“Probably broke every bone in his body,” I muttered. I took hold of the leg. It was loose and flopping. I tucked it back up beside the rest of him. Folded up the way he was, he didn’t take up much more room than a sack of potatoes. I squatted down beside him.
“Well,” I said, “you did it. God knows we ran you off this hill often enough. You just had to keep coming back, didn’t you?” I reached over and brushed some of the dirt off his face. The eye with the dirt in it looked at me calmly.
“I sure wish I knew what the hell to do now, old buddy,” I said. “You’re Lou’s deer, and I suppose I ought to make him keep you, no matter what shape you’re in. Christ only knows, though, what that’ll lead to.”
How did I always get into these boxes? All I wanted to do was just look out for myself. I had enough trouble doing that without taking on responsibilities for other people as well. I had to try to figure out, very fast, what would be the consequences of about three different courses of action open to me right now, and no matter what I decided to do, I had no guarantees that the whole damn mess wouldn’t blow up in my face. I sure wished that Miller were here.
I could hear McKlearey yelling, but he sounded like he was coming down the hill now. Whatever I was going to do, I was going to have to make up my mind in a hurry.
I put my hand on the deer’s shoulder. He was still warm. A kind of muscle spasm or reflex made his eyelid flutter at me.
“You’re a lot of help,” I said to the deer. I stood up.
I could hear McKlearey crashing around in the brush several hundred yards up the ravine.
“Well, piss on it!” I said and pulled on the limb sticking out of the gravel bank. The whole bank gave way, and I had to jump back out of the way to keep from getting half-buried myself. The slide completely covered the carcass. I stood holding the stick for a moment, then I pitched it off into the brush. I turned around and went on back downstream.
Lou crossed the wash and came down over the rock-pile at the foot of the cliff. He stopped yelling when he started finding pieces of antler. He was there for quite awhile, gathering up all the chunks and fragments he could find. Then he came on down. I had climbed up out of the wash and was standing up on the bank when he got to where I was.
“You find ‘im, Danny?” he asked me from down in the wash. His face was shiny with sweat, and his eyes were feverish.
“I came up from down that way,” I said. “He must be above here somewhere.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.
“No, I came down this creek-bed. He ain’t up there.”
I shrugged. “Maybe in the brush somewhere —”
“The bastard busted his horns,” he said, holding out both hands full of dark fragments.
“Damn shame,” I said.
He began stuffing the pieces into various pockets. “A good taxidermist oughta be able to glue ’em all back together, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know, Lou. I’ve never heard of anybody doing it before.”
“Sure they can,” he said. “But where the hell is the goddamn deer?”
“It’s got to be up above,” I said. “Did you get any kind of Mood-trail?”
“Shit! The way that fucker was bouncin’?”
“Maybe if we find one of the places where he hit —”
He’d finally finished stuffing chunks of horn in his pockets, and suddenly his eyes narrowed and he squinted up at me. His face was very cold and hard looking.
“Oh, now I get it,” he said. “You and your brother, huh? You two are tryin’ to keep my deer.”
“You couldn’t give me that deer after you knocked it off that cliff,” I told him flatly.
“That’s my goddamn deer,” he said angrily.
“I never said it wasn’t.”
“Where the hell is it? Where the hell have you got my deer?” His voice was getting shrill.
“Come on, Lou, get serious.”
“Don’t do this to me, Danny.” His eyes were bulging now.
“Settle down, Lou. Let’s go back up and check out the brush.”
“Danny? Is that you, Danny?” His face was twitching, and his voice was kind of crooning.
“Come on, Lou,” I said, “let’s go back up to where he hit.”
“You know what I did to Sullivan, don’t you, Danny?”
“Come on, Lou,” I said.
Now what the hell was going on?
“It wasn’t my fault, Danny. It was so fuckin’ dark, and Charlie was all around us.”
“Lou, snap out of it!”
“It wasn’t my fault, Danny. He come sneakin’ up on me. He didn’t give me no password or nothin’.”
“Lou!”
“Nobody knows where he is, Danny. I hid ‘im real good. Nobody’ll ever know.”
I suddenly felt sick to my stomach.
“Don’t tell the lieutenant, Danny. Everything will be OK if you just keep your mouth shut about it.” His eyes were wild now.
“Come on, Lou, snap out of it. That’s all over now.” I was starting to get a little jumpy about this. It could get bad in a minute. And I still wasn’t over the little session with Jack up on the ridge.
“I’ll pay you, Danny. I got five hundred or so saved up for a big R and R. It’s all yours. Just for Chrissake, don’t say nothin’.”
Very slowly I eased off the hammer-thong again. How many times was this going to happen in one day?
“Please, Danny, I’m beggin’ ya. They’ll hang me for God’s sake.” His rifle was slung over his left shoulder, and his right hand was on his belt, real close to that damned .38. I wondered if he’d remembered to reload it. Knowing McKlearey, he probably had.
“OK, Kid,” he said, “if that’s the way you want it.” The pleading note had gone out of his voice, and his face was pale and very set.
“McKlearey,” I said as calmly as I could, “if you make one twitch toward that goddamn pistol, I’ll shoot you down in your tracks and you damn well know I can do it. You know I can take you any time I feel like it. Now straighten up and let’s go find that deer.” I sure hoped that I sounded more convincing than I felt. Frankly, I was scared to death.
“I been practicin’,” he said, his face crafty.
“Not enough to make that much difference, Lou,” I said.
He stood there looking up at me. I guess it got through to him — even through what had happened on the Delta — that I had him cold. At least I had him cold enough to make the whole thing a bad gamble for him. Finally he shook his head as though coming out of a bad dream.
“You say you came up the creek-bed?” he asked as if nothing had happened.
“Yeah,” I said. “The deer’s gotta be above us somewhere — maybe off in the brush.”
“Maybe if we each took one side,” he said. “It sure as hell ain’t down in here.” He turned and clambered up out of the wash on the other side.
“Danny?” he said from the other side of the wash.
“Yeah?”
“Sullivan and the other Danny are both dead, did you know that? Charlie got ’em. They been dead a long time now.”
“Sorry to hear that, Lou.”
“Yeah. It was a bad deal. They was my buddies — but Charlie got “em.”
I didn’t want to get started on that again. “Work your way up to where you found those pieces of horn, Lou,” I said. “I’ll go up this side.”
“Sure. Fuckin’ deer has gotta be here someplace.”
I let him lead out. I wasn’t about to let him get behind me.
“You find ‘im?” Miller called from the ridge.
“Not yet, Cap,” I called back.
“Any sign?”
“Lou found some pieces of horn,” I said.
“And some fur,” Lou called to me. “Tell ‘im I found some white fur, too.”
“He got some fur, too,” I relayed.
“He’s gotta be down there then.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Did he go off that bluff?”
“Yeah. I saw him fall.”
Cap shook his head disgustedly and started to come down into the ravine.
The three of us combed the bottom for about an hour and a half. We passed the collapsed gravel bank about a half dozen times, but neither of them seemed to notice anything peculiar about it.
“It’s no good,” Miller said finally.
“But he’s down here,” Lou said. “We all seen ‘im fall. I got ‘im. I got ‘im from way up there.” He pointed wildly.
“I ain’t doubtin’ you shot him,” Cap said, “but we ain’t gonna find ‘im.”