“Down in the Valley”

By Paul Luikart

Down in the Valley

Adam leaned on the porch rail, out back of the little cabin that overlooked the valley with the stooped mountains beyond and he wondered again about the point of the divorce. The land sloped sharply away beneath him. The owners of the place said that sometimes there were black bears down there, and there were always squirrels and woodpeckers, and given the right spring evening, the porch would glow with luna moths. “Take your time,” they’d said, “We won’t need it again until tourist season in the fall.” He’d been there, so far, a couple of days and it was already hard to be still.

‘Maybe there’s a difference between lonesome and lonely,’ he thought, ‘And I guess I’ll find out.’ He lit a cigarette and puffed and paced the porch and thought that ‘alone’ was different. A person could be alone and happy but never lonesome—nor lonely—and happy. Lonesome and lonely were the same thing anyway. There really is no difference. It was stupid to think about. It was stupid to think about her, now at least, and about why, about what she might be doing at this very moment, and with whom.

            When the cigarette was gone, he stepped off the flat boards of the porch onto the steep slope that slanted all the way to the valley floor. Budded hickories and white pines grew straight up, even where the slope of the land was greatest. How could anything grow so tall and straight and heavy on the side of a mountain? As he descended, his boots scraped away layers of leaves and he covered the last half of the slope like a skier, pivoting his hips and making little jumps.

There was a creek that traced the meandering valley through the mountains until, someplace far off, it collided with the Tennessee River. He stood huffing, watching the creek slide over water-smoothed stones and when his breath was back to normal, he took the cigarettes from his shirt pocket and smoked another.

He stooped and put his hands in the water. For a handful of long seconds, every untethered thought about her or their life together or their end, disappeared and the clear, cold bite of the creek was all there was. When he finally stood, he clapped the water off his hands and ran them down the front of his jeans.

He walked along creekside in time with the slosh and whisper of the water. A frog plopped into the creek ahead of him, and the jewelweed and a plant he’d always called, ‘stickum,’ with fuzzed and ropey stems, clung to his jeans at the ankles. He stumbled more than once over hidden, half-rotted logs. The smell of the creek crept down the back of his throat—the slicked little banks and empty crayfish shells, the macerated and browned-over leaves. A flat, rank bitterness.    

The valley was filled with crow calls and he turned in place, staring at the sky, up through the branches that crossed his line of vision like black bolts of lightning that couldn’t disappear. When he got dizzy, he sat on a flat slice of shale and hugged his knees and sneered, “Well, come on, motherfucker. Get that peace of mind already.”

Twenty minutes later, he stood. He sighed and began to work his way further along the creek. The foliage became thicker, grasses up to his waist in some spots. He could feel his boots sinking in the mud. Then, ahead, he saw something. A spot where the grasses had been tamped down. In the middle, an elongated lump the color of sawdust. He stopped. When it didn’t move, he crept close and, closer, he could see it was a deer. A buck. An antler was missing. The jaw hung open and he could see the slanted rows of teeth. Just below the jawbone, the hair was matted with blood, smeared black in places and, closer to the gash in the animal’s neck, a reddish orange stained its hide. The gash was deep and long and irregular, and, in places, the white of the animal’s vertebrae poked through the purple muscle.

“Oh God,” Adam said, “Oh God,” and toed it with his boot.

He stooped and grabbed the remaining antler. It was cream-colored and smooth, and dark brown grooves in the keratin brought to mind the highway, endless roads to run on, a never-ending horizon. He squeezed the antler tighter and wrenched it to the side trying to snap it off, but it wouldn’t break from the skull and the slice in the deer’s neck opened wider and squeezed out blood.

But the animal wasn’t dead. In the time it takes a fly to vanish on the wind, the deer leapt. A sucker punch to Adam’s guts, a jolt of white pain. All the air went out from his lungs. The hooves scrabbled for purchase on the wet stones and water and mud flew in all directions. Adam splashed down in the middle of the creek, where it was deeper. The cold shocked him back to his feet and creek water filled his boots.

The deer bounded upstream and came to an off-balance halt as quickly as it had charged away. The forelegs buckled and, for a second, the top half of the animal was pushed along by the water and the creek flashed into the animal’s body by the rip in its neck and the rear half stayed planted by the hind legs in the mud. But then, the hind legs crumpled and the animal fell and the water replaced the blood and the animal died.

Adam stood staring. The crow calls smashed his senses first. Next, the ache in his feet from the frigid water. Then, a blunt pain spreading out from the middle of his belly. He scanned the blue for the black nicks of crows and pressed his hand to the soreness without looking down. His fingertips found the underside of the antler’s pedicle, rough and hard and still warm. He looked down then. The brow tine pinned the fabric of his jacket to his body and puckered it, but the stem of the antler was buried deep in his gut. He flicked at the burr, then pinched it between thumb and forefinger, and felt the antler move inside him. He felt, too, a slippery heat and glanced at his hand and saw it was slimed with red.

Adam staggered to the bank of the creek. All the light in his field of vision washed over its boundaries, as in a storm surge, a flood. Hot light overwhelmed everything in shadow, everything dark—mud, tree bark, every shaded thing among and through the trees. He felt weightless then. Not like floating, but a sudden loss of gravity all around. He perceived an enormous burning cloud before him, and a wind pushed him toward it. There was no sound. Nobody knew where he was. He couldn’t scream and there was nothing more to feel.

Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, forthcoming in 2021) and The Museum of Heartache (Pski’s Porch Publishing, forthcoming in 2021.) He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. He and his family live in Chattanooga, Tennessee.