follow the music
by Chachee Valentine
Tonight, a tarot reader I follow on YouTube speaks of Deer Spirit, how this spirit is with me. I wonder if this spirit belongs to the 12-Point buck we hit on a paved road many towns ago, that night you picked me up from Gram’s apartment, because now I feel you everywhere. The tarot reader says someone with the initial D, which is yours, is always near me, and that whomever D is, strokes my cheek and hushes,
Everything’s gonna be alright. You are safe, loved, protected.
It’s possible that to be with me you have melded yourself into Deer Spirit. Or maybe in a parallel universe, I am Deer Spirit, your protector, who keeps the sadness and aloneness you once felt for my mother close to my own.
I still carry guilt for not telling anyone about the dream. Gram and I were watching The Love Boat, followed by Fantasy Island. I had fallen asleep on her lap. Grandpa Ernie set his sauce on simmer and had gone to bed because he was old-school Italian. The dream was a quick flash: I was in a car that hit something head-on, so hard, the impact popped me off the plushness of Gram’s powder blue chenille housecoat. She gave me a pat and led me to their bedroom. Wanting to feel cared for, I pretended to sleepwalk as I climbed onto the aluminum folding chaise lounge Gram made into a makeshift cot.
Every sleepover, my grandmother seemed to know when I needed her to hold my hand. Bed to bed, we played a game to help me fall asleep. Stranded on a kind of Gilligan’s Island, we were separated by chopping seas. Swells lifted below our extended arms. Waves peaked its sharp teeth, but no match for the love between us. Holding hands for our lives, my grandmother quelled my Don’t let go! mumble by giving my hand a gentle, intermittent squeeze.
A long, intoxicating morning would follow. Grandpa Ernie hummed along with his prized vinyl record that crackled the dawn. Their parakeet, Baby, whose mate had died, would whistle and chirrup to Jimmy Durante. I remember Gram telling me the story about how one morning, Grandpa Ernie got up, but the parakeets were unusually silent. When Grandpa Ernie removed the night cover to sing good morning to the birds, Baby’s sweetheart had died in her sleep. The single parakeet perched next to his lover’s hardened body on the bottom of the cage. Grandpa Ernie said it was as if Baby’s eyes had slid down the sides of his opaline head. Numb in despair, it took months of coaching for Baby to learn how to sing on his own because my grandparents could not afford to buy him another mate.
Under the tangy pressure of oregano, tomato, and garlic, their four-hundred-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment bubbled. Although not related by blood, I admired Grandpa Ernie’s civil twilight rituals. I marveled at the way he ate meals on small plates. For breakfast, he would break up slices of thick, crusty bread and place the scraps into bowls. Over the bread, he’d pour steamed milk and coffee sweetened by sugar lumps. Under the bloom of mustard yellow lamplight, night would lose its grip as we slurped coffee soup. Baby and Grandpa Ernie crooning to vaudevillian music made it easy to imagine another place and time.
~
The deer’s body struck the glass like a crack of thunder. I watched the deer’s velvet ear droop in slow-motion. Through the shattered windshield, our three heads sat in the car as we became a distant horizon for the deer’s slot-shaped pupil. While its body twitched, the deer’s lone eye locked onto mine. Mother screamed, then I screamed. My stepfather told us both to hush. The inside of our car submerged into the deep woodland surrounding us, but I refused to turn away from the deer’s eye.
Throbbing yellow headlights and a throttle choked in the opposite lane. The deer’s eye looked as though it was watching memories of his day as it tilted its head, untied its legs, fell from the hood of mother’s car, and wobbled like a three-legged table into the opposite lane. There wasn’t any time to look away.
That’s the last thing I remember until I came back into my body. I must have wandered while my mother and stepfather checked for damage. Rain poured sideways. On the slick road, my bird chest pressed against the bridge’s guardrail as I wailed.
Gimme your hand! shouted the bystander.
On the bridge, I thought about the dream I had the night before, asleep on Gram’s lap, how in my dream, the car I was in hit something hard. Even though I knew the deer was dead, I sobbed out loud that I would jump unless someone told me the fate of the deer. I wanted someone to say the words,
The deer is dead.
The driver behind the throbbing yellow headlights told us if the deer’s antlers had been just a little smaller, it might not have caught the underbelly of his truck, but told us not to worry. He was a hunter and said the meat would not go to waste. He said those words as he and another man hoisted the tepid carcass into the bed of his pickup. My brain stopped working and stuck on the word, meat. One minute, the deer was merrily hopping over the hood of the car, and then through the shattered windshield, the deer and I were having a staring contest. Now the eyes, ears, legs, and belly of the deer were being addressed as meat. Skinned alive on a road, dragged by its antlers must have felt surreal, like being dragged by a single braid through a psych ward for unwanted teenagers.
On the bridge, I blocked out the bystander’s words and thought about the deer’s family being left behind. All deer have a herd with whom they belong. It’s impossible for a deer to miss curfew, to be late for dinner, to forget about date-night, skip anniversaries, or to act too busy to tuck in their young without having a deer in their herd hold them accountable. Deer families stay together and share the same worn path to ensure no one goes missing.
~
Flash forward. I’m in my forties, driving across the middle of Texas on one of those barren desert roads. Your only sense of being alive on these roads comes through watching wind turbines, and from fighting the urge to be hypnotized by the giant pinwheels strong-arming the vertical skyline. Methane clouds of rotting cow manure seep into the car vents and snake up my nostrils. I don’t know what it is about this oppressive road, but I am back there, back in that place that still runs through my veins like gravy.
This is there. Kicking and screaming down a hallway, I am pulled by my braid. I am fighting for my rights, fighting for my life, because I cannot get a witness. That is, I did not have a witness until I met Sohar and Chinnici. Dragged into a quiet room, walls covered in padding, padding covered and camouflaged with carpet, the Keys think I’m not smart enough to notice what kind of room this is, but I am. You don’t put in that much time in places like that to let anything escape you.
They want me to shut the fuck up! but I don’t listen. I scream until a hairy-knuckled hand covers my mouth. Like any animal under attack, I bite. My canines sink into the puff pastry of his hand made from Holstein butter, soft and chewy. Once my jaw is clenched and locked, there’s no letting go until a set of boney, prickly fingers and a sticky palm belonging to another Key slaps the side of my head across my left ear. The needle’s fury happens quick as death, and I’m out.
~
Back in time on the Texas road, as I shut the air vents my car runs out of gas. I think to myself, Here is one of those times I could go missing, but hang on. For someone to go missing, someone needs to notice their absence. Your presence needs to be significant. A person is no one if they do not matter to anyone. If someone’s energy was not important to the herd in the first place, they will remain unmissing. It’s during this moment of running out of gas that I wonder if the deer’s family paced and snorted all night in their den, never learning about the fate of their handsome buck. It’s this memory of the dead deer I connect with being the unmissing when I realize I’ll always be free to roam.
~
The next day after the killing of the deer, Mother’s car sat lifeless as a tomb next to the detached garage. Surveying the car, the energy in the breeze cried for the horror of the night. I could not hold back the desire to pluck tufts of fur. My fingertips pulled and weaved the dark, brisket hair webbed through the car’s front grill. Ghostly air-wriggled threads from white tail. Puffs of deer released from the car, snagged and anchored to the gravel around my feet, waving to signify surrender. Survivor guilt is in the details, and it’s the details that make it feel real. I’ve often told myself if ever I survived a plane crash, I would not survive surviving.
~
Every time I dream of Sohar and Chinnici from that place, we are in a grocery store, but not together like the old days. In Chinnici dreams, we play tag around food displays. Running and skipping, I try to touch Chinnici as she flies. She loops in and out of aisles with the same uncontrollable energy she could not contain when she listened to Prince. In Sohar dreams, I never see Sohar but talk to her on a magic phone. Every time Sohar’s voice comes through, a phone receiver drops from out of nowhere in front of me while I’m grocery shopping. In every Sohar dream, Sohar calls to tell me she loves me. I don’t know why, but Sohar dreams remind me of the only time the three of us had a chance to live together in a group home. Surviving on Slim Jim’s and Diet Coke, boy, did we blow it.
I just want you to know I love you, that I’ll always be there for you.
I’ll never forget Chinnici’s words because it helped me realize that even decent people break promises.
~
Chinnici was the first to leave our herd. That girl went out swinging on a sheet hung on a hook in a psych ward. I can’t remember the saying about how everyone gets a few minutes of fame, but I think Chinnici had hers. When she broke our contract to never leave each other, she left us in the same hospital where AIDS had devoured the supermodel, Gigi. Sohar never got out. In the same way those places never leave you, a part of me remains in those walls with Sohar and Chinnici, just like the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
~
On a good day when the Keys acted nice, they’d call us the three musketeers. It was one of those sly comments that’s meant to be chummy, but it was the manly Keys who joked with us like that because they believed they understood our musketeer conditions. Convinced the three of us were lovers, one of them would always hover around the table and jingle his pocket change. We used to fantasize about what it would be like to cut off his penis. Not because we hated men, but because we hated those men.
One time a Key grabbed Chinnici and tried to force her hand into his pocket. Sohar, bogarting our only pack of Marlboro Lights, stood up ready to charge, but I could see the look in Chinnici’s eyes. My arm blocked Sohar from stopping Chinnici who went along with the Key’s hand into his pocket. Chinnici squeezed his erection with rage that had been building and building. We watched as the Key cried baby tears, while Sohar and I lit another cigarette and laughed our asses off, until the other Keys heard his cry and stormtroopered the rec room. They dragged Chinnici’s wild smirk away and disappeared her for three days, but we knew she wasn’t missing. By way of expiation, they stuck her in the padded, carpeted room for penance.
~
Ever since the tarot reader spoke of deer spirit around me, I see images of deer everywhere. I’m not even looking for deer, they just cross my path. Like the other day, I drove to Ikea with a friend. In the check-out line, an oversized portrait of a deer, plastered in bright neon colors eyed me with the same penetrating smashed windshield stare.
Was that you, D?
That night, a friend who fosters dogs asked if a Chihuahua could stay with me for the night. When the dog arrived, everyone said the little dog looked like a baby deer.
Was that you, too?
If you can meld yourself into Deer Spirit, meld yourself into coffee soup so I can drink you. Sink into my insides the way sweetened, milky coffee seeps into crannies of spongy bread.
This almost worked when Gram died. Distraught by her absence, I could not comprehend her name printed on a label stuck to a shoebox filled with her stardust. No matter how I tried, I could not absorb that Gram had moved from the four-hundred-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment and into a tiny box to be buried in the ground. After the service, I swallowed two bottles of what was left of Gram’s medication she would no longer need. It wasn’t that I wanted to die. I wanted to follow the music, return to the island and hold her hand across the sea, but I could not find her because her pills chopped up my guts and made me sick.
~
Mother is embarrassed by you, D, for herself, and says there’s no way you’re my father, but science does not lie. Your DNA is half of who I am, as well as your ancestors who now belong to me, too. I wish I could see you so you would look into my eyes, so that I could see my reflection in another. I wish I could touch your ears, trace the sprinkle of freckles on your forearms. Like a magician, you’d wave your wand and turn yourself into something edible, abracadabra, into something to ingest, and you would stay with me, forever.
Chachee Valentine (they/them) has published widely and is a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee and MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Montana.