Mostly Dead Things

by Kristen Arnett

  Problem solving is hunting.

  It is savage pleasure and we are born to it.

  —Thomas Harris

  Happiness is a large gut pile.

  —T-shirt proverb

  for michael michael motorcycle

  ODOCOILEUS VIRGINIANUS— CUTANEOUS DEER FIBROMA

  How we slice the skin:

  Carefully, that’s a given. Cutting with precision sounds like the same thing, but it’s not. Consider the following: you’ve pared the flesh from a mango for a bowl of fruit salad. Have you done it thoughtfully, preserving the sweet yellow flesh, or have you done it with the clinical detachment of a surgeon?

  There’s gotta be some tenderness. There’s gotta be some love.

  Our father said this as he slid his knife into the coat of a white-tailed buck. It was unusual. He never let us close to the table while he worked.

  You’ve gotta want it. He pointed to the throat, tapping lightly with a fingertip. Start below the cape, here. Like you’re unzipping a jacket.

  Milo and I crowded at either side of the metal table as our father gently opened the body, his hands blue-gloved and steady, as if delivering a baby. We were nine and ten and treated the shop with its creatures like our personal toy store. Other kids had stuffed animals; we had preserved skinks and mounted bass and antlers coated with Varathane.

  Gimme a little elbow room, guys.

  We each stepped back half a foot, then moved in close a few seconds later. The buck was large, but I’d seen bigger. The deer had already been drained of its blood and lay limp, limbs sprawled like a dismantled puppet. It was a nine-pointer and the man who’d brought it to the shop was a regular, someone our father had over for beers in our living room.

  Why the whole deer? This wasn’t just a mount—the entire animal would be processed: chest, rump, legs. I couldn’t imagine why someone would keep the whole thing as a trophy; most hunters left the remains to rot out in the woods after their field prep.

  Our father’s eyes were bright with excitement. It was a new challenge for him, a way to put creativity into his work. He hummed under his breath. It made me want to sing too.

  Inside was cool with the constant hum of central air, but still humid enough to draw sweat over my lip. The sign in front of the shop was just as big and yellow as it had been when our grandfather ran the place: MORTON’S TAXIDERMY (& MORE). The marquee promoted sales, whatever was in excess that week: pig ears, deer antlers, rabbit pelts.

  Our father didn’t look at us while he spoke, just kept his voice at a low buzz that zinged in my brain. If it’s not done with some kind of feeling, the customers can tell. It won’t look real.

  Buckets sat at our feet for any leftover innards the customers hadn’t disposed of already, white plastic tubs that had at one point housed pickles soaked in yellow brine. Some entrails we saved, some we didn’t, but we always made sure the floor stayed clean. The smell of bleach saturated my cloud of dark hair, even when my mother braided it out of the way.

  Milo and I both wore old Publix bag-boy aprons, tied around our necks and backs in looping double knots. Though I was older by a year, Milo stood half a head taller than me—taller than anyone in the fourth grade. We leaned close to our father’s elbows, trying to catch the knife’s movements, until he cleared his throat and we both moved back again. He wore a black rubber apron that he’d rinse off in the back sink, slicking off the intestinal remnants of our daily autopsies with lemon-scented dish detergent. Our mother would wash ours and hang them in the front closet, next to our muddy sneakers and raincoats and the mothballed sweaters that we wore only once a year.

  Jessa-Lynn, hold the neck steady. I moved to the front of the table and dug my hands into the fur until the spine and tendons compressed beneath my fingers. I fought the urge to massage deeper, to let my hands crawl spiderlike up the column and embrace the muzzle.

  Now come here, son. It’s not gonna bite.

  From behind the deer’s fuzzy cheek I watched my brother take the knife from my father, a double-sided scalpel. On the table beside it sat the half-moon of the fleshing blade he’d use to strip the wet hunks of flesh from the skin. Its curve caught the light, blinking silver under the fluorescent bulbs that lined the paneled ceiling.

  Like this? Milo clutched the knife like he would a sharpened stick, something to gouge and mutilate. He fidgeted and nearly dropped his grip as he dug down into the deer hide.

  Let me show you. Flex your wrist. Press steady, slow. Not too deep.

  Prep meant our father would completely skin the buck and assess the skeleton. See where the shot penetrated and reconstruct the animal’s body, fortifying it with thick patches of wool and cotton padding and strong wiring to hold the pose. Most shops worked only off prefab mannequins and forms, but my father liked creating his own—even if it meant every piece took two weeks longer than it would at a competitor’s shop. Customers looking for specialty work were willing to pay for the extra labor, but most weren’t after the art my father wanted to make of their kills. It didn’t matter to Dad; he’d put in the time regardless. Even if it meant losing business.

  He’s got a gristly patch here, push harder.

  According to our father, customers wanted something commanding in the animal’s pose. Most were hunters, and if they chose to have their kill mounted, they wanted it larger than life, as if the animal might reanimate and attack. They wanted bigger, stronger, more muscled. Our job was to grant that wish, even if the person had shot the animal from behind as it nosed through a garbage can.

  Milo sweat through the neck of his shirt. It was cool in the back of our shop, low sixties to keep the inevitable rot at bay, but my brother looked like he’d just run in from the playground. I’m not sure. Like this? He pulled up the knife—jagged, moving too quickly. There was a purring tear. Sorry, sorry!

  Grunting, my father took my brother’s hand and guided it back down to the work. That’ll have to be repaired. You’ll have to stitch it up after we tan so the lines won’t show through crooked.

  Sorries wouldn’t fix the coat. There would always be a scar, something out of place to mimic the fat bullet hole behind its tufted ear. Ripped pelts weren’t ideal, but there were ways to cover them: mud flecked up on an ankle or the fur combed over in a way that suggested muscle mass beneath the skin. I ran my thumbs down the buck’s neck to the softest place at the heart of its throat. Its white hair had grown in a clumped oval, framed by the thicker, slick stuff that coated its back—the dense coat that grew in for winter, even in Florida. Usually my father would brace the deer’s antlers in one of the clipped tracks that hung from the ceiling. We’d never been so involved in the process before; certainly never been allowed to use his tools or cut into any of the customers’ prized pelts.

  There. Push hard, just below the fetlock. You gotta scoop along, like you’re pulling open canvas. Let the knife become an extension of your arm.

  Our father’s cuts were seamless. He’d been doing the work for almost thirty years, alongside his own father, who’d died the year Milo was born. In pictures, our grandfather looked like a harder, grayer version of my father: tattooed and T-shirted and grizzled, the kind of man who smiled only when he needed to stretch his mouth. His picture was still up in the front of the shop, near the register. It sat between the mountain lion he’d shot and stuffed and a BEST OF CENTRAL FLORIDA TAXIDERMY plaque with years pinned underneath it dating back to 1968.

  Milo’s blade slowed. They’d reached a blockage behind the back right leg. My father took the scalpel from my brother and squatted down to view the situation, lifting the carcass and turning it deftly. One hand pulled the skin taut while the other slid the knife below the lump that protruded from beneath the fur. He quickly sliced the fles
h and poked the knife beneath, flicking the tip upward until the mass was exposed.

  What is it? Milo’s face was ashy gray. His lips, normally petal pink—so pink that boys from school joked that he wore lipstick—had thinned into a pale slit.

  Deer tumor. Our father carved out the lump until it began to separate from the fatty flesh and veins that surrounded it. Pretty good size. Maybe four inches across. He hefted the mass in his hand, the vibrant blue of his glove clashing with the dark, clotted red of the tumor. He dug into it with the fleshing blade, testing the resistance of the growth. Hardly ever see any this big. Mostly just warty stuff around the neck. Sometimes the groin.

  Milo covered his mouth with both hands. A deep noise rumbled in his chest, a sound like gears grinding together, and then he turned and puked. We’d had tomato soup and grilled cheese an hour earlier. Most of it went in the big plastic bucket, but some of it splattered onto the concrete floor, with a few bits landing on our father’s shoe.

  The buck’s eyes were open, surfaces glazed and beginning to harden into wrinkles along the corners from where the water had leached. Milo continued to vomit into the bucket as our father stalked from the table. He brought wet rags from the corner sink. He waited until Milo was done, still slumped over on the floor, before thrusting one at him. Get the mop from your mother out front and clean all this up. Everything.

  The tumor sat on the metal table, my father’s knife still stuck in it. He took the blade by the handle and pressed on either side of the mass with his fingers until it pulled free. Wiping it against the other rag, he turned and offered it to me. Overhead, the air-conditioning hummed to life again. The breeze was cool against my neck as I took the knife. It was solid in my palm, the curvature of the handle fitting just inside the crease where my hand closed. He beckoned me around the table and I stood in front of him, contemplating the buck’s substantial bulk.

  See there? He held my wrist, gently pointing the knife toward the open wound, now taking on oxygen and darkening. We’ll have to work around that. Can you get below the leg and take the seam around the back?

  Being this close, I was enveloped in the odor of his aftershave. It reminded me of Christmas trees: piney and musky, a smell that wouldn’t scare off a deer. Behind us, Milo dragged in the yellow mop bucket. Some of the water splashed over the lip and onto the floor as he struggled through the doorway. Our mother called to him from the front of the shop. My father turned away from my brother and leaned down to whisper in my ear.

  You’re a natural. Just like your dad.

  It felt right; it felt like I’d been doing it forever. I could see the exact place I would set the blade and strip the animal, knew how we’d replicate the skeleton with trusses and padding and ruffed forms. I could see where the tanned hide would fit over the preparation: a strong, hardy deer, head uplifted, sniffing the wind. Inserting the tip of the blade into the opening, I pulled forward carefully. I let myself love the buck on the table. I caressed its soft, sweet body.

  My father put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed lightly. Leaning forward, I braced my arm against the cool metal of the table and looked into the cavity where the flesh separated from the skin. In the dark heart of its carcass, I saw my future mapped out in gristle.

  I was my father’s daughter and I loved him fiercely. We had identical hands and neither of us could roll our tongues. Both of us snapped using our ring fingers, which we thought was very funny. There were permanent frown lines etched between our eyes. We liked the crusts off pizza and the tartness of lemons squeezed in water. There was a security in seeing myself mirrored back. Our shared love of the animals; the way we could be in a room and stay silent, comfortable in our skins as long as we were together. No one knew me like him. No one understood him like his daughter.

  Not so different from us, Jessa. He tugged my braid. Just guts and blood.

  We were a family of taxidermists.

  We were collectors, dismantlers, and artisans. We pieced together life from the remnants of death. Animals that might have weathered into nothing got to live on indefinitely through our care. Our heart was in the curve of a well-rendered lip smoothed over painted teeth. I saw my father’s hand in the ears of the rabbit he created for my brother the one that rode on a small doll’s bicycle. It was in the glass eyes of an albino ferret whose lids my father sculpted with the utmost tenderness. We created better than anyone because we loved it more, because we knew those animals better than anyone else ever could. It was ours because we fashioned it to be ours. My father molded me to assist him; to be the one who helped shoulder the load. He was the lynchpin that held our family’s world together, but I was the one who supported him. I could always bear the burden because he told me I was strong. Because he told me I was the only one who could.

  I tried to tell myself this as I stared down at the blood and matter congealed on the concrete floor of our workshop. As I assessed the droplets that dotted the white cinder-block walls in a Rorschach pattern that my eyes identified as a butterfly, as two men shaking hands, as the entrance to a well that opened into something infinite. Let my eyes follow the sight line of the red mess, which had originated from the soft place in my father’s skull. Somewhere near the temple, but I couldn’t be sure. It was hard to look at for longer than a few seconds. Hard to believe it was real.

  Behind me, softly, the radio played Randy Jackson.

  He was in his chair, slumped over the metal counter where he’d spent so much of his life. Face down, head turned to the side so that I could make out the bristle of his mustache. The eye I could see was closed. His wire-framed glasses had slipped halfway down his nose the moment he’d fallen, one side bent crookedly behind his ear so his hair fluffed up to a graying point. He wore his apron over the plaid button-down my mother had gotten him for his birthday so many years earlier; the one I said made him look like the Brawny paper towel man. I could almost make myself believe he’d dropped off to sleep midproject, which he sometimes did. Working into the small hours of the morning, painstakingly stitching hide beneath the light of a gooseneck lamp. If he just woke up and grouched at me for staring at him. If he smiled at me so I could feel okay. If he were breathing. If there weren’t so much blood.

  It was the whole animal laid out in front of me again; unnatural and unknown. That was the first collaboration with my father. This would be the last.

  It hurt to see him that way, wounded and opened up to the elements. I allowed myself a moment to marvel at his face. It sometimes looked much older than its sixty-six years, but death had made him young again: his cheeks soft and loose, lips tender and partially open. His hands, always in motion, finally still.

  Though I knew I shouldn’t, I took off his glasses and smoothed down the cowlick in his wiry hair. I moved his hands from the table and set them in his lap, one propped on either thigh, how he always liked to sit at the dinner table while my mother prepped the meal. I unbuckled the watch from his wrist with trembling fingers, the watch that had been my grandfather’s before it had belonged to him. The one I’d coveted because it was my father’s favorite and he cherished it. Things that were his that I wanted to be mine. His watch. All the best knives. The shop. His pride.

  I picked up the handgun from where it lay on the floor. I set it on the counter next to the letter he’d left with my name spelled out in all capital letters. He’d taught me how to shoot with that gun. Taken me out to the backyard, just the two of us, and helped me pull the trigger. I was scared, but I wanted to look tough, because my father couldn’t stomach crybabies. He smiled and told me how impressed he was with my aim and my confidence. Put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed, how he always did when he was proud of me. He was always proudest when I refused to show weakness.

  My little miniature, he said. Best sharpshooter in Florida.

  Then I went to the back and pulled out the mop bucket and the bleach, staring hard into the water as it churned in the yellow tub. Told myself it was the fumes that teared me up as I dunked
the mophead into the liquid, and then began the slow process of cleaning up the mess. I left the letter on the counter until I could get myself under control, wondering if it would say anything to help me understand the animal in front of me.

  1

  Along with the typical antler sets and knotted pine logs that bracketed our porch, the plate glass window at the front of the shop held a goat, a Florida panther, and a wild boar. The boar and the panther had been around for so long we considered them part of the family. I’d mounted the goat just a few weeks back. It was a black-and-white English Bagot, identified as “vulnerable” on most species survival lists. It had a coat so soft you’d think you were stroking velvet.

  But when I came in that morning they weren’t in their usual display spots, reenacting a scene from Wild Kingdom. Instead, the panther was propped behind the goat, its openmouthed growl suddenly transformed into an expression of uninhibited ecstasy.

  “Why?” I turned to my mother, who was wearing her favorite pink floral nightgown with the smocked lace around the throat. She sat sideways on a metal folding chair she’d set in the middle of the sidewalk, holding an empty coffee cup and a cigarette. “Just . . . tell me why.”

  “It speaks for itself.” She took a drag and tapped ash into the mug, which she balanced on her knee.

  It was the second time in a month that she’d rendered a sex scene in the front window of our store. While the panther plowed away at the goat, the wild boar leered at the two of them from behind a large plastic ficus I recognized as a decades-long resident of my parents’ living room. Even now, in my thirties, I could vividly recall when my parents had brought it home—something green and “living” to chipper up the dull drab of decapitated animal heads that lined the walls behind the couches and my father’s recliner.

  Binoculars had been propped in the boar’s yellowed tusks. There were condoms thrown around, some of which had been opened up, innards dangling from the branches of the potted plants. A second look revealed that the panther’s paws were shredded from where the adhesive and pins had originally secured it to an oak branch.