Thomas McGuane - To Skin a Cat

I took Diana down to the Kellmans, and Dr. Kellman, who is such a young man, made a seemingly prepared speech about how much Diana had cost and how in a practice that was starting slowly, you cannot imagine how slowly, Diana had been a crazy sacrifice both for himself and for Mrs. Kellman. Among the party guests there was the gloom of drama slipping away, of a return to the everyday.

In another two hours, I had restored each dog but one to its rightful owner. The doctor and his wife said they were glad to be shut of the arthritic toothless corgi, hinting it was Howie’s punishment to keep it. Howie said it suited him fine.

Anyway, as things go, it just all blew over. And in fact, by spring, when Howie started having some chest pains, probably only from working too hard, he went to Dr. Kellman, joining our new doctor’s rapidly growing list of devoted patients.

The schoolroom was small, and we had the same teacher all day long. You could smell the many coats that hung in the back of the room. The burr-headed boys sat on one side and the girls with their elaborate hair sat on the other. Between the two there was an idle hostility, which did not seem to have anything to do with sex but, rather, a plain and small hatred awaiting transmogrification and secrecy.

Our lunches were all stored on a table in black pails. We lived in such proximity and confinement that we had powerful attitudes about what constituted a proper lunch. Freakish lunches — imaginative preparation, ethnic hints, dainty wrappings — singled out the hapless owner as a pampered twit. I remember vividly how we silently accepted a trick miniature pie that was going the rounds of the grocery stores and could be eaten one-handed. A heartbeat from being singled out, each one of us seemed to arrive the same day with an identical pie.

That year, reproductions of Civil War forage caps, blue or gray with crossed sabers, came into our world. Every boy bought one. Just three boys got the rebel model, because where we lived, the indigenous saint was Abraham Lincoln and he took care of the slaveholders years ago, the men in gray. The three who bought the rebel model were the Emery brothers: Bill, Buck, and Dalton. They had nothing to do with the South. They were what was called common-ass hoodlums, who already had a running battle going with the game warden and a flourishing business in stolen hubcaps. But these hats drew the brothers close for the first time, and entirely away from the rest of us. Bill, the youngest, was thin and humorless and the most daring thief. Buck was feebleminded and got his crewcut by the calendar so he always looked the same. He didn’t appear to have had the same mother as the other two. Dalton, ready to graduate, charming and crooked, was prison bound. When the Emerys found out about my big Lincoln log set, they decided I was the brains behind the Union forces, the men in blue.

When the school bus dropped us off that night, I took the route past the old stone quarry, a place we caught sunfish in summer. A path went around the back of the quarry, so close to the water you could see the shear of stone that dropped into vertical invisibility at the shore. I could see the Emerys drifting along slowly behind me, but I was sure I could make the shortcut to my house before they caught up to me. I was wrong; they made a rush and overwhelmed me at the edge of the sumac. Buck stood flat on the end of my foot while Dalton and Bill pushed me over backward.

My leg was in a cast for two months. But the torn ligaments didn’t really heal until after summer began. My school-work suffered because the Emerys stared at me while I studied and asked to sign my cast, forcing me to refuse, making it appear that I was hostile toward them and the one causing all the trouble.

When my cast was cut off, my leg was thin and white. Across the windblown playground where deer tracks appeared in the muck, Buck Ernery watched my crooked walk.

Buck often rode the bus with me, never taking his dark, stupid eyes off my face. His straight stiff hair was even and short. From any angle there was always a spot where you could see straight through to his white scalp, luminous under the hair with a gristly glow.

There was a sentimental attempt to rehabilitate Dalton in his last term at school. He was so clearly going to do badly in life because of his suave and malicious disposition that it seemed appropriate to put him in a position of authority. It was hoped that a day would come when he would not see petty theft or feeling up girls as the be-all and end-all he viewed them as now. The principal appointed him one of the safety-patrol boys and gave him the crossed white shoulder straps that identified the officers. He wore them with his Confederate forage cap and supervised the boarding and exit of the bus. One day when we stopped at the end of our road, he got off the bus with me and stared fixedly at my blue cap. He asked if I was still loyal to the boys in blue. I said that I was. But I knew he could see I was shaking. He said that if I was interested in my health, I would desert. As scared as I was, I thought of Abraham Lincoln and said, “Never.”

“Have it your way.”

My bedroom was an unfinished addition over the attached garage. The walls were made of what was called beaverboard. There was a window at the far end of the room and I could step through it into a huge, humid elm, go up and see the tops of the woods around us, or climb down into the yard. I had a crystal set in my room and spent long hours wearing the earphones, moving the whisker of wire over the nugget of crystal in its lead enclosure trying to catch the radio signals borne through the air around me. The room had no heat. Instead I had a thin electric blanket whose wires stood through the fabric like varicose veins. The blanket had a white plastic control with a wheel, numbered one through nine. In January, nine just got me through the night; by April I’d be down to four; then in October I’d start back up the dial again. I think the crystal set and the electric blanket supplied me with the largest general ideas about the world I would acquire in my grammar school years, vastly bigger than anything discovered in class, where the glacial communion of the three R’s was held.

The last time that I used the five setting, Buck appeared in my window on a clear night and hung there, arms and legs spread to the corners of the window frame, wearing his cap and staring in at me in my bed. I didn’t move throughout the long time he hung there, and I don’t recall his climbing down. Instead, he seemed to disappear from the hypnotic center of the very fear I felt. I spent the rest of the night watching the same empty window in which I expected one day to see the atomic flash marking the end of the world.

Suddenly it was springtime. Frogs roared in the woods. Jack-in-the-pulpits sprang from black mucky soil in secret. Pike appeared from the big lake and sought the muddy canal that crossed our woods and swamps. I could see them from the high bank gulping water into their wolfish jaws and finning indolently beneath the undercut bank.

I started my paper route, learning all over again to put the three-way fold in the daily edition so it could be thrown like a piece of kindling. Among my newest subscribers were the Emerys. “I didn’t know they could read,” said my father jauntily.

I delivered their paper first. It completely threw my route off. If I rolled my papers before school, I could deliver the Emerys’ paper immediately after school was out and while they were still finishing the chores their father required of them. Their father was in “haulage,” his term for intermittent employment. Chores in haulage might consist of stacking scrap iron or salvaged copper pipe, and it might mean cutting down a wild honey tree the old man had found in the woods while the boys were in school. The Emerys ran a line of muskrat snares and gigged bullfrogs. They could take a copperhead in their hands with impunity and make it strike through a piece of inner tube stretched across the mouth of a mason jar, spitting its poison inside. My father said that the Emerys had ability, which was his way of accounting for those who, though doomed, were undeserving of remorse.