Summer Stories 2025: ‘Hands’

We are packed four across the bench seat of OK Earl’s truck, shoulder to shoulder, the last of his hay bales loaded in back, when we come across a deer in a ditch along the forest service road.

“Poor girl.” Earl says. “Log truck must’ve hit her.” He sets the brake, and we all get out. Earl lumbers over and, using what he calls his OK hand, the one with only a thumb and index finger, Earl feels the doe’s neck and belly. We’re all afraid to ask how Earl lost them other fingers.

“Warm still,” Earl says. He straightens up. “Let’s dress her before the meat spoils.”

We all just stare.

“None of you ever field dressed a deer before?” He shakes his head like we just admitted not knowing how to use forks. “OK then.” Earl goes back to his truck and returns with a big buck skinner. Using his good hand, Earl draws the knife from its sheath. “Come on, ladies, gather ’round.”

I guess it’s him calling us ladies that gets Curtis ranting about drag queens.

“I seen one of them a month ago at the movies in Spokane,” Curtis says. “You know they let ’em read to kids in the library now?”

Curtis was the first hand hired. He was vaping outside the burned-out old gas station in Springdale when OK Earl stopped and asked if he wanted to make a hundred bucks in two days.

Curtis brought along his friend Doug, who we call Dough because he’s so soft. I was the third hand hired. It was my grandpa’s idea that I “put down the Switch and go learn something” from his old buddy, Earl. My grandpa has been raising my sister and me for three years now.

Dough and Curtis are both 17. I’m 16 and was a year behind them idiots in school.

Earl’s been ranching up here, on Rose Hill for, I don’t know, 50 years? Ever since he got out of the Navy. My grandpa says he had a wife for a while, but she died with their unborn on the way to the hospital in Chewelah. Ever since then, Earl has worked by himself, running that old swather and baler, crapping out his little 60-pound square hay bales, then picking them up by hand. The better ranches around here use them huge, 700-pound bales, and the fancy tractor spears to pick them up.

Earl’s old now – he’d be the first to admit it – which is why he needs what he calls “trailer-park hands” to help pick up the last of his August alfalfa and straw, before the weather turns.

Even now, I can smell rain on the wind.

“Who’d you say is reading to kids?” OK Earl props the deer against the side of the ditch so the blood will run downhill.

“Drag queens,” Curtis says.

“Like Shirley Muldowney?” asks Earl.

“Who?” says Dough.

“You don’t know Cha Cha Muldowney?” Earl shifts that big knife to his OK hand. “Only the greatest female drag racer of all time. At the ’82 NHRA finals at Raceway Park, I seen her outpoint both Don the Snake Prudhomme and Big Daddy Don Garlits.”

“No, Earl, not that kinda drag queen,” Dough said. “He means the men who dress up to look like sexy women.”

“Well, if they look sexy what’s the problem?”

“Ain’t natural!” Curtis says.

Earl laughs. “It’s probably the oldest thing they is, men dressing as women. In the Navy, we’d go ashore in Manila, or Sydney, buy dresses, and have beauty contests. I was runner up, Miss USS Coral Sea 1968. You wouldn’t know it, but I used to cut a fine figure.”

Dough and Curtis aren’t sure what to do with this bit of information. Earl probably weighs upwards of 250 now. “No, Earl, this is different,” Dough says. “They dress that way to trick you into sex.”

“That must be quite a trick,” Earl says. “You fall for that one a lot, do you, Dough? ‘Cause in the Navy, all you had to do was ask.”

This turn in the conversation is clearly unnerving Dough and Curtis. “I don’t think you get what we’re saying,” Curtis says.

“Yeah, the world’s gone crazy, Earl,” Dough says. “People say, ‘call me this or call me that,’ bunch of nonbinary crap. Hell, at the middle school, they’re letting ‘em pee in cat boxes.”

Earl squints. “Drag queens are peein’ in cat boxes?”

“No, the kids! I saw it on my mom’s Facebook page. The teachers let the kids pee in kitty litter, you know – if they identify as cats?”

“Well,” Earl says, “if they identify as cats, isn’t that where they should be peeing?”

Curtis and Dough are becoming outraged by Earl’s refusal to be outraged by their outrage.

I’ve had about enough of them. All three of us are technically drop-outs, so I suppose I got no standing to make fun of them, but I tell myself I left school out of boredom, whereas those two have been smoking themselves stupid since sixth grade.

“Don’t listen to them, Earl,” I say. “Nobody’s peeing in cat boxes.”

Curtis starts to say something about that, but then Earl makes the first cut on the deer, and after that, we all go silent.

Earl explains each step as he guts the animal, starting at its back legs, making a flat T-cut below the belly, guts blossoming out. He shows us how to keep from puncturing the stomach and bladder, and how to lift the skin and push the knife up and away from yourself.

As he moves up the torso it goes easier, like someone went and put a zipper in the animal.

“At this point, it gets messy,” Earl says, “no way around it,” and he reaches up into the chest cavity and cuts the esophagus. He yanks on the diaphragm and pull out a blob of bloody heart and lungs.

“There’s two ways to do the lower guts and that bit. Since we ain’t got a bone saw with us, you boys are gonna learn the hard way.”

We are silent as we watch him pull out the lower organs and toss them into the gully.

“Once you get through the hide,” Earl says, “you want to peel it all the way back, then start in on the muscle layer. You don’t want hair in the meat.”

I think it must change a person, watching a thing that was alive just a few hours ago get turned to food. I think about all my favorites – bacon cheeseburgers, chicken nuggets, pepperoni pizza – how everything good was at one time alive, running around free, thinking its animal thoughts, unable to comprehend that it can’t last forever.

Us, too, I suppose.

In fact, I don’t know how you could watch such a thing and not feel sympathy for every creature that ever lived, even Curtis and Dough.

It’s no wonder people become vegetarians.

I glance over at my fellow trailer-park ranch hands, wondering if they’re having the same reaction. But Curtis, for some reason, wants to return to the earlier topic: “But, Earl, tell me this: What would you do if one of them, like, ran track against your daughter?”

“Well.” Earl straightens up. “I suppose … I’d put my money on the deer.”

“No, not a deer! One of them boys that decides he wants to be a girl!”

“I thought you said they want to be cats.”

“Some of ‘em want to be cats! I’m talking about the ones that think they’re girls trapped in boys’ bodies.”

“Well, that sounds miserable.” Earl peels off his bloody gloves. “I guess I’d wonder … What business is it of mine?”

But Curtis won’t let it go. “Is that what you’d tell your daughter when she got beat in a race by a boy? That it wasn’t her business.”

I wonder if Earl is thinking about the baby he lost all those years ago, which, I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl. Instead, he says, “I’d tell her she was lucky the deer didn’t run, too.”

And that’s when Earl does the strangest thing. He looks at me, holds my eyes a moment and winks. And I realize OK Earl has been messing with us the whole time.

Curtis, though, won’t let it go: “Well, it ain’t fair is what I think!”

“No,” says OK Earl. “No, I suppose there ain’t anything about it that’s fair, Curtis.” At this, he lets out a sigh. “And I hate to be the one to break it to you, but most things aren’t.” He looks down at that skinned deer, lying next to the culvert along this dirt road. Then he looks straight up. The wind is rising, clouds piling up.

“OK, listen up,” he says, “all three of you.”

I’m a little put out that he’s included me with those two, but I guess what he sees is three dropouts, three ripe losers limping through the first quarter of life. And shoot, I can’t really argue the point.

Earl says: “Long as they get you worked up about these things that got nothing to do with you, you won’t see the big things that do. That’s how they want it. They’ll go on flying their private planes to Dubai with the money they stole from what should’ve been your college funds – while you play video games and smoke out in front of the grocery and keep your eyes open for pretty boys trying to trick you into sex.”

Earl gestures at the deer with his bad hand, and I see another advantage to missing three fingers. It’s easy to point things out.

“This here is what you three are – ignorant creatures got no idea about the machinery keeps running you down.”

At that, Earl looks sad. Maybe he feels run down by machinery too. Or maybe he can see by their faces that Dough and Curtis aren’t going to change their minds. About anything. Ever.

Maybe you can’t change minds. I don’t know.

But Earl looks back to the sky and takes a deep breath. Like he’s having a long drink of water after a hard day’s work. “Let’s get moving. Rain’s almost here.” He sheaths his knife. “There’s a tarp under the seat. Curtis, you and Dough wrap the carcass, bring it to the truck. I’ll butcher it back home.”

They go get the tarp and OK Earl looks over at me.

“What’d you think of last season?” he asks.

“What’s that?” I rub my blistered palms. Even with the gloves my grandpa gave me for my birthday, the strings on these hay bales have made rough work of my hands.

“‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’? Did you like Season 16? I ain’t watched the new one yet.”

I remember seeing the satellite dish at Earl’s place.

“It was pretty good,” I say. My sister and I watch that show. We’ve been catching our grandpa up on the old ones. “Not as good as Season 6.”

“No,” Earl agrees. “That was a good one. I wanted Adore Delano to win. You probably liked that Bianca Del Rio.”

I confess that I did.

“Yeah,” Earl says. “I hoped Adore would win when they brought her back for All-Stars. But it’s OK. Most of us ain’t built for winning.”

We watch Curtis and Dough pick up the skinned and gutted deer by its legs and lift it onto the tarp.

I used to believe that I was – built for winning – but now, I don’t know, maybe I’m not so sure.

“You know, I don’t blame you boys for being stupid.” Earl says, louder now, so all three of us can hear. “But remember, you don’t got to be. Least not forever.”

Dough and Curtis ignore this.

Me, I hope he’s right.

Those guys have reached the truck with the deer carcass. I climb on the back, move a few hay bales around, then help them slide the deer gently in, next to the stock racks.

We all get in the cab, the four of us packed shoulder to shoulder across the bench seat again. Then OK Earl drives us back to his place, the first drops of rain just beginning to smear the dirty windshield of that old truck.