To Skin a Cat

by Thomas McGuane

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Callahan was telling of an out-of-body experience she’d had when she banged her head on a rafter as a girl. “Ever since then,” she said, “I’ve seen life from a great distance, a great distance.” David wondered if this was what had made her glom their furniture. “In effect,” added Mrs. Callahan, “I died.”

  Said lawyer Neville, as though in reply, “I had an uncle who spoke with a Lebanese accent. As a joke. Gradually, he lost the ability to talk without his accent. My generation of people grew up referring to him as ‘the old A-rab over the store.’ ”

  “Oh, come on,” said Mrs. Callahan, “don’t cover up your origins for us.”

  “Easy there, Toots,” said Neville. “You’re letting the gin talk.” Loud laughter broke out among the guests, really loud. Neville conducted the noise like an orchestra. The gambling doctor was particularly sarcastic in his laughter, and Mrs. Callahan hurled her bowl of chili in his face. That got it quiet.

  “You carcass,” said the doctor. “Remind me to do your next myelogram.” He twisted his handkerchief around his forefinger and cleaned out his eye sockets.

  David joined Rita on the sofa, but Mrs. Callahan spotted it. “Out!” she shouted. “Anyplace but that.” They moved to the piano bench. “You’ll regret coming around here,” said Mrs. Callahan from her place in the next world.

  Soledad came in at three to one, and the doctor raised his arms like a champ. “Stick with me, kids. What’d I tell you?” Mrs. Callahan patrolled the edge of the party loftily. Suddenly, Rita tackled her. People crowded around screaming. They were on the floor in a heap. The doctor got Rita and pried her loose.

  “Call the police,” said Neville in an even tone. David looked at his wife, more strange than anything in the National Geographic, and felt a pride that surpassed anything he’d ever felt, a surprise that lasted long into that night, after they had lain down in the front room of the bare little home. He could hardly believe she was his. Her high, hard breasts were almost more than he could stand. The middle of her body was a blank in the dull light from the uncurtained windows, a blank except for the dark, precise crevice he ran his hand over until it seemed right. Then David got atop Rita. He had a horrifying picture of Mrs. Callahan peering in the window, but it passed in time for him to keep going until the emission. Later, he and Rita pondered what a climax for her would be like. She dabbed at herself with a towel. “I’d sure like to know,” she said, and they went to sleep.

  At three or so, the police came around and took Rita to jail. She went off with a red plaid wool shirt over her nightgown. David was paralyzed and helpless.

  “You got her into this,” said her father and made David sign an IOU for her bail. But Rita didn’t get out till noon. Her name made the Courthouse Blotter before their marriage was even announced. Mrs. Callahan walked by the house wearing a neck brace. David and Rita went out to the ranch and walked over to the cows, who faced them with their calves behind them, slowly backing up.

  “I wish we lived out here,” said Rita.

  “We don’t.”

  “Get this,” said Rita.

  Rita’s father called them by blowing the horn of his Ford a mile away. They ignored him and kept stewing. “I just wish we could enjoy our house,” said David.

  “The house. I just got out of jail.” She snorted slightly. “The house.”

  “One word from your father about the good life on the ranch, and I break every bone in his body.”

  That night when Mrs. Callahan passed the front window, Rita called out from the sink, “I wish you were dead,” David’s respect for Rita’s intransigence reached a point of fear. He suddenly felt less important in Rita’s life than her quest for immediate justice.

  “I feel like a second fiddle,” he said.

  “Oh, but you are.”

  “Why are you being sarcastic?”

  “I wasn’t being sarcastic. I’ll fix that whore if it’s the last thing I do.” Now that things had grown so sanguinary, David pined for the sex schmaltz of their courtship. He stared listlessly in the mirror, remembering his grandmother telling him that those black pupils were the home of Emperor Worm. He was prepared to do a lot to get rid of this feeling, change zip codes, anything.

  “If this is all too much for you,” said Rita, staring into the sink, “get out of my way.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this, he shot back,” said David.

  “You aren’t funny.”

  “Get me out of this popstand, he pleaded,” said David with no pleasure at all in his voice.

  “The trouble with you, David, is you have no love of struggle.”

  Neville picked Rita up at seven to go over the details of her case. He was wearing a cashmere sweater, in a deep tomato. He repeatedly smiled like a dog snapping at flies on a hot summer day. The house seemed to arouse in him a meticulously subdued sense of hilarity. When they’d left, David made for himself a potful of corn on the cob, boiling it until it was done. He dumped the cobs into the sink and ate them as soon as they quit steaming. He went out to the truck and listened to the news of hostages and inflation. He turned to a country station and heard a rural quartet with a basso profundo who intoned love ballads like a professional moron. He imagined his and Rita’s story blared by this sap and turned off the radio. He went back inside. He was nervous. He’d rather have had no furniture and no house than the current situation. He sat against the wall and read how to get rid of unwanted bikini hair once and for all, dead nervous. The next day when he got home from work, he found a note on the door. Rita was at the municipal pool. David went straight there in his overalls, covered with chaff and dust. He was breathless by the time he got to where Rita lay in a row of high school girls. When he spoke he was surprised at the pitch of his own voice. “Rita,” he said, “I’d like to know what you’re doing, what we’re doing. What’s the plan, what’s the future, what is going to happen to us?” Rita angled her hand to make a little band of shadow over her eyes.

  “I tell you what, David. I like it pretty well here by the pool.”

  They could set their clocks by the passing of Mrs. Callahan’s humped figure. “Hasn’t that thing healed yet?” yelled Rita from the doorway. They could just make out a streak of white against the viburnum.

  “She’ll see you in court,” said David.

  “Get off my case,” said Rita.

  Rita was found guilty of aggravated assault and fined. The court attached David’s wages. Neville stopped by to pick up Rita wearing a smart Shetland, in lime. Rita went as she was. They were going to appeal. Rita’s father came by with a card table and a standing lamp and a hall tree. They sat on the front stoop and drank beer. “I think me and Rita got problems,” said David.

  “Don’t come crying to me.”

  They talked about farm price supports and the drought in eastern Montana. David could see the road like a band of silver. “What a mess this is, they all exclaimed,” said David sadly.

  “You don’t sound so good yourself,” said Rita’s father.

  The old rancher left a couple of hours before his daughter came home. When she returned, Rita put her foot through the screen. “God damn son of a bitch,” she said.

  “Rita, what’s the matter?”

  “I want a nice home, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Whether you care to put your shoulder to the wheel or not.” David thought she’d gotten this odd locution from Neville.

  “But I’m actually paying for it,” said David.

  “Boola,” said Rita, definitely from Neville.

  At work, David tossed a fifty-pound block of iodized salt from the loading dock into the truck, and the rancher was out of the cab and in David’s face in one second. “That could have gone right through the bed, my friend.”

  “I’m not your friend.”

  “What? I need to talk to someone about you.”

  At lunch the manager looked at David, exhaling cigarette smoke through his teeth. “I can’t wait
until your honeymoon is over,” he said. “You ain’t worth a shit.”

  “Fair enough.”

  When he got home, Rita’s Runner-Up Miss Montana two-horse trailer was parked in front of the house. He undid his shirt and shook the loose hay out on the sidewalk. When he opened the door, it struck Rita’s suitcase. She skitted out of the way and buttoned her western blouse over her tanned bosom.

  “What I bought you is,” she said, “a microwave.”

  “For what?”

  “For batching it.”

  “For batching it? What is this?”

  “And there’s a big stack of dinners in the Igloo. We go to Helena to appeal. The state supreme court. Neville says we’ll leave no stone unturned. We’re going to bomb that whore back to the ice age.”

  “The ice age,” said David, like a student in English-as-a-foreign-language. He thought of Mrs. Callahan stooped under the weight of her neck brace. She was impossible but she was all alone, while Rita and Neville had not only their enthusiasm but their goal of ruining her. David made a mental note to call the computer technician school and the Navy recruiter. Too, if he got away from the grain elevator, he could quit snoose. You couldn’t dip and work on precision electronics at the same time. He thought of these possibilities with hatred, wondering if they had beaten the deadline for annulments.

  David heard something outside and went to the window to see Neville hooking up the horse trailer to his Buick. He asked Rita what they needed the trailer for. For horses, she said. How were the horses needed in the appeal process? he wondered. For trail riding to keep their spirits up.

  “I can hardly believe this is happening to me, he noticed,” said David. Neville came in for the bags. Rita trotted to the car and that was that. In two days, she called to say that Helena wasn’t buying her story. They were going to Elko to heal up, play the slots, get their minds off things. “They admitted it was a bad call,” said Rita. “But they have to look out for each other. I can see where they’re coming from.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Don’t.”

  Hearing that the marriage was shattered, Mrs. Callahan returned the furniture. She sent a note which made reference to the goodness of her heart. “I wanted,” she wrote simply, “something to remember my father by.”

  PARTNERS

  When Dean Robinson finally made partner at his law firm, his life changed. Edward Hooper, one of the older partners, did everything he could to make the transition easier. Between conferences and dinners with clients, the days of free-associating in his office seemed over for Dean.

  “You’re certainly making this painless,” Dean told him one hot afternoon when a suffocating breeze moved from the high plains through the city. Dean had felt he ought to say something.

  “An older lawyer did the same for me,” said Edward.

  “I hope I can thank you in some way,” said Dean, concealing his boredom.

  “I thanked mine,” said Edward, “by being the first to identify his senility and showing him the door. It was a mercy killing.” Dean perked up at this.

  Edward Hooper’s caution and scholarly style were not Dean’s. Yet Dean found himself studying him, noting the three-piece suits, the circular tortoiseshell glass, and the bulge of chest under the vest. It fascinated Dean that Edward’s one escape from his work was not golf, not sailing or tennis, but the most vigorous kind of duck hunting, reclined in a lay-out boat with a hundred decoys, a shotgun in his arms and the spray turning to sleet around him. At Christmas, Edward gave the secretaries duck he smoked himself.

  Friday evening, Edward caught Dean in the elevator. Edward wore a blue suit with a dark-blue silver-striped tie, and instead of a briefcase he carried an old-fashioned brown accordion file with a string tie. One side of the elevator was glass, affording a view of the edge of the city and the prairie beyond. Dean could imagine the aboriginal hunters out there and, in fact, he could almost picture Edward among them, avuncular, restrained, and armed. Grooved concrete shot past as they descended in the glass elevator. The door opened on a foyer almost a story and a half high with immense trees growing out of holes in the lobby floor.

  “Here’s the deal,” said Edward, turning in the foyer to genially stop Dean’s progress. He had a way of fingering the edge of Dean’s coat as he thought. “One of my clients wants me for dinner tomorrow night. Terry Bidwell. He is the least fun of all, and I’d like you to walk through this with me. He’s the biggest client we’ve got.” Edward looked up from Dean’s lapels to meet his eyes with his usual expression, which hovered between seriousness and mischief. For some reason, Dean felt something passing from Edward to himself.

  “What do you see me doing?” Dean asked.

  “I see you massaging this fellow’s ego, forming a bond. It’s shitwork.”

  “I’ll be there,” said Dean, thinking of his ticket to elevated parking. It occurred to him that being the only unmarried partner was part of his selection, part of his utility as a partner. But being singled out by the canny and dignified Edward Hooper was a pleasure in itself.

  Dean left his car in town on Saturday night and rode out to the Bidwells’ with Edward. The house was of recent construction, standing down in a cottonwood grove where the original ranch house must have been; the lawn was carefully mowed and clipped around the old horse corral and plank loading chute. There was a deep groove in the even grass where thousands of cattle had gone to slaughter in simpler times.

  Dean and Edward stepped up to the door, Edward giving Dean a little thrust of the elbow as though to say, “Here goes,” and knocked.

  There came the barking of deep-throated dogs and the door parted, then opened, fully revealing Georgeanne Bidwell. She flung her arms around Dean, then held him away from her. She was an old girl friend, actually his favorite one.

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “Neither can I,” said Dean, feeling the absurdity of his subdued reply. Georgeanne, whom Dean had not seen in a decade, took him by the arm as though she needed it for support. “I haven’t seen this man since spring break in nineteen-what.”

  Terry Bidwell appeared at the end of the front hall and blocked off most of its light. He took in his wife, clinging to Dean’s arm. “A little wine,” he said, “perhaps a couple of candles?”

  Dean thrust out his free hand. “Dean Robinson,” he said. “How do you do?”

  “I’m getting there, pardner,” said Terry Bidwell, looking at the hand and then taking it. Terry still seemed like the football star he had been. Georgeanne had always had a football player, and this was certainly the big one. His face was undisguised by its contemporary cherubic haircut, his thighs by his vast slacks. He smiled at Edward without shaking his hand and turned to lead them into the living room. Dean, behind him, marveled at the expanse of his back. But the face was most astonishing: handsome, it was nevertheless the face of a Visigoth.

  A television glowed silently in the living room, running national news, and when the sports came on, Terry took a remote channel changer from his pocket, flipped on the volume, got the scores, and turned it down again. Terry didn’t pour them drinks, but he went to the bottles and named off the brands. Then he went to the half-size refrigerator, pulled open the door, and said, “Ice.”

  “You’ve really made this place your own,” Edward said, gazing around. Is that a compliment? Dean wondered.

  “It is our own,” said Terry. “I paid for it.”

  Edward turned to Dean, but without full eye contact. “Terry has an air charter service that fills a gap.”

  “The Northern Rockies?” said Terry. “A gap?” Terry’s excitement over this point gave Dean a chance to look at Georgeanne, still as pretty as when they had dated. She had a long chestnut braid down the middle of her back and bright, black eyes that missed nothing. At one time, she had seemed to be astonished at everything she heard; it was part of her charm. That astonishment had been modulated to the point that it was now a mystery whether she was hearing any of this at a
ll.

  Seeing her took Dean back to when everything had seemed possible, though he remembered being exhausted by the alternatives. What was that old dilemma? Whether to cover yourself with glory or with flannel. I am well on my way, thought Dean, to covering myself with flannel.

  They moved like a drill team to the dining room. Next to the table was a vast window with a white grid overlay to suggest multiple panes. A pond had been dug out and landscaped, and the perfection of its grassy banks and evenly spaced, langorous willows depressed Dean. A silent woman in an apron began to serve the meal. Dean was in a swoon to find his old crush on Georgeanne still intact.

  “Well,” said Georgeanne, raising her glass. “How good to see everyone so healthy and so prosperous!” They all raised their glasses. The burgundy made red shadows on the table cloth. Dean had his throbbing hand on Georgeanne’s leg. Edward stared at him and he removed it.

  “You seem quiet,” said Terry to Dean. I wonder if he noticed, Dean thought, looking back at the slab face with its small ears, and the corded neck set about with alpaca. He couldn’t tell by looking over at Georgeanne, who seemed serene, practically sleepy.

  “Dean has learned restraint since rising to partnership. It’s very becoming.”

  “Partner!” said Georgeanne. Only a pretty woman could chance a screech like this one. Dean jumped.

  “They’ve got me on a trial basis. I could be sent down any time.”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” said Edward. “It’s quite final. That’s the charm.”