by Bull Garlington
“Here’s the part I need you to pay attention to.”
My brother says this squinting around a Pall Mall held between his fingers like a fuse.
“This part. It’s weird, so look, I know how you are, and I know you hate this shit but just…just fucking listen.”
I think it was the accident that made him this way. He hasn’t slept since. Eight years of sleeplessness fueled by coffee and Adderall and gas station barbeque. I look into his face. I pour myself into his eyes. I am here for you, I’m trying to say this by the way I lean, by the way I hold his gaze and then there it is. That millimeter of saccade, that micro-twitch, like he sees something behind me.
“No, it’s cool, tell me,” I say.
“I’m walking the pipeline, you know? Back up where me and Freddy used to shoot cans, up there past the quarry. I’m walking down this creek trail, like the Narrows but small, tiny, like a baby creek. But damn, Sis, the forest is all over this thing. It’s all over it. Ferns and come-to-Jesus trees and hickory shoots. Everything is new, like it popped up out of the ground that morning, right? And so, there’s this part where it cuts into the ground and gets deep and so I’m climbing down into it cause what the fuck else am I gonna do?”
He clenches the Pall Mall and pulls a savage drag.
“It gets tough and I’m bitching about it but then it levels out into a like a wide spot and the water lays out flat and shallow and I look up and there’s a twelve-point buck looking at me.”
“Twelve.”
“I fucking counted. But here’s the thing, sis. Here’s the thing. It’s white. Snow white. Head to toe. Snow fucking white. And so now I’m standing there, and it looks at me, fucking seven feet tall I swear, ginormous motherfucker of a buck, and it looks at me then it takes like these delicate steps closer and drops its nose down and nudges my pocket. I didn’t know what the fuck to do.”
“I’m blown out from climbing down that gully with the fern walls and the red clay falling out from under me. Fifteen feet wide. Two inches deep. Water running and pooling and flat. Side of the mountain on my left, slate like a stack of knives, forest to my right, gully behind me and right there, right up next to me, checking my shirt pocket, a twelve-point albino buck. But that’s not the weird part. It says, ‘Can I bum a smoke?’ ”
Boze stops talking and stares at nothing. Then he looks at me like I asked a question.
“I was in a Buffalo Wild Wings this one time. I just needed a beer and some wings and a little time by myself after work to read a book and chill the fuck out. That place is wall to wall 40-inch screens all blaring every sport known to man, eleven football games, the WMBA, motocross, boxing…every nine seconds some table full of bros yells and fist pumps the ceiling cause their guys won or their guys lost. It’s so loud, so perfectly unavoidably, deafeningly, horribly loud that it becomes a sort of silence. The forest is like that.
“Here I am on the backside of Whitfield’s Hill, where the paper mills shaved the mountain down to the dirt so many times the trees grow like cornstalks. Trunks thin as my wrist, twisted together, not an inch between them so nobody hunts back here because how the fuck could you? And so here I am in this flat accumulation of this pea-vine creek staring into the frost blue eyes of a ghost and the silence of the forest is that same deafening wall as a Buffalo Wild Wings.”
Boze goes into a world of his own.
I pull my pack out of my pocket and slide a cigarette out, crisp and white, sharp and bitter. How do you give a deer a square? I hold it out and he bends down, his bifurcated lips curling around the smoke.
“Light?”
I hold up my zippo. He takes a deep drag, chomping the cigarette around so it hangs out the side of his mouth. He lifts his head and looks off into the woods. My feet are cold, and I look down at my chucks and they’re soaked through from the creek. Minnows the size of my fingernail swirl around the soles of my shoes, around the muddy hem of my Levis, worn down in the back from walking on them for ten years, faded into nothing. Denim work shirt. Camo Bass Pro lid. Porn star mustache. Cut rate Burt Reynolds.
He looks back at me.
“Nobody comes down here anymore.”
“I don’t know how to deal with this,” I say.
There’s a cold column of what the fuck aimed at my balls, and I think, I seriously believe, I may shit my pants.
“Have a smoke.”
Point. I pop a smoke, light, inhale, blow a cloud. We stand there for a minute looking at each other. He isn’t quite seven feet tall, unless he lifts his head all the way up. His rack is more than just twelve points. The more I look at it the more points there are until it’s a bouquet of barbed bones. A kudzu vine snakes out from the bank to curl around his back ankle. He shakes it off and it floats away to the other end of the pool, dotted with debris and biscuit colored foam.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
I look away from the antlers into the forest at the tangle of paper mill pine trunks snapping and crackling as they bulge and stretch.
“Carl.”
Fuck. I was expecting some kind of native American thing. I pinch my cigarette for a quick hit then flick it into the water. It arcs out like a long, slow cast on a morning lake, sizzling out as it hits just under an overhanging vine, then floats away. His placid gaze following the butt like he’s calculating pi.
“Are you a god?” I ask.
“Deity. Myth. A story.”
“Never seen a story smoke a Pall Mall.”
He walks over to the bank, kicks a hole in the mud, buries the butt of his spent cigarette. Looks over at me like he’s holding out his hand. I offer him the whole pack.
“Put them on that rock.”
I lay the pack dead center on a wide, flat river rock. I light a couple sticks and put one in his mouth.
He looks down at me.
“What’s your name?”
“Joel Boseman. But everyone calls me Boze.”
“Boze, the ancient trees have seen many wanderers like you, child of Alabama. In your search for a path, remember that the forest’s heart beats with the rhythm of your own. There are no wrong turns, only paths you have yet to walk. Trust the whisper of the wind and the murmur of the streams; they are the echoes of your spirit guiding you home. Even when you feel lost, you are exactly where you need to be.”
“Really?”
The great chalky buck snorts, drops the cigarette in the water, stomps once. I get some kind of shine that it’s laughter. He purses his lips for another smoke.
“Read that in a magazine. It works for the tourists. Hell, it works for half the tribes. I use it as a litmus test. Which you passed.”
We stand in the water smoking and digging the overwhelming silence. Water flows between my chucks and ripples around his hooves. A hawk lifts off a tree and screeches away over the mountain.
“Do I get three wishes or something? Solve a riddle?”
“There’s no blueprint. You do you.”
I shove my hands in my pocket and think about it. I sit down on the rock with the smokes, roll my jeans up and pull off my chucks. Worst fucking footwear for the pipeline. They’re tore up and soaking wet. I pour out water and lay them side by side on the granite in a little pool of sunlight.
“I don’t suppose this is going to happen again?” I say.
“Unlikely.”
“And I don’t think this is a wish granting situation.”
A school of tiny minnows dance over the surface of the pool before him like a rainstorm.
“It’s rare, is what I’m saying. But go on, ask your ask. No promises.”
“I don’t want nothing.” I slip a couple smokes out and light them, hand one over. “I guess my sister could use some help. Carl, do me a favor. Give her what she needs.”
“Fine,’ he says, just like that. “And for you,” he steps over and shoves one of his million antlers into my dome. It breaks the skin, slides in deep, probes around and hurts like a motherfucker, but I am compelled to stay perfectly still. He rears back, looks at me for a minute.
“My name’s not really Carl.”
He walks away down the stream, his alabaster tail twitching.
My brother leans back away from me, out of the story, back into the room. God, give this guy a notebook and a pen.
He lobs his foot up onto his knee and rubs his ankle and looks off into the trees at the bottom of the yard. I know this look, this trucker stare, this I’m done for a little while look. So I get up and clean the table and load the dishwasher and scrape the coleslaw and the chicken and rice into Tupperware. I’m wiping my hands on a dishtowel when he walks over.
“This happened.”
He takes off his hat and there it is, sticking out three inches from the behind his ear, a bone-colored horn, grooved and mottled, tapering to a quick point.
An antler.
“What the fuck, Boze?” I reach up and touch it.
“It’s warm.”
I run my fingers along the antler and it falls off.
“Shit, fuck—I’m so sorry, Boze!”
We look at it laying there on my rose colored mediterranean kitchen tile. He picks it up and puts it into my hand. I stare at him like he just shit on my arm.
‘Keep it. It’s for you.’
I put the antler into the drawer in my hutch where I keep all my keys and bottle openers and remotes.
*
Six years later at the funeral home, I’m standing over Boze, what used to be Boze, worn down to a nub, emaciated, his head too big for his body like a child attached to a balloon. It was the lack of sleep. He was coming into the Narrows on the first wide curve and just kept going. Drove his truck right over the edge of the highway, right through the barriers, crashed into the rocks in Yellow Leaf Creek. Folded the car around them so tight it took two days for them to peel it off and haul it away.
They cleaned him up but he’s a wreck. His face is all the colors of a winter sunset. Soon as I’m done they’ll ship him over to Bynum’s for his funeral but right now we’re alone. I trace his hairline, then reach around behind his ear and there it is. Dry and raspy. A little ridge to it. A perfect circle.
Bull Garlington is a writer from Chicago by way of Florida and Alabama. His stories have appeared in various publications such as Slab, Bathhouse, The Memoirist, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. He is currently pursuing an Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing at The University of Oxford, fulfilling a lifelong dream.
