Walker

A Deer novel experiment.

I’ve been trying to think about how I could abstract the Deer novel more, think about how I could take it away from something that is so closely my lived experience. Ultimately, I like the direction I’ve been heading with the novel, but every once in a while, I run through experiments to play with story abstraction, and what you will read below is one of those abstractions. And who knows, maybe I’ll even figure out a way to crowbar it into the novel as it stands—I can see a way.

There are a million of these mediocre cobblestone street photos on the internet. I forgot who I stole it from. Sorry.

Walker took a bite out of an apple, then sharply sailed it into the face of the guy with the .32 coming at him. The apple, when it slammed into the face of the guy with the .32, took him off his feet and sent his head straight back to meet the wet cobblestone below him. Walker walked right up to him, stepped on the guy’s wrist, pulled the .32 from his hand, and stuck it up against the guy’s apple-smeared jaw, asking, “I thought we were done with all this, Ricky?”

“I guess—errrr—OUCH!—can ya’ step off the wrist a little, Walker, geez?” Ricky, the guy who no longer had the .32, asked Walker this, then sat up from the cobblestone as Walker let Ricky’s .32-less hand slide out from his boot. The rain was coming down hard now, but when wasn’t the rain coming down hard, in Seahaven, Walker thought, as he watched Ricky massaging his wrist, still splayed out on the cobblestone below him. Ricky, the guy without the .32, still had apple smeared on his face when he looked up to Walker and said, “I guess, we both know that’s up to the Deer, not us.”

Walker stared at Ricky, the guy without the .32, looked at him real good, and thought he looked like a dog that had just been whooped in a dog fight, then said: “Go on, get back to yer’ master boy, I ain’t got time for this!” Then Walker kicked Ricky, the guy without the .32, straight in the teeth, picked up what was left of his apple, and started walking down the street looking for the nearest bar.

Seashaven wasn’t much of a town. It still mostly operated as a logging and fishing village, much as it did a hundred years ago. Walker liked it, though. He liked the low pressure of being at sea level. He liked the people who mostly kept to themselves. And he sure as hell liked the long, wet winters that meant the town, and most of the people in it, didn’t mind a drinker. In fact, they almost encouraged it. Everybody understands a drunk in that kind of wet.

Punching through the doors of a bar called The Lighthouse, Walker saddled up to a barstool that looked out at the water, set the apple down next to him, and ordered himself a beer he knew he shouldn’t have. The light was just now cutting below the water line, and turning the sky a real bloody red. It was a sky Walker usually liked, that soothed him, but he couldn’t help feeling it held some kind of foreboding, or violence now. Walker tried to keep his wits about him—keep his head mostly screwed on straight, not let himself get all messed up thinking about things in the abstract. He knew he needed to focus on things that were real, now, and he knew he couldn’t get too drunk now that the Deer was back on his heels. A red sky was just a red sky, nothing more or less. It’s sinking bloody red had nothing to do with that damn Deer, he thought, he lost back in Middle America. But there he was now, whether the sky was violent or not, lurking somewhere off in the distance, plotting and scheming to kill Walker. Burn everything he’d built up out here, since he got away from him two years ago.

The bartender of The Lighthouse, this guy who looked like he had his nose punched in one too many times, and wore a magician’s top hat, brought over the beer Walker ordered, popped the top, and asked him with a wink, “Ya need a magic trick to go with that?”

Walker slammed a five-dollar bill down on the counter and said, “Keep tha’ change!” Then, he waved away the flat-faced magician bartender, trying to get him into more trouble than he was already in. Magic sounded great, but God knows it would only mess up things more. Walker knew the deer loved the kind of magic the bartender-magician was offering him, and he didn’t want it stinking up his bones, giving the Deer and his goons something tangible to sniff out. So, Walker slammed the beer, grabbed his apple, punched himself back through The Lighthouse doors, and walked out into the wet to go find the Deer before he found him.