To Skin a Cat

by Thomas McGuane

  “I like revisiting the scene of the crime.”

  “Crime?” Chino grins. “What crime?”

  Bobby gazes around the room. “The crime against taste in this creephole you call home. What do you want with those plaster Buddhas? Are you a Buddhist? And that beanbag chair? You make enough money. Is your crud taste necessary?”

  Chino stares serenely at Bobby. After a moment, he asks, “Where is the gun?”

  “How come lowlifes have always got hippie books on their bookshelf? What’s this, Watership Down? The Hobbit? What a soft heart you must have. Let’s have something to eat.”

  In the kitchen, Bobby takes a plate down from the cabinet and gets some silverware out of a drawer. He sets a place. He goes to the refrigerator and takes out a container.

  “Mind if I take some of this organic yogurt?”

  “Nope.”

  “I think it’s wonderful you should be having all these wonderful things. They’re so good for your karma. What do you do, sit down with the Mother Earth News, eat some yogurt, and then go knife somebody?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Join me,” Bobby orders. He seems possessed. He’s thinking of killing Chino, but he’s modulated that to possession. Chino sits.

  “Where are those pictures you showed me the other day?”

  “Under the bookend.”

  Bobby wanders absently into the other room. He doesn’t remember the bookend. Chino gets up and quietly begins to follow him. He picks up Bobby’s dinner knife. As he clears the corner, Bobby swings the short heavy revolver into his face. Chino drops the silverware and totters around like an old man, holding his face and cooing. Bobby strolls back with the pictures and gestures for Chino to sit down. He sits.

  “This is dinner. This is what you’re gonna eat, Chino.”

  “I can’t eat those. I can’t eat Polaroids. They’ve got chemicals on them.”

  “You have to eat them. If you don’t, I can’t answer for my actions. You can put any seasoning on them you like.” Bobby throws the ghastly pictures on Chino’s plate, one by one.

  “What’s this one?”

  “My kid. Name of Jesse.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Ten.”

  “He looks about three in this picture. You shouldn’t have this picture in here. Who’s his mother?”

  “Used to be one of my girls,” says Chino gloomily.

  “You don’t have to eat those pictures.”

  Bobby wanders disconsolately out the door. The curtain is falling.

  “See you.”

  “ ’Bye.”

  Donna’s features have grown vaguer since Bobby left. He sits down next to her. She says, “I’ve been cocktailing since you left. Thanks for the drinks.”

  “I feel the best thing would be for you to come back to my place.”

  “What’d you say to Chino?”

  “Not that much.”

  “Did you hit him?”

  “Once I had to.”

  “You hit him …?”

  “Had to.”

  “I’ll come with you. Will I be able to work?”

  “That’s the whole idea.”

  “Here’s the thing. You’ve made it so I have to hide out, and, like, I’ve had to hide before. But you’re not necessarily my next guy.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Four.”

  “Names?”

  “Jan, Marielle, and La Costa. And Donna.”

  “All Caucasian?”

  “La Costa is Negro. We never see Marielle. She went to college. She has her own clients. She buys municipal bonds.”

  “Is this all you guys do?”

  “Jan dances. What about your lady?”

  “I’m in love with her. I could marry her. It could happen. She’s Caucasian.”

  “All the pimps fall in love with La Costa. If you see Chino again, it will be because of La Costa.”

  Before they ever get inside the door, Bobby wants to know how Donna likes the view. She says, “It’s great.” Bobby asks her if she remembers tricking him into going to Chino’s the first time.

  “Yes.… ”

  Bobby slams her across the face. She takes two staggering steps with her arms hanging. “That was the last mistake you’re allowed.”

  Marianne opens the door in time to glimpse the blow. Bobby is a bit breathless from the adrenaline; it was like real exposure in rock climbing. Marianne asks what’s going on.

  Bobby says, “I was just explaining to Donna that the fastest way to get a low red-cell count is to have someone cut your throat.” He feels the gravity on his noggin.

  But Donna is the first to go into the house, introducing herself to Marianne as she passes. When they follow her in, Marianne says, to improve the situation, “I’m afraid Bobby sees himself as dangerous.”

  “I’m afraid of what else he sees,” says Donna.

  “Have you eaten?”

  “Not today. I sat around Enrico’s, and I guess I drank too much. Bunch of mixed drinks.”

  In the kitchen, Marianne begins to reheat some homemade lentil soup for Donna, who is applying cleansing cream under her eyes, reverting to the plain midwestern girl she is. The day is done. Soon she is tucked in, in the spare bedroom. Bobby puts cheese melba toast and a glass of wine next to her bed. He works the tiny concerns to the point of dowdiness.

  “You might get an appetite during the night. Tomorrow, we get your clothes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And maybe we can ring up the other girls for a drink in the evening.”

  “Maybe,” says Donna, eyeing his lips for slobber. No sign.

  “Y’know what I mean.”

  “I know.”

  Upstairs, while Marianne lies in bed reading, Bobby stretches out on the floor and sketches the floor plan of the house on a large sheet of butcher paper. Marianne thinks for a moment; then it dawns on her. “If you’re planning on turning this into a whorehouse, count me out. I don’t see that as an intelligent atmosphere.”

  “What else could you do?” asks Bobby maladroitly.

  “I could go back to work! Working in a whorehouse is not the only option I have! I never had such a discussion until I met you!”

  “You were the one who took on that cop with such alacrity.”

  “Not alacrity, you bastard, I was fool enough to indulge myself in your wishful thinking.”

  “Which I see you now resent.”

  “You bet your life! And especially since you don’t seem to have any conviction about it yourself. Listen to me, Bobby, I am reading a nice book by Jane Austen, and tonight I have no further desire to discuss whorehouses. Go talk to the whore downstairs, if you can’t stand the pressure. I’m reading my book.”

  “I might.”

  I am on probation for soliciting. One slip and I will be jailed or assigned to community service. I prefer Jane Austen.”

  “I’m going downstairs to talk to Donna.”

  Bobby’s bathrobe trails behind him as he descends. Bobby opens the spare room. It is empty. The drawers on the first floor are all pulled out. Marianne’s purse is upended, looted. He turns his wallet inside out in futile hope. When he treads upstairs and back into the bedroom, Marianne inquires, without looking up from her book, “We been robbed?”

  “Yup.”

  “Did she eat the little snacks you left by her little table?”

  “I guess there wasn’t time.”

  Bobby goes to bed, outfitted in disappointment. Yet once the lights are off, he falls into a deep sleep, dreaming of ambulance service in the Ardennes. Then he wakes up and snaps the light. Marianne is already awake, lost, her eyes going nowhere.

  “Darling?”

  “What, baby?”

  “Have you had thousands of lovers?” he asks.

  “Oh, babe.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No,” she says.

  “How many?”

  “I don’t know, darling.”

>   “You don’t even know how many?”

  “I didn’t count.”

  “Count. You mean it would be necessary to start counting?”

  “Oh, Bobby, can’t we just sleep?”

  “I have to get this off my chest.”

  “Why do you have to?”

  “I can’t sleep,” says Bobby. “Under fifty?”

  “I think so.”

  “But close.”

  “Bobby, I don’t know! My God, we don’t even make love ourselves lately!”

  “What a heartache I’ve got.”

  “I’m starting to get mad!”

  “Don’t get mad at me. My heart is aching, God damn it!”

  “If you’ve got such a heartache, why are you trying to turn me into a hooker?”

  “To wipe those aches away!”

  “Well, let me tell you right now, I’m not about to reconstruct my past for you. So you can quit worrying about that one.”

  “Yeah, but you had one.”

  “So did you.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Did you sleep with that English rotter?”

  “Obviously yes.”

  “I’ll bet he was a bum lay.”

  “You’ll never know.”

  “I can guess.”

  “Let’s put it this way,” says Marianne measuredly. “He beat the hell out of that plainclothesman.”

  “Don’t keep running my face in that one!”

  “Bobby, honey, you’d better figure out what you’re up to. I mean, this is all very adventurous, but if you can’t handle it, you better think of something you can.”

  “Is that some kind of attack on my nerve?” Bobby says sharply. Who is this dumb bunny trying to put on the spot?

  Marianne has no trouble finding Donna at her predictable table the next day. The same bartender is in the corner like a heron spotting minnows.

  “May we have our belongings back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That wasn’t very nice.”

  “I’m not very nice. Blah, blah, blah.”

  “That’s right,” says Marianne. “You’re a useless girl. And your fingerprints are on everything. I’m going from here to the police unless we can have our things back.”

  “Better have your boyfriend go. You’ve got a record.”

  “That’s fine. Is that how you would prefer it?”

  “I’ll tell you something better. All your stuff is up to Chino’s place, ’n’ that. Your boyfriend went up and hassled my guy, and it was a question of my getting back in the first place. I’m not interested in being a house pet with a view of the ocean. Part two, I love my guy. Can you follow that? If you want your stuff, go get it.”

  “Thank you very much, I will.”

  It must be that Chino can feel the vibration of someone on the fire escape because once more he is smiling on the landing, this time at brave Marianne, who seems primly ascending, like someone distributing leaflets for Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  “Good morning,” she says. “I’ve come to see about my things.”

  Chino holds the door for her. Still sleepy, he looks more like Donald Arthur Jones; “Chino” is for as the day goes on. But it does seem the latter is coming on rather rapidly.

  “Oh, yeah,” he says. “The odds and ends Donna lifted. The money is in my bank and the credit cards are back in circulation.”

  “Well,” Marianne says, feeling very much as though she were at the World Trade Center, “start thinking about how you’re going to get them for me.”

  “Why?” Chino is narrowing down.

  “Because we need them.”

  “Who? You and what’s his name, Errol Flynn? Errol Flynn needs them. You don’t.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “That means you’re not going anywhere. Errol Flynn is going to have to do his own cooking and washing until he can find some more live-in help. His old lady just found a new job.”

  “I’m looking for a girl named Donna. You remember, a tall brunette who sits at that table, that one there, next to the sidewalk?”

  “I don’t know her,” says the bartender.

  “Come on, she sits right there! I left a hundred bucks with you to cover her drinks.”

  “I don’t remember that either.”

  “She’s here every day!”

  “Lower your voice or I’ll have you bounced.”

  “I … I’m sorry. I have a job to do. I want to clean up this neighborhood. I could’ve used your help.”

  “Sorry.”

  “If it turns out I needed your help bad, I’m coming back to see you.” Bobby’s got his hand on the gun, and he’d like to shoot this fucker’s lights out.

  “Whatever blows your dress up,” says the unflappable bartender as he swishes mai tai glasses in the suds.

  Bobby stands on Chino’s landing with his ear to the door. He can hear incoherent murmuring from within. He’s got the gun in front of him and he’s turning the knob as slowly as he can. The latch clicks and the door is free. Bobby kicks it wide open, jumping inside with the gun held two-handed, straight in front of him.

  Three Chinese house painters babble in abject terror in the completely bare flat. Bobby gapes at the emptiness as he backs out amid the oriental cacophony.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry.…”

  “So sorry,” they echo, nervously trying to get with it.

  In a regally anonymous condominium, high in the middle of the city, each of whose windows gives onto a merciless view of the ocean and the far bridges of the bay, the silent corridors reach past the sealed doors like a nervous system. A door opens; a well-dressed man backs into the corridor trailing a woman’s arm. It drops away and swings back into the doorway. He says thank you and goes. The girl is not Marianne; she is on the couch beyond in a nightgown. But the door closes.

  At the Garden Court the next day, under the splendid green-house roof, Chino is having lunch with Marianne, whose terror and beautiful clothes have made her ravishing, beautiful. Chino is attempting a vain, somehow intimate speech to her. He seems to think only of Marianne.

  “My job is to provide the illicit. Is that not so? In recent years I am up against hippies, sluts, and, worst of all, experimenters. And many of our country’s people have become queer. What can I offer a successful man besides mere convenience? I am not McDonald’s! I wish to be something more than a drive-up window. My clients are not … swingers! My clients are powerful, friends of the system. On the level of pure merchandise, they are happy with what I give and they … remunerate me so I can go on as a well-paid, quietly efficient person of crime. But … I think now I have something for the discerning, something which is not now easily obtained, not without crazy and needless risk. My clients have families and concerns; they need to express themselves.”

  “What is it you can offer them?” Marianne asks, in terror of this knife-wielding animal playing the gent at the table.

  “I can offer them an unwilling lady, an intelligent woman who hates everything that is happening to her.”

  “But what if I learn to like it?” Marianne asks him desperately. Learning to like it is the only card she holds.

  “Then you are just another one of the girls. You become commonplace.”

  “To whom?” A disappearing pulse of courage.

  “To me, to yourself. What’s the difference?”

  Jane Adams, the lady realtor, a woman of energy and brains, is on the porch of Bobby’s Presidio Heights house running down a rumor. Jane hates this. She wanted to make a living and this is it. The porch is covered with glass from a broken bottle that has been thrown from inside. Jane states as she enters, “Why not say it? I’ve had complaints.”

  The place is a mess, with half-finished meals and newspapers slung over the furniture.

  “This certainly proves the value of a damage deposit,” says Jane, hating the position she’s in, this real-estate sham. E
very time she has said “ranchette,” “bungalow,” “younger couple,” “handyman’s dream,” has been, she now feels, a black mark on her soul. But Bobby’s hauteur helps her through the moment.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” he says jauntily.

  “I’m thinking in terms of eviction.”

  “You’ll need a hot lawyer.”

  “I’ll get one. I rather thought your friend would be tidier.”

  “She’s been kidnapped. Tough to be tidy, under the circumstances.”

  It’s very quiet.

  “Have you reported this to the police?”

  “On, yes, first thing.”

  “And what happened?”

  “They said she had merely left. She had a record, which they said indicated that she had simply moved on.”

  “A record for what?”

  “Prostitution.”

  “Well, I would never have guessed that!”

  “Please don’t evict me. I’ll get a maid.”

  “You look like you could cry.”

  “Can I touch you?” Bobby asks.

  “We shook hands once,” she said.

  “Can I touch your hand again? I’m desperate.”

  When Bobby has finished seducing Jane in the sordid shambles of the bedroom, he says, “I want my Marianne back.” His throat seizes. Tears stream onto his wino face.

  “You make me feel like a stand-in.”

  “You are a stand-in.”

  This flings Jane into all the ugliness of her trade, and before she can stop herself she says, “I’m going to have your ass evicted if it’s the last thing I do. I’ll see you in hell.”

  But then Bobby begins to cry a little, and once again she hates herself for being mean, a sensation Bobby has not experienced. He whimpers, “Please help me.” He’s beginning to acquire the tiniest bit of a new erection.

  During the long day in bed, Bobby tells Jane everything he knows about Marianne, Donna, and Chino. Plus what he heard about Jan and La Costa. He keeps checking to be sure that Jane really knows the town. Too, he likes her hard flat-sided buttocks, her irrational exclamations, and her lingerie. Sometimes he cries a little, but Jane is drawn to him because he is crying less and less. Finally, he has a shower and puts on his striking clothes. How handsome! she will recall thinking.

  Chino is in the luxurious living room of his condominium. He is speaking to Max, a hearty mid-forties salmon canner and developer from up north. Chino plays a marvelous new role; compared to the love birds in Presidio Heights, Chino and Max are just plain happier.