Want Not by Jonathan Miles

“Nice.”
    “Asshole! Then he turns his phone off. He’s fucking garbage, man. And you should see this broad he’s doing, the one in Parsippany. She’s like a total cow. It’s like, grab a fold and fuck it. Not me, man.”
    “Yeah, well,” Elwin said, cringing as he assessed the fuckability of his own copious folds. He twisted the final leg off the deer and dumped it with the other ones. “How’s the meat looking?”
    “Here, hand me that flashlight,” Christopher said. “It’s not bad, man. Check it out. This side over here is kind of ripped up, but it’s all right. Make sausage out of that.”
    Elwin’s eyes followed the flashlight beam. Christopher’s appraisal, he saw, was far too generous: The collision had rendered the doe’s left shoulder ragged and jellied, reminiscent of cherry pie filling—completely unsalvageable. “It’s already sausage,” Elwin muttered. The flesh of the right shoulder, however, appeared, if not prime, then choice: nicely striated and evenly purple, just a shade lighter than the Douro wine that had indirectly led to the doe’s death, and layered with a webbing of diaphanous ivory fat. “Better than I expected, actually,” Elwin said.
    “Nice bumper placement,” Christopher said, and slapped Elwin on the back. “Like bullet placement, right? Bumper placement. Hey, you got a beer inside?”
    “No, sorry,” Elwin said, realizing he did but letting the lie stand anyway. “So let’s get this skin off. You mind? The two of us can manage fine without the quad . . .”
    “Come on, with the quad it’s like
that,
” snapping his fingers.
    “I don’t want to wake the whole street.”
    “Like
that,
” he said, re-snapping his fingers. “See that stainless-steel exhaust? That fucker’s
quiet,
man. These new models, they gotta be. Some law in California.”
    “Then let’s be quick,” Elwin said. “We need a rock or something . . .”
    Christopher said, “A golfball.”
    “You got one?”
    “I got
everything,
” he said, then took off running. The slam of the storm door, as he rocketed into the house, was enough to shake the slumbering icicles from the roof. He was back within a minute, holding a can of Bud Light in one hand, and, in the other palm, flaunting a yellow golfball as if it were a glinting nugget he’d just panned from a stream. Which wasn’t so far from the truth, as it turned out: “We used to fish these fuckers out of the ponds at Spring Brook, when me and Joey was kids,” he said. “Late at night, you know, ’cause they’d run you off if they found you. There’s this pond, on the fourteenth hole—fucking
full
of balls. Just put some waders on, walk around with a landing net. Fucking bonanza, man. We got, like, five hundred balls one night
alone.
Sold them back for a quarter a ball—except for those Titleist balls, you know? Fucking dollar
per.
”
    “Not bad,” Elwin said, plucking the golfball from Christopher’s hand and inserting it into a fold he made with a skin-flap hanging from between the doe’s shoulder blades. “Hand me that other rope,” he said. After tying a slip knot, Elwin rung the nylon loop around the base of the skin covering the golfball, so that the ball was tucked inside the furry bulge, and tightened the knot. This would secure the deer’s skin to the rope so that they could peel it from the carcass with a single motorized pull. “Your turn,” he said to Christopher, tossing him the other end of the rope.
    “We found this ball once,” Christopher said, setting his beer on the rear fender so that he could tie the rope to the quad’s hitch. “Had Saddam Hussein’s face on it, right? The Iraq dude? And it said, ‘Slam Saddam.’ Fucking beautiful. I saved that one.”
    “Now let’s do this
quietly,
” Elwin said.
    Christopher tapped his bootheels together, saluted, then mounted the quad. “Yippee-ki-yi-yay, motherfucker,” he said, to nothing and no one in particular, before glugging down a long