The Hanging Tree by Bryan Gruley

somehow deserved her fate; it was more that I believed it was where she alone had aimed herself, a destination she had mapped out, consciously or not, years before. I had nothing to do with it then, so why should I have anything to do with it now?
    But there were questions I could not answer: How did she get into the tree? What did she stand on before she dropped to her death? How did she get out there? All by herself. In a storm that had torn branches from trees.
    I thought of Elvis and the others at Audrey’s snickering over their breakfast plates. Boneheads, every one of them.
    “All right, Mom,” I said.
    My phone started ringing again. I ignored it.
    “All right what?”
    “I’ll be looking into this. There must be an explanation.”
    Mom allowed herself a faint smile. She shrugged the afghan off her shoulders and stood. “You better get going then,” she said. “I’m going to put those turnips on.”

four
    Look,” Gracie said. “Is it dead?”
    She had spotted the white-tail lying beneath the boughs of a Scotch pine in the woods near Jitters Creek. July sun dappled the deer’s back but the trees were thick enough away from the creek bed that most of the animal lay in shadow. It held its head up straight, its eight-point antlers reaching into the branches above its head. Its eyes were closed. I’d never seen a deer with its eyes closed.
    “No,” Darlene said. “It’s sleeping.”
    Gracie took a step toward the deer. I grabbed a fistful of the back of her T-shirt. “Don’t,” I said. “It might be hurt. Dad said never mess with a hurt animal.”
    “It’s just a deer,” Gracie said, yanking herself away. “What’s it going to do?”
    “It can put a hoof right through you.”
    “It’ll never catch me.”
    “Yes, it will,” Darlene said. “Deer are fast.”
    “They run like deer,” I said.
    Gracie sneered. At eleven, she was a year older than Darlene and me, and she thought she was a lot smarter.
    “Ha-ha-ha, booger face. I’ll just go jump in the creek. I’ll bet he can’t swim.” She started toward the deer again. This time Darlene grabbed her by the arm. “Wait.” Darlene bent and picked a dead tree branch off the ground. “Let’s test him first.” She took two tentative steps toward the deer and tossed the branch at its back. The deer didn’t budge.
    “See, he’s dead,” Gracie said.
    “Let me try again.” Darlene found a bigger branch lying on a bed of pinecones. She threw it end over end and it glanced off the deer’s neck.
    The deer opened its eyes. All three of us jumped back.
    “Oooooh,” Gracie cried. We scrambled behind a tree and watched.I felt my heart pumping hard. The deer’s head swiveled slowly in our direction. The rest of him did not move. His eyelids drooped.
    “He’s hurt,” I said.
    “Poor thing,” Gracie said. Again she started to move toward the animal and again I grabbed her. This time she didn’t try to pull away.
    “Gracie. That deer will kick your butt.”
    “But we have to do something.”
    “We should call the ranger,” Darlene said.
    “What ranger? There’s no ranger.”
    I let go of Gracie.
    “Your mom’s is closest,” I said. “We can mark the spot and go tell her.”
    Our bikes waited back on the two-track road that wound down through the woods. We had planned to do some bike-diving into the creek, flying down the hill over the bank into the water. But Gracie had insisted on seeing if we could find a new path through the trees. “We can slalom,” she had said.
    Now she looked at me, then at the deer, at Darlene, at the deer again.
    “No,” she said. “Let’s leave the deer alone.”
    “Leave it alone?” Darlene said. “A minute ago you wanted to go right up and pet it. We can’t leave it alone. It’ll die.”
    Gracie shrugged. “Everything dies. I don’t want to tell my mom.”
    “She’s not going to know we were bike-diving,” I said. “We’re not even wet yet.”
    “She doesn’t give a crap