“What’s wrong with it?” Jenson asked.
“I don’t know.”
Something was.
His hind legs weren’t steady, they wobbled as if he were a newly born fawn. His head swung from left to right, not smoothly, but with jerking motions as his mouth opened in some sort of silent cry.
He moved sideways as if trying to loft his body.
What looked like a huge sore graced above his back leg, but more alarming than that was the color of his fur. It was greyish brown, almost completely gray, which was far from the reddish-brown color it should have been for July.
“Is he hurt?” Jenson asked. “I think he’s hurt.”
“Or sick.”
“He could have been hit by a car.”
“We need to call the state police,” Brad said. “Let them know. He isn’t moving from this road.”
“I don’t think he can,” she said.
“Pull up the map on your phone,” Brad said, watching the buck continue in its behavior. “Ping where we are so I can let them know.” He grabbed his own phone.
“I feel so bad for him.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“We’re not far. We haven’t passed the Dairy Delight yet.”
Brad had eyes on the deer as he blindly tried to dial the three simple numbers. It was just before he hit send that the buck violently hurled himself toward the car. Like someone trying to break down a door, he slammed side first into the front end.
Both Brad and Jenson jumped.
He slammed into the car again with an elk-sounding cry.
Brad knew the animal hadn’t a clue what he was doing. He was hurt or ill and his actions were out of the control. Or maybe even the creature was trying to find some relief.
Brad tossed the phone down, threw the car in reverse and backed up. Again, it aimed for the car. Hurriedly, after putting the car in drive, Brad jerked the wheel, went around the deer, and peeled past it with spinning tires.
“Jesus,” Jensen gasped out holding her chest.
“Call. They need to know.”
“Maybe he’s gone,” Jenson suggested.
Brad looked up to the rearview mirror the same time Jenson turned to look back.
The buck was still on all fours, shaking and thrusting its body forward to nothing in a dance of pain.
Their eyes were on him. Only for a second or two.
Not on the road.
A second or two was all it took.
By the time Brad lowered his eyes from the mirror, because of the accelerated speed, their four-door sedan slammed head-on into another large buck. The animal flew up into the air, bounced on the hood and through the windshield.
The car swerved out of control. Brad couldn’t see a thing past the animal that took up his entire view. Not only was it still alive, but thrashing relentlessly half in and half out of the car.
Brad’s foot powered toward the brake but it was too late.
The car smashed into something, ejecting the airbags. Brad felt it hit into his face and his head banged into the driver’s side window. There was nothing he could do, it was out of his control. The car tilted, rolling on two wheels before hitting another object and coming to a dead stop.
He was conscious in that brief moment after. He didn’t know if he was ready to pass out or ready to die.
The buck was still in his car, more so now than before. Still alive, its grunts and huffs mixed with the sound of a car horn blasting steadily in the distance. Brad couldn’t see Jenson. He tried. He couldn’t turn his head, couldn’t call out.
In fact, he couldn’t move. He just had to sit there and wait and hope that help would arrive.
3.
SCOOP
May 5
Griffin, Arizona was a town out of time. A lot of the town’s buildings looked like something from the doo-wop era. Meticulously maintained for the benefit of the small but steady tourist season that happened upon them every summer.
Griffin was isolated.
The closest town in all directions was thirty miles away. A green view from one side of town, a brown from the other, Griffin was nestled between a desert and the mountains and was smack dab on the course of the famed Route 66. The residents often said the town was the basis for the famous animated movie starring automobiles.
The story was the same.
At one time it was always busy, but with the construction of the interstate it was more of a novelty. A standing icon to an era long gone.
They paid tribute to that era by keeping up the throwback appearance, although many said the decade they most paid tribute to was the nineties. Because more times than not they were stuck with landline, dial-up speed internet when the Wi-Fi signal was lost.
Looks and technology, the town of three thousand was a throwback showcase. They still had a print edition newspaper with a staff of three. For a while they operated every day, twice on Sunday, but that dwindled down to four days a week.
They’d never really get rid of the print edition all together. They couldn’t. People needed their news. When the Wi-Fi went down, so did the cable. It took too long to download the pictures on the web edition; one could make and eat a sandwich before the weather report loaded. The local TV station got their news from the Griffin Times.
The Griffin Times got theirs mainly from the AP wire.
Any way they could.
They still used a fax faithfully and Walt, the editor, had his great-grandfather’s teletype machine that occasionally spouted off when Walt called the New York office to say they were down again. Headlines would auto type away sounding like a data printer. Which… Griffin Times still had.
Hiring practices at the Times were less skill based and more of a twisted nepotism. An inherited right to work there.
At least with the three employees that held down the fort. Walt Sommers was the editor-in-chief. His great-grandfather times five had started the paper, and it had been handed from one generation of Sommers to the next.
Brian’s ‘Griffin Times Genealogy’ dated back to his great-grandmother who was a typist. Brian was the best writer of the three. He hated that people requested him for obituaries.
The backstory of Cass was similar to Walt’s, at least three generations of her family had worked at the Times. Most famously her father, who was best known as Scoop McDaniels. A nickname Cass had not yet lived up to. Not yet. It wasn’t for lack of trying.
It wasn’t to say the three of them made a living or career from working at the Times. Brian was a high school teacher; Walt ran the local car repair and body shop. Cass didn’t need more than her part-time income. She lived quite comfortably off the inherited remaining balance of her grandfather’s Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes win. He took the thousand dollar a week payoff which she now collected.
The Griffin Times was the glue in the center that held the town together more than people wanted to admit.
It gave it the sense of small town, keeping things real and personal.
Griffin was far removed and in a sense was like its own entity.
An alien nation.
In fact, that was what Cass called the town of Griffin in a piece she wrote about how culturally different they were than the rest of the world. How Griffinites weren’t pampered but were self-reliant.
They were down to earth and as old-fashioned as they came.
The fact that they all still had and used landlines proved that.
Cass was the first one in the office, she figured she would be. Walt talked about how he had to pound out the dent on the Marshal car and Brian never got up before eight during non-school months.