Mostly Dead Things

by Kristen Arnett

  Leave it, he said, climbing into the truck and restarting the engine. We’ve still got about a half hour before traffic starts up and the sun really gets cooking.

  I put the tail on top of the gator’s torso. It still looked menacing, even without a head. I wasn’t sure what made me feel so uneasy. But when we got back into the truck and drove past, I noticed no buzzards circled the body.

  I was fine with most kill, but there were a few things I couldn’t stomach. There were always too many dogs. Small and large alike, unlucky mutts with mottled fur, too skinny, ribs poking out so far you could see inside their bodies. I couldn’t look at these animals; they made me feel too sad.

  My father always stopped for dogs. He gently placed the bodies into whatever patch was grassiest. There were buzzards at dog kills, and my father had to shoo them off to move the body out of the road. Then we’d drive on and the birds would move back in, wings flapping against each other as they made room for themselves over the carcass.

  Only once did we take one with us. It was a Sunday morning and there was no one around. The humidity was so thick it almost hurt to breathe. My father was talking about a customer who’d accidentally cooked up his largemouth bass when he was drunk, a fish he’d been saving in his freezer to mount. He was smiling, the sun just peeking up over the horizon like a bright slice of fruit. It colored the skin of his face fresh and bright. He laughed with his mouth hanging open so I could see the backs of his teeth. It made him seem young. It made me want to laugh too.

  There was a horde of vultures circling the sky. The number seemed impressive, the most I’d seen in a long time. I knew my father must have thought so too, because his mouth snapped closed. He turned down the volume on the stereo, which was playing some loud morning talk show.

  It must be something big, I said, trying to make out the shape. It was hard to see with the sun coming up hot and red orange, a bloody contusion welling up over the lip of the earth.

  Slowing to a crawl, we approached the animal. It was covered in flapping, writhing vultures. So many we couldn’t make out the lumped shape of the body. My father got out of the truck and pulled the shovel from the back before approaching the mass of birds. He brandished the tip like a blade. They flapped up and then landed again, too eager to pay much attention to anything that wasn’t carrion.

  My father pinged one with the shovel, smacking at it the way he would a golf ball. It made a deep, guttural squawk and flapped awkwardly to the side. The rest of the birds dispersed, settling down into the patchy weeds five feet from where my father crouched.

  His arm went up, waving at me.

  Bring me one of those blankets. When I didn’t move right away, his head snapped around and he shouted my name.

  I stumbled over my own legs as I jumped down from the cab. The smell outside was all wet, trampled grass and the funky odor of birds. Some were still circling overhead, but others were perched along the roadway. They reminded me of those cartoon vultures from that Disney movie. Those ones had been funny; these just looked menacing. Their necks and faces were ugly and wattled. They moved jaggedly, as if they didn’t know how to operate their bodies.

  My father kept a small pile of furniture blankets in the tool compartment. They smelled strongly of metal and oil. I hurried one over to my father, who was talking to the animal, making crooning noises, soft words I couldn’t quite make out.

  It was a black dog, maybe a Labrador. A deep gash ran along his neck, and a red collar that had once been bright tugged dirtily along the matted fur. Kneeling down beside my father, I put my hand out to try to touch the dog’s side.

  Don’t, my father said, voice very sharp. It might hurt him.

  He’s alive? The animal looked dead to me. He was twisted up, body contorted in the way that I always associated with the bagged animals we carted back to our shop. There were already so many open wounds in the dog’s torso. Blood dripped onto the asphalt.

  My father shook his head, spread out the blanket. Mostly dead, Jessa. Not all the way gone yet.

  The dog made a high whimper, a hurt sound that made me want to plug my ears. My father lifted him carefully onto the blanket, but still the animal cried.

  My knee stung horribly. I looked down to see a wide trail of fire ants leading over from a huge pile next to the fence. They were crawling up my legs. I jumped up and smacked them off, sweeping them from my pants and my shoes. Ants! I yelled stupidly.

  They’re on me too. They’re all over the goddamn dog.

  And they were. Everywhere there was wet blood, there were ants. Scores of them. I tried to brush them off his leg, but it was so twisted up and bent that it only brushed them farther into his fur.

  Move out of the way, I’m going to put him in the front seat. Hold his head, okay?

  My father picked up the blanket, carrying the dog like a small child. He wasn’t making noises anymore, or maybe he was and I just couldn’t hear them over the sound of the vultures. They’d started shrieking, flapping around where the body had lain. Angry at the deprivation, they smacked into each other and pecked the earth.

  I wanted to throw something at them. I looked around for a rock, anything to make them pay for putting that awful look on my father’s face, but there was nothing. Aside from the birds, the ground was nearly swept clean.

  My father called my name again, and I hurried back to the truck. It smelled heavy inside the closed cab, like iron, like the shed full of my father’s tools.

  We drove fast, my father pulling a U-turn so precise that we barely even drove over the grass. Vultures scattered, flocking outward in a dark mass. I couldn’t see much of the dog, just the tip of his nose poking out from the blanket. It was very dry and cracked. I wondered whose dog he was. Who’d abandoned him, left him when he’d needed someone the most.

  I held my fingers cupped in front of that nose, feeling for breath. Little puffs of air against my palm reassured me that he was still with us. My father reached over, across the dog’s still body, and gripped my shoulder with his hand. He held on to me for the rest of the drive down the highway, not letting go, not even when we turned onto the state road leading back into town.

  13

  I spent most days in the rubble as we deconstructed the restaurant next door. Since it had been abandoned, we talked the rental agency into letting us keep the restaurant equipment as long as we took care of disposal ourselves. Some stuff we put on Craigslist. Booths, tables, countertops, stools—all older, but in pretty fair condition. Other items we sold to Winnie’s: the large bank of commercial fridges, the glass pie counters. One of the new craft bars downtown took the taps and the vintage bar top. I let Bastien have the neon beer sign from the back wall, but told him he couldn’t keep it in the shop.

  “Grandma’s porch,” Bastien said, holding it in front of him. The lights were a clear, vivid blue. “That’s where I’ve been keeping most of my stuff.”

  “At least it’s cooler out now. Too hot during the summer.”

  “It’s not so bad. Got a beer fridge.” He set the sign carefully in the front seat of the truck. “She’s gonna let me put a new shed out back so I can store things.”

  I thought of the old one, leaning rickety for so many years before it had finally collapsed on itself in a rusty heap. We’d barely been able to excavate the lawn mower from the pile.

  “Maybe get a plastic one this time. Something squirrels won’t nest in.”

  My mother was rebuilding her creations, but this time she and I both used the back of the workshop. Bastien had stopped procuring living creatures after I’d told him if he didn’t knock it off, I’d start dumping the remains in his bed. I could tell he was relieved, but that didn’t stop him from outsourcing labor to one of his seedier associates. There was a slew of new animals to take out of the freezer: an ocelot, a couple more peacocks, two otters, and a capybara with a face so much like an enormous hamster that Lolee screamed bloody murder when we unpacked it from the tarp. She climbed on top of the metal work
table to get away from it, shrieking.

  “What, you can scrape the insides out of a deer, but you can’t deal with an oversized rodent?” Bastien got down on the floor and flopped the thing’s monstrous head back and forth while Lolee screeched. I unsuccessfully tried to hide my smile. She scowled and put out her arms, the way she’d done when she was little.

  I couldn’t lift her anymore, but I kicked off the brakes on the table and rolled her over to the other side of the room. She hopped down through the open doorway, middle fingers blazing.

  “I’m going to Kaitlyn’s. Call me when that thing is gone.”

  She walked to the front door with her purse strapped over her chest. I thought she looked older since her haircut. She’d shaved it underneath and cut the hair on top into a wedge. My mother had done it for her, and then Lolee had buzzed my mother’s. I’d never realized how similar they looked. Looking at Lolee was like staring into a fuzzy picture coated over with the filmy residue of Brynn: shadows of it in her walk, the tilt of her hips, her long, slender arms, nearly disproportionate to her body.

  “You need a ride?” I asked. “How will you get home?”

  “Dad’ll get me.”

  Milo had moved back into our mother’s house with Lolee. He was fixing up a lot of the wiring and things that had gone to shit in my father’s absence. The rugs were steamed, the sheets were washed, and he’d somehow tamed the overgrown backyard with the help of a borrowed lawn mower. His next project was tackling the leaky roof over the back porch.

  My mother spent early mornings with Milo, supervising the cleanup, and then met me around noon at the shop. We’d sit up front and eat the sandwiches she’d prepped—me chewing on the pickle spears she’d packed in wax paper next to the ham on rye, her digging out the tomatoes she’d put on both sandwiches even though she hated them.

  Then we’d head to the back.

  It was weird; there was no other way to describe it. I still wasn’t sure about the things my mother was creating. The kind of work she envisioned didn’t speak to me, for a number of reasons, foremost being that it dealt so closely with my father and his sexuality. It made me uncomfortable, which made me wonder about discomfort in general. What about sex made me feel as if it couldn’t be connected to emotion? Why was it something that made me cringe? I asked my mother questions about her work and, when I felt too overwhelmed, drank a beer or just went out to the lake. Tried to focus on what it was that made me shut down.

  For so many years it had been only my father there, a strong, silent presence. Then suddenly it was my mother. We shared the tools and the workstations. Sometimes we put on music. I scraped and gutted, prepped and stitched. She went through bins of preserved animal parts and brought over big tubs full of crafting gear: plastic beads and strings of multicolored party lights, sequins, aluminum foil, old CDs. There were also boxes of art we’d done in elementary school, birthday cards she’d saved, family photo albums, and pictures of my father when he was younger than Bastien. It was strange to see him in those shots, looking so much like Milo. In one of my mother’s favorites, he had a full head of dark hair and straddled a motorcycle in my parents’ front yard.

  When our hands cramped and we felt sick from the fumes wafting off the tanning solution, we’d take a break. Sometimes we wandered out to the front walk, lounging on metal folding chairs, soaking up the sun as we shared a cigarette. We’d face the store, checking out whatever new display my mother had come up with for the week. I’d encouraged her to take over the front; she could use it as a trial run.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind?” she’d asked, looking from the small, bare space in front of the window to my face. Back and forth, as if determining whether I really meant it. “You don’t care what I put up?”

  “It’s your shop too. You get a say.”

  “You’re right.” Her eyes had turned sleepy, how they always got when she was focused on what was happening in her head: forming the structures, placing the animals, choosing the backdrops and furniture. Theme, she said, was the most important part. Everything else came second. I wondered why my father hadn’t utilized her more in the shop. She was creative and good at putting things together. Even the stuff that made me uncomfortable made me think.

  “It’s a good thing when you can’t stop thinking about a piece,” she said. “That’s when you know it’s done the work. When you can’t get it out of your head afterward.”

  That sounded right to me.

  I kept the bearskin. I loved how alive it looked, even without the stuffing. Though it would have brought a good price, I couldn’t stand to sell it. I spread the skin out over a couple of sawhorses, trying to decide how it looked best. My mother said theme was what mattered, but for my father it had been display. Display, he said, was the most important part of the process. It was the finishing touch to weeks of work put into an animal. If you didn’t mount it correctly, it wouldn’t matter that you’d sewn the skin perfectly or that the eyes were set exactly right. The mount meant that the animal had a place to live; it had a home. If the mount was wrong, everything looked fake. It took you out of the magic. Mount it right, my father said, and you gave your audience something to believe in.

  The bear’s face was well rendered. I loved to stare at the glinting red maw of its mouth, the sharp canines so perfectly placed beneath its curled lip. Its claws were fine and shiny, smoothed down to yellow points. I looked at it from every conceivable angle—sat upright like a floppy stuffed animal, pinned to the wall and snarling down at me, flat across the floor with limbs outstretched, as if reaching for every corner of the room at once. There was no way I posed it that I didn’t like it; the bear was a companion and a pal. It looked at me with its glistening black eyes and seemed so alive I could almost hear it snuffling and breathing.

  I took it home to my apartment and spread it on the couch, then moved it to my bedroom. The skin covered the entire mattress. That was where it looked best, welcoming me back every night. After long hours spent curled over the table with my needle and thread, scraping out the insides of things, I always had a friend waiting to greet me.

  Lucinda Rex, her name already bigger than life, refused to leave my brain. Though I didn’t call, I thought of her. I’d see her card on the counter beside the shop register or find her chicken-scratch handwriting in the bottom of my purse, notes about things to pick up from the store: eggs, bacon, sharp cheddar cheese. At my mother’s house, invitations from the showcase migrated from the front of the fridge to the kitchen counter, even into my childhood bedroom.

  When I went out, I drove past places I thought Lucinda might be: the bar where we used to spend our evenings, the seafood restaurant near the lake where she’d told me they had the best fried shrimp. I thought about her body in vague, ghostly ways that made me sad and aroused at the same time. At a moment’s notice, I could conjure the smooth skin of her forearm and the hard, sharp jut of her jaw. The curly mass of her hair when she lifted it into a ponytail after sex, the smell of her neck when she was sweaty. She clenched her teeth so hard when she came, hard enough to break the skin of her lip and draw blood that tasted coppery when I kissed her. There were two moles dotting her right temple and three at the base of her spine, right above her ass. In the back of my mind she hovered, sometimes slipping out in the patterns of my speech or in how I set my hands on my own skin. I thought of her when I touched myself in bed at night. Afterward, I looked at the bear and wished she were there with me.

  When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I sat next to my mother in the kitchen as she basted a chicken and tapped a finger against another copy of the outdated invitation. It had somehow ended up in the breadbasket, poking out from where we kept the dinner rolls.

  “Do you think we have everything?” I asked, tapping at the basket until it scooted along the countertop. “Is there anything else you’re missing? Someone we should ask for help?”

  My mother threw open the fridge and pulled out half a stick of butter, a tub of sour cream, an
d some bacon bits in a little plastic pouch. She slapped everything down beside the raw chicken. “All the pieces I have are good enough.”

  “Okay.” I slid the card along the counter, back and forth. Lucinda’s name glinted gold in the light, winking at me.

  “Why do you ask?” She poked her head out from behind the fridge door. Her reading glasses were jammed on top of her head and she was squinting over at me as if it would help her see better. “Did you think of something I forgot?”

  “I never got to see the whole thing. How would I know what’s missing?”

  “Just wondering.”

  Ripping open the inside of the bird, she took the serrated knife from the counter and dug a slit up the back end. “Can you get me some spinach from the crisper?”

  “What the hell are you making?”

  “Chicken ballotine. Or some variation of it.” She gestured in the air with her knife, drawing a heart. “It’s French. Found the recipe on the back of the Ritz box.”

  “If it’s got bacon in it, I’ll eat it.” I pulled out the spinach, noting all the wrinkled apples at the bottom of the drawer that needed throwing out. “Why do you still buy the Red Delicious if Dad was the only one who ever ate them?”

  “You don’t eat them?”

  “You know I don’t. The skin’s too tough. It’s like gnawing plastic.”

  My mother flipped the chicken over and began smashing it with the rolling pin. “Lolee likes them.”

  I snatched a piece of bacon. “No, she doesn’t. The last time you gave her one, she licked all the peanut butter off and stuffed the piece under the couch cushions.”