December 13

December 13

George drifted past the bench where Pete sat waiting for Brittany after school.

Pete jumped up and stood in front of his friend, blocking his way.  “You’ve got to talk to me.”

George just stared.

“Dude.  It’s been weeks.  You’ve gotta let me in.”

George just shrugged.  “I don’t know how.”

“Talk to me.”

“I tried.  You don’t understand.  You weren’t there.”

“You have been walking around like the undead.  You sit next to me at lunch, and you don’t talk.  You just stare.  What are you thinking about when you stare like that?”

“You wouldn’t understand.  You weren’t there.  It’s just too much.”  George’s voice drifted off, and George drifted away to his house, where, if Pete were to believe Brittany, which he actually did, he would just sit in his room with the lights off and the shade down, until someone called him for dinner.  She said she had walked in on him more than once, and he hadn’t even yelled at her.  He hadn’t even noticed her.  He had just sat there – staring.  She said it gave her the creeps.  The whole thing gave Pete the creeps.  He missed his friend.

*   *   *

“It’s a deer,” Pete’s mom announced as he walked in the front door, after waiting fruitlessly for Brittany at the bench for at least half an hour.

“What’s a deer?”  He checked to make sure he still had the notebook.  He did.  His mom wasn’t reading the story.  She didn’t know about Fawn and Chloe.  Or maybe she did.  She was sitting at the computer.  Maybe it was coming to her e-mail now.  Maybe the universe had gotten disgusted with him, and was sending the wiener dogs to his mom instead.  He didn’t blame Brittany for not looking for him after school.  He hadn’t been very nice to her.

“Uncle Duane’s stench.  It’s a dead deer.”

“That’s terrible!”  Pete usually wasn’t all sentimental about animals, but his first thought was to wonder if it was Fawn or Chloe unexpectedly flying into the wrong world – because they weren’t used to flying, after all. 

And then flying into a hole?  In Uncle Duane’s yard? 

He really needed to get a grip.

“It doesn’t seem all that surprising to me, actually.  There are a lot of deer where Uncle Duane lives, and early man did catch deer by building traps that were often little more than holes in the ground.”  Pete wandered into the kitchen to get a snack.  His mom was still talking when he emerged with an apple.  “I usually teach that they would cover them with some kind of camouflage, so that the animal wouldn’t simply go around the hole, but if it was running, or looking somewhere else --”

Had Chloe been trying to run away from the raven?  No.  A perfectly normal deer from perfectly normal Reedsport Oregon was probably running away from a car.  Nothing supernatural.  His mom was still talking.

“He sent a copy of something he posted somewhere on the Internet.  It seems he’s not sure what to do about the deer.  He thought about sprinkling lime on it because somebody on the Internet responding to his post says lime makes dead animals decompose faster, but then somebody else pointed out that lime is poisonous, so he doesn’t want to poison the other animals that might want to eat the deer.”

“What other animals?”  Pete asked.  “It’s at the bottom of a deep hole.  How are the other animals supposed to get down there?”

“Do you think the hole is really all that deep?”

“I don’t know.  Why don’t you ask him?”

His mom swiveled around, typed the question, and hit send, before continuing her report on Uncle Duane’s long e-mail about his deer dilemma, and the e-mail flurry it was causing among random strangers on the Internet after he had posted the question on some site where random strangers answer your questions.  “Then he says that he is thinking about putting bark chips over it.”

“What will that do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Isn’t there someone he could call?  Wildlife Services, or something?  I mean, why is he asking you, and asking random strangers on the Internet?”

“Good point.”  She swiveled around to typed again, talking as she did so.  “Uncle Duane hasn’t always been really good with authority.  Maybe he just didn’t think of it.”

“Not good with authority?  Wasn’t your own Dad the mayor once?  How can he not trust his own brother?”

Joey walked by on his way downstairs, and kicked Pete in the leg as he passed him.  Pete shoved Joey.

“I can’t imagine,” said their mother.  She continued, scrolling down.  “So he finally tells us more about this Cindi woman.”

“Yeah, lets hear about the girlfriend.”  Pete sat down on the couch, and perched his elbows on the arm, ready for gossip.

“She’s still ‘this Cindi woman’?  I don’t know if I like the sound of that.”  His dad had just walked in the front door.  He joined Pete on the couch, ready for the lowdown.

“She has young children.  He talks about how beautiful she is.  How she’s been working so hard since she left her abusive, drug-addicted husband.” The furrows in his mom’s forehead got deeper and deeper as she read. 

“Wait a minute.  This beautiful woman and her young children are living in that little cottage with Uncle Duane and a dead deer in the yard?”  Pete couldn’t quite get his head around that image.  It was a very small cottage.

His mother continued to frown at the computer screen.  “I get the impression that the children are with their father, or maybe fathers, because he says they’re talking to a lawyer about getting custody.”

“The father presumably being the abusive, drug-addicted husband?”  Pete’s dad asked.  “Exactly how old is this beautiful woman with the two young children?”

“He isn’t terribly explicit beyond the fact that she has beautiful eyes, and a beautiful mind, whatever that means, but it sounds like she’s in her late twenties.”

“And he’s in love with her?”  Pete couldn’t believe it.  The man deserved a girlfriend, but this was just too disgusting.

“Does she return his feelings?” his dad asked.

“He says she’s ‘almost there.’”

“What does that even mean?” Pete asked, trying to control his upper lip, which was experiencing an uncomfortable inclination to twitch upward on the right-hand side.

“I could ask,” his mom offered tentatively.

“Don’t.” Pete and his dad both said at the same time.

“Too much information.”  Pete held up his hands, palms facing outward, as if he could push away the disturbing image.

His dad agreed.  “Some things we just don’t need to know.”

“You guys can laugh,” his mother said, “but I’m worried.”

“So you think fifty years might be too much of an age gap?” his dad asked.  “She not only wasn’t alive when Kennedy was shot, she had yet to be born when Chernobyl exploded, or even when Princess Diana died.  Conversation could be difficult.”

Pete jerked his head back and forth, trying to rattle the ideas around.  His parents talked about Princess Diana?

His father saw his reaction, and smiled.  “It’s a context thing.  You’ll understand when you’re older.”

“Well, you know, Duane is still on oxygen,” his mom reminded them.

They all agreed that there was nothing to be done about it from the other side of the world, unless they popped through Uncle Duane’s uncompleted hole (past the decomposing deer) to visit.  All they could do was hope for the best.  They would see him in a few weeks on their Christmas vacation, but even then – Pete wondered what they could expect to do?  Uncle Duane was a grown-up, after all.  More than a grown-up, Pete reflected.  He was like, a tribal elder, or something.  The guy was seriously old.  They should be respectfully going to him for the wisdom of his years, not second guessing his disturbing relationship with a woman barely old enough to be Pete’s own mother. 

Maybe he knew what he was doing.

Pete took the notebook up to his room.  It was Friday.  He didn’t have any plans for Friday night.  He didn’t have any plans for the weekend.  George wasn’t speaking to him, and now, apparently, neither was Brittany.  His parents were busy with end of term grading, so there wouldn’t be any of the hikes, or outings they called forced family fun.  The one English language television station never had any good shows, and he had watched all their DVD’s a million times.  He couldn’t kill aliens on the Internet for two and a half days straight.  He would have plenty of time to do homework over the weekend, because there was nothing much else to do, so he didn’t need to start now.  Studying for finals would have to stave off two days of boredom. 

He didn’t really want to read the wiener dog story without Brittany. 

But Brittany wasn’t here.

He looked at the notebook.  Sitting on the bed next to him.

He put it on the bookshelf.  He could review history now.  He could read the notebook later.  With Brittany.  When she decided to speak to him again.

         He opened his history text to the chapter on the Middle Ages.  He had reached the economic shift from feudalism to mercantilism.  It’s funny; he hadn’t made the connection until just now.  Economics was something people were dealing with back in the Middle Ages too.  There was no stock market yet, but people still had to live with an economy.  People back then had been caught thinking things were always going to be one way – thinking that they had it made, because they were knights, or feudal lords – but everything was changing with the rise of the middle class.  It probably didn’t change quite as fast as things had changed in the nineties, or as fast as things had changed over the past few years.  He wondered if medieval people had noticed that things were changing gradually, or if some just came home from the crusades and went: “Wow! My life is completely different.”

         His eyes strayed to the notebook on the shelf.  He wondered how the wiener dogs were doing.  Had they learned more about the water?  Had they met with Manchester the elf?

         He forced his attention back to his history text:  The Black Death – the Bubonic Plague – one of the most devastating pandemics in human history.  It made him think of the raven.   The history book said that the plague had probably been caused by a bacteria that was passed from person to person via flea bites, but that there might have been another version that had been air borne, and affected the lungs.  And then it went into the explanations people were making at the time:  God might have been mad at them.  Jews might have poisoned the wells. 

Even now, it said, there was some controversy.  Could the bacterial culprit really have done so much damage?  Some scientists said no. 

Had it really been a disinterested bacterium, a purely scientific phenomenon, or had it been an evil raven?  Could the evil raven create super-deadly bacteria in this world, the same way it could mess with water in Fawn and Chloe’s world? 

Of course not.  He was being crazy. 

But maybe it could get into people’s minds, and stir them into a prejudiced froth, and lure them to burn down Jewish settlements.

         But the book seemed to suggest that killing off fifty percent of the European population might not have been such a bad thing, because it meant the farm workers could demand more money for their labor, and they had a better standard of living.  Back to economics.

         Would it be worth killing off fifty percent of the world’s population, if it meant that the people still left alive all had jobs, and houses, and plenty of money?  Who would get to choose which fifty percent got to stay?  The raven?

         OK, he couldn’t stand it any more.  He opened the notebook.

December 13, 2004

Just then, a duck walked up.  "Are the reindeer flying again?  Thank goodness."

"No.  Not reindeer," said Blitzen.

"The reindeer have been enchanted by this trough water, conjured by the evil Raven.  Likewise have the ordinary deer, Fawn and Chloe, been made to fly.  The Raven wanted to ruin Christmas.  But, why can't other animals, who are normally flightless, sip this water and pull the sleigh?"

"You're kidding, right?  It takes years of training and practice to make the sleigh team," said Donner.  "It takes incredible skill and stamina to make it through a Christmas run!"  He blushed slightly.  "I mean, not to toot my own horn or anything.  Not that I can even fly anymore."

"Who are these dogs?" asked the duck.

TO BE CONTINUED...

         The man sat with his head in his hands.  Each day’s story was more bankrupt than the day before.  At this rate, it was going to degenerate into “See deer fly.  Fly deer, fly,” by the time Christmas got here.  It just got worse and worse.

         He didn’t have any answers.  He didn’t know what he was doing.  Didn’t know what he was writing about.  He was supposed to be the grown-up.  He was supposed to have the answers.  Where was his wife?  Where did the amusing pictures come from?  When would he find a job?  Why did the cat die?  What was wrong with Santa?  Why was the raven evil?  What was evil anyway?  He didn’t know anything anymore.

*   *   *

Jennifer opened the door to her flat on Queen’s Road East.  Her building was older than the buildings the teachers lived in.  Her teak floors were no longer highly polished, and they slanted a little.  The rooms were small, and the paint wasn’t fresh, but it was a typical downtown flat, and probably rented for three times as much as a house in the suburbs back in the States.  She didn’t know.  Her father didn’t know either.  His company paid for it.   Her father lived there too – in theory.  He had a bedroom, and a wardrobe full of suits.  He came home for a few days at a time every once in awhile.   OK, he was home most weekends.  Right now he was away.  Somewhere.  She looked at the calendar.  Singapore.  He was in Singapore today.  He would be back in a few days.  With any luck, he said, he could stay home until after Christmas.  Luck.  Did she want him home?  He had offered to send her to her mother for Christmas – or to her Grandparents.  Any one of her four Grandparents and their new spouses.  She thought about it again.  Maybe it wasn’t too late to get plane tickets.  Palm Beach?  Too many old people.  Coos Bay, Oregon?  That dump?  Nothing to do, and she couldn’t stand the weather.  Palm Springs?  Too many beautiful people.  She kind of liked Las Vegas, but she couldn’t stand her mother, or her mother’s new husband.  

She rifled through the stack of mail on the counter, and opened her progress report that had been mailed home to her father.  Two D’s, and predictable comments:  “Must do well on finals in order to blah, blah, blah.”  Who cares?  It’s not like she was on a sports team to get thrown off of, if she failed a class.  They wouldn’t throw her out of school.  Not for grades.  Her dad may not be around a lot, but he could always be counted on to come to a conference, and bluster on about how her grades were all the school’s fault.

She pulled back the corner of the aluminum foil covering the dinner the maid had left her.  Lasagna.  Again.  Oh well. 

Like everything else, it didn’t really matter.

*   *   *

I can no longer flog myself with the whip of tedium.  Cannot remain bound to you and yours by blind habit.

Show the two of you a meteor shower, part way up the mountain, away from the light pollution of the city, and you worry that cougars will attack out of the darkness. 

Take you swimming in a deserted mountain lake, encircled with pine trees, and you complain about the cold water. 

Take you climbing on sand dunes.  Will you pretend to be Bedouins?  No, you complain that it’s too hot, and that the sand will get into your clothing, and make the car messy.