Peter Orner
Three Stories
The Deer
When she was a kid, she watched a mountain lion chase a deer into the lagoon at low tide. The deer ran out so far the mountain lion turned back to the shore. An hour later, the deer was still stuck in the mud. The tide began to roll back in through the channel that connected the lagoon to open water. She was only a kid but as she watched the deer out there alone, she already understood that this was something she’d carry the rest of her life. Later, she heard that someone had called the fire department—you can see the lagoon from Highway 1—and begged them to do something. The assistant chief said, “What do you want me to do about it? Go out there with a boat and get kicked in the head? Call the DNR.” The lagoon, the motionless deer. It made no sound, or at least none that she could hear from where she was sitting, as it waited, or seemed to wait, as the water rose, first covering it’s legs before rising higher. She’d been riding her bike on the path along the edge of Murch’s farm when she heard the crashing of the deer. Then, out of the trees, it emerged, leaping, followed closely, silently, by the mountain lion. She’d sat on a wet log and watched, the damp seeping through her pants. The wind began to blow in from the ocean. No, it wasn’t really happening. Even then it was more like an image, fixed, not a breathing deer out there in the water. So much of what she remembers became lodged in this way. Something occurs, in the motion of the present, but it’s already over. Because even then, even out there, she was already moving away from it, already thinking how years from now she might tell someone about this. Someone who’s never even seen this lagoon. The northwest wind began to blow harder. The sun had long since dropped below the treeline. When she couldn’t watch anymore, when she picked her bike off the ground and rode away, the water had reached above the deer’s chest, and still it had not moved.
Stinson Beach, 2013
He goes with his ex-wife and kids to the beach and there’s calmness, an easy silence between the few words they say to each other. The kids dig ruts by the edge of the water. Sammy’s on her back watching those weird little bugs that bounce backward. He rubs her back with sunscreen. She didn’t ask but didn’t recoil, either. He hasn’t touched her back in three years, maybe four, since that last one they hardly looked at each other. His hands linger longer that need to make the creamy whiteness disappear and still she doesn’t say anything and he thinks maybe she’s not watching the bugs anymore and has fallen asleep. Skin he knows and doesn’t know, a kind of alien familiarity he couldn’t explain with words. Why? What’s more simple than remembering—not remembering, seeing, rubbing—a mole on a left clavicle you forgot all about? And he remembers something else, his hands still rubbing her skin, something she once said, not at the end, earlier, years earlier than the end, before it went wherever it went. What if we’re ordinary? And his response was to laugh. Us? And now, the years having piled up, and even the kids, too afraid that this rare moment will vanish into blue air, hardly even argue. Quiet, digging in the sand, though the oldest, at 9, believes he’s too old to be digging in the sand and would have said so had this been a normal day. And the younger girl isn’t hungry and doesn’t need to go to the bathroom. None of that. It’s as if they are both holding their breath at the edge of the water. Sammy murmurs something.
“What?”
“Gmnec?”
“What?”
“Get my neck?”
Not a question, an order, but shaped to sound like a question, which was Sammy all the way except now he was happy to oblige, and he wonders, as he slicks both his palms down the contours of her throat if love sometimes comes down to this, orders poised as questions and how we react. She’s re-married to the very decent Doug. She found him on-line. He knows how to change the oil himself and is very kind to the kids. He comes to the door and Doug shouts, “Rugrats, you Dad’s here!”
Her shoulder blades are shaped like the prows of rowboats.
The Case Against Bobbie
Was embezzlement of her demented mother’s bank account. There wasn’t any question of fact. She’d drained it. Someone from the nursing home must have tipped off the police. The day after the story appeared in the The Light she walked to town in the morning like she always did because the old Mercedes that had belonged to her father no longer ran. It sat in her driveway, sometimes you’d see her in there sleeping, with the front seat reclined. Every morning she sat in the park and waited for Smiley’s to open. This was when the bar still opened at 9:00. I’d already be there, sitting on a bench with a cup of coffee reading the paper, but willing to listen in case she was in the mood to talk. If Bobbie was in a good mood she’d interrupt me and tell me another story about her father who’d been once been a well-known film director and her mother who’d been a concert pianist. The House on Alder was long bought and paid for, though god knows, she’d say, they’ll pry it away from me eventually. The day after the story broke she didn’t want to talk. Who would? I went back to reading. After a few minutes though she told me that the night before she’d had a talk with her father’s ghost. You know, like in Hamlet, she said. Her father asked her—no demanded—that she go and kidnap the child, or the grandchild, a grandchild might do the trick even better, of one of the studio execs who’d fleeced him back in the sixties. “Kidnap a kid,” Bobbie said, “like Lindberg’s baby. Lindbergh was an ass but he didn’t deserve that, or at least that little boy didn’t. You ever see his picture? The little blonde boy with the fat face? So I said, ‘Papa, I love you, but I’m not a kidnapper, I don’t even have a ladder.’” Bobbie looked across the street at the bar, which was still closed. There were some mornings, for Bobbie, getting from 8:45 to 9:00 took an hour.
Eventually they dropped the charges. Her mother, the concert pianist, had left her estate to Bobbie so while it was still technically theft because the mother was absolutely still alive, the DA in San Rafael probably decided the a jury might not convict given that the money would be Bobbie’s soon enough. It wasn’t good precedent, but you had to pick your battles. And as far as the town felt, most people thought why shouldn’t Bobbie have the money and not the bigger thief in this case, the nursing home? Bobbie didn’t gloat. She’d sit in the park in the morning like she always did and try not to look at Smiley’s. She started reading the paper again. She never bought her own. She’d ask to look at mine because the last thing Bobbie would do would be to walk into John’s and buy her own paper. Another morning, a couple of months after her mother died—so we all knew that she was either flush with cash, or at least would be soon—Bobbie told me, without preface, “She always thought her hands were ugly, that they were too plump. That’s why my mother played Bach so fast, not that anybody could see them that far away in the dark.”
Peter Orner is the author of five books, most recently, Am I Alone Here?, a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Dartmouth.