Mostly Dead Things

by Kristen Arnett

  Despite the fact that my licenseless nephew was behind the wheel, I cracked open the last beer before we even turned onto the street in front of the shop. Bastien parked at the entrance, hopping out to lift Lolee from the back. They let down the tail, each of them grabbing a bird. I knew they expected me to get the third, the largest one, but I busied myself with the keys and let myself inside. The glow from outside gave me just enough light to see my shadow running ahead of me down the hall.

  The usual burnished warmth of beer flooding my veins wasn’t able to keep up with the horror of murdering three peacocks in cold blood. I sat down on the toilet in the rear of the shop, not even bothering to close the door. Bastien strutted past, then Lolee, staggering a bit under the weight of her bird. I peed, the sound a loud rush, and closed my eyes, able only to focus on emptying my bladder.

  “How many other animals have you killed this way?” I asked, reaching around in the dark for the toilet paper.

  “Not many yet.” Bastien walked past again, his boots heavy on the linoleum. “These today, that hawk two weeks ago. Some egrets. A red fox, maybe female? Oh, and the kittens.”

  “Kittens? You killed kittens?”

  “Not me. Lolee.”

  There was a moment where I thought I’d need to get up so I could puke, pants around my ankles, urine splashing up into my own face. To think of my little niece strangling baby cats was too much to bear.

  “C’mon. I didn’t kill those.” Lolee stopped and smiled in at me. She looked too thin. I worried about her hanging out with Bastien if he was taking her out to kill things in the middle of the night. That seemed like something a serial killer might do. Wasn’t that something they said? That the first sign someone was a sociopath was animal murder?

  “What did you do?” I asked, staring at her while she pranced around in the doorway.

  “I found them, already drowned. Kaitlyn’s stepdad did it, I think. Just a big, wet sack full of dead kittens. It was really sad. Kaitlyn cried for like a week.”

  “Do we have any more toilet paper?” The empty tube rattled under my fingers as I thought of the sweet little kittens with their sleeping faces; the ones I’d sheared and reconstituted just a week earlier. “I thought those belonged to somebody. That we were doing a pet consultation?”

  “We’re out. You need to go to the store.” She shoved a fistful of fast food napkins at me. “Don’t flush those.”

  Like I didn’t already know better. I sat and wiped with a wad of them. I could hear them both out there, opening drawers, pulling out instruments. There’d be a lot of cleanup. I’d never skinned a whole peacock before, and there were three waiting for gutting.

  “Bloody Mary,” I whispered, face dark and wild in the mirror over the sink. I felt slightly buzzed. That helped. “Bloody Mary.” I washed my hands and dried them on my pants. “What the hell are we doing?”

  Gear was spread out on the countertops. Lolee and Bastien piled the birds onto the center table, necks knocking into each other loosely.

  “This is too much work for now.” I pulled my apron over my head and readied the gut tubs next to the table. “It’s already after ten. Put two back in the freezer. We’ll play around with this one; see what it needs for prep.”

  “I think we can do them all.” Bastien slapped a hand against the back of the bird closest to him. Bits of fluff flew off and hung suspended in the air. “Let’s gut ’em tonight, then we’ll scrape in the morning.”

  I looked at Lolee, who was jumping up and down on the balls of her feet. “You’re gonna help?” I asked.

  She was already pulling on a spare apron—the one I’d gotten from a garage sale that said LORD & MASTER OF THE GRILLE in yellow embroidery.

  “Go grab the other table, then. Not enough elbow room here for three.”

  We each claimed a bird. I let Lolee choose first, because it reminded me of the first time Milo and I’d crowded around my father at the back of the shop. It was still exciting then, the fun of not knowing, both of us wondering what might happen. The bridge between the living and the dead, operating as the conduit between those lines. I wondered how much of my thirst for nostalgia I owed to my father, a man who’d sincerely loved looking backward, as if the past were a place he could visit any time he wished.

  Lolee dragged hers over to the secondary metal table that Bastien had pulled out of the supply closet. I helped her settle the animal, back first, the feathers fanning out until they dipped close to the floor.

  “Would’ve liked to read up on this first. Maybe research how to do it before we mangle them.”

  “How hard can it be?” Bastien had already ripped into his, slicing slightly below the gullet. Here I’d been thinking that we’d been lucking into an assortment of pricy work, when all along it’d been thanks to the murderous schemes of my nephew. How many animals had I cut into that he’d strangled the breath from? Run down with a car?

  Maybe I just hadn’t wanted to know.

  But maybe that wasn’t true. I was projecting again, like I always did. He was just trying to help out. Be what I needed, what the shop needed. Helping the family.

  Though he was truly mangling his bird. He hadn’t even put on work gloves. Clotted innards stained his hands all the way up to the wrist. I knew from experience that it would take a long time to come off, especially under the nails. Animal blood turned everything it touched nicotine yellow.

  “Put these on.” I grabbed some for Lolee and then pulled on my own, snapping them back over my wrists, pulling them up so far that the hair on my arms got twisted up in the latex. It was a good kind of feeling; like coming home after a long day out with strangers.

  “How do I do it?” she asked, holding up the scalpel. The blade was neat and clean. “Show me.”

  I helped palm the edge, guiding it into her hand. Showed her the best way to make an initial incision; small and neat, something easy to cover with supplementary feathers and small stitching.

  “Here’s where we cut. Be tender, don’t press too deep.”

  Her fingers were strong beneath mine, wrists corded with muscle, flexing hard below the joint. Bastien grunted as he stabbed into the torso, turning it into a sloppy mess we’d have to cover with a ton of extra stitching. It was unusual for him to jump right into butchering. Normally he stood back with me and assessed the situation. He made slow, specific cuts. But the kind of slicing he was doing now was rudimentary, a true hack job. He looked gleeful, hair stuck up in the back like a little kid. I wondered if it came from the thrill of running the birds down with the truck. His smile was too wide; his shoulders too tight. There was a dimple in his chin that dug in below the scrape of his beard. He looked like his mother whenever she got worked up over fight scenes in movies. Kind of bloodthirsty.

  “If you go too hard you can mess up the torque of the neck.” I said it loud enough for him to hear, but he just kept sawing. Lolee leaned into me and I could smell the unwashed scent of her hair, the soft dairy smell of her skin.

  What was happening here was illegal. It was absolutely against the law. And I wasn’t the only one who stood to benefit. My brain worked hard, flipping the idea over, rubbing at it like a coin between my fingertips. There was something else we could get out of this. Money aside, my mother had been working on pieces from the shop. Had possibly even used some of the illegal stuff for her art.

  They couldn’t put on a gallery showcase using illegally acquired animals.

  Right?

  Inside the peacock was a fascinating mess. We widened the slit large enough for Lolee to reach inside, pulling out innards as gently as she could: the twisting, looping swing of intestines, dark with feed and insects and bits of greenery; gristle and tendons; the fatty bits behind the haunches where all domesticated birds picked up weight.

  “Open it a little wider, but careful. Flay it like a jacket.”

  As she pulled the knife downward, the skin slit seamlessly. I leaned down and pressed my cheek to her hair. She felt warm; her body heat
radiated feverishly against me until I felt as if I were standing beside an open oven door.

  “I can do it,” she said, taking the knife from me and opening the bird the rest of the way. It lay spread, wet insides tender and red.

  “You’re doing real good. Just take out the big organs; we’ll do everything else tomorrow.”

  I pulled the last peacock over to the opposite end of the metal counter, away from where Bastien hacked at his bird with lumberjack enthusiasm. The final one was the prettiest. Its feathers were wide and painted in rings of gold, green, indigo. It was a beautiful animal and probably very expensive.

  “Are we gonna get in trouble for this?” I cut into the long line of its neck, working around the joints and smaller bones. “I mean, were there security cameras at that place?”

  “Isn’t that something you should’ve asked earlier?”

  “Probably. Are we going to jail? Me, you, your little sister here in an orange jumpsuit?”

  Bastien laughed and then coughed, a smoker’s hack that lodged in his chest and stayed there rattling, wet and deep. “Nah. A guy owes me a favor. They’ve got like twenty of these birds. They won’t miss three.”

  While that was probably true, it didn’t make it any less illegal. The last thing our family needed was more stress. The art show, the illegal animals. Art show, animals. The coin, flipping between my fingers. It would be so easy to make a call. I was always looking for an out.

  Nudging the gut bucket with my foot, I dumped out a large portion of the peacock’s stomach and bowels, trying not to split anything open in the process. I scraped the interior using my favorite knife, the one with the long wooden handle, smoothed from years of use. It had been my grandfather’s. My father had given it to me one afternoon when we finished cleaning eight deer in a row. I was so exhausted that the muscles in my forearms wouldn’t stop twitching. When he handed me that knife, he told me I’d earned it. It glistened shiny silver in the light, and I wanted to gut another, just to prove I could. My father had skinned two more than I had. He was strong. When he talked about my grandfather, it was always to reference that kind of strength.

  He never talked to me about anything, my father said one afternoon, the two of us drinking beer on the front porch as the sun set, sinking blood red in the Florida heat. Not like you and me. Not like how we talk.

  “Would you ever do this with Mom?” Lolee asked, face hidden behind a long swoop of hair. It was nearly trailing down into the bird, and I tucked it back quick behind her ear so it wouldn’t collect any debris. “Did she do this kind of stuff?”

  Lolee hardly ever asked about Brynn. She didn’t have a lot of concrete memories. Bastien was the one old enough to remember and hurt, the way I did. I shot him a look. He was concentrating very hard on his knife work, pretending not to listen.

  That was the thing about Bastien. He might run down some peacocks in the middle of a golf course, but at the end of the day he had too much love in him to deal with how shitty human beings were to each other.

  “Not really.” I slowed down, homing in on the tough meat near the back of the bird. It would be so easy for the blade to slip right through, to pierce the other side and ruin the shiny plumage. “Sometimes she’d come hang out in the front of the shop. She wasn’t really into all the blood and guts.”

  “Not like you and Dad?” Lolee’s eyes were big in her pale face. They were wide-set like her mother’s, but the color was all Milo. Such a deep brown they bordered on black.

  “Your dad doesn’t really like it either.” That was an understatement. If Milo thought too much about skinning, he got queasy. Once he’d accidentally cut himself slicing tomatoes for a sandwich, and when he saw the blood pooling in his palm, he’d passed out cold, right there on the floor. My mother walked into the kitchen, saw the knife and the spatter, and thought he’d been murdered. Brynn called me later to tell me about it and used the voice we always did for my mother, a kind of nasal-mucusy shriek.

  You should have seen him, Brynn said, nearly cackling. Classic Morton moment.

  I’d laughed along with her and thought about them there, at my parents’: Milo and Brynn, my mother and father, the kids. Everyone spending time together, doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. Living lives perfectly engineered to bring them happiness. What made a Morton moment classic? Couldn’t it be that way only when I was there to be part of it? There was something in that image that made me feel I’d never understand it. That my family had absorbed Brynn, that it was whole without me. Jokes, personal stories, dumb shit that meant nothing to them and everything to me. It was a bad feeling, knowing my family could exist without me as an active participant. I’d gotten blackout drunk in my apartment afterward, thinking about that phrase and understanding I wasn’t included in it: classic Morton moment.

  “Only you?” Lolee pushed down on the back leg, trying for a better angle. It bounced back up again and knocked into her chest. “And Grandpa, I guess. I thought this was a family business. Why doesn’t everybody work here?”

  It was a question I’d asked before too, years ago. My father and I’d been closing the shop. It was quiet, and I was balancing the register while we had some Cokes. Lemme tell you something, he said, adjusting a mounted crow on the shelf behind the counter. I love your mother, but if I had to see her at work all day and then at home we’d be divorced by now. People need space so they don’t wind up killing each other. We drank our Cokes in silence for a couple of minutes. It would be better for your brother if he spent less time at home too. Brynn’s got him by the short hairs. He looked hard at me when he said this. It was one of the only times I felt an acknowledgment of the role I played in Milo’s marriage.

  But how to put it to Lolee, who wouldn’t understand that explanation? “It takes a certain kind of person to do this work.” I set my blade down and went over to where she was tearing at the back of the peacock, guiding her knife through a knot of bird flesh. “By the time I was your age, I’d mounted at least five deer. I’d learned tanning techniques too.”

  “Did Grandpa even like working here? I mean he killed himself, so that maybe shows how shitty this place is.” Bastien hacked so hard through a tendon that the leg severed completely from the torso. He swore and threw it and the scalpel across the metal table. The leg slid across the floor and landed next to me. When I picked it up, there was a residue of thin spatter left behind on the concrete. Didn’t that tell me everything I needed to know about this young man? Too much feeling in his body to handle anything appropriately.

  “Don’t be dumb, Grandpa loved this place.” I handed him back the leg. Careful. “You shouldn’t use a large-grade utility knife. This is finesse work; you need a smaller blade.”

  I understood why my father chose the shop. He was always happiest surrounded by his tools and the animals he’d pieced together. There was nothing he loved more than making a first incision. He once told me that cut was one of life’s perfect moments. When you still have that animal’s future mapped out in front of you. Complete freedom to play God; to turn a creature into anything you choose.

  Watching his blood cool on that metal counter, I’d thought about fate and choice. He’d taken that power into his own hands, but in leaving his body behind, he’d forced me along with him. The letter, a thing that should’ve provided answers, was nothing but a load of unanswerable questions. I trust you, he’d written. I trust that you’ll do the right thing. Duties, responsibilities. How could I choose my own fate when it was always assigned to me?

  “That’s enough for now.” I snapped off my gloves and dropped them into the slop bucket. Lolee groaned. I took the scalpel from her and pushed her toward the sink. “Scrub everything. Up to here.” I pointed well past my elbow. “Use lots of soap.”

  Bastien grabbed some rags and a bottle of cleanser we kept in a bin next to the tarps. We cleaned in silence, wrapping the birds in damp cloth, soaking the instruments in alcohol, mopping down the floors and tabletops until the room re
eked of Clorox.

  I bought them pizza and drove them back to my mother’s house. Bastien turned and waved once, to shoo me off, but I stayed to watch them get inside. It was pitch-black, no lights on, not even the porch. I went back to my own dark apartment and sat up on the couch until daylight pinkened the sky.

  An invitation arrived in my mailbox, stuffed between oil change coupons and overdue credit card statements. The envelope was generic, but the paper inside was creamy, the kind of expensive stuff I associated with weddings. Sandwiched between stiff squares of tissue paper sat a thick piece of cardstock, embossed with gold writing. When I stroked my fingers across it, it was so soft. It felt like petting a cat.

  At the very top was a golden bull rutting atop a silver stallion. Also included was a scrawled note from my mother on a folded piece of notebook paper that asked me to bring a couple gallons of iced tea and to wear something dressy. Dressy, as if she knew I might have problems coming up with something appropriate. Was it my fault all formal wear felt like trying to zipper myself into a straitjacket?

  “Fuck this.”

  I stuffed the envelope and all the coupons into my overflowing garbage can. I knew whose money had paid for the expensive paper. It was the same person who was paying for the rest of it, the woman I continued to sleep with, even though she was enabling my mother’s descent into a pornographic void. A woman I knew was married to someone else. She held my family’s well-being in the palm of her hand. Again I thought of the phone number still stashed in my bedside drawer. How easily I could call and put a stop to everything.

  I just want to be with you, Lucinda said the last time we were together, and I wanted to believe it. But I’d heard it before, whispered by a much better liar.