The Killer Returns

My name is John Deer, and before you ask, no, I am not the tractor guy. I am a CSI agent for the St. Louis department, and what I am about to tell you is the story of my life. It starts the way most stories do, at the very beginning, which in my case was September 11, 1980, on a Tuesday afternoon that nobody in my family seemed fully prepared for.

My father, Drake Deer, was sitting in the living room when my mother, April, first felt the contractions. The Brady Bunch was on, and from what my mother told me years later, Drake was so locked into that television set that a marching band could have walked through the front door and he would not have blinked. April stood in the kitchen doorway holding her stomach, telling him it was time, and Drake held up one finger without even turning around.

"Just give me two more minutes, April. Jan is about to tell Marcia something important."

April told him that Jan and Marcia could figure it out on their own, because she was in labor. That got Drake off the couch fast enough. He grabbed his keys, his jacket, and his wallet, kissed April on the cheek, and ran straight out to the car. It took him a full minute sitting behind the wheel before he realized he had left his pregnant wife standing in the kitchen doorway. He came back in, helped April to the car, and they were on their way to the hospital.

My grandparents, Doris and James Dickowski, were supposed to meet them there. They were almost late because of James, which was not a surprise to anyone in the family. Doris had been standing by the front door with her purse and her coat on for twenty minutes before James finally came out of the bathroom.

"James, what on earth were you doing in there?" Doris asked him as he came down the hallway.

"Doris, a man needs his time," James told her. "You cannot rush these things."

"Your daughter is having a baby and you are in there reading the newspaper." She shook her head and walked out to the car.

They made it to the hospital, and I was born at noon on the dot. Drake said I came into the world loud and ready, which he took as a good sign. They named me John, after my father Drake's middle name and my grandfather James's father, whose name was also John. So there I was, brand new and already carrying a name with history behind it.

When the family brought me home, the nursery was not quite finished. Drake had been meaning to get the second coat of paint on the walls for two weeks, and the crib was assembled but missing one of the side rails, which Drake had lost somewhere between the garage and the bedroom. He found it eventually, behind the water heater. April did not find that particularly funny at the time.

The first few nights were hard on everyone, especially Drake. He was not what you would call a natural with the nighttime feedings. He would stumble into the nursery half asleep, pick me up the wrong way, and spend ten minutes trying to figure out which end of the bottle was which. April watched this from the doorway more than once and decided it was faster to just handle it herself.

But there was one thing Drake did right, even if nobody in the family would ever let him forget how badly he did it. Some nights, when I would not settle down, he would try to sing to me. The problem was that Drake Deer could not carry a tune to save his life. Doris once said that his singing sounded like a screen door in a windstorm, and James agreed without being asked.

April was different. She would hold me close in the rocking chair by the window, and she would sing a song called "In the Hush of Night's," soft and slow, until I stopped fussing and went still. Her voice was steady and warm, and it filled that little nursery the way nothing else did. Drake would lean against the doorframe listening, and even he knew better than to open his mouth when April was singing.

That was how it started. A Tuesday, a television show, a father who ran to the car without his wife, and a mother who could quiet the whole room just by singing. That was the beginning of John Deer.