To Skin a Cat

by Thomas McGuane

  I went back into the restaurant and got one of the doctors. I told him that Albert had a heart condition and that he was fibrillating to beat the band, on the verge of cardiac standstill. “Can you help?” I pleaded.

  The paramedics wheeled Albert through the silent restaurant, those walls lit up over and over with the lights of the ambulance out front. When the gurney went past my table, I said to Albert, “If you have to go, go first class.” I’d had enough. I called his wife and told her coldly that Albert had been taken to the emergency room at the hospital. She slammed down the phone in panic. It was as though someone or something had come between them, and this way they would get a chance to talk.

  SPORTSMEN

  We kept the perch we caught in a stone pool in front of the living-room window. An elm shaded the pool, and when the heavy drapes of the living room were drawn so that my mother could see the sheet music on the piano, the window reflected the barred shapes of the lake perch in the pool.

  We caught them from the rocks on the edge of the lake, rocks that were submerged when the wakes of passing freighters hit the shore. From a distance, the freighters pushed a big swell in front of them without themselves seeming to move on the great flatness of the lake. My friend that year was a boy named Jimmy Meade, and he was learning to identify the vessel stacks of the freighters. We liked the Bob-Lo Line, Cleveland Cliffs, and Wyandotte Transportation with the red Indian tall on the sides of the stack. We looked for whalebacks and tankers and the laden ore ships and listened to the moaning signals from the horns as they carried over the water. The wakes of those freighters moved slowly toward the land along the unmoving surface of water. The wakes were the biggest feature out there, bigger than Canada behind them, which lay low and thin like the horizon itself.

  Jimmy Meade and I were thirteen then. He had moved up from lower Ohio the previous winter, and I was fascinated by his almost southern accent. His father had an old pickup truck in a town that drove mostly sedans, and they had a big loose-limbed hound that seemed to stand for a distant, unpopulated place.

  Hoods were beginning to appear in the school, beginning to grow drastic haircuts, wear Flagg Flyer shoes, and sing Gene Vincent songs. They hung inside their cars from the wind vanes and stared at the girls I had grown up with in an aspect of violence I had not known. They wolf-whistled. They laughed with their mouths wide open and their eyes glittering, and when they got into fights they used their feet. They spent their weekends at the drags in Flat Rock. Jimmy and I loved the water, but when the hoods came near it all they saw were the rubbers. We were downright afraid of the hoods, of how they acted, of the steel taps on their shoes, of the way they saw things, making us feel we would be crazy to ever cross them. We were sportsmen.

  But then, we were lost in our plans. We planned to refurbish a Civil War rifle Jimmy’s father owned. We were going to make an ice boat, a duck blind, and a fishing shanty. We were going to dig up an Indian mound, sell the artifacts, and buy a racing hydroplane that would throw a rooster tail five times its own length. But above all, we wanted to be duck hunters.

  That August we were diving off the pilings near the entrance to the Thoroughfare Canal. We had talked about salvaging boats from the Black Friday storm of 1916 when the Bob-Lo steamer passed. The wash came in and sucked the water down around the pilings. Jimmy dove from the tallest one, arcing down the length of the creosoted spar into the green, clear water. And then he didn’t come up. Not to begin with. When he did, the first thing that surfaced was the curve of his back, white and Ohio-looking in its oval of lake water. It was a back that was never to widen with muscle or stoop with worry because Jimmy had just then broken his neck. I remember getting him out on the gravel shore. He was wide awake and his eyes poured tears. His body shuddered continuously, and I recall his fingers fluttered on the stones with a kind of purpose. I had never heard sounds like that from his mouth in the thousands of hours we talked. I learned from a neighbor that my screams brought help and, similarly, I can’t imagine what I would sound like screaming. Perhaps no one can.

  My father decided that month that I was a worthless boy who blamed his troubles on outside events. He had quite a long theory about all of this, and hanging around on the lake or in the flat woods hunting rabbits with our twenty-twos substantiated that theory, I forget how. He found me a job over in Burr Oak cleaning die-cast aluminum molds with acid and a wire brush. That was the first time I had been around the country people who work in small factories across the nation. Once you get the gist of their ways, you can get along anyplace you go because they are everywhere and they are good people.

  When I tried to call Jimmy Meade from Burr Oak his father said that he was unable to speak on the telephone: he was out of the hospital and would always be paralyzed. In his father’s voice with its almost-southern Ohio accents, I could feel myself being made to know that though I had not done this to Jimmy, I was there, and that there was villainy, somehow, in my escape. I really don’t think I could have gotten out of the factory job without crossing my own father worse than I then dared. But it’s true, I missed the early hospitalization of Jimmy and of course I had missed having that accident happen to me in the first place. I still couldn’t picture Jimmy not able to move anything, to being kind of frozen where we left off.

  I finished up in August and stayed in Sturgis for a couple of days in a boardinghouse run by an old woman and her sixty-year-old spinster daughter. I was so comfortable with them I found myself sitting in the front hall watching the street for prospective customers. I told them I was just a duck hunter. Like the factory people, they had once had a farm. After that, I went home to see Jimmy.

  He lived in a small house on Macomb Street about a half mile from the hardware. There was a layout duck boat in the yard and quite a few cars parked around, hot rods mostly. What could have explained this attendance? Was it popularity? A strange feeling shot through me.

  I went in the screen door on the side of the house, propped ajar with a brick. There were eight or ten people inside, boys and girls our own age. My first feeling, that I had come back from a factory job in another town with tales to tell, vanished and I was suddenly afraid of the people in the room, faster, tougher kids than Jimmy and I had known. There were open beer bottles on the tables, and the radio played hits.

  Jimmy was in the corner where the light came through the screens from two directions. He was in a wheelchair, and his arms and legs had been neatly folded within the sides of the contraption. He had a ducktail haircut and a girl held a beer to his lips, then replaced it with a Camel in a fake pearl-and-ebony cigarette holder. His weight had halved and there were copper-colored shadows under his eyes. He looked like a modernized Station of the Cross.

  When he began to talk, his Ohio accent was gone. How did that happen? Insurance was going to buy him a flathead Ford. “I’m going to chop and channel it,” he said, “kick the frame, french the headlights, bullnose the hood, and lead the trunk.” He stopped and twisted his face off to draw on the cigarette. “There’s this hillbilly in Taylor Township who can roll and pleat the interior.”

  I didn’t get the feeling he was particularly glad to see me. But what I did was just sit there and tough it out until the room got tense and people just began to pick up and go. That took no time at all: the boys crumpled beer cans in their fists conclusively. The girls smiled with their mouths open and snapped their eyes. Everyone knew something was fishy. They hadn’t seen me around since the accident, and the question was, What was I doing there now?

  “I seen a bunch of ducks moving,” Jimmy said.

  “I did too.”

  “Seen them from the house.” Jimmy sucked on his cigarette. “Remember how old Minnow Milton used to shoot out of his boathouse when there was ducks?” Minnow Milton had lived in a floating house that had a trap attached to it from which he sold shiners for bait. The floating house was at the foot of Jimmy’s road.

  “Well, Minnow’s no longer with us. And the old boat is just set
ting there doing nothing.”

  The next morning before daybreak, Jimmy and I were in Minnow Milton’s living room with the lake slapping underneath and the sash thrown up. There were still old photographs of the Milton family on the walls. Minnow was a bachelor and no one had come for them. I had my father’s twelve-gauge pump propped on the windowsill and I could see the blocks, the old Mason decoys, all canvasbacks, that I had set out beneath the window, thirty of them bobbing, wooden beaks to the wind, like steamboats viewed from a mile up. I really couldn’t see Jimmy. I had wheeled him in terror down the gangplank and into the dark. I set the blocks in the dark and when I lit his cigarette, he stared down the length of the holder, intently, so I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I said, “What fun is there if you can’t shoot?”

  “Shoot,” he said.

  “I’m gonna shoot. I was just asking.”

  “You ain’t got no ducks anyways.”

  That was true. But it didn’t last. A cold wind came with daylight. A slight snow spit across the whitecaps. I saw a flight of mallards rocket over and disappear behind us. Then they reappeared and did the same thing again, right across the roof over our heads. When they came the third time, they set their wings and reached their feet through hundreds of feet of cold air toward the decoys. I killed two and let the wind blow them up against the floating house. Jimmy grinned from ear to ear.

  I built a fire in Minnow Milton’s old stove and cooked those ducks on a stick. I had to feed Jimmy off the point of my Barlow knife, but we ate two big ducks for breakfast and lunch at once. I stood the pump gun in the corner.

  Tall columns of snow advanced toward us across the lake, and among them, right in among them, were ducks, some of everything, including the big canvasbacks that stirred us like old music. Buffleheads raced along the surface.

  “Fork me some of that there duck meat,” said Jimmy Meade in his Ohio voice.

  We stared down from our house window as our decoys filled with ducks. The weather got so bad the ducks swam among the decoys without caring. After half a day we didn’t know which was real and which was not. I wrapped Jimmy’s blanket up under his chin.

  “I hope those ducks keep on coming,” he said. And they did. We were in a vast raft of ducks. We didn’t leave until the earth had turned clean around and it was dark again.

  LITTLE EXTRAS

  David and Rita were starting their life together. David was a hard-working twenty-two-year-old with the strong features of his Norwegian parents and the muscles his manual work produced. Rita—a Miss Montana Runner-Up—was admired for her terrific ambition. They were married up the Valley in August and moved into the double-wide on Rita’s father’s ranch. Rita helped her father with the cows and the books, while David worked at the grain elevator in town. Rita wanted a house immediately and they had already saved for a down payment. When Mr. Penniman, the grocer, passed away, David approached the lawyer who was handling the estate, asking if he and Rita could buy the house. The lawyer, who was known all over Montana as a ladies’ man, pulled his mouth to one side and gazed at the couple before answering. “There will have to be an appraisal.”

  “We know that,” said David. He really didn’t.

  “And there is an heir, a daughter.”

  “Oh,” said Rita. The lawyer, a Mr. Neville, looked at her.

  “She won’t want that house. She’s well off. But she may want a thing or two for sentimental reasons.” She noticed how very thin and well-dressed Neville was, and there was something appealing about his sneering delivery when talking.

  “We wouldn’t mind,” said Rita. David looked at her, curiously weighing her words. These domiciling arrangements seemed thunderous after an unexceptional small-town courtship. They looked at the house every day, a pretty white house that had been painted and fussed over all its life. When the appraisal came, David had to go home from the elevator, take a shower, change, and meet Rita at the bank. The bank officers went along with them, and they bought the house as is with the understanding that Mrs. Callahan, the grocer’s daughter, could have a day in the house alone, to select mementos. There were beautiful things in every room. David and Rita packed the contents of the double-wide in the back of David’s truck. Mrs. Callahan used a U-Haul and a crew to empty David and Rita’s new home. Rita wept all the way back to the double-wide. That night Mrs. Callahan called to say there were no hard feelings.

  Neville, the lawyer, phoned up the following morning in response to five panic messages from David and Rita. “You said you didn’t mind her taking something for sentimental reasons.”

  “We didn’t expect her to clean out the whole house,” said David.

  “You should have thought of that at the time,” said the lawyer. “You bought it as is.”

  Rita got on the line and said, “She took the stove and refrigerator.”

  “Whatever,” said Neville. “I’ve got calls waiting.”

  Neither David nor Rita could stop everything for this crisis. But it was a fact that they couldn’t move into their new house until they had saved for furnishings. When David went back to the banker, he said, “I’m afraid you have been treated badly. But this can’t be solved by me. You’re going to have to learn this lesson and go on with your lives.”

  “So, we do nothing?”

  “I tell you what. Why don’t we try this. I’ll wangle you an invitation for Mrs. Callahan’s rodeo party. And you and the wife just put your best faces on and make a pitch to get your things back. Whether you do or not, you’ll learn even more about life. Take it from your banker.”

  The night of the rodeo, David thought he was too tired to go. His muscles were sore from loading grain and salt and steel T-posts. But Rita was excited. David tried to be touched by her belief that they would get everything back. Even Rita’s father thought that David would have to take on some of Rita’s optimism and eye for the main chance if he was ever to get out of the elevator and go places. But he got dressed. So did Rita. By the time they put on their cowboy hats, they didn’t know what to think. David took some aspirins and carried a beer to the truck.

  They could hear the crowd roaring before they ever got there. There was a glow of light over the rodeo grounds. The bleachers were full and they had to edge their way past people’s knees for a long way before they could sit down. They could see Mrs. Callahan and her companions in the reserved seats. Rita got cotton candy and visited school friends sitting all around them. David didn’t want to move until after the saddle broncs. Before the calf roping, a man came onto the field and penned sheep with quick little collies on whose backs rode monkeys in cowboy suits. Rita sat back down with her cotton candy. “I can’t believe her,” she said, staring across at Mrs. Callahan and her friends, who now were leading a cheer for the dogs and monkeys. Then it started to rain hard. During the bulls, it became such a wallow, people headed for their cars. The roundup banners popped in the wind, and the hard beer drinkers got under the bleachers with their coats pulled up over their heads and jeered passersby.

  Mrs. Callahan lived on the edge of town where it broke off into big pastures. Her place seemed almost like a ranch, with a few small buildings set away from a two-story gray house with white trim and big rose-cluttered trellises around the doors. There were a lot of cars parked in the driveway and in the yard; the rain-covered cars shone in the house lights. They were not really a cross section of the town’s cars, and it made David nervous to be going in there at all. Rita, on the other hand, strode toward the house combatively. It got worse inside, where they could see their furniture scattered among the antiques. Everyone who David and Rita had ever consulted about their teeth or their bodies, their finances or legal matters, was there, gathered around a tank of Everclear punch. Dr. Dillingham went past, fastening hundred-dollar bills to his forehead with saliva, announcing, “This is how I meet girls in Las Vegas.” When Mrs. Callahan doubled over with laughter, the lawyer Neville deftly spooned pickle relish into her hairdo. It went unnoticed.

 
Rita stretched out on one of the sofas that had come from her house. Mrs. Callahan waggled a finger in her face. “Keep it up,” said Rita, “and I break it off.” Mrs. Callahan moved her gaze to Neville and pulled the corners of her mouth up into a sort of smile.

  Then the power went off for an hour. A few people walked outside with their drinks and waded in the irrigation ditch. When they came in, their muddy pant legs clung to their legs and they were all amorous. “Did you pull this?” Mrs. Callahan screeched at David on finding the relish in her hair. Now she was drunk.

  “No, I did not.”

  “And you can steer the little woman right out of my sofa.”

  “Okay.”

  Harvey Perry, a sober accountant, led Mrs. Callahan by the elbow to the Mexican snacks, where her guests stood and stared in the anesthesia of the punch. Dr. Dillingham was on the phone with his bookie, holding up different numbers on the fingers of one hand while he placed bets. Mrs. Dillingham stood behind Mrs. Callahan in a wing chair, redoing Mrs. Callahan’s hair with a brush and a piece of paper towel. Every now and then, Mrs. Callahan gripped the arms of the chair to twist in David’s direction and fix him with a look.

  The banker came in and played Garry Owen, the old cavalry call, on the bugle while two wives, making like vestal virgins, emptied a vessel of grain alcohol into the punch tank. Mrs. Callahan staggered out of the wing chair and cried, “The chili!” By the time she carried the big drip-baste pot to the table, there was an extraordinary tension about what the condition of the chili would actually be. Was it burned or dry? This was famous chili with cascabels and black olives, and woe betide if it had burned. But then, finally, it was okay, it was fine.

  “You stay out of this,” said Mrs. Callahan, shaking her ladle at David. The others lined up all the way to the porch. David got a beer, drank it down, and got another. He sat on the piano bench and listened in around him. A realtor, a rural type, picked at his chili, shuffled, raised his shoulders, and moved his lips real slow in an effort to be a man of few words. He was talking to Anita Baldich, the banker’s wife. “I got this itty-bitty place on the edge of town,” the pitch began. Mrs. Baldich had a sudden fullness around her mouth and her nostrils flared: a concealed yawn.