How To Shoot Deer With Your Panties Up Your Butthole

                                                            

                                                        NOTE: Names have been changed.

     The last time I saw Eva was back in March down in the Yankee-infested Low Country marshes of Charleston, South Carolina.  She greeted me facetiously with “so how’s the sexual harassment suit going?”  In February I had nipped my misanthropic loner tendencies in the bud and did something I knew I shouldn’t have done: I went out with my employees for my assistant’s 35th birthday.  I had grown close to my assistant and a 20 year old girl who worked for me as a seafood clerk.  The professional line blurred and I thought of them as friends.  This was not in my character.  Prior I had always kept my employees at a distance.  But they kept on pushing until I relented and went out for drinks.  The twenty year old drunkenly texted me a few weeks later at midnight: “I love you, Josh.”  

    “Twenty year olds are dangerous.” Eva warned me.  “You’re going to get yourself in trouble.”

    “I’m sure she didn’t mean it that way.” I replied.  “We’ve just known each other for a long time and are really close friends.  She’s my sole confidant.”

      Well…Eva has a tendency to always be right while I am inclined to be an idiot.  Oh my Jesus, God, how things spiraled after that lecture.  Eva was about to embark on a three-month roller coaster ride via texts and calls and Facebook messages.  About a week later I texted her:

    “So you’re going to be really mad but…I went on a date.”

    She replied with a photo of a disgruntled facial expression.

    “With who?”

    “The twenty year old.”

    I received another photo with the expression clearly screaming “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING!?”

    That was the beginning of my mid-life crisis at the ripe old age of 35.

    What started out as a drunken night on an air-mattress progressed into a beach trip, then officially dating and meeting each other’s parents, all the while hiding it from everyone at work.  That didn’t go so well.  People started catching on and “dating within the chain of command” was a big “no-no”…especially for a manager.  Someone reported us to my bosses.  I hated my job anyhow so I left as quickly as possible for a new gig with the prospects of being open and free in my relationship.  I was tired of the drama, plus I was really happy with her.  The happiest I had been in almost a decade.  I was all-in.  New job, new life, new love.  That didn’t last long.

    She broke up with me two weeks after I quit my job—via a lengthy text message at 2:00AM.  Then she just ghosted me with the line “Josh, I can’t pick up the phone.  I can’t hear your voice.  I know I make you happy, but one day I will say or do something to hurt you.  And I can’t hurt you.”  She said, as she hurt me by completely cutting me out of her life with a measly goddamn text message.  In two texts I lost not only my girlfriend but my closest friend.

    “Twenty year olds are dangerous.” Eva had warned me.

    I handled it like a steer takes a cattle brand—just diving off the deep end and losing my shit.  I had jeopardized my career and quit my job for a girl 15 years younger than me.  What the fuck was I thinking?  I was devastated and humiliated.  At 7:00PM on the last day of the four-day bender that officially ended my mid-life crisis, I counted 17 shots of tequila and 40 cigarettes I had consumed since 11:00 that morning.  I talked to Eva every day during my bender.  We called, texted, messaged on Facebook.

    “Josh, I’m giving you two weeks to get over this.” Eva affirmed.

    Four months had passed, almost to the day.  Now Eva was coming to town for our yearly hunting weekend with our mutual friend Dawson.  She was coming up a day early to go deer hunting before sunrise the following morning.  She put up with a lot dealing with me over the last few months, never knowing which way my mood would swing on any given day.  I went through phases of grief for both my job and my girlfriend and various stages of depression.  

    First I went on a health kick and lost twenty pounds running every day and going to the gym, eating healthy.  I quit smoking and curbed my alcohol intake.  Then I went through a workaholism stage where I got a second job I didn’t need and worked from 6AM-10PM because I wasn’t used to having two days off a week and so much free time.  I didn’t know what to do with myself—so much so I experienced existential boredom: just being entirely uninterested in life.  Then there came the drunken poetry phase.  I wrote dozens of melancholic poems with less-than-subtle sparks of misanthropy while halfway deep in a bottle.  Blame it on my ADD, baby.  Now things were evening out and I had entered into a more normal phase: the annual hunting obsession that begins every September.  

    I had long been over my relationship, but I still wasn’t feeling right.  My former job was all-consuming.  I worked seven days a week for weeks or months on end, dealt with a constant influx of phone calls after work every night, text messages, and just this perpetual feeling of always being on the clock.  It was unhealthy and toxic.  But I had Stockholm Syndrome.  Now I just had all this silence and while I should have been happy, I was drowning in existential boredom from that newfound peace and solace.  I missed the challenge, the excitement of literally putting duct tape over a catastrophe every second of each day.  The calls I once hated would have been welcomed.  I loved my new job, but I was just all alone.  

    Once I welcomed my solitude and embraced it.  But after six months of having a social life and hanging out with people, having a girlfriend, and going out and doing things all the time, I had lost the contentment I felt being by myself.  I was slowly working to get that back.  I never wanted to go out in the first place, I reminded myself.  I was fine being alone.  Now that half-year had me all mixed up.  I craved social interaction where I never had before.  I had to get back to how I was: an antisocial loner.  I didn’t want new friends, I didn’t want another girlfriend.  I just wanted to be alone.  No one can disappoint you or let you down or fuck you over if you have no one in your life you let get that close.  If you haven’t passed the 10 year marker of dealing with me, you haven’t even met me yet.

    Eva was more than an acquaintance.  We had 15 years rolled up in our friendship.  I ruined her couch after a fight in college with all the blood loss that she had to throw the couch out.  I wanted to show her a good time.  We’ve always had people on either end of our spectrums wondering why we don’t date.  We’re equally as fucked up, but we think of the other like brother and sister.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.  It’s good to have people that close, that you trust, that will tell you when you’ve fucked up and still be there for you.  It’s an unconditional love that I learned after flooding her house after a hefty shit and buying that Jewish girl a sausage biscuit to make up for it on a “High Holiday.”  She literally had to call me and tell me “you know we’re still friends, right?  I love you, Bubba!”

    I got off work early that Thursday.  Deer lasagna I promised Eva out of her list of choices.  I had no idea how to make lasagna.  Italian food has never been my thing.  I cook Southern, country, Mexican, or Asian food, but never anything with noodles that aren’t made of rice.  I used my mother’s recipe, put everything together and started in on the case of Coors Banquet in the fridge.  I was excited.  Eva was so used to me acting all sorts of ways that about a month prior she told me “Josh, I need you to act fucking normal for one fucking day!”  That day had finally come.  But…then she called me.

    “I’m still in Charleston.  I’m stuck in traffic.  I won’t get there until almost eight o'clock.  We don’t have to do the lasagna.”

    “No, we’re having lasagna!  It’s already put together and ready for the oven.”

    I was anxious and bored.  I pulled out the tequila and started taking shots with Perrier and lime chasers.  I sat on the couch and dipped Swedish snus.  After about six shots and a few beers I fell asleep with a dip in my mouth and an unopened Coors on the cupholder beside me.  I woke up a few hours later dazed, confused, and disoriented to a text on my Apple watch reading “I’m here.”  I groggily stood up and made my way to the door.  There she was, my long lost friend who had just spent three hours on the road after a full day at work to come hunt with me.  

    We hugged.

    “You look high,” she said.

    “Eight o’clock is my bedtime.” I replied.

    “Oh my Jesus, Josh!” Eva exclaimed as I turned to walk back inside.  “You have no ass!  You’re tiny!”

    “I’ve lost 44 pounds since I saw you last.  I only eat one meal a day.”

    We went inside and I grabbed beers and put the lasagna in the oven.  We sat at the dining room table and talked.  She made shirts for the annual hunting trip for the three of us, with designs ranging from ducks to deer to guys with mullets advertising “I’m here for deer and beer!”  We were excited about the next morning.  I laid my 30-06 and the .243 she would use on the dining room table.  The timer for the oven beeped and the lasagna was done.

    “How is it?” I asked as we tore into our plates half-starved.

    “It’s GOOD!”

    I was surprised.

    We drank more and talked more.  She brought hair products for my curls.  I had let my hair grow long and it poofed into this curly fro that I tucked beneath my hat.  There were conditioners and gels and all this stuff I promised I would use but probably wouldn’t.  Like most women, she was really invested in those curls out of jealousy.  And equally upset that all I did was hide them under a camouflage hat and tuck them behind my ears.

    I grew even more tired and zoned in and out of consciousness with the passing beers.  The rest of the night is a blur.  We talked about my writing and how I should self-publish.  She lectured me on my enduring melancholy.  “But I’m funny with my sadness!” I deflected.  I was trying to “act normal for once” but I was drunk and ready for bed.  4:30AM wasn’t too far off.  I wanted to get to the stand early, before any of the other 39 members of the hunting preserve even thought about hitting the woods.  The last two days I was off work, there was someone in that stand by the time I arrived.  I wanted to get there a full two hours before daylight.  So we said “goodnight” and went to bed.

    My alarm echoed through the blackness of the bedroom the next morning.  I got up with a slight hangover and changed into my hunting clothes without a shower, shave, or brushing my teeth.  I immediately put a pouch of snus in my upper lip and loaded the rifles and ammunition into the backseat of my Nissan Frontier.  When I went to knock on the door to the guest room I noticed the light was already on.  I knocked and instantly Eva appeared in the doorway.  She was good to go.  Showered and decked in full camo, she had long been ready for the morning, while I had snoozed through two alarms.  We piled into my truck and stopped by the gas station for energy drinks and water then pointed the truck to the South Carolina border and the 35 minute drive to the stand.

    You can always tell when you cross into South Carolina.  Sure, there’s big reflective signs that shine in the headlights, but you don’t need those.  Just feel the bumps in the road, the violent vibrations of the potholes that give you the sensation of being one of those Union soldiers charging headlong, bayonets gleaming in the twilight, into the caldera-like crevasse at the Battle of the Crater.  That first bump and jump signals you to place the .45 in the center console.  For us Yankees up in NORTH Carolina, we must open-carry our pistols in a vehicle without a concealed weapons permit.  South of the border, the firearm can be concealed in a closed glovebox or console.  

    I vaped some fruity-flavor from a disposable, filling the car in nicotine mist.

    “That smells so good.” Eva said.  “I fucking hate you.”

    I blew the vapor in her face.

    Eva quit smoking years ago, then quit vaping.  She barely drank.  The Hank Jr. song All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down rolled through my mind.  I was the last one standing.  The last one to purge myself of vices, even during the years I ran a multi-million dollar market.  My buddy at my new job introduced me to people as a “high-functioning alcoholic.”  I took no offense.  I could drink like a twenty year old and still wake up at 4:30AM for work.  Snoozing through a few alarms, sure.  But I was usually up and ready without any negative effects from the booze.  And when I did overindulge, the consequences were minor—a slight headache.  I had more of a withdrawal from the Beta-Blockers regulating my heart-rate.  I needed to take them first thing every morning or my heart played an old-school Bad Religion beat in my chest.  “We’re only gonna die!”  NO!  Not today, Satan!  You will have my soul one day, but today I have my meds!

    We drove through the poverty-belt of South Carolina, the small towns that once boomed from the textile mills processing the miles of cotton into fabric.  I recalled Lil’ Wayne’s song Me and My Drank as he sung the lyrics “rolling a foreign car through the streets of the third world.”  My foreign truck soldiered the potholes past forgotten Main Streets with dilapidated buildings and empty shopfronts at every stoplight.  Fast-food restaurants sprouted from the cracked sidewalks like weeds, fattening up the populace with instant gratification on a one dollar menu to make them forget about the good ol’ days when their parents and grandparents earned enough money from the mill to buy a house and raise a family.  They lost a part of themselves and their family legacy with every bite of that greasy cheeseburger.  By God, we still have cotton!  But the jobs are gone, a relished memory, like the taste of grandma’s fried chicken.  She has gone and passed.  KFC has 11 ingredients but they don’t measure up.  That’s all we got now…eleven ingredients to take the place of 200 years of tradition.  You still long for the days gone by and the spread of a supper table after church with family and friends.  But they have gone, like the summer, like the sunrise, like a high tide rolling back; everything is clouded in shadows of the past.

    My hunt was clouded in shadows of the past.  Fifteen years I had known Eva.  My closest friend until this last year when I replaced her with contenders.  But here she was in the flesh.  The rest were gone.  Faded into the night like a bad dream, like the morning after a hangover, painful memories that haunted me when I woke up in the early morning to take a piss.  I still missed her.  Not the relationship.  I missed her being in my life like she had for four years.  Our banter, my sarcasm, her witty reply.  I missed my friend.  She had always been in my life in one shape or form.  I had to push all that from my mind.  I talked to Eva.

    “I lost a part of me when I quit my job.  My job was my identity.  I made good money, I was a market manager.  Now I sold my kayak and two guns to afford the weekend.  I don’t know if I can afford the $3,500 for the membership next year.”

    “We don’t have to do this.  We can still have our yearly hunting trip and just find a different place.”

    “But I like the preserve.”

    “We’re poor now, Josh.  We can do something different.  This doesn’t have to end.  We’ll just find someplace else and meet up every year.”

    “I guess.”

    After the poverty belt, the cotton fields bloomed along with dead soybean crops and corn and vast fields that had been destroyed of their deer hunting opportunities for the all-mighty dollar.  We drove passed them until we came to the Pee-Dee River and hung a right.  A large lodge on the edge of the river greeted us.  We climbed out of the truck and walked onto the deck to find the binder containing the hunting stand sign-in sheets.  No one was at our stand.  It was a two-seater tripod stand where I had taken three deer over the last two years.  We jumped back in the truck and drove to the two old silos next to the stand.  

    We sat in the truck and talked for an hour.  It was 5:30AM.  We talked about our families and life and everything that had brought us to this moment of relief and freedom as the tree frogs croaked and the crickets sang in the meadow.  The peace of nature overwhelmed us—the blackness and stillness of the morning, the sun still too shy to shine over the tree line.  At 6:30AM I turned on my headlamp and we gathered our rifles and ammo, our bags, and headed to the stand.  

    Eva climbed up first as I held her rifle.  

    “Did you fucking see that bird attack me!” she screamed as a sparrow flew out of the flaps entering the blind.  That bird had greeted me every morning I sat in that stand so I wasn’t surprised.  I handed her up the rifle and climbed in.  She sat to my right and I was on the left.  We opened both blind windows in the front and loaded our guns.  I hoped this wasn’t going to be a repeat of our last hunt where she took Adderall and talked the whole time.  

    “I didn’t take any Adderall” she said.  So I was feeling hopeful.

    About thirty minutes in she taps me and turns.

    “I think I have to take a shit.”

    “I only have enough toilet paper for one shit.” I told her.

    The sun blushed across the top of the trees and cast dim rays onto the field in front of us.  Birds began to sing their songs of getting laid and procreating and the frogs and crickets silenced.  Eva farted.

    “I just farted and now my panties are all twisted up my asshole!” Eva whispered.

    I ignored her and kept my watch on the clear-cut in front of us.

    About 30 minutes after sunrise I saw a deer’s head poke out from the brush.  I tapped Eva’s leg and she shot me this dirty look until she saw what I was seeing.  The doe walked out and I wasn’t sure if she was a shooter.  It’s hard to estimate the size of a doe at a distance.  I had shot one that was too small and felt insecure about shooting does ever since.  Then four more deer came out of the brush and into the clearing, walking slow and taking their time.  A big doe walked to the front.  Eva gave me this look like “can I take a shot?”

    “Take the first one,” I whispered.

    Five sets of eyes were on us and I was sure we would be made.  They were only twenty yards off.

    “Make sure you’re shot is clear and there’s not a deer in behind her.” I told Eva.

    She raised her rifle slowly, flipped off the safety.  The deer looked at the stand.  Eva paused.  I was shaking.  I could only imagine how she felt.

    I had given Eva a lecture prior to the stand.  “Raise your rifle when they’re looking away.”  She did just that.  Every time the deer looked away she raised her rifle more and more then paused.  It felt like a millennia of the earth.  I could feel the world rotating on it’s axis and watched the hand of time tick on the clock, each second like a century and each breath like a full life lived into old age.  Suddenly my right ear erupted with an explosion and I could hear the ring of a gunshot.  I wasn’t expecting it.  The whole moment took me by surprise.

    “Fuck!” Eva whispered.  “I think I missed it.”

    I didn’t think so.  I had watched the deer and was pretty sure I saw the hide shudder from impact.  I unloaded my rifle and told her to keep the spent round in hers until we climbed down from the stand.  We were both excited but unsure.  At the bottom of the stand we reloaded our weapons and searched for blood.  

    “We don’t have to whisper anymore.” I told Eva.

    I walked the tree line.

    “I don’t think she was up that far.” Eva yelled.

    I didn’t listen.  I walked into the woods and looked for blood.  After about 10 minutes I whispered a prayer to a God I didn’t believe in: “please let me find blood.”

    Just then a yell.

    “Josh!  Come here!”

    “Did you find blood?”

    “NO!  I FOUND THE WHOLE FUCKING DEER!”

    I walked over to her and saw the doe on the ground just five yards from where she stood, a bloody bullet wound just behind the shoulder.  A lung shot.  Perfect.

    I used the muzzle of my rifle to tap her eye like I saw in hunting videos when I was a kid of people shooting cape buffalo.  No blink or wince, she was dead.  I dragged her out of the woods and onto the clearing.  

    “So I did good?” Eva asked.

    “Perfect lung shot.  You did great!  Hold her head up and I’ll take a picture.”

    She grabbed her head, blood dripped from her mouth.  I snapped a picture.

    “Goddamnit, Josh!  Squat down to take a picture so I don’t look fat!”

    I did as instructed then showed it to her.

    “That looks good.”

    I was about to walk back to my truck to grab the knives and saw when Eva stopped me.

    She grabbed onto the Star of David chain around her neck and said a prayer of thanks to the deer and God and a thanks to her grandfather who was an avid hunter in life.

    Now the work began.  I snatched my knife and saw and went to doing what I do.

    “Awww…” Eva said.  “This is the first time in 15 years you’ve ever treated me like a girl.  You’re going to gut it for me?”

    “Yes.”

    I was still shaking from excitement and hangover.  I took the knife up the belly and the saw through the sternum and jerked the windpipe from the neck and pulled out the entrails.  I was covered in blood and hair.  I had no gloves.  It was a big doe for a Carolina deer and we each took a leg and dragged it through the mud to my truck.  We had to stop along the way for a breather.  I dropped the tailgate to the truck and we loaded it in.  It was only 8:00AM.  The only thing left to do was drive it to the processor.  I always liked butchering deer myself, but the rules are the rules.  I couldn’t bring a deer across the border intact per the regulations to prevent the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease.  Boneless meat or without the vertebrae only.  And I wasn’t allowed to butcher it at the site of the kill.  So I had to take it to a processor.

    Along the way we recounted the morning.

    “Make sure you fart and get your panties up your butt crack next time I go hunting.” I told her.  “That’s the good luck charm.”

    We laughed and I felt happy.  I was probably more excited than she was.  I had killed nice deer but I hadn’t been this excited about a deer since I was eleven.  All my melancholy was gone.  I was living life again.  Life feels better when enjoyed with friends.  Seven months in between seeing each other, and I had made the lull well worth her wait.  She was officially a deer hunter.  I couldn’t have been more proud.