Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [97]
"Anything else about the deer?"
"Nothing he hasn’t already told you," she said, and she hung up.
David Potter, with a third Martini in his otherwise empty stomach, stood in front of the auditorium and looked both ways for a deer.
"But our X-ray spectrogoniometer is sturdy, Dr. Potter," Stan Dunkel called to him from the auditorium steps.
Across the street was a patch of green, bordered by hedges. David pushed through the hedges into the outfield of a softball diamond. He crossed it and went behind the bleachers, where there was cool shade, and he sat down with his back to a wire-mesh fence which separated one end of the Works from a deep pine woods. There were two gates in the fence, but both were wired shut.
David was going to sit there for just a moment, long enough to get his nerve back, to take bearings. Maybe he could leave a message for Flammer, saying he’d suddenly fallen ill, which was essentially true, or—
"There he goes!" cried somebody from the other side of the diamond. There were gleeful cries, shouted orders, the sounds of men running.
A deer with broken antlers dashed under the bleachers, saw David, and ran frantically into the open again along the fence. He ran with a limp, and his reddish-brown coat was streaked with soot and grease.
"Easy now! Don’t rush him! Just keep him there. Shoot into the woods, not the Works."
David came out from under the bleachers to see a great semicircle of men, several ranks deep, closing in slowly on the corner of fence in which the deer was at bay. In the front rank were a dozen company policemen with drawn pistols. Other members of the posse carried sticks and rocks and lariats hastily fashioned from wire.
The deer pawed the grass, and bucked, and jerked its broken antlers in the direction of the crowd.
"Hold it!" shouted a familiar voice. A company limousine rumbled across the diamond to the back of the crowd. Leaning out of a window was Lou Flammer, David’s supervisor. "Don’t shoot until we get a picture of him alive," commanded Flammer. He pulled a photographer out of the limousine, and pushed him into the front rank.
Flammer saw David standing alone by the fence, his back to a gate. "Good boy, Potter," called Flammer. "Right on the ball! Photographer got lost, and I had to bring him here myself. "
The photographer fired his flash bulbs. The deer bucked and sprinted along the fence toward David. David unwired the, gate, opened it wide. A second later the deer’s white tail was flashing through the woods and gone.
The profound silence was broken first by the whistling of a switch engine and then by the click of a latch as David stepped into the woods and closed the gate behind him. He didn’t look back.
(1955)
THE LIE
IT WAS EARLY SPRINGTIME. Weak sunshine lay cold on old gray frost. Willow twigs against the sky showed the golden haze of fat catkins about to bloom. A black Rolls-Royce streaked up the Connecticut Turnpike from New York City. At the wheel was Ben Barkley, a black chauffeur.
"Keep it under the speed limit, Ben," said Doctor Remenzel. "I don’t care how ridiculous any speed limit seems, stay under it. No reason to rush—we have plenty of time."
Ben eased off on the throttle. "Seems like in the springtime she wants to get up and go," he said.
"Do what you can to keep her down—O.K.?" said the doctor.
"Yes, sir!" said Ben. He spoke in a lower voice to the thirteen-year-old boy who was riding beside him, to Eli Remenzel, the doctor’s son. "Ain’t just people and animals feel good in the springtime," he said to Eli. "Motors feel good too."
"Um," said Eli.
"Everything feel good," said Ben. "Don’t you feel good?"
"Sure, sure I feel good," said Eli emptily.
"Should feel good—going to that wonderful school," said Ben.
The wonderful school was the Whitehill School for Boys, a private preparatory school in North Marston, Massachusetts. That was where the