I feigned interest long enough to get the approximated coordinates of the doomed Bambi, then said no chance was I going to get a deer tag so these erstwhile frontiersmen could gun down a baby deer with a rope around his neck, courageous as that sounded.
Rich looked like he might use my head for a speed bag when I started humming “Davy Crockett,” but one of the other guys offered to go to Bender’s. It was never a bad idea to build up a few points with Rich; he had graduated the previous year and, as part of his commitment to Wolverines Too, was donating time to work out with the team, and you just might end up staring across the line at him in some practice drill designed to make you eligible for state disability funds.
Anyway, while Marshall and his Gang of Two drove Ralph Raymond to Bender’s, I pedaled my mountain bike out past the old Carter place deep into the woods on an overgrown one-lane logging road to a clearing where, sure enough, the young deer stood vigil over its dead mother, a nylon rope snug around his neck, tied to a pine tree. This wasn’t just Bambi, this was early Bambi. Mom and Dad said later it may have had to do with the loss of my own mother, but I’ll never forget the look of it, head bowed, standing over her still corpse. I could almost feel the weight in its chest in my own.
The fawn lurched as I rode up, choking on the tightened noose, but I laid my bike on the ground, talking real soft as I moved in, and though it jerked back in panic twice more, I was able to slip the rope over its head. It bounded away a few yards, stopped, and ventured back. I knew Marshall couldn’t be far behind, so I yelled and whistled and even slapped it on the butt, but it never got past the edge of the trees before turning back.
Across the clearing a cloud of dust rolled up behind Rich’s dually as he slammed on the brakes, snatched his rifle from the gun rack as he leaped from the cab and sprinted toward me and the deer with Wyberg and Barbour close behind, screaming my name.
Even with all that commotion the fawn wouldn’t go far, and there was nothing left but to throw myself over it. To shoot the deer, asshole Rich Marshall would have to shoot me, and in my imagination that would be better than to witness this killing. Wyberg and Barbour tried to peel me back, slapping the back of my head and kicking my ribs, and in the chaos the deer kicked a three-inch gash in my forehead, but I held on like a bulldogger and Rich couldn’t get a clean body shot. I will forever remember the sensation of that animal going slack in my hold as the bullet went through its temple.
Then the three of them proceeded to kick my ass all over the clearing.
Even at fourteen I was big enough to do some damage to Wyberg, and under different circumstances would have welcomed the opportunity to put a few well-placed bruises on Barbour’s face, but the fight had drained out of me with the soul of the deer. They loaded both animals into Rich’s dually, backed over my mountain bike twice, and left me in the middle of the clearing soaked in a mixture of the deer’s blood and my own.
I met Mr. Simet for the first time as his Humvee crested a rise in the single-lane dirt road and swerved to miss me, walking directly down the middle toward town-“determination,” as he put it, “smeared across my face in blood and dirt”-and he told me to get in. At first I wouldn’t-couldn’t-tell him what had happened. He stopped by his place to let me clean up and loan me some sweats so my mother wouldn’t have to see me like that, but I took only a glass of water and asked to be taken home.
Simet said later he thought I was crazier than an outhouse rat, and he rendered a credible imitation of my ranting and raving the rest of the way to my house. “Rich Marshall had no right to kill either of those animals. That spoiled rich asshole isn’t starving; he wasn’t hunting food. His family owns an entire logging company, for Christ’s sake. Rich Marshall hunts because he likes to hurt things. An entire football field isn’t big enough to hold how big a shithead Rich Marshall is. I’m by God tired of living in a part of the country where you become a man by mounting some helpless animal’s horns on the hood of the pickup your old man should have made you earn instead of dropping it on you like some Charlton Goddamn Heston rite-of-passage gift on your sixteenth birthday.” Simet still re-creates that speech any time he catches me cranking up.
Other than telling me they were antlers, not horns, he let me purge, and when he dropped me off at my house, said I should probably call the cops; that if my story were even close to true, Rich Marshall should be prosecuted for assault.
No chance I was calling the cops, but the following Monday morning I pulled on my bloody T-shirt and jeans and, for the next five days, wore them to school like a soldier draped in his war-torn flag, telling everyone who asked and most who didn’t where the blood came from and which unconscious ass wipe put it there-all in the face of significant opposition from the front office. In my imagination people would hear my story and demand that Rich Marshall have nothing further to do with Cutter High School; that even Wolverines Too would drop him like a smoking turd. Mr. Morgan requested that Mom and Dad intervene, citing a school rule prohibiting “disruptive attire”-a rule they used on me once when I wore a T-shirt with a cartoon depicting a proctologist standing over his patient, his dutiful nurse beside him, extending a can of beer. The caption read, “I said a butt light, not a Bud Lite.” Actually, Mom and Dad sided with the school on that one.
But not this time. Morgan was, at the age of thirty-six, the youngest principal in school district history and lacked full appreciation of my parents’ history growing up in the age of civil disobedience.
“Our son is disrupting his classes?” Dad asked as the three of us sat in Morgan’s small inner office. I said before, Dad is a motorcycle guy, and he looks like a motorcycle guy: brown hair to his shoulders, an earring, tattoos gracing his massive forearms. He’s real decent and articulate, but he looks like he eats children.
Morgan said, “In the sense that the bloody shirt attracts so much attention, yes.”
“So the other students are refusing to work in order to stare at T. J.’s shirt? And the teachers are paralyzed from their duties because they can’t take their eyes off him? Does that remain constant throughout the entire class period, or does it seem to dissipate when everyone gets bored with it?” Dad was never a fan of the controlling aspects of the educational system.
I think Morgan was beginning to sense that dealing with my parents might be more difficult than dealing with me. “Don’t be absurd. That kind of behavior undermines the authority of the school in the students’ eyes. Certainly as a parent you can understand that.”
Dad said, “Don’t take it on.”
“Meaning?”
“Leave it alone. If you don’t exercise authority over it, your authority won’t be undermined.” Then Dad asked if Morgan knew how my clothes got that way, and Morgan said there wasn’t a hearing citizen in the county who didn’t.
“And what are you doing about it?”
Morgan said it was outside school jurisdiction, a matter Dad and Mom could take up with the legal system if they so desired.
“Tell you what,” Dad said, “we’ll let it ride. And that should be a relief to you, because you’ve got this maniac running loose in your school and he’s not even a student. T. J. knew what he was getting into when he went to the clearing; it’s not as if Rich Marshall’s reputation is a secret.” Then he said, “Let me give you a piece of advice that could make your life easier. The last time I tried to power struggle this kid, he was five years old, and I was at least three years too late. I doubt you’ll have any better luck than I did. If you suspend him, we’ll support him however we have to. Truth is, I think this is a free-speech issue.”