An Excerpt from Erin Flanagan's "Deer Season"

Erin Flanagan | Deer Season | University of Nebraska Press | September 1, 2021 | 320 Pages

When Peggy still wasn’t home by Tuesday morning, some of the town wives set up a schedule for meals and chores so the Aherns wouldn’t have to do anything but find their daughter. Clyle had hosed his work boots off when he finished his own chores before coming inside for a shower to prevent contamination between the farms, and now he sat at his kitchen table in slippers. “It’s a terrible thing,” he repeated, something he’d said on autopilot for the last twenty-four hours. He tried to think of other terrible things that had happened in Gunthrum. Once, when he was a teenager, a little girl in town was riding on the back of a bicycle her father was pedaling, and she stuck her fingers through the spokes and had her fingers cut clean off at the tips. A boy a class below him had died of a bee sting, his face swelling up like a muddled balloon while they were all playing baseball. Clyle had been at the park when that happened, and he thought of it still whenever he saw the soft rind of an overripe cantaloupe.

Alma stood in the kitchen frosting a pan of cinnamon rolls; a lasagna cooled on the stove burner, already covered in foil. She turned around, a hand on her hip. “I’m not looking forward to this.”

“No one is,” Clyle agreed. “But it’s the right thing to do.”

“Don’t tell me about the right thing,” Alma grumbled, ripping a sheet of tinfoil from the box to cover the rolls.

Hal, fresh from his shower, came down a few moments later, a clean shirt of Clyle’s tucked tight into his work pants, his eyes rimmed red. Clyle had been the one to tell him about Peggy; he’d heard about it from Alma Monday night when she came home with a pizza box in one hand and a mouthful of gossip. He knew she hated how much everyone in this town talked, and it amazed him to this day how quickly word could spread. The only reason he hadn’t heard earlier was that he’d been working on the farm all day, cocooned away from the rest of the world.

Clyle knew about Hal’s crush on Peggy, knew he had come back from that centennial picnic last summer talking about how he had fallen in love. Loading hogs in the trailer the next afternoon, he’d asked Clyle if it was possible Hal himself might get married someday. “You know, like a regular man?”

As Clyle had predicted, Mick Langdon, Hal’s landlord, had called earlier that afternoon with follow-up on the hunting trip. “Found a deer in my dump.”

Clyle felt a rush of relief. “That must have been a surprise.” He hadn’t realized how worried he’d been about that deer and whether or not there was one after he heard about Peggy. He hadn’t wanted to admit even to himself that when he heard about her disappearance, he thought about the blood in the truck.

“Hal must have thrown it in there while I was at church because you can damn well bet if I’d been there, I would have heard him.” Clyle asked Mick if he wanted him to come get the carcass, but Mick figured it could just as easily rot in his dump as Clyle’s. “But I thought you should know at least.”

“We need to skedaddle,” Alma said. “Sooner we go, the sooner we can leave.” They piled into the car, one casserole pan balanced on her knees in the passenger’s seat, the other on Hal’s in the back, where he sat like their child.

At the Aherns’, people had parked their cars and trucks carefully on the side of the gravel drive, not one wheel on the grass. Many were the same vehicles parked here on Friday and Saturday nights although never so neatly on the weekend. “Good Lord,” Alma said. “Now they’ve got a house full of people to entertain. I thought the wives would set it up so we weren’t all coming at once.”

Cheryl and Larry Burke stood on the porch—a paper grocery sack in his arms—speaking to Lonnie McKee and his wife, Diane. They stopped talking as the Costagans and Hal pulled up and parked. The two couples were part of the Aherns’ drinking crowd, Cheryl and Larry the youngest members at twenty-eight. Lonnie had hired Larry at the garage a few years back after Larry completed an auto tech degree at Northeast. Most of the people in the crowd had cheered at the football games when Larry scored the touchdowns, leading the Bulldogs to the conference championship. In the years since, like most of the people in Gunthrum, he’d found a way to transition from child to adult with the people he’d known since he was in short pants. Clyle was a rarity—someone who had left town and made another life for himself, then come back—but all he’d ever really wanted was to live in Gunthrum.

“We didn’t know if we should go in or just leave the things on the porch,” Diane whispered as they walked up. She’d dyed her hair a darker shade of brown, and Clyle thought it made her look older.

“Terrible thing,” Lonnie said. “Just terrible.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying all day,” Clyle said.

Cheryl put her hand on Larry’s arm. “Lare gave up bowling league to come tonight, make sure we could do what we can.”

“A real hero’s tale,” Alma muttered, and Cheryl glared at her.

“Hi, Larry,” Hal said, and Larry mumbled a “hi” back but didn’t turn to look at Hal. Clyle knew from Alma’s run into town the day before that Larry and Sam were telling anyone who would listen that Hal had stranded them near Valentine and they’d had to get a ride from Cheryl the next morning. And now this girl was missing, and they probably felt petty trying to drum up sympathy over something as stupid as a hike. They should, Clyle thought.

“I think we can leave it, don’t you?” Diane said to no one in particular about the food they’d brought, so Alma rang the doorbell.

“Figures,” Cheryl muttered, and they stood a moment in awkward silence until the door opened.

Linda Ahern peered out, her face white as a wax candle. “Come in,” she said, and waved them in. “No need standing out on the porch.” Her boy, Milo, was behind her, a cautious look on his face.

Cheryl stepped forward. “We don’t want to be a bother.”

“It’s fine,” Linda said, and Clyle explained he and Hal were here to help with chores, that they’d stay on the porch in their boots.

“I assume you know what needs to be done?” Linda asked.

“We do,” Clyle said. He’d gotten the call from Randall about what to do on the farm. “One feeder works enough like another.” He and Hal headed toward the barn, Alma shooting a look over her shoulder as she heaved herself up the steps. Sometimes he worried as much about leaving Alma in a social situation as he did Hal, especially around Diane, but if she was going to say something, it would have been long ago. Alma always spoke her mind, something many of the women around here didn’t understand. They’d been raised to be deferential to their men and social norms, neither of which Alma gave a hoot about. It was one of the things he had loved about her in the beginning.

In the Aherns’ barn Clyle found the on-off switch for the feed. His own barn wasn’t on an electrical system, but he knew well enough how one worked. He flipped the switch, and the machinery rumbled loudly to life as he and Hal stood next to each other watching the pvc pipe with its coiled snake of cable drop feed into both sides of the pens. At home he used a crank to control the depth of the feed, monitoring that it was high enough for the food to flow out but not enough that the hogs could waste it.

Joe had hung simple tools on the walls, the ones most farmers kept in triplicate in the house, toolshed, and barn: pliers, screwdrivers, hammer. It felt strangely intimate being inside another man’s barn. He could tell from the way the straw was stacked and the tools were hung on hooks on the walls that Joe Ahern was a fastidious man who believed hard work would be rewarded. A man who thought he could protect himself and his family through sheer will. Hal leaned against a sorting panel and continued to watch the feeder even though the chute unloaded the grain to each bin in exactly the same way. Clyle understood. This was one of the simple pleasures of farming, the repetitive motions, like lulling a baby to sleep.

Growing up, Clyle had always loved the farm. He started chores with his father when he was just a little tyke and was running the tractor by the age of eight. He’d always loved the soreness at the end of the day, the tightened, sunburned skin in the summer and the chap of cold in the winter. He’d left for a college education—his parents had been adamant that he explore his options—and junior year he’d sat next to a pretty girl in Victorian Literature who leaned over and asked if he believed it was true that the Victorians were so prudish they covered even the table legs. She’d smelled like sawdust and wore a maroon cardigan and a skirt that stopped just above her knee. His first introduction to Alma.

“It feels weird being in here,” Hal said over the noise of the feeder, and Clyle told him there was nothing to be afraid of. He thought of the boy with the bee sting, how his face had swollen so fast it was like watching a balloon inflate. He and Alma studied together for at least a month for that class until finally she leaned over and kissed him at the library, her mouth wet and tasting of cherry Sucrets. Good Lord, he was embarrassed to admit it, but she was only the fourth girl he’d ever kissed. If it hadn’t been for her, they’d still probably be at a long wooden table near the stacks, Clyle debating if he should hold her hand.

While the feeder continued unloading, Clyle and Hal walked through the rows of hogs in the barn, then went to the three large outbuildings. Joe had one of the bigger operations in the county. They turned on the other mechanized feeders and checked the hogs for irregularities. Two piglets in building three had the scours, and Hal and Clyle could tell which ones by their anuses. They each grabbed one by their back legs and separated them in an empty pen; Clyle would leave a note for the next guy. He found the mini-fridge in the third building, the shelves lined neatly with glass bottles, the syringes on top. He filled two with penicillin and grabbed a blue Paintstik—the color for third-day shots at the Aherns—and gave a litter their shots of penicillin against pneumonia while Hal held them in the football hold.

The loud rattle of the feeders stopped. Hal switched them off, and they made their way back through the buildings, making sure the feeders had filled and the water was fresh. They ended up back at the barn. It was the oldest building by far on the farm, with wood siding and an uneven cement floor, while the newer buildings were corrugated steel, their floors so smooth you could roll a marble straight. No question the Aherns had some money.

In the barn Hal looked up to the hayloft, his voice echoey. “Maybe she’s up there,” he said. “Maybe she’s hiding.”

“She’s not hiding,” Clyle said evenly.

“You never know. I hid in a hayloft for like three days once.” That had been back when Hal was in high school and had just started working for them on the weekends. He still lived with his mother then, and at most he’d hidden an afternoon. Marta had caught Hal smoking dope with some boys at school, and he’d come to the Costagans’ to hide. Clyle and Alma hadn’t even known Hal was there until he appeared at their doorstep, hay in his hair, claiming he was starving to death. Clyle called Marta to tell her they’d found him, and she’d sighed. “Just send that idiot boy home,” she said.

“Maybe I should check,” Hal said, and turned toward Clyle with wide eyes. “I could be the one to find her. I’d be the hero!”

“No one’s going to be a hero,” Clyle responded, and then, even though he didn’t believe it, “I’m sure she’s fine.”

Used with permission of the University of Nebraska Press.
© 2021 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.

Erin Flanagan is the author of two short story collections and a professor of English at Wright State University. Deer Season is her debut novel.