The Deer Lake Sightings
by Patricia Anthony

* * * *

The people on the north side of the lake had given him good information, but on the south side, closest to where the sightings had occurred, the families were so reticent as to be rude. By the time he’d reached the fifth house, where a woman was scrubbing her porch, his feet were tired and his temper worn.

As he started up the drive a liver hound rounded the side of the house. Harry stopped dead and stared suspiciously at it. “Shit,” he said under his breath, holding his camera and tape recorder a little closer to his chest in case he had to run.

But it was the dog that fled, backing away with a hesitant growl at first and then taking to its heels with a yelp as if Harry had really flung the rock he’d considered throwing.

Harry took a long breath and let it out before he continued his trudge up the hill. At the bottom of the porch steps he stopped and pushed his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose with an irritated gesture. It was a hot day and the skin of his face was oily, his armpits damp.

“I’m Harold Sterns with Mutual UFO Network,” he said, trying to conjure some warmth into his voice, “and I’ve been told that some of your neighbors have seen strange lights.”

The woman didn’t look up from her cleaning. She was on her hands and knees, a position which looked oddly natural for her; and her face was stamped with the seal of the mountains, an old-before-its-time sort of look.

Doggedly, Harry continued. “Your neighbors on the other side of the lake say that nearly every night for the past six months they’ve seen a flash just after dark that lights up half the sky. They’ve also sighted what they call ‘little dancing balls’ over here near where you live. You ever see anything like that?”

The metal bucket made a teeth-gritting sound across the concrete as she pulled it closer. With dull concentration, she plunged the bristle brush in the bucket to rinse away its coating of pink scum and began scrubbing the floor again. The air was prickly with the stench of ammonia.

“He comes ever night,” she said without looking up from her work, “and stands just where you’re standing.”

Harry felt an icicle of fear dislodge from the top of his spine and slide its way downwards. The woman’s brush made a shus-sha-shus-sha rhythm against the raw cement. “He?” Harry asked.

“Stands just where you’s standing now. Then when we walk out, he comes up on the porch. Never comes in the house. At least he never come in the house.” She paused in her scrubbing and sat up on her knees. Wisps of grey hair had come undone from her bun and they hung around her face like spider webbing.

Harry licked his lips. Surreptitiously he flicked on the tape recorder and noticed his hand was shaking with excitement. “Who comes to your house?”

She gave him a flat, country look and went back to her scrubbing. “Him. The man.”

“What does he look like?” Harry asked. He mounted the porch slowly, so as not to alarm her.

“Tall as you. Plaid shirt. Jeans.”

Harry’s face worked itself into a puzzled frown. “Is he human?”

The brush paused. The pause was so brief, so sudden, that it seemed that time itself had stopped. Then she picked up her scrubbing rhythm again. “Don’t know.”

“What does he say?”

“Nothing.”

“He just stands on the porch?”

“Uh huh.”

“And he never says anything to you.”

“Wish he would,” she hissed angrily. “Wish the bastard would say something.”

“Uh huh. And then you come out on the porch to meet him.”

“Don’t have no choice.”

The brush made a hollow thunk as it was tossed into the bucket. Taking up the handle, she walked into the house.

After a brief hesitation Harry followed her. The parlor was faded, the hooked rug worn. The floors smelled of oil, but there was another smell under that: the lye soap scent of clean poverty.

The linoleum in the kitchen had once been green. He could see glimpses of color in the corners. The traffic areas, though, had been bleached to an off-white. “What do you mean you don’t have any choice?”

She poured the foamy pink water down the drain and filled up the bucket with clear from a tarnished tap. “He don’t give us no choice is what I mean. Sometimes he comes at dinner and we get up from the table and walk outside.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the thrumming of the water.

“Like you’re drawn or something?”

“Just like we don’t have no damned choice about it. Just like we don’t have no say in it at all.” 

“Tell me something, Mrs. . . .”

“Foote.”

“Mrs. Foote. Do you remember anything after you get to the porch?” His voice was staccato with anxious energy. Harry had utterly forgotten how tired his feet were, how his back ached from his walk. “Do you find that after he’s gone you’ve lost time? Like maybe you’ve been watching one program on TV and after he’s gone another totally different show is on? Maybe it might seem like he was only there a few minutes, but you find out later a couple of hours have gone by.”

She turned off the tap and looked at him. Her eyes were a dirty brown and her eyelashes were grey as her hair. He guessed her age in an indiscriminate area between a hard forty and a gently-worn sixty. “I remember,” she told him.

“Remember what?”

“I remember what happens when we gets to the porch.”

She pushed past him and walked outside where she splashed the clear water over the cement. Through the screen door he watched as she took up a broom that had been matted by time and use into a permanent comma. She began to sweep the suds away. In the middle of the porch was a stubborn, dark sienna stain.

“He cuts my heart out,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“He cuts out my damned heart.”

The ancient broom moved methodically over the porch. Her arms were thick and strong; and when she swept the water she swept it out in a high arc across the yard. The motion of the broom was angry, as if she were imagining murdering someone.

The dog had come back and was whining under the stairs. Harry pushed at the screen door. It opened with a pained squeal. Careful of where she had swept, he stepped outside with her.

He considered turning off his tape recorder. “What are you talking about?”

“You ever been raped?” she asked suddenly.

Harry cast around for an appropriate answer, but found none. He shrugged and shook his head.

“That’s what it’s like. Being raped.” There was an uncatalogable expression on her face.

Suddenly he understood the look. He hadn’t recognized it at first because he wasn’t expecting it. Mrs. Foote was watching him like a lost young kid might look for help from a policeman. Quickly he dropped his eyes. “I’d like to go over your statement again,” he said.

Mrs. Foote dismissed him with a disappointed, cynical sniff. “You think you’re so smart. How many times I gotta tell you?”

“You want me to believe that a man comes to the door, you come out, and he literally cuts out your heart while you’re standing there, and you let him?” Harry couldn’t help the tone that had crept into his voice. “Come on, Mrs. Foote. Really. If he cuts out your heart why aren’t you dead?”

“Don’t know,” she said wistfully and without the abrasiveness he’d been prepared for. “Jimmy Lee killed hisself. Don’t know why I don’t take the shotgun to myself, except for the boy.” She jerked her head to the right. Harry looked over to see a gangly teenager emerging from the barn. “Don’t seem fair to the boy.”

“Jimmy Lee?”

“Husband,” she said. There were no more suds on the porch but she set to sweeping again, anyway.

“Mrs. Foote . . .” he sighed. Turning towards her, he saw she had halted in her sweeping to open her blouse. Embarrassment nearly made him leap down the steps to the ground. Talk about rape, he thought to himself. She must be kidding.

The neat, pink line stopped him in mid-flight. It ran from just below her collar and disappeared someplace past the still-fastened fourth button.

“He takes his finger,” she said, “just so.

She stepped up to him and ran her own finger down the front of his shirt, etching a trail of cold through Harry’s sternum.

“And I open right up, dress, bones, and all. Then he takes out my heart and holds it in his hand like he’s giving me some sort of gift. He looks at me while he’s doing it, looks right into my eyes. And I can see my heart move up and down like a mouse twitching in his palm.”

She was standing very close to him, closer than he would want anyone he didn’t know well to stand.

“I hate him,” she said. “He cured my angina, but I hate him. It’s like he comes back ‘cause he wants me to know what he done for me. I don’t give a shit. Wish I was back the way I was, even with the breathing hard to walk across the room, even with the waking up in the night with the pain in my chest. He hurts me,” she told him. “He hurts me so bad. Seem like if it was a miracle, it wouldn’t hurt so much, don’t you think? Seem like if it was a real miracle he wouldn’t have to come back all the time.”

She stepped away. He looked down. The sienna stain was right between his feet.

A few yards away from the porch steps the boy stopped and made a hooting sound like a night bird. Harry flinched and glanced the boy’s way. The boy’s blond hair was plastered over his forehead with sweat. His eyes were the same dull, muddy brown as his mother’s. His expression was frightened.

“It’s all right,” Mrs. Foote told her son. “He ain’t here to hurt nothing. Just asking questions is all.”

The boy made a ‘whuh-whuh’ noise that sounded like it might have been a question, but the woman ignored him.  The dog crept out from the shade of the steps to stand with the boy.

“Donnie was deaf,” Mrs. Foote said as she turned to Harry, “ ‘til the man cured him. He hears now, he understands what I’m saying, but he still won’t talk.” She held out her hand to her son. “You want to come up and show him what that man done to your ears? You want to come up on the porch now, Donnie?”

The boy backed away three paces and then swiveled and sprinted back to the barn, the dog at his heels.

Mrs. Foote’s blouse still gaped open. Harry’s gaze was drawn to that line. It ran between the crepy mounds of her breasts, too straight, too neat, to be an incision.

She took the broom, placed it against the side of the house and then walked down to the yard, Harry tagging after. In the back was a clothesline with its burden of mended cotton. On the fronts of all the dresses were faded blotches of brownish red. There were dark auburn stains on the shoulders of the wash-stiff shirts.

“He holds onto my heart and looks into my eyes and I keep thinking that one night he’ll squeeze. Donnie screams when he cuts into his ears. I don’t when he cuts me, ‘cause I don’t want to upset the boy any more than need be. No need to make it any worse than it is.”

“Who do you think the man is? I mean do you see him well enough? Do you remember him clearly?”

Her voice changed to a harsh, spitting whisper. “I’m afraid . . . sometimes I think . . . what if it’s Jesus? I mean, he don’t look much like those pictures they got in Sunday School, but what if it’s Jesus all the same? Who else can heal like that?”

“The other people . . .” Harry said before his voice died. He had to clear his throat to ask the rest. “Your neighbors. Have they had experiences like this?” 

She tossed a stiff, torn towel into her clothes basket and straightened to look at him. “Janie Mitchell killed herself three months ago. With her it was just the dyspepsia. The man took out her stomach just the same. Dutton Friendly put a gun in his mouth just last week. He used to have the arthritis in his back. I don’t know. Some people can take it more than others, but you get tired of it, hear? You get real tired.”

Mrs. Foote looked tired, tired in a way Harry knew he could never understand. Mrs. Foote was worn old by her very survival: the wood-stove cooking; the farming; the burden of the nightly miracles.

“And your husband?”

“It was his eyes,” Mrs. Foote told him in a strained voice. Her face knotted up into an expression of pitying repulsion. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” she said in a whimper, “Jimmy Lee just couldn’t stand what that man did to his eyes.”

Harry swallowed hard and pushed his glasses back in place. To Mrs. Foote’s back the sun was crouching down fast behind a stand of trees.

After a moment she got her face back in control. She tried to smile, but shouldn’t have. “Stay on a bit. I’m about to set out dinner.”

The air was cooling down, but it was suddenly hard for Harry to breathe. “Maybe I’d better go.”

“Sit a spell,” she said. “Please. I’ll fix you some tea and hominy cake and greens.”

“I think . . .” He took a step backwards.

“It’s hard being alone with Jimmy Lee gone. I don’t mean. . .” she seemed embarrassed for a moment. A seemingly impossible blush spread across her sun-wrinkled cheeks. “I don’t mean that, exactly. But you’re different. From the city. Maybe he wouldn’t come tonight if you was here. It’s scary all alone.”

He backed away another step. “I’m pretty tired and everything.”

“If you don’t stay, you’ll tell somebody? The government’ll come out and tell the man to go away?”

“Yes. I could send somebody out,” he agreed, knowing he’d never have the courage to talk about Mrs. Foote’s visitor. Being a UFO researcher had held him up to all the close-minded ridicule he could stand. He had a sudden mental image of an army of Catholic priests, maybe a Bishop or two, standing around a plaid-shirted, jeaned Jesus, telling him to put the heart back in Mrs. Foote’s chest. He tried to end the image by Jesus disappearing, but all his mind would picture was the sullen, angry look on the large-eyed face and the gout of blood as he squeezed his hand into a fist.

She shot him a knowing glance as if she had seen inside him to the dark nest where his cowardice lay. “Mind that you do,” she said curtly. Then she gave up on her brief attempt at courage and started to cry silently. “It don’t matter any more if he tells us why he’s doing it. I’m way past that, now. Just want him to stop. Please. You got learning and all. Just make him stop.”

Harry turned his back on her and started down the hill fast. The dog had come out of the barn and when it saw him it turned and ran again. Yard dogs don’t run, Harry thought. Holy Mother of God. I’ve never seen a yard dog run.

He hit the dirt road at a brisk trot, his camera bouncing against his chest. Down by the lake night pooled among the trees. Bull frogs thumped in the reeds.

After a few yards Harry slowed reluctantly to a fast, purposeful walk. His lungs hurt; the backs of his legs were on fire. For the first time in five years he wanted a cigarette badly.

Ahead of him he could see lights blink on in the nearest house, turning the squares of the windows yellow. His flight became a limping, sore walk. Remembering his tape recorder, he glanced down to turn it off.

A strobe light went off in his face.

Flinching, he looked up. The light came again, turning a twenty-degree arc of the sky into noon. Above his head small orange spheres were dancing a waltz in the purpling, starlit sky.

“Damn!” he said. Raising his camera quickly, he started snapping pictures. Behind him a big dog howled a single, bass note of terror.

He saw the plaid-shirted blur through the lens first and slowly lowered his camera. The man was standing in the middle of the now-bright road, his arms down at his sides, a cryptic, gentle smile on his face.

“Please,” Harry whispered.

The man walked towards him. Without wanting to, without having willed his legs to move, Harry found himself stepping forward to greet him. When they were inches apart, the distance of a lover to his beloved, the man put his hands up and tenderly slipped off Harry’s glasses. Staring directly into Harry’s eyes, he folded the glasses and put them into Harry’s shirt pocket.

“No. Please.” Harry was crying now, his cheeks and mouth twisted. He tried to move, but, like all the nightmares of his childhood, he couldn’t.

Harry couldn’t move his head, but his mouth was still under his control. There was no one around to see, and no one who needed him to act brave, so like Donnie, he started to scream.

The man seemed oblivious to Harry’s weeping, his pleas. There was a piercingly sweet smile on his face, one that was sad but at the same time intensely, hurtfully loving. He put his fingers up, up, up towards Harry’s eyes as if all in the world he wanted was to wipe the tears away.