CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Junior stood on the bank of Turkey Creek in the dark, shining a flashlight beam onto yards of yellow tape crackling in the night wind. He’d hoped to pick up more empty bottles, this time without any onlookers like before. But this was new. This was bad.

He didn’t remember leaving the creek last night, but he did recall setting out after he’d had the whiskey, and wishing for Yella dog to lick his hands, to run in the tall grass alongside him, to bark at things he couldn’t see. Yella lived for the two-mile walk from the cabin to the creek bed, a cattywampus trek they’d taken so often that they’d nearly worn a trail.

Junior had heard the party before he saw it, and wasn’t a bit surprised to see a bonfire and find a crowd full of faces he didn’t recognize anymore. The party was why he went there, after all. It was a sure thing, discovering discarded cans and bottles at the creek. He must have collected them before he left, because just that morning he’d woken up on Odeina’s couch with shoes full of sand and a sack stuffed with glass, the old woman watching him patiently from across the room.

“Grandmother.”

“Another one” was all she would say. “Another one taken from the living.”

Junior had spent most of the day’s remaining light getting home by hitching a ride, then walking the rest of the way. He expected Yella to bark a greeting, then remembered the dog was dead; he trudged inside, made a bologna sandwich and set out once more for the creek.

Where he wanted to be now, where he felt alive, was in the wide open. Junior pulled a long stalk of feather grass as he walked and worked it with his teeth, the fluffy head bending in the wind to tickle his neck, his chin. His fear of the land becoming blighted with a mining camp was the only thing that could have brought him out of hiding, caused him to speak at tribal council, made him break his commitment to solitude.

He’d kept to himself for ten long years, making only occasional visits to the Trading Post, where he sometimes drank too much and let his fists make contact with skin, with blood, with bone. It was the pain he kept coming back to, pulling it around himself like a blanket and using it to ward away memories of those long-ago high school kids always hanging around.

He’d liked the company in those days. Liked the girls especially, with their dangerous looks, the way they paraded as women but were still tender flesh in their unlined beauty and the soft way they tried too hard to be ready for the world. In the night there was always some group outside his cabin, not at the creek like now, and they had swapped smokes and sips around a burn barrel. Or squeezed onto his broken couch, touching at the shoulders and thighs.

Those old days. He didn’t think of them often, not anymore. Kept them partitioned in a part of himself that locked up things that hurt: losing Starr’s father, a war, his loneliness, Loxie.

He’d withdrawn after Loxie disappeared. Disappeared in that bad way. Maybe it was not knowing what happened to her that caused him to be cautious. Or maybe it was the eye of suspicion cast over his life that made him want to hide away. And that was what he’d done with the cabin, made it a den he could hole up in like an animal. Like some foul yeasty thing hibernating until a thaw.

Where had his mind gone on those nights he couldn’t remember? What about his hands, those strange creatures that had a mind of their own when he drank, making fists or love? What about the rest of him, the hidden parts that longed for contact, to be made real in what they pushed against?

Had Loxie been at the cabin when he lost himself? Yes. Of course she had. He remembered that clearly, the beginnings of those nights, those hazy next days. But had she been there that night? The last night she was seen? What was he capable of? But that was one question to which he knew the answer. War had tapped a part of him that had been resting in his DNA for generations; it had unleashed the spirit of ancestors who whispered that it was time to kill.

He’d found no evidence of having done an unspeakable thing, not to Loxie. Not to any of those girls, or the boys who tagged along with them, hopeful for their shot. No clothing left behind, no spatters of blood; and with relief, no body. And he would remember a body, wouldn’t he? The only things left of those days, of Loxie, were the muddled memories he couldn’t see his way through, and the fairy rings—those dried flowers she’d woven again and again into circles. Once, they’d been everywhere. He’d found them hanging on the arms of camp chairs, lying on tired transmissions, in the place where Yella slept. He was down to only one now, the others gone to the wind and rain and whatever other elements broke things down into their most basic parts, returned them to earth—to biome, to microbe, to resurrection in a future life, riding in the cell of a creature furred or fanged or feathered. He longed suddenly for that flower ring, to know her long brown fingers had plucked each stem, pulled it into a weave, fashioned it into something more.

Junior walked down the creek, skirting the caution tape and the spent firewood, hoping for an answer. He heard rustling in the bushes near the woods and flashed a beam of light at it, expecting a possum or maybe a skunk, but instead it was a woman, motioning for him to come near. He couldn’t believe what he saw in the circle of light. Had she been at the party the night before? Did she need help? Was she looking for answers too?

She turned away from him.

“Wait,” he croaked. “Wait. I need to…who are…”

He followed, his flashlight waving as he hurried, its beam catching a pair of antlers against bare branches.

His knees went out and he dropped the light, felt the gritty surface run under his skin as he buckled into the sand.

“What have I done?” Junior screamed into the pitch.

Here it was at last. What he’d always feared. Deer Woman had come for him.