Read Online Horsekeeping by Roxanne Bok - Free Book Online

can get it picked up.”
    I took a last glance at the largish doe, trunk scraped up and legs tangled, her strong neck and head gracefully arched. I wondered why their long tongues always loll out, a last indignity. With nothing left to do, we retreated home.
    Paula and I tucked Elliot into bed and bemoaned our fate and raised a glass of tranquilizing whiskey to any and all guardian angels. The car sustained a broken headlight but otherwise seemed unscathed. Yet two days later, as Paula gassed up, the traumatized Honda refused to start, debilitated by a slow leak of fluids. Now when I travel that stretch of road, I remember that deer. Still tender to that spot, I beg Scott to slow down, as if our chances of a run-in are higher there than anywhere else in town.
    The next time, Scott was behind the wheel. Elliot and Jane slept peacefully in the back of the Suburban, but Elliot’s friend Max, an inner city kid with little country experience, was too excited to sleep. He sat in the middle of the back seat with big eyes staring out the front windshield as we plowed over a fawn following behind his running mother who we had just barely missed. The creature rumbled gingerly under the chassis, front to back, and sick gathered in my stomach. A baby! Our high beams torch-lit the entire scene—a ghastly movie set. My distress grew realizing that Max was alert to every second of his country adventure. Worrying that it might not be dead, I persuaded Scott to turn around to check, and also to make sure that the doe did not hang around endangering herself, and, if necessary, warn other drivers. An image of a mother nosing around her dead fawn had me on the brink of tears, held back only for Max’s sake.
    â€œDid you see what happened, Max?” I asked, keeping my cool.
    â€œYeah. We ran over that animal.”
    â€œIt was a deer, Max. Unfortunately it happens in these parts because there are so many. I’m sorry you had to see it.”

    He remained silent as we circled and saw the fawn dead-still with the mother nowhere in sight, though I imagined her big doe eyes accusing from the dark woods. As Bambi’s mother whispered: “ Man was in the forest.” I wish Walt had spared us that film.
    Being a fairly young fawn made it more like hitting a raccoon than a deer, but we sustained some front-end damage nevertheless. Unfairly, I took my helplessness out on Scott.
    â€œYou shouldn’t have been driving so fast. You always drive too fast.”
    â€œI wasn’t driving too fast. They just came out of nowhere. Anybody would have hit them. Don’t make me feel worse than I do already.”
    He was right, and we had Max to consider.
    â€œAre you alright, Max?”
    â€œYeah.”
    Â 
    Â 
    DEER ACCIDENTS cement in your mind forever. It’s like remembering where you were when Kennedy was shot or when the Twin Towers crashed down. Like the one we helped get euthanized on New Year’s Eve; and another time, on our return to the city, when I spied a downed deer just short of the village.
    â€œOh no,” I cried. “Scott, did you see that?”
    â€œWhat?” Elliot asked.
    â€œAn injured deer.”
    â€œYeah, I saw it,” said Scott wearily, knowing what he was in for.
    The young deer sat oddly collapsed, upright on its torso, head up and alert and eyes perplexed, in no obvious distress. But all four legs were splayed outward in a double split. My eyes welled.
    â€œPull into The White Hart so I can ask Larry to call a trooper.”
    Exiting the inn I passed a man striding in with purpose.
    â€œDid you see that deer, too?” he asked.
    â€œYes, I just asked the desk manager to call it in.”
    â€œThat’s good,” he said, turning back to his own potential assassin of
a vehicle. “He’s paralyzed for sure, and there’s no sense in his panicking for very long.”
    â€œIt’s so horribly sad,” I couldn’t help saying,