Watch Out for Deer
If I told you I enjoy torturing my husband, Earl, would you think I was a monster?
If you answered already, shame on you. Life is not black and white, and you should hear my story before rushing to judgment—especially the part about Earl’s secret.
First off, Earl thinks he’s brilliant. To be fair, he is pretty sharp. If he’d been born into a family in a big city, he might even be a professor or something. He’s a barber on Main Street in our Wisconsin town. Everyone loves the vintage feel of the place, the free coffee in Styrofoam cups, the eggs he sells from our backyard chickens, and the homespun wisdom from the devout Christian barber. He only accepts cash, and he cheats like a felon on our taxes, but that’s no reason to hate him. Depending on your moral code, you might even admire him.
Wait now—Earl came into my room to give me a sponge bath. He’s wiping my ass. Judging by the way his grill is twisted up like that bitter beer face commercial, he hates it. I laugh so hard, on the inside, every time he has to roll me over and clean me up. You should hear him curse. So many F-bombs. One time, he even puked. I never thought I would find the smell of my own shit so endearing. Oh, sweet baby Jesus, it is funnier than rodeo clowns on acid.
My room is our second bedroom. Earl still sleeps in the master, where I used to sleep with him. But I’m not complaining. I won’t let myself feel sorry for my predicament because self-pity is an emotion for losers, and I’ve always been a winner, like when I was prom queen. In fact, I give thanks every day in my gratitude journal. Like this story I’m telling you, it’s more of a mental journal than a physical one.
I have one of those deluxe beds where the head and the foot move up and down independently with a button. Not that I’m able to touch it. Against the far wall is a chaise lounge thingy with a brown corduroy cover where visitors sometimes sit. Above it is a framed print of the Ice Bowl, when the Packers beat the Cowboys on the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field. When they prop me up, I have no choice but to stare at it all day.
Sometimes the scenery changes, though. Like a month ago, when Earl led his mistress to the corduroy couch and started getting busy with her. He kissed her all over, nice and slow and tender, then lifted her skirt with bad intentions. After all that hullabaloo, he couldn’t get it up. Probably a case of shy pecker due to guilt. He kept looking over at me, like he expected me to object. I lay there stone-faced the entire time because that’s all I’m able to do. I imagined Bart Starr looking down and laughing at Earl’s limp dick. It was the most excitement I’ve had in months, since the accident.
I never saw that mistress again, although I suspect he might have a new one.
The accident is another testament to Earl’s cleverness. As long as I’ve known him, he’s been a schemer, working the angles. It happened about six months ago, when our marriage started going sideways. I was planning to leave him. He knew it, but I knew he knew, and I told my friend Heidi as an insurance policy in case he got any ideas.
Hold on—Heidi is here. Lucky for me, she’s my home care nurse now. She only comes three times a week, because that’s all Earl can afford. He’s kinda broke on account of all the expenses and the loss of my income.
Heidi is my court-ordered security blanket, after a welfare check found that Earl was neglecting me. I was malnourished and had bedsores that gurgled pus like the hot springs in Yellowstone; at least that’s what Heidi said. It’s not like I felt the sores because I’ve been a quadriplegic with a traumatic brain injury ever since the accident.
If I could use my hands, I’d be making air quotes around the word accident, because it was all premeditated by our genius Earl. His dipshit insurance agent brother told him about a case where two women were driving at night, a deer jumps out, flies through the windshield, and decapitates the woman in the passenger seat. Now, if you’re like most people, you would’ve thought that’s a one-in-a-million shot because everyone hits a deer sooner or later, and they hardly ever crash through the windshield. But not our mastermind Earl. He hears this story and thinks it could be the perfect crime, a way for him to get my life insurance money and bury his dark secret forever. You see, I’d caught him cheating, and the divorce wasn’t gonna go his way. Not only was he looking at losing the house and the barber shop, but he’d go to jail for a good long time if I spilled his secret.
It almost worked out the way Earl smarty-pants planned. One Saturday night, he pretended to make nice, took me out for a queen cut prime rib at the supper club out on Highway 173, where the deer are always running. On the way home, he tried to hit one, but the critter was too quick, so he swerved and struck a four-by-four post holding up a Deer Crossing sign. The shattered post flew through the windshield and struck me in the head.
The trouble for Earl is that it didn’t quite kill me. I’m still here, and now I am his round-the-clock pain in the ass. His brother stopped over a few weeks back, and Earl tore him a new one about the plan going sideways. Brother says it wasn’t his plan; he just told Earl about the insurance claim for the headless woman. What do you call two doorknobs arguing about a plan gone wrong? Hilarious!
Oh right, you’re probably wondering about Earl’s secret. Well, when he was sixteen, his family took a vacation out West. On the way back, they stopped to visit his cousins in South Dakota for a few days. Earl and his cousin Ned got drunk, raped, and shot an eighteen-year-old Lakota girl five times, then dragged her body for a mile behind Ned’s pickup truck and dumped her on the bank of the Missouri River. Heinous, right? Three weeks later, he starts his junior year like nothing happened. And we were high school sweethearts. He was a wrestling star, and I was the prom queen. An all-American couple, except one of us was a rapist and a murderer.
Here we are, fifteen years later, and his secret is still safe—for now—on account of the deer debacle. The murder of the Native girl is still unsolved, and while I do feel bad for her family, I had to protect my Earl, the husband-package I’d curated. Besides, he was only sixteen at the time of the crime, and a lot of guys have raped once or twice, right? At least that’s what he said when he first confided in me the night before our wedding eight years ago. He cried a little, said he was ashamed, but he couldn’t hide the animal thrill, the flared nostrils and glistening slivers of moisture beneath his eyes. The only time I’ve seen that look since then was when he bagged an eight-point buck during bow season. Oh, and of course last month, when he tried to bang the mistress.
Anyways, we were in the parking lot of the restaurant after our rehearsal dinner when he told me about the rape and murder. I was in a pickle. We’d already received a ton of gifts, and all my relatives were in town for the wedding. It would have been so embarrassing to cancel. Earl just had to get it off his chest; it was eating away at him, and he thought he was being sly with the timing. And he was. I know, most women would have run away screaming. But most women would have missed the opportunity of a lifetime. Not me; I saw it right then and there, glowing as brightly as the neon lights hanging in front of Biggie’s restaurant. The limitless ability to control a man, to get him to do whatever I wanted, because if he ever wavered, I would go to the cops with his secret.
I never had to come right out and say it. He felt it, the way a person knows when someone is standing right behind them. Every once in a while, when he started to forget who was boss, I’d poke him with gentle reminders like, “None of us is as bad as our worst mistake,” or “Can you believe they gave that guy fifteen years for manslaughter?” Most people don’t know that fear is a power stronger than love. With all that control in the palm of my hand, what was I supposed to do—call off the wedding?
It’s not like we haven’t had our good times, like him parading me around the beer tent every summer at the Dairyland Super National tractor pull. He always wore his best cowboy boots, the ones with heels that made him look five-nine, so that we’d be the same height. My favorite game was finding the second-best-looking woman and then draping myself all over her man. Did I tell you I was prom queen?
I have a secret of my own, a brand new one. Last week, the university hospital sent a brain injury expert to examine me. She hooked up electrodes to my head and figured out that while I can’t move or feel any physical sensations—duh—I see and hear everything going on around me. And I’m able to blink to communicate. Don’t tell Earl. He was at work when this happened. Heidi was here, and now it’s a secret between her, me, and the brain expert. So now I’m faced with another dilemma. Do I blink the details of Earl’s secret to the brain expert, or do I continue to revel in Earl’s misfortune, his financial ruin, his bitterness at having to care for me?
I do wish I could share all of this with someone so they could appreciate the irony that while I’m lying here, my body wrecked and immobile, I still have all this power over him. I am the puppet master pulling the strings. On the other hand, Earl deserves prison. I mean, if I don’t hold him accountable, who will?
Huh, I hear people talking down at the end of the hallway. Sounds like Heidi, giggling about something. Who’s she talking to? Oh, it’s Earl.
That’s weird.
Now they’re in my room, holding hands and smiling. In Earl’s other hand is a pillow. And he has that animal look in his eyes.
About the Author
Pat Scheckel lives with his family in Madison, Wisconsin. Fantastical Midwest noir ideas shadow him while being walked around the neighborhood by two puggish dogs, Taco and Lulu. His work has appeared in Creative Wisconsin, BULL, and The MacGuffin. You can find him at scheckel.com.