To Skin a Cat

by Thomas McGuane

  Jack went about a half mile off the end of the road. There was an overgrown sorghum field that practically abutted a stand of longleaf pine, and beyond that it was all broken up little fields, some clearcut; and where it had grown brushy, the hedgerows were laced up shut with vines and brambles of kudzu and wild honeysuckle. It was still too green and early. Jack normally waited until it had frozen and the frost-killed foliage had dried in the cold, because the dogs couldn’t smell as well when it lay on the ground and rotted.

  Jack got down off the horse, which stood empty-saddled holding the straining dogs. He walked down the check cord and whoaed the two dogs, vaulting at the end of the rope toward the quail fields beyond. “Whoa, Tess,” he said. “Whoa-up now, Night.” The dogs stood on all fours staring ahead and, except for the trembling that shook them, did not move when Jack unsnapped their shackles. He made them stand while he coiled the check cord carefully and walked back to the horse and tied the coil to the back of the saddle. They continued to stand while he remounted and sat for a long moment looking down at the waiting dogs and finally said, in a long-drawn-out utterance, “All right, now.”

  The dogs shot off on separate but somehow communicating angles, tails popping, heads high, as they ran through a small field of partridge peas and wire grass and shoemaker berries. They used up this field and cracked through a tall hedge, obliging Jack to canter along after them, losing them at the hedge and picking them up again in the next field, his shotgun slapping up under his left knee and coming out the far side with a strand of honeysuckle trailing from the trigger guard.

  A big runoff ditch came up in the red soil, a place Jack normally rode out around, but he took it at a canter today and vaulted over it, seeing the big dark channel fly under him as he sailed into the rough growth. Jack thought about that ditch and wondered if he would jump it coming back. I’ll jump it at great speed, he concluded.

  When he came into the next field, the dogs were on point, Tess forward and Night behind at an angle, honoring. When Jack reined the bay past the low sun, the light flared red at the edge of the horse’s nostrils. He stopped and got down, pulling the double-barreled gun from its scabbard, breaking and loading it while he kept one eye on the dogs. Night catwalked a couple of steps, and Jack made a low sound of disapproval in his throat and the dog stopped. Jack walked past the dogs, watching straight ahead for the covey rise. He presumed the birds were on the little elevation of ground under the old pines.

  There were no birds. The dogs were still on point, and Jack pulled off his hat to run his hand across his forehead. He didn’t understand it. He went back and stood next to Tess and tried to figure out what she was pointing. Both dogs were quick to honor any shape that might be another dog on point. He got down on one knee and saw the gravestones. Bird dogs back any white shape, and Tess and Night were absorbed in distant knowledge. Jack shouted at them and gestured harshly with the gun. “Get out!” he shouted, and the dogs cowered off and watched him. He got back on the horse and pointed out ahead. The dogs resumed, a little slow at first.

  Jack felt the blood recede from his face. There had been a community of tenant farmers here raising shade tobacco. The town was gone, the tobacco was gone, the church burned. Except for the graves, the people were altogether gone. Maybe they have heirs, he thought angrily, maybe they have rich sons of bitches living in Boca Raton.

  There was a clear little swamp a mile or so farther on. It was circled by trees, and lily pads floated with their entirely green stems clearly visible for many feet underneath them. Quail had come out to feed, and the dogs pinned them down about forty yards south of it. Jack got down off his horse once again, prepared his gun, and walked the birds up. When the quail roared off, he dropped two of them. The rest of the covey made a whirling crescent into the trees. He tried to watch them down, at the same time calling Tess and Night in to retrieve—“Dead birds! Dead, Night; dead, Tess”—and, as they worked close, coursing over the ground the birds had fallen on, “Dayy-yid” and “Dead!” when Tess picked one up, and a triumphant “Dead!” when Night found the other and the two dogs brought them to hand.

  He was sure he had watched the covey down fairly well when the bell began to ring, carrying pure as light turned to sound in the still trees. He stopped and gave it a listen. The music resumed and he felt its pressure, a pressure as irritating as a command to begin dancing. He climbed on the horse and reined him toward the down covey.

  Then the bells came again, this time without any of their music, like a probe or like the light that went on in his office, in the roar of the air conditioner, that meant “Customer.” I don’t want this customer, he thought. He rode toward the swamp and felt a wave of courage that quickly receded. He wheeled the horse and yelled, “Tess, Night! Come here to me!” It’s nearly dark, he thought, too dark to see that ditch. The dogs shot past, and in a moment he could not see them. He broke the horse into a rack until he saw the brush irrigated by the runoff. He pricked the horse lightly to set him up, released him, and felt as if he were going straight to heaven. The horse went down into the ditch, and Jack was knocked cold by impact as the horse scrambled without him, scared backward forty feet, and then turning to run home, dragging the broken reins.

  He woke up in the ambulance. The driver was straight ahead of him, a black silhouette. The paramedic was next to him, a woman with a braid pinned up under a cap. Beside Jack was another figure, entirely covered.

  “Don’t drop me off first,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said, “but it is important that we drop you off first.”

  “I don’t want to be dropped off first,” said Jack.

  “You we drop first,” the woman said.

  City lights licked across the two in front. They arose, penetrated the windshield, and passed. Jack tried to anticipate them, and once when the ambulance was flooded at a stoplight, he looked over.

  They wheeled him inside. He was in a room that sounded like a lavatory. People walked around him. When a doctor put a needle in his arm, he explained, “I really didn’t want them to drop me off first.” And then it came, a miracle of boredom, and he was out.

  THE RESCUE

  This is kind of a one-horse town, and to get the fellows to stay on as directors of our credit union, we had to offer them a group life insurance plan and a few other things that struck them as the kind of perks people over in Billings were getting. The paperwork and physicals should have discouraged everyone but they didn’t; on top of that, the insurance company, knowing it was dealing with a handful of yahoos, required that we learn the latest in emergency procedures in the case of heart attack. We called a special meeting for this purpose, and it was at this meeting that my friend and fellow director Albert Buckland disgraced himself once and for all.

  At the beginning of the meeting, Albert wasn’t even there. Ejnar Madsen, a dryland wheat man from way off near Roy, managed to make it. Jack Dolan was there, winking at everyone from one side of the table, his Lucky Strike tilting a cone of smoke toward the big ventilator overhead. “What d’ya know?” he rasped at me when I came in. He sold cars, any cars, all across Montana. Beside him was an old sleepy man, practically a narcoleptic, named Dawson. Dawson never missed a meeting. His special area of interest was housing for railroaders. We called him Sleepy Dawson. Muriel Bizeau was there from the Chamber of Commerce. And Dan Pfeiffer from Taco Hut. The only one who had seemed to be unable to make it was Albert Buckland, who doesn’t even have a job, having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and spent his life hunting elk.

  “Where’s Albert?”

  “Ain’t here yet,” said Ejnar, popping a breath mint.

  “I guess we’re gonna learn CPR,” croaked Jack Dolan.

  “What is it? What is that?” asked Sleepy Dawson.

  “First aid for heart attacks,” said Muriel Bizeau. Albert was also a park director, a hospital director, and a county commissioner. I guess it isn’t fair to say he doesn’t work.

  Anyway, t
he CPR instructor arrived carrying his demonstration dummy. “I’m Ted Contway,” he said. He was bright and looked committed to the day’s lesson; he would remind you of a really enthusiastic pharmaceutical salesman or an aerobics instructor. He wasn’t religious, but he was getting there. “I’m told we’re missing one individual. However, I’ve got Lewis and Clark Rest Home at eleven. We better start.” It was just as well Albert wasn’t there. He chewed up guys like this and spit them out.

  Ted Contway held his hands together as though in prayer, raised them, and touched their ends to his lips. He lowered his eyelids for a moment.

  “In the course of this class, one of you could die of a heart attack. There is such a thing as first aid for heart attacks. That’s nice, huh? We will learn that this morning. To begin with, I will discuss some general principles with you and I will ask you for a volunteer to try to put those principles into practice. Then we will learn correct rescue practices, okay?”

  Suddenly, Albert Buckland slung himself into the doorway. He is a big dramatic-looking man, and he was dressed for a wonderful idea he had had the previous evening. He was still drunk. Ted Contway took one look and then made as though he hadn’t seen him. Instead, he went to the other faces and studied each of them like a coach looking at his starting lineup. Jack Dolan’s face disappeared behind a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  “Cardio … pulmonary … resuscitation. CPR. Pharynx, larynx, trachea. Learn them. Ventilation, circulation. Not the same thing. Cardiac arrest. Brain damage. Death. The victim: stricken in a dental chair, up a telephone pole, in a stadium seat, anywhere. Things happen: minor things and deadly things. Is the victim, for instance, breathing. Is his blood circulating? We look at the beds of his fingernails. They are dark as night. Collapse of the heart, standstill, fibrillation. Direct inspection of the fibrillating heart reveals an organ that looks and feels like a bag of worms. Pain, bad pain, spreading from the center of the chest. Fear.” We all looked around at each other, trying to make a joke of this with our facial expressions. Albert Buckland wasn’t really there as he ran his fingers down the length of his necktie and made it pop.

  “At this point the alternative to correct and proper CPR is—guess what?—death. But let’s wind back a sec to shock. Move your victim away from that object that got him. Victim is floating in a swimming pool next to a toaster. Stand on a dry spot and separate him from that toaster with a pole or a tennis racquet.

  “Obstructed airways. Booze and dentures, a deadly combo. Rapid chewing, laughing, drinking, talking: the ‘café coronary.’ And old brother Death. Or: partial obstruction. Our boy sounds like a crow. Say to him, ‘Can you speak?’ And say it like this: ‘Can you speeeeak?’ Victim clutches neck. There’s your answer. And now my dear rescuer, you are on your own. You don’t have any of the goodies! You don’t have the resuscitator, the inhalators, the oxygen. Rescuer, you are alone.

  “Victim has both his hands on his throat. But maybe we know something. We go to our back blows, our manual thrusts. But death, my friends, is staring in the window. What if the victim is on the ground in shock? Can you turn him over as a unit? There are cuts on his face. Is his neck broken? You try artificial respiration, but you don’t know how to do it right. When you blow into his mouth, you hear air escaping but you don’t see the chest rise. Surprise! You’ve got a laryngectomy! Now what’re you going to do? Maybe you don’t inflate the lungs after a few tries but the stomach distends: a dead man can throw up on you! Maybe you’re lucky, a couple of puffs and you feel the compliance of the victim’s airway. You’re a hero. You were lucky. But we are not talking about luck here today. We are talking about making life … resume.”

  With a sudden gesture, he sent the dummy floundering onto the floor. We were all in shock. And scared.

  “Who would like to save this person who cannot speak, who cannot breathe, and whose heart is at a standstill?”

  Albert Buckland stepped forward, pursing his lips and adjusting his pants.

  “Ooh la la, is this what policemen and firemen do?” he asked.

  Ted Contway, the instructor, smiled across the room at the assembled faces: half of them in the heart attack zone. Jack Dolan blew thoughtful plumes of deep lung smoke into the circle. He seemed to be in a rapture, as I was, thinking about—well, not being here anymore. Even though we all felt the drama of emergency, maybe we were hoping that Albert would louse things up and keep us from having to think about passing into the next world. At the same time, like in a play, we sort of believed in the dummy, which was a big rugged test item. We wanted the dummy to get better.

  It was soon clear that Albert had managed to evade the general feeling. We could tell he thought this was a pretty dismal convocation. But he got right into it and straddled the dummy. “Don’t despise me, love,” he said. “I am but a man.” In a heartbeat, his pants were down, and it was a trial for the rest of us to see who least wanted to watch the assault.

  We all ran out of the room and clustered in the reception area with the secretaries. I think we were actually afraid of Ted Contway, who had been almost like a minister bringing word to us of something better. It was shocking that one of our group plan would have acted like this.

  There was a disturbance, almost a scuffle, in the boardroom. Albert Buckland came out in his overcoat and went straight through to the street. I tried to say something decent to Ted Contway when he came out. I told him that I thought we had all learned a lot. But he didn’t hear me.

  “I’d like a paper towel,” he said. It was winter.

  After lunch, I went over to my own office. I am a cattle trader and I was receiving a thousand head for a client’s warm-up lot, and there was paperwork, mostly brucellosis, Bang’s vaccination certificates, and brand inspections. Milk River range cattle going from the prairie to steroids to the fast-food lines.

  Albert called me in midafternoon, and he was sober. “I got a room at the Murray,” he said. “Someone called Diana and told her what I did. I got pitched out. You’ve got to go over for me. Diana likes you. She knows you’ve done crazy things but she likes you. She’ll buy your story. Call me, I’ll be right here.”

  There were narrow windows on the side of the Buckland front door. After the bell stopped ringing, the face of Diana appeared in the one on the right. She opened the door for me and I followed her into the drawing room. She sat down in a flamed silk armchair in the winter light that came through the curtain. Reflexively checking to see if I had tracked up the rug, I sat down and angled my Stetson between my knees.

  “Where do I start?” I said. I could see she wasn’t going to budge. Diana’s features were immobilized and her mouth was a mark. I told her that no one wanted that class in the first place and that it had made everyone nervous. “Besides, we’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t.”

  Diana adjusted her head in the light. The furnace turned on in the basement. I had this instant of hope that someone had pulled up. The curtains stirred faintly at the registers. Diana had not moved at all. I felt I couldn’t really face the situation the instructor wanted us to believe in. Finally, there was a bit of movement, a focusing of Diana’s gaze. She turned and looked straight at me.

  “He fucked the dummy,” she said. I stood and said I thought I had better go. She didn’t respond to that. So, I went.

  I called Albert, and he was drunk all over again.

  “I didn’t get anywhere.”

  “What did she say?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Hm. You have time for a bite to eat?” I realized that there was a difference between eating and getting something in your stomach but I accepted. I think I was starting to be irked with Albert.

  The Sport was crowded and we were lucky to get seated. There were four doctors at one table and next to them a crowd of merry ranchers from up the valley. Next to us were two handsome couples in their seventies. In their faces was this old-time social excitement.

  Albert reeled to his chair, counting the house wi
th a magnanimous gaze. He looked anesthetized. We sat down.

  “Do you know,” he said, “that I am the heir to Blair Castle in Scotland?”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I am the real Duke of Athole and a spurious cousin has stolen my castle.”

  “I see.”

  “And no one in this dump knows it!” he shouted. Heads jerked up. The Duke of Athole caught their faces and asked them if they even knew when Blair Castle was built. They didn’t.

  “Twelve sixty-nine!” he bayed, flagging the barmaid. We got in two orders at once. I should’ve cut him off, but the prospect of more liquor calmed him. When the drinks came, Albert drank his immediately. I was trying to think how to get out of this wreck when one of the couples at the adjoining table stood to go. The woman, perhaps seventy-five years old, had a full-length coat which my friend the Duke of Athole sought to help her with. He held it up like a bullfighter’s cape.

  “Why, thank you,” she said and backed a bit toward the armholes. The Duke lost his balance slightly. It seemed that her attempts to backstroke into the coat only flushed the Duke in the opposite direction. By the time they crossed the restaurant in this way, the woman was frantic and the owner of the restaurant had Albert by the arm. I wished he’d have beaten him within an inch of his life.

  “Give the lady her coat,” said the owner, deftly trading him a drink. Albert downed it on his way back to the table. I hate discourtesy, and my appetite was shot. Albert stared at me from his secret place in the universe.

  “I,” he said, “am going to be sick.” He got up and made his way to the rear, shoving people as he went. After a bit, I followed, hoping to find him dead, but instead I found him fervently embracing the base of the toilet, his chin on the seat. He was real sick.