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going down.”
    I didn’t usually like butchering the animals Dad brought home, although I liked eating them well enough. The guts and all the really sick shit had already been taken care of, but I hated the blood stink that lingered on my skin for hours after we were through cutting and wrapping the meat.
    Still, Dad was pleased when I did stuff with him like that, just us men, and I was hoping that by the time we’d finished, he’d have forgotten about that blowhard Tom Biedermann, and wouldn’t do anything crazy.
    Not that my dad was crazy. Sometimes, though, he could
act
kind of crazy.
    Dad stared at me a long minute without saying a thing, the way he had at Mr. Biedermann, until I grinned widely out of nerves, then he turned on his heel, muttering something about “an eggsuck dog” and stalked off to his shed where there was a big chest freezer and the bench where Dad would butcher his kill.
    I figured that Dad was set to shrug off what Mr. Biedermann had said, and the worried knot in my chest loosened up some.
    By the time I’d pulled on my Converse and made it out the back door, Dad was already leaving the shed, and I got a real bad feeling when I saw the big Poulan chainsaw in his hands.
    Dad hauled the whitetail down off the flatbed without waiting for me to help him. Instead of taking it back to the shed, he dragged it around the side of our house where the Biedermann’s lounge windows overlooked the scrubby strip of yard there. I caught up to him just as he started up the chainsaw.
    Mrs. Biedermann stood in the window, her face white and angry. Mr. Biedermann appeared at her shoulder, his skinny rabbit’s face all blotchy with rage.
    “Dad, come on now, this isn’t such a good idea.” I was trying to speak calmly, which is a hard thing to do over the noise of a chainsaw, and it didn’t do a lick of good anyway, because Dad set right to work cutting up that deer. He didn’t do it neatly, with the purpose of separating the meat into cuts, he just laid into it like the animal had done him wrong.
    He cut off the legs and tossed them aside, where they lay scattered on the lawn like yard sticks.
    “Come on Dad,” I tried again. In truth, I was scared.
    Dad, the fence, and the side of the house were soon covered in a sick mist of gore and deer hide. He sliced almost at random into the body, little shreds of fur and meat flying, the chainsaw groaning and coughing smoke when it hit bone, until what had once been a good kill was just a vaguely animal-shaped heap of hide and blood and bone.
    Finally he cut off the doe’s head, which was missing an ear and most of the flesh of the left side of its face, and set it on top of the woodpile, where it was the ideal height to stare right in through the Biedermann’s window.
    “Come on, Dad,” I tried again, but my sentence was cut off by the crunch of car tires on gravel, and when I looked up, a cop car pulled in front of the house.
    Lou Carrigan, a good pal of my dad’s, climbed out of the cruiser. His presence made me feel a little better, but not much.
    All around us, curtains twitched in windows as the neighbors gawked. I felt my face going red, and hoped Dad wouldn’t notice.
    “Hey there, Carl, what’s this about?” asked Lou, taking in the scene as if it were no big deal to scatter deer parts all around your yard.
    “That asshole, Biedermann,” muttered Dad, “told me to get rid of it. So I did. I work hard all week, Lou. Can’t a man bring home food for his family without some snot-nose prying into his business?”
    “Sure, Carl,” said Lou, “but you’re upsetting the kiddies.”
    “That professor is ruining them kiddies,” shouted Dad. A little scrap of bloody deer hide drooped above his eye like an extra eyebrow and gave him a mournful sort of expression. He was out of breath from wielding the chainsaw, and looked so tired and old that I felt ashamed of him, then ashamed of myself for feeling that way.
    “I guess I raised
my
boy right.