, this time for a blanket, which she brought him, tucking it neatly around him. She noticed that his skin had become cold and clammy.
A few moments later, he called again. He was saying her name, though his speech was so slurred she could barely make it out. When she entered, she found him with his head thrown back against the back of the recliner. He was sounding a low, steady moan.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
There was no reply.
As she stood there, his body stiffened; his arms were thrust straight out in front of him. Though his eyes were open, he didn’t appear to be conscious. Then his entire body started to convulse. He was having a seizure.
It was only a matter of minutes before it was over.
The most elaborate preparations had been for the disposal of the body. Inspired by the deer collision, her first thought had been to wrap it in the deer hide. But she quickly realized that wouldn’t work. The hide simply wasn’t big enough, trophy buck or no.
Then she remembered another hide in the attic—a memento of a kill from Harry ‘s younger days. This she sewed together with “Harry,” punching the holes with an awl and stitching the edges together with leather shoelaces. She had spent a couple of weeks’ worth of evenings on the queen-sized bed in the motor home engaged in this task while watching TV with Daisy. The result had been well worth her time: a sleeping bag—like deerskin pouch with an opening at one end. It was probably not unlike the sleeping gear that Indian squaws had once stitched for their braves.
Once she could no longer detect Harry’s pulse, she retrieved the deerskin bag from the motor home and spread it out on the carpet next to the recliner, which she extended fully by pulling the lever on the side. With the chair extended, it was a simple matter to roll Harry’s body over the arm. She was used to moving inert bodies around from the hospital. It landed on its side with a thud. After binding the arms and legs, she worked it head-first into the deerskin bag. Harry hadn’t been a large man, and it fit perfectly, forming a neat package about five-and-a-half feet long. His feet stuck out a little, but she could fix that by bending his knees when she sewed up the end.
After half an hour, her handiwork was complete, and she stood back to admire it. As deer went, Harry was fatter than most, but she doubted this would arouse suspicion since many of the carcasses cleared from the roadsides had already begun to swell. All that was missing was the head, which looked down at her from over the mantel, though whether it was with reproach or approbation she wasn’t sure.
The next step was loading the body onto the hand truck. She was a strong woman and almost as large as Harry himself, so it wasn’t difficult. Finally, she wheeled the hand truck out to the garage, which was attached to the house—all the better to shield her activities from nosy neighbors—and maneuvered the load into the trunk.
The deer disposal pit was located in the woods at the rear of the public works garage. She had scoped it out one evening the week before. A gravel driveway led around the garage to the edge of the pit. If the best place to hide a body was a battlefield, as it was said, then the next best must be a charnel pit, especially when that pit was for deer and the body was covered with a deer hide.
By now it was after ten, and the site was deserted. Barbara backed the car up to the edge of the fence surrounding the pit and popped the trunk. Then she opened the gate, lifted Harry’s body out—this took some effort—and rolled it over the edge. He didn’t fall far: the pit was nearly full of deer carcasses. These would be covered over tomorrow with a six-inch layer of soil, which she had learned was done every Wednesday. It was a good thing, too: the smell was getting bad.
Concealed in the deer hide, Harry’s body was indistinguishable from the other carcasses. But to make sure that no one would recognize it as such, she covered it with a layer of lime from the barrel at the edge of the pit and then sprinkled it with leaves and twigs to make it blend in with the carcasses cleared from the roadsides.
The deed was done.
She was packing up the last of her clothes two months later when she heard the familiar squeal of brakes, followed by the thunk of metal on flesh. This time there was also a crash: the driver must have lost control of the car. After calling the police, she went out to the road. The driver had hit the maple in front of the house across the street, but appeared to be okay. He was inspecting the damage to the front of his car. A dead doe lay on the roadside at the rear of the car; it must have been flung over the roof by the impact.
Warren Miller arrived a few minutes later, followed by a pickup from the public works department. While Warren wrote up the accident report, two members of the road crew hoisted the carcass into the back of the truck. The damage to the driver’s vehicle wasn’t great, and after a few minutes the scene of the accident was cleared up.
“How’s Harry?” Warren asked once everyone was gone. “I expected to see him out here. Isn’t he keeping his deer count anymore?”
“Nah,” Barbara replied. “He couldn’t keep up. The numbers were getting too great. Plus, the paper stopped reporting deer collisions in the ‘Police Beat’ column, and he wasn’t about to start running out to count every carcass.”
Warren shook his head in sympathy. “Yep, it’s getting worse and worse. It’s carnage on the roads. Especially out this way. We’ve had to open a second deer pit. The last one was filled up after only three months; we thought it was going to last a year.”
“Oh really?” Barbara commented innocently. “When did that happen?”
“We covered the old pit just yesterday.” He nodded in the direction of the departing pickup. “I expect this doe will be the first occupant of the new one. We’re looking into hiring an outside contractor for disposal. There’s just too many to keep up with.”
Changing the subject, he nodded at the real estate company’s SOLD sign on Barbara’s lawn. “I see the house is sold. Are you and Harry finally going to take that trip out west that you’ve been talking about for so long?”
Barbara turned to look at the motor home in the driveway. “Yes, we are,” she told him with a smile. “We had a house sale last weekend. Sold most of our belongings. The rest we’re putting into a storage locker.”
“Footloose and fancy free at last,” said Warren.
“You bet,” Barbara replied, her voice ringing with delight. “We’re leaving on Tuesday. First we’re going to Alaska. Then we’ll meander south. We don’t have any plans, other than to visit all the national parks. That’s always been Harry’s dream.”
“Mine too,” said Warren, his youthful countenance alight with enthusiasm. “But I don’t think it’s going to happen in my lifetime. Or at least not until the kids are grown. How long do you figure it’s going to take you?”
“Oh, years!” exclaimed Barbara. “There are thirty-nine major national parks in the forty-eight contiguous states alone.”
“Then you’re not planning on coming back?”
Barbara shook her head. “Maybe for a visit.”
“Do me a favor,” Warren said.
“Of course,” replied Barbara.
“Send me a postcard.”
It was three months later that Warren Miller got the postcard. It was a view of a snow-capped Mount McKinley at sunrise, with Denali National Park written diagonally across the photo in red script. On the back it read:
On the road, Aug. 4
Dear Warren,
It feels great to be on the road at last. We’re at Denali National Park now and getting the hang of our rambling lifestyle more and more with each passing day. Our address now is Alaska, but after that who knows? The continent is our neighborhood now. We love our little house on wheels.
We caught our first red salmon the other day: cooked it on the grill and shared it with a fellow we met in Washington State. We’ve been traveling with him for a while now, and we get along very well. We don’t have a single regret. We would do it again in a heartbeat.
Cordially,
Harry and Barbara (Daisy too)