I once built a house out in the famous Texas Hill Country that people always rave about. Having driven all over Texas, I figured that The Hill Country was revered mostly because the rest of the state is so hideously ugly, that in comparison, some rolling hills with trees looked magical. 

It took a year to build it. I bunked in a 10 x 10 storage building behind where the house was being built, cooked in a microwave or on a camp stove, and showered in a copse of cedar trees where I had a hose with a spray head hung on a branch.

There were no laundry facilities on the property, so once every two weeks I would drive the 3 hour trip back to my house in Austin, do my laundry, deal with my mail, and buy some food, and then back out to Leakey and the house I was building.

It was kind of an idyllic year. I stargazed almost every night with the closest neighbor, Dave-the-neighbor, as I called him. He would run into the Quick Mart and buy a 12 pack of their cheapest beer, and wander over to the house, and we would sit on the porch and watch the constellations move across the sky until they went behind the mountain. And drink the 12 pack and talk about life. I would have one can, sometimes two, and he would finish the 12 pack.

After one of my trips to Austin to do my laundry, I was heading back out into the Hill Country early in the morning, to meet one of my subcontractors, and just coming out of Johnson City about 7am, going real slow because there were school kids waiting for the schoolbus at the end of their driveways.

As I passed a little motel, a deer, of which there are way too many here because we killed all their predators, leaped out from behind a big clump of Oleander and right into the left front corner of my truck. It smashed my headlight, crushed my front fender into the tire, and was knocked off its feet by the collision. 

I slammed on the brakes, and leaped out of my truck very angry at the deer’s effrontery, and looked at the damage. The fender was really crunched into the top of the tire, and the headlight was hanging down by the wires. The deer was laying on the road about 10 feet in front of me, stunned by the impact.

I dislike deer anyway because of how their years of overbreeding and large herds were damaging the fragile landscape. And because they are so dumb that leaping in front of traffic was a common thing. I often called them “cockroaches of the woods.” I looked at my messed up truck again, and back at the recumbent deer, and something just snapped in me.

I walked over to the deer, muttering curses at the damned thing, and hauled off and kicked the prostrate deer as hard as I could in the side, and shouted “You Motherf***er, look what your stupid ass did to my truck!” 

The deer got unconcernedly to its feet and ran across the road and off into the woods, apparently not hurt very much. I stomped back to my truck, and let out a few more expletives as with great effort I yanked my bent fender back up off the tire so I could continue on my way. 

As I got out a zip strip to anchor my busted headlight in place, I glanced up around me, and noticed the nearby groups of kids waiting for the bus were staring at me with stunned looks on their faces. Oops.

“Sorry!” I shouted to the kids, and cranked up the truck, and went on my way. As I drove out of town, I imagined some of the kids in the morning show-and-tell in class saying, “Teacher, while waiting for the bus today I saw a man jump out of his truck and kick a deer and call it a Motherf***er.”

Gotta watch that potty mouth.