To Skin a Cat

by Thomas McGuane

  “Eight hours from now,” said Dr. Dahlstrom, “I’ll be dropping gallstones in a porcelain pan. I can’t deal with this.”

  “You know what I’m in a mood for?” said Melanie. “A diner. Some ham and eggs. The night shift. Neon.”

  “That is Melanie,” said Dahlstrom. “That is her magic.”

  “I’m going to let those dishes sit till morning,” said Betty, apparently overfaced by the magic of Melanie. Conversation trailed off; a car started up; things in the foreground seemed impossible to notice.

  Jack wandered over to the bar and made himself a nightcap. He was already in a cloud. Betty went up the stairs and Jack slumped in the peculiar apelike repose produced by patent recliner chairs. But there was a slumberous burn still in his eyes. When Iris came down the stairs in her robe to get some ice cream, Jack smiled at her and kept smiling, finally smiling to himself. The burn went out of his eyes as the sweet sound of the scoop in the ice-cream container reached his ears.

  “Daddy,” said Iris, “I know this isn’t what you wanted to happen.” She stopped to think. She was comfortable with Jack. “I realize … my condition. But me, so long as it’s healthy, at this point I don’t care. It did occur. I’m the first to admit that. But aren’t we trying to pretend that all this will go away here at the lake? Daddy?”

  Jack unfortunately was sound asleep. Among the key effects Betty brought to the lake was Jack’s stadium blanket in blue and maize, his school colors. Iris covered him with it, knowing he had to work tomorrow and needed his rest. With the ice cream in one hand, she reached the stairs and turned out the light.

  Passing time was a kind of sedative for Betty and Iris. They became like old friends, the kind who can’t leave each other on deathbeds. When Jack came home at night he thought they were babbling, and sometimes there was a genuine issue: Iris still wanted the baby; then Betty wanted the baby because of the one she had lost through her ectopic pregnancy; then Betty and Iris thought they could team up and raise the baby. Under the last plan, Jack would have to move out. Even Jack thought so.

  They lay out on the lawn with bright tanning reflectors under their chins; they were stretched on lawn chairs; and the heat, the big midwestern heat, was everywhere.

  “I realize this is crazy,” said Betty. “Sunbathing will make an old bag out of you in a New York minute.”

  “Did you ever get the name of this lake?” Iris asked.

  “Don’t move your head when you talk, Iris! You’re blinding me!”

  “All right.”

  “I don’t know, Lake Polliwog or some fool thing. Don’t you wonder what’s going on at home? I see grass growing knee high. I see four feet of morning papers on the porch; a storm door slams back and forth in the wind. Maybe the fire department broke in looking for bodies and stole my silver. The TV we left on to discourage burglars has become some kind of haunted Magnavox. It’s awful what your mind will do to you. We never got around to putting a decal on the picture window, so the birds with broken necks have gone on piling up. Life just rushes at you and the birds keep dying.”

  “My feet are swollen.”

  “This happens.”

  “And my fingers too.”

  “Mm-hm,” said Betty.

  Iris held her hands up in the glare and examined their watery thickness. “I could go for a foreign film right now,” she said. “In the picture this girl is pregnant. Out of wedlock in Italy. It’s a spa, and Marcello Mastroianni is careless about cigarettes and their effect on the unborn. The spa carries extremely complicated pastries which resemble pretzels. There’s a bilingual midwife, and all the cars are low-slung. Sometimes the girl rides in the cars with Mastroianni. Sometimes they pass the evenings playing chess, which they call ‘shess.’ The girl only knows how to play checkers, which they call ‘sheckers.’ When she says ‘king me,’ they are pleasant about it and give the girl soda water, a ring, a buncha stuff. Finally the baby is born, so pink, so perfect and all. They call a wet nurse from the village but the baby won’t have a thing to do with this stranger. The baby returns to the girl … by suction.”

  “Iris, that’s impossible. A baby can’t fly through the air by suction.”

  “Mom, it’s a movie.”

  “What about Marcello Mastroianni? Does he get around by suction too? When your father was courting me, it was like a real movie. He lived in a boardinghouse. The lady who ran the place raised enormous Belgian hares. And when the lady slept, the Belgian hares guarded the stairs. They had two big teeth in front, and if you didn’t go up the stairs in a slow and dignified fashion, one of those huge rabbits would have you by the leg like that!”

  “What were you doing up the stairs of Dad’s boardinghouse?”

  “Not what you think, young lady.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Silence; then Betty said, “I’m not going to let this pass.”

  “So don’t.”

  “I’m terribly afraid that you have confused my morals with your own.”

  “What a lovely remark,” said Iris in a broken voice.

  “The truth shall set ye free.”

  “You bitch.”

  The two were now sitting up, reflectored heads facing each other like two nodding, miserable sunflowers.

  “You won’t hear this child calling you what you called me,” said Betty. “You won’t hear it call you anything.”

  Betty had always enjoyed her cocktails, but she never drank in the daytime. That changed. It didn’t make her sentimental or angry or any of the usual things. It just sped her up. She didn’t drink that much, but it was enough to get her darting around and creating an atomosphere of emergency.

  One unseasonably cold afternoon, Iris sat dog-earing a paperback with the glass porch doors closed and the oven door open to supplement the baseboard electric heating. Betty was coasting past the windows about the time Jack was expected. Suddenly, she froze in place.

  “Here comes your father followed by Sid Katzendorf in a Cadillac! It’s the low-mileage Eldo!”

  When Jack came in, he was equally excited. Even Iris felt the desperation in this; there had never before been any conversation about Cadillacs. It was just desperate.

  “A beauty,” Jack said, “and it’s loaded. But let’s don’t rush. You drive it. Try it in a few spots, the freeway, here in the neighborhood. At first it seems like the Queen Mary, but you’ll get the hang of it. If you like it, tell Sid to mark it sold. We can swallow the tab. I’ll spare you the details. Try the factory air.”

  When Betty went out the door, things calmed down. Jack had bought Iris a Swiss Army knife, the one that must weigh a pound, and she immediately treasured it. Then they had some orange juice. It almost seemed as if the Cadillac were a decoy. Iris thought Jack loved her.

  “Iris,” he said, “you’re going to survive all this. You’re going to finish school. You’re going to go to college. If that Polack and his squashed hand don’t take my company away from me, I’ll give it all to you. How’s that sound?”

  “It sounds wonderful.”

  Jack hugged Iris and said, “Then I’ll never lose you.”

  The whole house seemed to go quiet. Iris marked her place and put the book aside. She opened and closed each blade and implement of the knife. He loves me very much, she thought. The evening sun got under the clouds and began to suggest a normal summer evening. The door burst open and Betty ran in, struggling for composure. When she spoke, her voice was tragic and bore the keening finality of a summing up. She quit talking like Massachusetts.

  “We’re going along the freeway. I see this other Cadillac but it’s a two-tone. I’m sitting there trying to think which I like better. Obviously, the driver of the other Caddy is having the exact same thought. We get real close and head for the identical off-ramp. Suddenly it looks like we’ll collide. I swerve. I crash into a jalopy. The jalopy takes off.”

  “That’s it?” said Jack.

  “That’s it.”

  “Where’s Sid?”

 
; “Sid has gone.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He stared at me and said, ‘You own it.’ ”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Whatever happened to us, Jack. Whatever happened to our luck?” She keened like her own mother out east.

  “Is that a question?”

  Iris was free to assume what she had brought upon them.

  About halfway through the last month of Iris’s pregnancy, the adoptive parents came by to meet her.

  Betty did it up as an occasion with fresh flowers on the end tables. Jack checked his watch, shot his cuffs, looked out the window at rapid intervals. Iris had been dressed in high-octane maternity clothes: a conical navy blue dress with a whimsical, polka-dotted, droopy bow tie.

  At the very moment of the Anses’ arrival, Jack seemed to panic. He was frozen in the hallway babbling in a low voice. “They can’t find the door. They’re gonna walk into the lake!” He started to call out in a high, tinny voice, projecting crazy merriness. “Back there! Right where you parked! You missed it! You missed … the front door!”

  “Iris!” said Betty. “Animate yourself!”

  They finally came inside and the introductions were achieved as the judge looked carefully at everyone, settling finally on Iris, whom he examined at length until she said, “Don’t look at me like I was a horse.” But the judge took it well and said this was a happy day in their lives. Judge Anse and his wife, Mona, were a couple in their fifties. Judge Anse seemed unable to leave his judicial air at home and put a considerate pause before each remark, a pause that left one feeling scrutinized. His wife looked very scrutinized. It was easy to think that her desire for a baby was all she had left.

  “We had a baby once,” said Mrs. Anse without varying the tone of her voice. “We had it such a short time we didn’t have time to name it. It appeared in the obituary as Baby Anse, comma, girl.”

  “Are you familiar with ectopic pregnancy?” asked Betty of no one in particular.

  “Is it a problem?” said Judge Anse.

  “You can say that again.”

  “Nothing she’s got, I hope,” said the judge, jerking his thick head toward Iris.

  “No, it’s something I had,” said Betty.

  “Oh.”

  Judge Anse said he worked hard and there was no estate, no one to leave it all to and we can’t live forever. That seemed to anger him and he used off-color language. He asked the present company to excuse his French. Iris sat blankly in the middle of a discussion of what a difficult age it was for raising children. It was hard to tell whether this was a reference to Iris or to the age in which the baby would live. But it must have been the latter because Jack said conclusively that the country had nowhere to go but up.

  Mrs. Anse kept a level gaze throughout this directed upon Iris. Iris felt this gaze and was ready for anything. When Mrs. Anse smiled and asked her question, Iris was ready. “What was the young fellow like?” she inquired.

  “A real gorilla.”

  “Have we mentioned Iris’s grades?” Betty asked. “Straight A’s.”

  “You know,” said Mona Anse in a cracking voice, “the agencies wouldn’t talk to us. They told us we were too old.”

  “That’s not exactly true,” said the judge patiently.

  “It is for a Caucasian baby. Old. That’s all we heard. We heard it from the state, from the Lutherans, from the Catholics. Old. People suggested every crazy thing you can imagine: midgets, pinheads, boat people. I may be old but I won’t be taken advantage of.” The judge rested his hand on the back of his wife’s.

  “Let ’em whine,” said Jack to the empty middle of the room. “They’re getting a bargain.”

  Two days later, Iris found out how they met Judge Anse.

  “Your father is being sued by a man at the plant who lost something in a machine,” said Betty, blandly.

  “Lost something?” said Iris. “What?”

  “A limb.”

  “What’s that have to do with me?”

  “That’s how we got to meet Judge Anse. He’s hearing the case.”

  Iris thought for a moment and said, “You sold the baby.” It wasn’t an accusation.

  The night the contractions began, the whole thing almost fell apart. Iris bolted and was found two hours later hiding in a boathouse clear on the other side of the lake. By the time they got her back to the house, Betty was behind with the buffet. Somehow, everything went back into place, and by the time Judge and Mrs. Anse and Dr. Dahlstrom arrived, Iris was secured upstairs. Supplies were laid out. Dahlstrom had been playing golf, and Jack had to lend him some carpet slippers to keep him from marking up the floor with his cleats.

  “What are you hoping for?” asked Dahlstrom.

  “We don’t care as long as it’s got five of everything,” said the judge. Dahlstrom made a Dagwood sandwich. Betty went up and down the stairs at frequent intervals. Jack seemed edgy but remarked that the leading indicators were up.

  Dr. Dahlstrom was balancing his sandwich on one palm and building with the other, when Betty came down and said, “Delwyn, now.”

  “Hold your horses.”

  “I can hold mine but I can’t hold hers.”

  “Betty, do me a favor and wait for the pretty part.”

  Betty came back downstairs and sat while Dahlstrom ate his sandwich, holding it between bites in front of his admiring gaze like a ship model. When he finished, he said, “And now the good doctor will work his magic. You people pace and wring your hands, whatever blows your hair back.” And he went up the stairs.

  There was no way to disguise the waiting. Betty mentioned a Big Band Era retrospective on FM but got no response. Everyone was quiet, but Jack seemed to be smoldering. He slumped down inside his suit coat and stared. After a while, he said, “A good deal was had by all.” This was not lost on Mrs. Anse.

  “To whom do you think you are speaking?” she asked, simultaneously with a moan from the second floor.

  “Simmer down, Mona,” said Jack. “Simmer down.”

  “I don’t want this ruined.”

  “Try the salad. Betty used walnut oil.”

  “This end is well done,” said Betty pointing at the roast. “You can see the rare from where you are.”

  “You’d think I’d feel young tonight. But I don’t. I wonder why?” asked the judge.

  “Have you tried Grecian Formula Nine?” asked Jack.

  “You’re a crumb,” said the judge. “You’re an insufferable crumb.”

  “And why not?” Jack flared. “I’m about to become a grandfather. How do you think that makes me feel? And Betty, my childhood sweetheart, this whole God damned thing is going to make a grandmother out of her. You know what this means, Judge? This means we’re starting to die. That jackass doctor upstairs is shoving us into history.”

  “If that’s how you feel,” the judge said.

  “That’s how we feel.”

  So, by the time Dr. Dahlstrom arrived at the top of the stairs to announce a successful birth, Jack and the judge were at a stalemate. Jack’s moment of vindication lay in his climbing the stairs alone, without looking back, to view the baby lying in its mother’s arms. Whatever was going on around her, Iris was too happy and too far away to notice the arrival of Judge Anse and his wife, or to realize that her baby was a millionaire.

  A MAN IN LOUISIANA

  That Winter, Ohio Exploration had its meeting at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Alabama. Barry Seitz went along as special assistant to Mike Royce, the tough, relatively young president of Ohio Exploration. Barry knew spot checks could happen any time, and as this was his first job that could go anywhere, he memorized everything. The range of subjects ran from drilling reports in various oil plays in the Southeast to orthodonture opinions concerning Mike Royce’s impossibly ugly daughter. It was Royce’s thought that the girl’s dentist was “getting the teeth straight, all right, but blowing her profile.” Barry was to “mentally note” that Mike Royce wanted to get together so
me three- and four-year-old snapshots of the girl and arrange a conference with the dentist. Barry didn’t envy the dentist. The girl had inherited her father’s profile and would always be a rich little bulldog.

  The winter meeting was going to be shortened and therefore compressed because Mike Royce had just decided that he hated the South. So everyone was on edge and the orthodonture issue seemed quite inflamed the longer Royce contemplated his daughter’s mouth. Barry could see the pressure forming in his boss’s face as he stared past the crab boats making their way across the dead-slick bay. Barry arranged to have some pictures same-day delivered, and he was with his boss when he thumbed through the snapshots.

  “I could shit,” said Royce from a darkening face. “These kids around here have straight teeth and their folks can’t change a lightbulb.”

  A number of the things Mike Royce said were irritating to Barry, and when Royce was angry he expressed everything in a blur of exposed teeth that made part of Barry think of self-defense. But Barry saw himself on the cusp of failure or success. At thirty, a backward move could be a menace to his whole life; and while he knew he wouldn’t be in Royce’s employ forever, he wanted to stay long enough to learn oil lease trading so that he could go out on his own. Once he was free he could do the rest of the things he wanted: have a family, tropical fish, remote-control model airplanes. The future was an unbroken sheen to Barry, requiring only irreversible solvency. One of Barry’s girlfriends had called him yellow. She went out with the morning trash. Having your ducks in a row does not equal yellow. Barry was cautious.