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Table Seven (or... The Deer Lady)

My name is Chris and I am a thirty year old blackjack dealer from at the Thunder Mist Casino in Newcastle, Oklahoma. When I am not dealing cards I am usually absorbed with the furry fandom. Now, I am more absorbed than ever.

I used to think the fandom was all about a fun-loving group of sub-culture geeks. A group of folks with no place in the science fiction community that was also much too oversexed for the Mickey Mouse Fan Club. As I write this I now realize that all things furry and anthropomorphic are mirrored glimpses into a darker side of the real waking world. I have to get my story onto the page. For me, it is cathartic. Maybe once it is written I will burn it on the stove. Maybe I'll try and sell it so I can afford my psychiatric therapy sessions. I can't stop thinking about the twenty-sixth of October last year; but, I know for my own health I had better.

Anyway, my pit boss, Robert Stevenson and I had always gotten along. From the first day we had met, things just sort of clicked. At least, they clicked for me, as normally I am too shy to express myself around people I don't know really well. I just liked the man. Not only was the guy physically attractive - too bad he turned out to be straight - he also demanded respect. Very macho. But the good part was that he was also full of jokes. I'm not talking about the old, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" I mean he simply had a comical outlook on life. Whenever situations at work really got to me, he was able to make light of it and turned what seemed stressful into something silly. Also, he had the habit of calling me "dog". Or, 'dawg' as he said it. Which is pretty funny, because I have always considered myself a dog within the furry fandom.

This is also how I came to confide in Robert that I am a furry. A couple months ago I was dealing on table six and having a really bad time of it. I know that B.F.E. Oklahoma is nowhere close to Vegas (or even Tunica) but I'll tell you what! When a table full of rowdy people with lousy communication skills and a language barrier are playing with me for about a thousand a hand I get real nervous. I mean to say, I am not afraid of my players, I am just afraid of screwing up and accidentally paying a losing hand. Can you imagine? These are the types that if you paid a thousand-dollar loser they wouldn't give it back and I would have to pay it.

So here I am dealing on this table and I am so nervous I am shaking, literally. Let me paint the picture for you. The players sitting at my table are all of one particular ethnic breed and they are related. Deep sigh. I am by no means racist in any way but some days... I think I understand how wars get started. So, at least two of them are deliberately trying to blow smoke in my face every time the Pit Boss turns to look at another table. One of them keeps adding money by the hundreds right before I deal the first card. If I deal too quickly it is a mess because I have to stop and the Pit Boss has to remove the extra wagers that were capped at the last second. Another one is currently losing about seventeen-thousand-dollars and is, well, pissed. This is the worst animal at the table and apparently he is also the only one that can speak a little broken English. He likes to slam his chips down every time he bets. He is also very clever at giving me compliments like, "You suck! You are a mother FAH!" Really, he says, "FAH". I don't think he ever took the time to learn the real curse word. All the while this group is speaking very loudly and arguing with each other on how to play every hand as if they think they can count cards coming out of an automatic continuous shuffler. I am not a violent person but please pass the shotty because I am about ready to spray this table.

The ironic part is that the creature who keeps insulting me is also the smallest man I have probably ever seen before. He might weigh a buck ten, wet. His face is also tiny, refined, and a bit like a hatchet. In any other setting a person like me would just think, "Awwww... he is so cute! I want to hug him!" Yessiree, and I am absolutely terrified of him.

I was so scared of this guy and his family that I didn't even know Robert was trying to communicate with me until hatchet face said something that sounded like, "God Damn! Talk to boss man. He tell you, you suck! You go away now!" Now you see what I mean. I am ready to start causing wok related stress injuries to my players. I am thinking about that guy on TV who can toss card with so much force that it drives itself into wood planks. Can I do that too?

With a few simple words, Robert changed my entire outlook of the situation. "Hey dawg, you gonna let that cat keep scratchin' you?"

Now, this could have been just some old clichéd throwback statement from the seventies except for one critical thing, this jerkoff I was dealing to actually looked like a cat! I, in all my furriness, had never even noticed I had been dealing to a bitching, moaning, Siamese cat. No wonder I don't understand but one out of every three words, I am a dog.

Not really though, I understand that people are people. Or, so I thought. But I shouldn't get ahead of myself here.

I started to chuckle. The cat kept going, "meow, mroower, blahblah moew" and I kept giggling. I couldn't help myself. I think it was all the nerves suddenly released. They probably thought I just snapped. At least they stopped blowing smoke in my face and I was able to keep dealing, regaining some control over myself and my table.

There was a lesson to be learned from that experience. I never again had any problem dealing to these particular folks. I was ever after able to rationalize that they simply didn't, couldn't, understand me. I am a dog and they are cats. They were mean cats though, and remained true-to-form. Once they learned they could no longer get my goat, they never played with me much after that. It seems that they prey on the weaker dealers and are always up to no good no matter how the pie is sliced. Watching them reminds me of the Discovery channel, the part where the pride stalks and harries the weaker or sickly gazelle until they kill it. Lucky for us, our gazelles jump to the safety of a new table every twenty minutes to stay alive, as the case may be.

I gained a whole new level of respect for my boss. Robert made me stronger whether he knew it or not and he helped me overcome one of my biggest hurdles - dealing with insane gamblers throwing five-hundred-dollar chips around like they were burning discs.

Naturally, I began to feel very comfortable around Robert. He had, in fact, taken me under his wing. I pictured him as if he were an enormous griffon, so the wing thing kinda worked. Of course, eventually I told him about furry. I used the whole cat-man thing to break the ice, to test the waters. I think that given enough time, he might have decided that he was a furry too.

Robert started with mundane questions like, "So, you like Lion King a lot? Your friends dress up in mascot costumes at parties? Is this like that thing on C.S.I.?" Normally I would back off here but he kept asking me questions with what seemed to be genuine interest. So, I kept answering as best I could. Eventually, I even told him about the convention around here. I think he was even planning to attend. He had said so.

Robert wasn't shy about asking others if they had heard of furry. Nor was he shy about prying into the knowledge base from our Native American employees. The questions posed to me quickly progressed from, "So, you really, really like the Lion King?" to "Aren't creatures like werewolves and centaurs furry creatures too?" Much to my dismay, other employees inevitably heard about these questions as well.

Strictly speaking I am not shy, but I was taken aback when furry started becoming the break room discourse for the next couple of weeks. I can't even begin to describe the colorful questions about furry fandom and its many and varied sexual practices. "Check out FurNation" I would keep repeating time and again. "Check out FurNation but don't say I didn't warn you!" And the next day, "No, I don't write stuff for FurNation, no, I can't even draw... but you would get a kick out of the art currently hanging up in my house!"

Eventually, even the Native Americans got into the discussions - sort of. I was only mildly curious to hear them speak of furry in hushed tones but for Robert... it was like giving him the skeleton key to a secret society. Listening carefully, you could hear catch words and phrases being quietly and reverently being passed around by the Indians like: skin-walkers, therianthropy, Little People, the Deer Lady, yeenaaldlooshii and many more I could not hope to pronounce, let alone spell. It was essentially impossible to catch more than a few words because the Indians made a point not to discuss any of this with outsiders, period.

My only attempt to coax information ended in a failure I wish never to repeat. David is a Creek Indian and full blooded by birth. He is also an impressive man, the type that when he walks into a room, everyone takes note. He runs our shift with an iron fist and employees do his bidding or else there is trouble. That is just the way he is.

He is also gay, but he doesn't act stereotypically gay. I happened to see him once with his mate in one of the local nightclubs. Unfortunately, knowing a little bit outside of work hasn't made my job any easier. If anything, it seems like the guy is harder on me than most others, almost like it being the price of admission for having dared to see him in a more natural element.

Intrigued about the going conversations that the general topic of furry had spawned I tried to ask Dave about the 'Deer Lady'. "No" he would say, "I'm not going to speak about her."

I thought that maybe I had offended him by bringing up the subject and I recall that I tried to apologize for asking him about it. At that point he replied with something that I will never forget. This two-hundred-twenty pound tough, muscular, Native American looked right into my eyes and as serious as one could ever be, he said, "There is only one reason why I'm not going to tell you about her. I have to drive home tonight. Alone. So, don't talk about her anymore." As he turned and walked off I got the feeling that with respect to the Native American community, furry was well understood, albeit in a fractured and more sinister light.

This is the day I wish I could burn away. If for some reason you are reading this now, I implore you to stop here as once a person has seen things, dark things, they cannot ever be unseen again.

Well, don't say I didn't provide fair warning.

The following begins as a conversation around four o'clock on the twenty-sixth last year. Unfortunately for Robert, when he overheard said conversation it created the catalyst for these impending tragic events.

Right after David terminated any possibility of illuminating the subject of this mythological 'Deer Lady' he turned and walked away from my tab le, table six, with a deep scowl that only an old soul could pull off. I was unable to follow and apologize, knowing instantly that I had crossed an unseen line. Even lacking a single player at my table, I could not simply step away from a rack containing somewhere north of thirty-five-thousand-dollars just sitting out in the open.

Robert happened to be within earshot of my short conversation with David. He had been eavesdropping. I can't blame him for his interest though. After all, the day was going uncharacteristically slowly. Being football season, most of our regular gamblers were out betting on the game and that left us with several dead tables. Next to me, on table seven, was standing Bud Little Eagle. Like me, he was standing at a dead spread and like me, had too much time on his hands.

Bud and Robert came and left work often together. They did this when they were working on the same scheduled days and shifts. It wasn't because they were roommates, let alone something more intimate (Robert professed to be straight, after all), but simply because they lived fairly close to one another and shared a dislike of ever-rising gas prices.

I still can't shake my sense of guilt. I have been on the meds; they don't do anything but perpetually screw up my non-existent sex life. I have gone through therapists and shrinks like one-night-stands, each urging me to understand that nothing was my fault, that I can't be held responsible for others' actions, or that I am supposed to accept that furry is all fantasy and spiritual ideology be damned! "Accidents happen" they all say. Yeah. Whatever. Something else happens too. It's on a bumper sticker. The fact remains that if I hadn't asked David the question about the 'Deer Lady', if I hadn't received such an enigmatic response from him, if our tables hadn't been prematurely dead, if Bud Little Eagle hadn't been next to my table, if Robert hadn't overheard, if all the planets hadn't been aligned that day, would my friends still be alive?

I need to just finish this narrative. If I stop now I know in my heart that I will never type (or utter) these words again. I feel like puking. Here is another if / only statement that rattles around my braincase: if only I hadn't asked my buddy with the Lighthorse Police what he came across that foggy night then I would have chalked the whole ordeal up to being a freak accident. But, once more I am getting ahead of myself.

After David left our tables, Robert said, "Deer Lady?"

Now Bud, he was a different sort of Indian from Dave. He was easily just as proud as Native but instead of embracing the sacrosanct oral tradition of his cultural heritage, he tended to make a light mockery of it whenever he could. To be fair, I would say that he never intentionally put down any of his fellows, but he could be awfully self-effacing.

With a slight turn of his head and sporting a mischievous grin, Bud said, "Deer Lady?" A derisive laugh, then, "I can tell you about the Deer Lady. What do you want to know? I tell you anything you guys want to know, I don't care." The mood had shifted. I could feel the tension in the air rising about ten clicks even as Robert wandered closer to table seven. Storm clouds couldn't begin to describe the looks that Bud was getting as a group of Natives within earshot went about their work of pushing in chairs at the nearby slot machines. When Bud spoke again he said, "That Deer Lady..." with a smirk and lighthearted tenor, "...she's, bad." This is where the storm clouds scattered. Suddenly it was as if the mostly idle workers all had somewhere else to be. The tension, however, remained palpable.

I'll be honest here. I was very intrigued. Let's face it, a furry(ish) story about a mythical Deer Lady that is powerful or scary enough that simply invoking its name had other Indian workers hurrying off? For all my curiosity, I could only imagine what gears were turning in Robert's head.

Robert quietly inquired, "So what about this Deer Lady is so bad?"

Bud replied with a brief description of this how this person (creature) was actually thought to be an undead evil humanoid that lured victims like a Banshee into the woods and killed for pleasure using torture and fear. He went on to describe how the Deer Lady had been around in the folklore of the tribe for generations, more of an origin story, and that the telling had not disappeared with the coming of technology. Little Eagle laughed as he said how the Deer Lady would look like a very pretty woman walking by the side of the road. An unsuspecting person would pick her up, thinking her stranded perhaps. Then she would turn into a deer while you were driving and kill you. Although Little Eagle was obviously making light of the story, and it sounded like one of the seemingly ubiquitous cultural stories told to little ones to "be wary of strangers" or maybe to male teens to "watch out for the wiles of the fairer sex", his overly jovial tone had the opposite effect in its telling. In a sense it made me immediately envision the story of Stephen King's "It".

Robert, also in good humor prodded Bud on with, "But deer are cute! How on earth is a female deer supposed to kill you? Come on, Bud, really?"

Bud answered here by becoming a little more serious in his descriptions which made the story all the creepier if that were even possible. I could begin to picture Bud lounging around a Boy Scout campfire making the kids shit their pants.

I will try and paraphrase here as close to Bud's words as I can remember.

"Imagine you pick up this really hot chick because her car is broke down and she needs your help. She's dressed all nice, the kind of clothes you couldn't let her change a tire in. She is kind of quiet and keeps smiling but not really making any direct eye contact.

"So, once she's in the truck and you're rolling, she won't really talk anymore but just occasionally grunts yes or no to questions you ask. You begin to notice a smell of musk and iron. What could that be? Is that coming from outside?

"Anyway, about the time you're doing sixty, seventy miles an hour you turn to ask her where she needs to go, or does she need you cell phone and you see some bullshit straight out of an old Clive Barker movie.

"The elders say her eyes turn black as pitch, the whites and all, and begin to bleed profusely. Or maybe they ooze blackness, but who can really say? Her face cracks and breaks open, elongating into a muzzle with big old nasty looking teeth, only she has bits of flesh peeling off her face and exposing rotting muscle and bone beneath. From above her lengthening ears grow a set of wicked bloody antlers as if she's not really a "she" at all but some demonic stag. Her bones start breaking with loud, dry snapping sounds as if she is transforming into some huge bipedal undead buck. Her bones are cracking like broomsticks breaking. She is screaming some unholy sound the whole time, and she is pissed!

"Her feet become black cloven hooves as her knees break backwards, shoes falling off and clothes melting away as if they were all illusion. By now the odor is so intense it would gag a morgue worker. Bits of dirt rain off her body as if she had been drug along open ground or had just come from some forgotten hole.

"Then the fight begins. She'll stab you at will with her spear sharp antlers while smashing everything around her with her razor sharp hooves. There is nothing you can do to hurt her. She's already broken, and dead. Sometimes she takes your whole body in violent sacrifice, others maybe she just bites off a few bits and pieces of tasty human souvenirs - sweetbreads for the dead. Or your soul. She'll rip it out cast your husk to the side.

It took a few moments to realize that Bud was done. Robert practically had to pick his jaw up off the floor. "Christ! What causes a person to incur that kind of fucked up wrath? This only happens to bad people, right?"

Bud thought for a few seconds and said, "Well no, not really. If you believe this crap, it happens to anyone who thinks about her too much. You know, gets her attention or some shit."

"You seem to believe in this stuff don't you?"

"No, give me a break."

"Why not? Wasn't this how you were raised? I mean, with these sorts of stories? You seem to have a crystal clear memory of it. You know what I mean, like, aren't these like life lessons?"

"Ohh hells no. Like most of my tribe I'm a Christian so I don't believe in that junk the elders would tell me when we would sit around the circles. Like you said, life lessons. Stranger danger, girls have coodies. All that."

"So, there are others in the tribe that believes in this?"

"Oh, yes! No doubt about it. Even my family does. Ask them and they'll tell you about a lot more than just the Deer Lady. Well, actually, no, they wouldn't say shit to anyone. But you know what I mean."

Then Robert began to pepper Bud with questions like, "Could you get on good terms with the Deer Lady if you fed wild deer?" And, "can she turn people into deer, like trophy hunters?" There were a few more I recall, but Bud didn't seem to have any definitive answers and then some new players finally sat down at his table. Although this ended the conversation completely, I am afraid it opened a floodgate on Native American (furry?) folklore for Robert. There is no way he was going to be satiated until he drained Little Eagle of all his knowledge about the Deer Lady that night. I would hear occasional key words about the subject as the night progressed from table to table, but no more.

In fact, my rotation in the table line-up made it so I never really got to talk to Bud Little Eagle for the rest of the night. Actually, although I had my own questions, I really never got to speak to either one of them again. For the remaining hours I noticed as Robert kind of followed Little Eagle in the rotation and because I personally always had players from then on, I couldn't do much but focus on my games. Even if I could have joined their discussion I don't feel that in that point in time I would have had much in the way of intelligent additions to the topic. Stories of the supernatural were not my wheelhouse back then. It just sounded to me like any old proverb; albeit from a different bible.

That night they were killed in what Lighthorse deemed a single vehicle accident with unknown loss of control. It was shocking to all of us at the casino to say the least, but especially for me as they were both friends. Details of the accident didn't begin to trickle out for several days. I guess that there is something about lag time with the media while accidents are under investigation. There really wasn't much more forthcoming than a guess that they swerved to avoid an animal and lost control. I didn't remotely think to connect this with the story from table seven until I spoke with Jon Farmer.

Officer Farmer was the man who had investigated the break in of my BMW that I'd left parked at work about a year ago. He was always on my side since that break in and we got to know one another pretty well over time. Farmer told me he was the first responding unit to the accident scene, but he didn't offer this until I had asked him if he had any more information about the tragedy. In fact, I didn't even call him about until I had read the "known" details from a local paper which had backed up the rumor mill at work.

According to the A.P., at about two-thirty in the morning, Bud Little Eagle was thought to have fallen asleep at the wheel, ran off the road then striking a deer, and plowing into a densely wooded area further off the shoulder. A deer. No alcohol or drugs were involved, yaddah yaddah. The driver, Bud, was pronounced at the scene and his passenger, Robert, was later found ejected from the vehicle, impaled by branches. According to the press, Robert passed with EMS crews present and waiting for Lifeflight. A deer.

I pretty much had a personal freak out. I had to call Farmer. I now wish I had never called him. He told me what he saw, but not right away. He drove out to the casino to meet me privately before my shift. He insisted on coming during daylight hours because, as he informed me, some things should never be discussed once the sun is down. I watched as his cruiser turned in to the back parking lot overflow area. Really, nothing more than some patchy gravel next to some ungrazed fields.

Farmer hopped into my car and neither of us said a thing for minutes. With the oil derricks churning in the distance on one side of the lot, and the quiet but hurried throng of desperate players entering the casino on the other side, Farmer began to tell me about the early morning of the twenty-sixth.

Farmer had told me how he'd been on routine patrol along state highway nine, looking out for the typical creatures of the night - speeders, drunks, and drunken speeders. He'd just crested a hill by the water tower when he was more or less blinded by someone else's high beams. Except they were coming from off the road to the right, and at an unusual angle. He told me that he immediately knew it was from an accident. Being familiar with the stretch of road, there was no turn-off or house in the area this car was in.

Once he got his cruiser pulled over, flipped the warning lights on, and called in the accident (automatically asking for fire-rescue), he left the safety of his car and quickly approached. Farmer told me he jogged down the hill, moving left of the high beams, and as he scrambled closer he was able to make out the vehicle type where it had come to rest, more or less.

Farmer said he knew it wasn't good and the way the vehicle ended up facing back, it was as if it had tried escaping from the woods and failed. The impact with an ancient oak tree had obliterated most of the front end and caused the whole vehicle to spin around. How the lights were still on seemed to defy the laws of physics.

The F-250 was on its side, undercarriage facing Farmer such that he had to pick his way around the wreck to search for the driver. The corner of the truck that made first contact with the old tree seemed to meld together, a twisted amalgamation of the animate and inanimate. Later investigation would further show that Bud had managed to cross the center lane to end up on the wrong side of the road before fatally entering the forest fringe.

There was definite damage to virtually every part of the vehicle and Farmer showed me a few snapshots. It looked like the vehicle had managed to roll at least once, spider-webbing all the remaining windows. The front windshield was missing, but then it was easy to tell bumper from engine from frame.

Farmer said that as he called out he got no responses. Pointing his flashlight into what was left of the pitch black and now abbreviated den of the cab, his worst fears of finding a body were confirmed. He told me how his light shown upon random spaces on the interior of the cab; spaces that shown strange white shapes. Here and there on the seats, and the ceiling, white. Farmer said when he realized what he was seeing, he vomited onto the ground. White was the normal interior color, you see. This was a bloodbath of carnage. Coming further around where the front windshield should have been and kneeling down, his flashlight exposed what might have been the shape of a person covered in blood, viscera, and bone fragments, still secured in a seat belt and basically crushed against the popped airbag and steering column. Farmer said the person who we knew as Little Eagle was actually still moving slightly and making some sort of high pitched whine.

Farmer said he had been to any number of fatal accidents in his years with the troop, but this is the first one that just stunned him completely. He didn't know who was behind the wheel, he just knew in his heart that the injuries were grievous, fatal, and he was witnessing the agonal final breaths of a body that didn't quite realize yet that life had ceased.

After pausing to put his phone away, Farmer mentioned, in a tiny voice, that he'd stood helplessly watching that body try to breathe for about twenty seconds when realized he could hear what sounded like a child crying back behind the wreck and further into the woods.

Turning around and moving quickly through the heavy brush, trying to pinpoint the area where the crying was coming from, Farmer called out again and again. About thirty-five yards further into the forest, through relatively heavy brush and hampered by a growing mist he came across a broken and dying Robert leaning on another tree. At least, said Farmer, that is what he thought - that Robert was leaning as if taking a rest. The crying wasn't from a child, it was from Robert himself, but it wasn't even crying said Farmer, struggling to articulate what he had heard exactly.

Robert was struggling to breathe every second and was rapidly losing that battle. With the compound open fractures that were his legs, it was obvious he wasn't supporting his own weight, he was stuck to the tree like a receipt from a cheap diner placed haphazardly onto the receipt mound. The crying sound was not coming from his mouth, but from a sucking chest wound that had Robert impaled. The sound was fading into a more animalistic whine, the register of which could not be made by a human trachea, but could be made through the grizzled intercostal tissue of the ribs.

Farmer told me he couldn't do anything for Robert but radio dispatch to expedite the rescue vehicle by indicating there was a trauma alert survivor. When he looked back up from his shoulder mic to the broken man, he saw that Robert was semi-aware and was weakly but desperately trying to point at something behind Farmer. Somewhere perhaps Robert's body had essentially taken flight through the brush and branches.

Farmer said he turned to see one of the biggest whitetail bucks he'd ever seen. He smelled him before he even turned. Here is what I remember Farmer saying, pretty much word-for-word.

"I sweat that buck, something that big, could not just get behind me, and what kind of creature would come to investigate humans at a vehicle crash site? It just didn't make any sense. At the time I was much more terrified of the thing I saw coming up behind the deer, but that buck remains the fuel of my nightmares. I don't sleep anymore, no fucking way. That person shape I basically left for dead, pinned back in the truck, the one still buckled in? He wasn't in the truck anymore. That wasn't Little Eagle, no fuckin' way. This goddamned thing was moving up beside this buck, right? The buck wasn't even moving, just staring at me - Jesus Christ! I couldn't move a muscle, I pissed myself, man. Then this horribly mangled thing shambles up to the side of the buck, I can't even fucking move. It comes up, right? And it fucking says, 'Would you like to pet my deer?' Are we fucking kidding?! I passed smooth out right there.

Farmer told me he woke up in the back of one of the responding ambulances, still at the scene. Farmer said he was informed while still in the back of the ambulance that the man impaled on the tree had died on scene after efforts to stabilize him had failed, and that another vehicle occupant was pronounced dead just a few feet away from the first after having come to rest from his own ejection.

I tried to say some useless things to console my friend, Officer Farmer, but with a stern voice he said, "No, there's more to this."

Farmer explained that a few days following the accident he received a call from the medical examiner that was as terrifying as it was inexplicable. The county M.E. explained that over the phone that who they now knew was Bud Little Eagle, and presumably the driver (it was his personal truck) had not, in fact, been ejected from the cab but that Robert Stevenson most certainly had been. Farmer said he wasn't about to tell the M.E. 'no shit, I saw the corpse right walk up to a massive buck that decided to hang out with me'.

Farmer said that the M.E. went on to say that other than some obvious but minor trauma likely caused by the seatbelt and some facial bruising from the airbag deployment, there was really not a scratch or broken bone on Robert's body. Furthermore, the autopsy indicated Robert died on scene due a massive coronary that was ultimately a ticking time-bomb of a congenital defect. Probably, said the examiner, he couldn't have been revived and everyone was placing their immediate efforts on the impaled Mr. Little Eagle.

Farmer told me he that when he said none of this made any sense, that Robert was covered from head to toe in blood - blood that wouldn't have come from Bud since he was immediately ejected - that the doctor stopped him by saying, "Well, we know that they smashed into a large deer when they veered off the road. It was pretty much all over the whole cab. Basically it exploded when it went through the windshield; they were going pretty fast, after all."

Farmer told me that the examiner said both bodies were basically covered in deer gore but that it wasn't a significant factor in either death. That most likely, both the driver and occupant had fallen asleep and smashed into one or more deer after crossing the center line and that there was no skid marks on the highway. Consistent with a sleep-deprived driver.

With that, Officer Farmer got back into his cruiser and didn't even say goodbye. I think that for some folks, telling people about a bad experience is a form of therapy; in my friend's case it certainly didn't have any beneficial results. I wanted to tell Farmer about the conversation Bud and Robert had had at the Blackjack tables just hours before this all went down but I just couldn't bring myself to open my mouth when Farmer was in my car. I was in shock, maybe more so than him.

A deer. Wasn't a significant factor in their death.

And now I can't talk to Farmer at all. He took his life later that same day.

I am afraid. I am afraid because of everything I typed here but especially for one particular thing Bud said that keeps resonating through my mind. "...it happens to anyone who thinks about her too much." Now I cannot stop thinking about her and I don't think I ever will, either. I just sit here and wonder as I type... when will the Deer Lady come for me?