The Deerslayer

He was always a quiet man, his neighbours said, kept himself to himself, even when he came home with blood on his fender.

'Hit a deer,' he said.

In the dark and the fog at fifty miles an hour, what jumps out into the road? The flash of it in the headlights registers less than a second before it hits. It is all noises, the thud and shudder as it passes beneath the wheels, the screech of tyres, and then, and forever, the engine idling alone on the highway. The only sound for miles and miles.

The hit and run made the local papers, young boy dead, and curtains twitched as he pulled his car straight into the garage every night after.

'I hit a deer,' he said as he cleaned the dented car on Saturday morning, the day it was due for the body shop. The bucket of soapy water steaming on the driveway and his words coming out in thick clouds of condensation. 'I saw it, it was a deer.'

Still they whisper. 'He never parks on the street,' they say, 'goes straight indoors. Never stops to talk, keeps himself to himself.'

A squad car drove him home, two officers looking in the garage while he stamped his feet and glanced up and down the road. He turned himself in, they say.

'I thought it was a deer,' he said at the station, 'I genuinely thought it was a deer. Really, I genuinely believed it was a deer.'