His lower jaw bobs up and down as if it were timed to a metronome. He concentrates hard and presses the tiny buttons again, the hand that holds the remote rocking back and forth so bad he’s lucky he manages to hit even one of them. This time it takes us to the home shopping channel, where a woman extols the virtues of a gadget that scrambles your eggs inside the shell. All it is is a needle you jab into them, and it whirls their innards around.
“Then just crack the egg right over your preheated nonstick pan!” she exclaims. “Instant scrambled eggs!”
He hurls the remote across the room. It hits the wall so hard the battery compartment breaks open and the batteries jump out. They roll loud across the floor. He stares at his palms, turned up in submission like dogs’ pale, tender bellies.
Real slow and deliberate, just in case he might miss it, I pick up the remote with my brand-new mechanical arm, a long plastic stick with pincers on one end and a trigger on the other so you don’t have to bend down or reach up to grab a thing, carry it to the trash can, and drop it in. He sticks a toothpick in his mouth, so it’ll look like he means to chew, and sits there with his arms crossed, hands clamped tight in his armpits.
I hold the new remote out, right in front of him, turn to the court channel, and look real pleasantly surprised at how easy it was. The police are holding the mother in custody now. There’s footage of them ushering her into the police station, while she holds a ragged teddy bear in front of her face so the cameras can’t catch it.
He goes to the bedroom and closes the door.
He doesn’t get up for dinner, or to use the bathroom, or to watch the news. He’s still lying there when I wake up in the morning, so silent and still that for a second, before I hear the heavy rasp of his breath, I think he’s dead. I open the blinds so the morning light slashes his eyes. He turns his back to it.
At lunch, I shake his shoulder and tell him it’s time to eat. I set his medicine and a bowl of peach cobbler on the nightstand beside him.
“I’m too tired,” he says.
“That’s because you’re not eating. You need to eat.”
“I’m too tired to eat,” he says.
After I’ve cleaned the kitchen, I perch next to him, on the very edge of the bed. He’s facing away from me. His ice cream’s all melted, just some peaches and crust floating in a pool of cream and sugary ooze.
“Are you feeling all right?” I say. He doesn’t answer, doesn’t stir. His breathing is slow, with a sudden, sharp exhalation at the very end of each breath, the way it is when he sleeps. But he could be pretending. I put my hand on his arm. He doesn’t pull it away, and he doesn’t roll toward me. I shake him.
“I feel fine,” he says.
“You’ve got to get up.”
“Why? I can’t do nothing.”
“Can’t do anything. Can’t do nothing means you—”
“I’m worn out,” he says, with such resignation I almost believe him. “I need to rest. The doctor said so.”
“All you’ve done all day is rest.”
“I’m tired.”
“No, you’re not. You’re just doing this to get back at me. And you’ve succeeded in making me miserable and worried sick for the past twenty-four hours, so you may as well pat yourself on the back and get out of bed. Mission accomplished. Job well done. Use whatever remote you please.”
“Tell me one thing I’ve got to get out of bed for,” he says.
“To keep your muscles working. Before they atrophy.”
“Tell me one thing I’ve got to get out of bed for.”
He waits for me to come up with a reason. In the hall, the clock chimes the half hour in hollow, brassy tones. I hardly even hear it anymore.
“I’m just trying to keep you around,” I say. “That’s all.”
He tugs the sheet out from under me and pulls it up to his chin. I take his bowl back to the kitchen, scoop the wasted food into the trash, and load up the dishwasher.
Fifteen minutes later, the mattress springs groan as he slowly gets out of bed. All the energy his weight’s coiled inside them unwinds and is gone, flung out in little bits of imperceptible heat that dissipate into the general coldness of all things. He walks into the hallway, his hair stuck out in all directions in damp, quivering shocks. Outside, squirrels rip the shriveled tomatoes from his vines; the land rises up quick in dandelions and stars-of-Bethlehem. His feet whisper across the floor as he makes his way to the bathroom, does his business, and goes right back to bed.
SIX
He came to the shop late, later than usual, sweaty and flushed and out of breath. I was at the counter, measuring a whitetail buck some yokel had driven over with his car and dragged straight there behind it, as proud as if he’d killed it with his bare hands, when Frank shouldered his way through the door. He smiled when he saw me, sweat running down his face. His nose and cheeks were sunburnt just the faintest pink, so he looked perpetually embarrassed. It drove me a little wild.
“Did you run the whole way here?” I said.
“Just wanted to stretch my legs a bit.” He looked all around the showroom, as if making sure nobody was hiding in the corners. He seemed strange, exhausted and frenetic at the same time, and distracted. He’d got a job painting houses for the summer, so he wouldn’t have to bus quite as many tables in the campus dining room when school started in the fall, and he was plainly fatigued from twelve hours in the sun, but he kept bouncing on the balls of his feet like a child who’d been cooped inside all the glorious, free summer day, even after he folded his arms on the counter and peered with evident sorrow into the huge, ragged slash down the deer’s belly where the yokel had tried to dress it, stretched and torn in spots as if the knife had run into resistance and he’d just gone ahead and used it as a crowbar, pried the deer open and pried him out—intestines and stomach, heart and lungs—into a glistening heap on the side of the road. His entire midsection was crumpled, the tire track smudged black across his snapped ribs, shattered glass glinting and ground into his fur. Frank ran a hand along his back, the skin torn away in some spots, rubbed bald and caked with gravel dust in the rest, as if to comfort him. He never could bear to see an animal hurt, sat on that counter with his legs swinging over the floor and wept the night he drove over a cat on his way to the shop and saw it rolling all around twitching in his rearview mirror, sat there and wept and made me walk down the road with my skinning knife to put the thing out of its misery. He always was the kinder of us. I never had the patience.
“That idiot thought he could still get a full-body mount out of this thing,” I said. “‘Raised up on his hindquarters and ready to leap. Just like the Good Lord made him.’ We’ll be lucky if I can salvage him a shoulder mount.”
The antlers were wide and budding, still covered in gray velvet. The man had chained him by the neck and hooked the chain to his back bumper to keep them off the ground, keep them from tearing. When you squeezed them, you could feel through all the blood and soft tissue only the thinnest sliver of bone compressed at the core, barely begun to harden.
“And of course,” I said, “of course he wants to keep the antlers. In June.”
Frank nodded. The bell over the door rattled faintly from the tapping of his foot.
“I need to get the hide off,” I said. “Before he spoils.” Already he was beginning to smell, with death’s particular scent of sweetness allowed too much of itself, of fruit grown so tender and ripe it’s split wide open and leaked out, liquid. I dragged him onto a rolling cart a couple inches shorter than the counter. The impact threw a cloud of gnats up from the gash, spreading outward for a brief moment before drawing themselves back downward, inward, to hide under the skin.
“Can I stay?” Frank said. He was studying the edge of the counter.
The eight o’clock train from Atlanta rumbled into the depot, trembling the floors with its cars full of hoboes and grain, flapping the pheasants’ wings against the wall. I’d never let anyone watch, not even the dumb, earnest tee
nage boys with sunburnt necks who came in wanting to learn. Not even the handsomest of them.
“Only if you relax,” I said. “You’re making me anxious.”
He followed me into my workshop. It was about the size his shed is, cluttered and close and hot, even with all the windows open and the fans going. He had to squeeze his way between the big tubs of arsenic along the wall, dissolving inside them the living tissue from the skins of the dead, and the armatures of deer, their wooden bones awaiting wound excelsior muscle, grazing among the split and scattered pieces of the plaster mold of a mountain lion I was doing for the Natural Science Museum down in Raleigh—legs halved lengthwise, belly sawn from back—shellacked and waiting to shape the layers of burlap and plaster and window-screen mesh into the form that would finally hold the skin.
I stacked the deer’s hind ankles and pounded a nail through the bones. The knives on the table rattled and bounced. Frank shoved his hands in his pockets. He looked oversized and oafish standing there, the air and the quiet too thick to permit space for him, like he’d shouldered his way into it and now found himself wedged too tight.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“You’re acting strange.”
“How?”
“You’re being quiet.”
I pried the nail free. Frank pretended to be deeply engrossed in the novelty squirrels drying in whimsical tableaux upon the shelves: a squirrel orchestra, seated in tuxedos and playing tiny violins I’d carved from balsam; hayseed squirrels in overalls and no shirts lounging down by a blue-glass fishing hole, slender bamboo poles held in their curled toes, chewing blades of grass; a turn-of-the-century squirrel couple out courting, the young squirrel lady dressed in the finest tulle I could sew, a white lace parasol balanced in the crook of her arm, while her monocled squirrel beau lifted his dandy cane in greeting to some invisible squirrel passersby.
I always hated those things myself. Their hands, their fingers, always bothered me. They looked downright human, with their sharp little nails, greedy and grasping. But they sold like you wouldn’t believe.
“You never talk about your family,” Frank said. “Your life before—all this.”
“No,” I said, and started working a hook, on the end of a rope that ran up to a pulley I’d rigged on the ceiling, through the hole the nail had left behind. “I don’t.”
“Did you—do you have brothers or sisters?” He tried to sound real casual, as if he thought I might not catch his line of questioning.
I shook my head and yanked the hook, hard, to make sure the bone wouldn’t split.
“What about your parents?” he said.
“What about them?”
“I don’t know. Are they living?”
“I expect they are.”
“Expect?”
“I was sixteen the last time I saw them.”
“Oh.” He nodded several times, as if I was still talking and he was thoughtfully agreeing with each thing I said. I hauled down on the loose end of the rope. The stag’s crushed ribs crackled as the cut along his belly pulled open and pulled them apart. Inside, the empty cavern of his chest was dark and dripping. Frank pulled his shirt over his nose.
“Don’t look so astounded,” I said, between tugs of the rope. “Living things are disgusting.”
“You mean dead things?” His voice was muffled by the fabric. The deer’s head swayed at my chest. His knees tapped the edge of the table.
“The difference,” I said, tying the rope to its anchor on the wall, “isn’t very great.”
With a sewing needle I pricked the rounded tips of each antler, then clamped my thumb and forefinger around the burr in a collar I pulled tight along the length of the beam and down each tine, squeezing the soft tissue tight. Frank pressed close beside me, watching over my shoulder as little spots of blood bloomed on the tip of each branch, swelled, and ran together into a trickle that fell and splattered on the tile, spotting the toes of his boots. I wiped the blood from the soft fur—it was almost iridescent—and felt through the shriveled, empty tissue for the resistance of an artery, through the wall of which I eased the tip of a syringe and pumped it with formaldehyde till the antler was plump again, the artery turgid beneath the velvet. I squeezed that out, too, then filled it and emptied it, over and over, until the fluid ran clear.
It was too early in the summer, the tissue too young and unformed. In a few weeks it would shrivel and flake away, unravel the barely-knit bone inside, and the yokel would come in complaining until I replaced them with a salvaged rack, even though I’d already told him I couldn’t save them. But I wanted Frank to think I could. I wanted him to think I could work magic, that I could resurrect the dead.
I dipped the syringe into the jar of formaldehyde, and, as I pulled back the stopper, my elbow brushed the loose fabric of his shirt, hanging away from his stomach as he leaned forward. I could feel him beside me, how rigid he held himself, the tension in his muscles it took to keep from backing away. He felt like an aching knot, a sore spot in the air. In a wide-mouthed jar on the next table, scavenger beetles filigreed the flesh from a copperhead’s skeleton, stripping it clean and fine as the bared veins their herbivorous cousins leave quivering on the branch. I eased the needle into each artery and filled it one last time, slowly, watching the wrinkles as they filled and flattened, until the antler was heavy and swollen and taut, straining to hold itself in.
“What happened?” he said. “To your family?”
I slipped the curved tip of my knife under the soft, white fur of the stag’s chest, right at the bottom of his breastbone, and drew it in a circle over the shoulders. The skin split apart easy and clean. Didn’t even try to hold itself whole.
“I left,” I said. “Lived in boarding houses for a while. Sometimes I lived nowhere. Mounted what trophies I could, worked odd jobs while I saved up money, kept it all in a wad in my boot, that kind of thing. It’s a bleak tale. Which is why I never tell it.”
“Sixteen sounds awful young to make a decision like that.” The very idea of it was impossible to him.
“I didn’t have much choice.”
“Why not?”
I had to be sure, absolutely sure. I knew, by then, what happened when you weren’t.
“It turned out,” I said, working hard to keep my hands steady, “I wasn’t any of the things my parents wanted me to be.”
I opened a line along the spine, up to the base of the skull, forked the cut, and drew a branch to each antler; I peeled an edge of fur back from the shoulder blades. The skin was cool, but underneath it the buck had just the last little bit of warmth left.
“We’re all disappointments,” Frank said. “In one way or another.”
“Not like this.”
He watched me, waiting for some explanation. There was a sort of desperate brightness in his eyes, a restlessness, something of the wild and starving dog that keeps moving, pacing, to stave off the pangs of his hunger. The back of his hand was streaked with white paint. I took it wide and cool and trembling in mine; I slid his fingers into the cut. I thought it would tell him, somehow, all the things I couldn’t say: my mother’s magnolia perfume exuding from behind the heavy folds of her dress, so thick and sweet it made me sick to be close to her for too long, the dark shine of my father’s hair, with its sharp part, shellacked so tightly to his skull he might as well have been bald, the bump and jostle as he drove us swerving over the dirt road, late at night, from one of their endless parties, the two of them drunk and laughing and leaning together as they stumbled onto the porch; the way, as a boy, I’d felt the passage of time with an acute pain, nostalgic for afternoons when I was happy, for beautiful spring evenings full of warm, wild wind, before they were even over, so that I’d start to cry in the middle of running through the grass with my cousins because I knew it would be over so soon, the way, when I was ten years old and the first booklet of the Northwestern School of Taxidermy’s nine-part correspondence course arrived in t
he mail, its thin pages, with their arcane diagrams and alchemical formulae, seemed so grave and profound, so full of the power to make the world finally stop for a moment, to stay as it was, that I carried it with me everywhere, though it was years before I was brave enough to try even the simplest of its rituals, my mother’s voice murmuring though the wall as she suggested hopefully to my father that this might, after all, be a marvelous introduction to the art of medicine; all the plans they’d had for me, and the way I felt those plans torn away late one summer afternoon when I was fourteen as my friend Paul pulled his sweaty, dirt-streaked shirt over his head after an early-evening pickup game of baseball, and how I stood alone that night on the bridge where the Neuse and Trent Rivers joined, the setting sun reflected red on their waters so they looked like a branched vein rushing toward the sea’s frantic, troubled heart, and thought about his skinny, bare chest, and about how easy it would be to fall: how quickly the water would draw you into itself, how one good breath would draw it into you; how many years after that I had been, in one way or another, alone.
Down there by the shoulders, where the skin’s good and thick, it comes off easy, cleaner than you’d peel an orange. You don’t even need a knife. Frank’s whole arm was rigid and shaking as I worked our hands under the skin, gnats swarming at our wrists, and pressed his palm to the muscle of the shoulder, so he could feel its cabled fibers, its radiant, diminishing warmth. His fingers stayed stiff a long time before they relaxed and cupped the shoulder’s curve. I covered them with mine.
The further up we went, along the smooth length of the neck, the thinner the skin became, and the more tightly it clung to the body. The membrane that joined it to the muscle snapped across our nails and wedged tight beneath them. I watched our fingers creep under it, a little bit at a time, along the warm, slick neck, all the way to the top of the spine, nearly to the skull, until the skin was so delicate and married to the muscle we could see it stretch across our fingertips, the hairs that covered it spreading apart to show the pale hide underneath. Frank’s breath whistled in his nostrils. He looked like he was going to be sick. If we pushed any further, our fingers would tear through, out into the cold, thin air.
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