river rat: seven At first, they wanted to send me away. They were afraid I'd hurt someone or myself.
They said something had to be wrong for a seven year old boy to wake up from a nap, go downstairs to the kitchen, set the kitchen garbage can on fire, and then go back upstairs and fall asleep. They worried I had a death wish-that I'd lost contact with the idea of right and wrong. They eventually called in experts.
They were afraid.
A young buck with horns still fuzzed out in velvet, crossed the frantic three lane highway between town and the river a day before I set the kitchen on fire. Each year, traffic on the highway killed thousands of animals in the one mile stretch running the length of town. We'd find them flattened-'possums, muskrats, 'coons, deer, even frogs-but the deer never terrorized town by making it across the road alive.
We called them "sailers", the small dead animals, anyhow, not the big ones. The big ones we walked fifty feet down and away, over the bank to the river, no matter how steep the bank, to avoid the death rot smell. The small ones, the sailers, were called sailers because a well preserved, perfectly flat road kill could be peeled from the road and tossed like a Frisbee. A perfect sail. Catch!
The button buck with the reddish, purple velvet on its five inch horns dodged lumber trucks and commuter vehicles, sauntering into the green between the highway and Front Street. One of the guys at Mater's Garage saw it grazing near the veteran's memorial kitty-cornered from our front porch. It lowered its head, oblivious to the sixty mile an hour steel and rubber stream of death it had navigated, eating from the tall grasses and shrubs at the monument's base as if it were on an island in the river grazing peacefully.
Bucky-I like to call him Bucky-fed to full and then crossed Front Street, walking past our front door, its hooves clip-clopping on the sidewalk. Ricky Burlee watched from the garage bay up the street as Bucky squared his shoulders to our neighbor's house. Ricky said he turned, just for a second, to go get one of the Mater boys to come see the confused animal, and when he looked up next he saw Bucky launch himself through the Bucher's picture window, into their sitting room.
Bucky didn't like what he found in our neighbor's parlor. Since the beginning of the company, Bernice Bucher was the town Avon Lady and had been collecting every cut, cast and blown glass bauble and gee-gaw Avon ever made. Four glass display cabinets lined the wall opposite the window. The cases stared out the window through the oak trees my grandparents planted at the top of the river bank, the cabinets fixing their flat panel eyes on the mountain face across the water. A glass coffee table, specially built to house every manner of blown glass bird, was centered in the room in front of a couch whose plastic covers were never creased with the burden of a human's ass, let alone removed to expose their virgin fabric to the light of day.
Bucky landed in the center of the coffee table, falling backwards onto the couch. Deer don't like to fall backwards. They flail the way a turtle waves its legs when stranded upside down on his shell, but a deer has legs with lean cloven hammers on the ends instead of slow moving reptilian claws. Imagine a horse's hooves swinging wildly in the air and then remember that horses are mostly domesticated and that deer living on the river are about as wild an animal as you'll find.
Bucky's left antler nub poked through the plastic high on the couch's cushions, piercing the upholstery and hooking on the ash wood frame. His one hundred thirty pound body lurched forward, breaking the horn off, also breaking the couch's frame before he could right himself. When the green horn snapped, overturning the wrecked couch, his forward momentum carried him into the display cases, powdering ever piece of bric-a-brac, but not before the top glass shelf made a ragged saw cut through his neck-a fatal wound that would bleed him out just as he leapt back through the window and stumbled onto our front porch. Bernice's pristine parlor looked like the Tate mansion following a friendly visit from the Manson family.
The door thumped hard-not with a knock or a ring on the doorbell-but with a thump. I was home sick, mostly milking a sore throat for the second day, playing hooky. From the kitchen I heard the thump. It was loud, like a sack of rocks pitched into the door frame, rattling the front of the house in a shudder. I opened the door and found Bucky. His tongue stuck a half a foot out of his mouth, foamy red. His eyes and mine locked until the last bubble pushed its way out of his flared nostrils, drying impossibly--a deflated balloon of super elastic bubble plastic.
The fire thing in the kitchen? The psychologists the school called in said it was post traumatic stress syndrome, like someone in the Viet Nam war, only without me doing the killing, but similar because of all the blood. They said the tragedy disoriented me, that it dazed me, perhaps causing confusion for the next twenty four hours, and that in my confusion, I inadvertently set the garbage can on fire and went back to bed.
I didn't tell them I was asleep when I did it. I didn't say that I sometimes wake up in strange places, like standing over by the veteran's memorial in my underwear in the dark, or waking up sitting on the rough wooden seat of our neighbor's outhouse with one of Dad's large spud wrenches cold in my hand. I didn't tell them about the time I woke up in the rain, holding a shovel and standing on the hood of Dad's truck, nor did I tell them about the time with the hammer and our dog and how it took stitches to heal the dog and I swear I don't remember doing it but the bloody hammer and my pajamas and the dog couldn't possibly lie. I didn't want them to be afraid that it was something about me turning seven when all the sleep walking started.
It was a lot more fun to have them think the crazy was temporary.