ST2.2 | "Deer Tracks"

PROMPT: The coldest months are here, and with them, we’re thinking of all those frozen things, just waiting to thaw out. This month, send us your best story about something that’s been on ice for too long—a secret, a relationship, a memory, a lie, or anything else that can be frozen away. And then tell us what happens when it finally starts to thaw.

DEER TRACKS

by M.E. Proctor

There was a story Willie remembered hearing at the Pit Stop, of a man found frozen on a mountain. At first, folks thought he might have been an alpinist or a hiker gone missing in a storm, but it turned out he was from a thousand years ago, and he’d been beaten up and killed. Or he died from hunger and exposure. The Pit Stop regulars had debated the topic for hours, as they tended to do, because they loved arguing, and there was little else available in town in the way of entertainment. Willie didn’t recall how the story went, and he wasn’t going to look it up on his phone. Everything you did on these machines was recorded somewhere, that’s what Morris from the Pit Stop said, and Morris was a fool but that didn’t mean he was always wrong. It didn’t hurt to be careful.

The snow overnight reminded Willie of the old iceman, even if the two-inch-thick layer that coated his land didn’t compare to what fell in the mountains. He expected the stuff to stick for a few days. The ground was frozen solid, had been for almost three weeks, which was unheard of in these parts. It messed up the roads and kept people snug at home. Pretty quiet all around. Not that Willie expected anybody to visit. And he certainly didn’t want anybody to visit unexpected. He’d made it clear that he wanted to be left alone. Most of the time, people complied.

The crisp cold air, the blue sky, and the white powder made the old farm and the fields pretty as a postcard. All the rusty crap going back years that Willie had never bothered to pick up was blanketed and the view was much improved. The snow was undisturbed, except for a line of tracks as precise as stitches on a freshly laundered linen tablecloth. The deer had come close to the farm, looking for something to munch on.

Willie had spotted two does at the edge of the woods this morning and it made him curious to see where they’d been exploring. He bundled up, took his sturdy cane, and followed the tracks. They were all over the wide-open north field, delicate and jumpy, like the deer had been having fun dancing in the frosty fluff. He followed the elegant hoof tracks all the way to the frozen pond where the animals must have lingered. The snowy crust was trampled.

Something in the pond, under the thick lid of ice, caught his eye.

He stuck his cane in the spiky clumps of grass for balance and leaned forward to get a better look. The sight made him take a step back and he almost lost his footing. His breath caught, a sudden clamp on his throat. He fought for a wheezing gulp of air and grasped his cane tighter.

Goddamit. He didn’t need the aggravation.

He glanced around, squinting in the bright light. He was alone. A handful of crows strutted on the other side of the pond, involved in a shrill argument he wasn’t part of.

Maybe the deer had spotted the same thing he saw under the perfect blue mirror of the pond, glossy and unbroken except for the old duck house half collapsed in the middle. He wondered what the animals thought about it. Were they scared? Had they reared back in alarm, like he did?

It was strange how the snow didn’t stick on the frozen pond. Maybe the water still retained some of the warmth of the fall. That was a disturbing thought, the possibility of captive heat under the ice. With what was down there . . . Willie’s knuckles whitened on the cane.

“Get a grip,” he grumbled.

The sight gave him a shock, but it wasn’t anything to be afraid of. Bernie Cullen wasn’t going to rise from the depth, break the ice, and grab him by the ankles. He was as dead and frozen as that primitive mountain man from long ago.

Willie forced himself to look in Bernie’s pale eyes, took in the guy’s familiar stupid fat face as round as the moon. It seemed intact. Bernie looked smarter in death than he’d ever been alive. Like he was reflecting before uttering words of wisdom. Willie chuckled. Right, as if Bernie ever thought twice before spitting insanities. The problem with Bernie was that he could never keep his damn mouth shut. Words drooled out of him like snuff juice. Dangerous words that had consequences. It was like what they said during the war that Willie’s dad went overseas to fight: Loose lips sink ships.

Bernie’s loose mouth could have sent Willie to that old red brick house in Huntsville.

A bullet silenced him. A cinder block should have kept him at the bottom of the pond. What the hell was he doing up, with his frozen fat face sticking to the underside of the ice?

“Wanna tell me a tale, Bern?” Willie croaked. His throat prickled with the last shreds of the head cold he caught while waiting for Bernie to come back to his camp after a day of hunting. Rainy, windy, and dark. Wreaked hell on his arthritis. Twisted his back too, when he’d heaved the body into the truck. The pain laid him low for a week. Bernie was the misery that kept on giving. Damn nuisance. The chain that tied him to the cinder block must have slipped. Willie was dog-tired when he worked on that. Must have made a mistake.

He secured the cane more firmly and bent over, one hand on a bony knee for extra support. He’d never noticed that Bernie had so much hair on his head. Probably because he always wore that greasy John Deere ballcap. Was it true that hair kept growing after death? The gray tendrils on the side of Bernie’s head moved with the current of the spring that fed the pond. It was uncanny how well preserved the wretched bugger was. The fish and turtles, or even the occasional resident gator waddling over to the pond from the nearby lake should have made quick work of the asshole. The unexpected cold snap threw things off.

Nature. Never going the way you wanted. Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry. The eternal punishment of the farmer. A good thing that Willie wasn’t growing anything anymore. He was done worrying about the weather. A guy from the other side of town came for the hay and split the profits with him. It helped with the bills. Not that Willie needed much to get by. There was enough left of Marion’s money to last to the end.

The goddam money that he thought was a blessing, coming in like that, just when his body decided it had taken its fill of abuse. The money Marion inherited from a forgotten aunt, out of the blue. Now they could enjoy the land, he told Marion. Watch the deer and the change of season. We deserve to rest, my beloved.

She didn’t want to hear any of it.

It was their chance to get away from the lousy farm, she said. “Sell the land, Willie,” she nagged. His land. Where his parents were buried, his grans, his brother, the baby they lost when they were newly married. The blood, the sweat, the ache. His land. Leave it for what? A town of brick and concrete, sickly trees and flea-infested pigeons?

They fought. They screamed at each other, worse than they ever did. She said she would go, with the money and without him. He lost his temper. Damn, he always had a temper, and he was stubborn, had to be, to work this land that was hard clay and as hardheaded as he was.

Willie’s gaze drifted from ghostly Bernie making faces at him from under the ice to the crumbling duck house. Marion was down there. What was left of her, which couldn’t be much after all the years. It reminded him of his panic during the big drought, when the lake dropped four feet, and talk of what was uncovered was all over the county. Sunken boats, farm equipment from before the lake was filled, pieces of the old railroad tracks, vehicle carcasses—didn’t they find a body in one of them? Willie checked on the pond every day during that blasted summer. He watched the pool level diminish, saw the spring shrink to a sweaty shine on the mud, measured the cracks on the bottom, filled his nostrils with the stench of rotting fish, and waited to see bones, white as bleached wood poking through the muck. Marion encased in red clay.

He feared he’d have to walk out there, sink up to his knees in that rotten deposit of time, and break Marion’s bones to shards with a shovel.

But the pond was deep there in the middle, and Marion’s resting place was secure. Then the rain came and the pond filled up again. That was twelve years ago, and the pond never got that low again.

How Bernie got it in his head that Marion hadn’t left, like Willie told whoever asked, would forever be a mystery. Bernie had a bit of a storyteller reputation at the Pit Stop. His yarns didn’t amount to much, an amusement for the evening between cards and football on TV. Good for a laugh or a shiver. He must have had a crush on Marion because he kept bringing her up in conversation every chance he got. Willie told him to stop, that her leaving him still hurt, no matter how many years had gone by, and for a little while Bernie took heed. Till he got back on the subject again and Willie knew he had to put an end to it.

Willie tapped the ice with the cane. It made a dull sound, like a full barrel.

The crows were still haggling, irritating in their insistence to be noticed.

Willie knew how the next days would roll. It was a repeat of the drought. Worry would drive him to check on Bernie, knowing full well that nothing would change—the eyes, the face, the hair. Not until the thaw, and then the stench, until the body rotted and sank.

He didn’t have the patience for it.

He trudged back to the farm to get tools.

***

A blizzard blew down from Canada that night and the temperature dropped another ten degrees. It was much worse in the open fields where the wind whipped at will, unhindered by trees. Records were broken. Thermometers burst, according to Morris. The regulars at the Pit Stop agreed. It was a devilish night, all right, the night Willie died. Heart attack, the doc said.

The Pit Stop guys couldn’t figure what’d got into the old man.

Some said it was because of the deer. That he went to break the ice to give them running water. And there sure were lots of tracks around the pond. Others commented that Willie was a little off. Hadn’t been right in the head since Marion left all these years ago. Being solitary like he was. That couldn’t be good for a man. Made him odd.

If the mail lady hadn’t decided to brave the black ice, fallen trees, and snow-choked country roads to deliver a package that had sat at the post office for a week, Willie might have been left out there a long time. The Pit Stop commentators concurred that it would have been a horrible thing. Animals got hungry this time of year. The old men contemplated that predicament with frowns and head shakes.

Then the conversation shifted to Bernie Cullen, whom none of them had seen in a while. He must still be at his deer lease, dedicated hunter that he was.

“Willie dying like that all of a sudden. That’ll give him a shock,” Morris said.

Sure would.

M.E. Proctor (Twitter—@MEProctor3) was born in Brussels and lives in Texas. Her short story collection Family and Other Ailments (from Wordwooze Publishing) is available in all the usual places. She’s currently working on a contemporary PI series. Her short fiction has appeared in Vautrin, Bristol Noir, Pulp Modern, Mystery Tribune, Reckon Review, Shotgun Honey, and Thriller Magazine among others. She’s a Derringer nominee. Website: www.shawmystery.com