Thomas McGuane - To Skin a Cat

Some days there were no chores. Bill, Buck, and Dalton would be lined up silently on the lawn. I pitched the paper, sailing it past their expressionless faces. Then I made off on my bike, putting all my weight on first one pedal, then the other.

Summer was making its way right over top of us. I played baseball after dinner, every one of the players sick on Red Man. I caught turtles. Because I hated books, my mother bribed me to read the Penrod stories and The Master of Ballantrae. Later, in the hope that I might be an entertainer, she drove me to play Mister Interlocutor in the annual minstrel show. Wearing a swallowtail coat, I read in a hysterical voice from cards she had typed, crazy questions to Mister Bones and others.

When the slow-moving green-to-brown water of the canal got warm enough, we swam in it. We drifted under the fallen trees that stretched over its mirror surface and caught the sunning turtles when they tumbled off. I had five of them, small painted and mud turtles whose cool weight in my hands and striving far-focused eyes thrilled me. The flare of shell, the arrangement of openings for head and legs, their symmetry and gleam of burnished camouflage were aching to comprehend. I took them to school and Dalton Emery, of the safety patrol, tossed them from the bus at forty miles an hour onto the paved road, where they blossomed red for one instant and flew apart. He pointed in his manual to a prohibition of pets on the school bus, an order of the state.

I didn’t deliver papers that week. It seemed half the town called my father about it. I wouldn’t explain myself; I guess I had the feeling that others might be listening. My father looked on in confusion as my paper route was turned over to an Estonian boy down the canal who had recently joined the Confederacy.

I had a path in the sumac that wound through low ground to a bank of cattails where redwing blackbirds flickered and sang. The maroon seeds had a salty taste, and to be undaunted by their rumored poison was part of the heroism of sojourning in the low ground. This same path crossed stands of milkweed with its pods of pagan silk and drew me close to the paper globes of hornets suspended in shadows. On the path I sometimes found a mother opossum with her infants stuck to her underside like stamps. The sumac path wound around and forked into itself. It seemed never to be the same from day to day. I now spent all my time in either the gravity of school supervision or close watching in my own home. My disappearances into the sumac were the only exception to all the unwelcome order.

I always wore my Federal cap on these junkets and carried a Barlow knife. I had wedged a piece of wood inside the knife that kept the blade point slightly exposed, so that it could be flicked open against the seam of my dungarees.

On the ninth of June, I placed my unsatisfactory report card on the kitchen table and headed for the sumac. I wandered down in it until I couldn’t feel the heat of the sun but instead felt the cool breath of air from the mudbanks and sinkholes around me. A small hawk used my path for a whirling departure that cleared cobwebs at face level for fifty yards. At the first fork I found a snare that was meant for me. A powerful elm bough had been drawn down with a piece of old rope, the rope wound with vines, and the loop staked to the ground and covered with last year’s brittle leaves. I tripped the snare with a stick, and the report of the bough carried through the bottom. I sat down and watched the rope snare turn in the air ten feet above me. In the climbing ground, I could hear the diminishing whisper of shrubs against pant legs. Then it was still.

I was taken prisoner the Fourth of July, a day that will live in infamy. My parents left for a long weekend on a cabin cruiser, which was really how summer always started for us, not flowers or south winds so much as cabin cruisers. The Emerys must have known because they took me right at the foot of our road. Dalton got my Barlow knife, and when we reached the canal, Bill threw my forage cap into the water and shot it full of holes with his twenty-two. I was held in a piano packing crate from Mr. Emery’s haulage business.

“If you escape, we’ll know where to find you,” said Buck, with his way of looking through me. Buck was the one who would, years later, live alone with his father and help keep up the trap line. Dalton was in and out of prison. And Bill was killed in a rocket attack on the Mekong Delta. “If we have to go looking for you,” Buck said, “we may finish you off.” I know all this was talk, but there was something to Buck that lay outside of all agreements. He had shoved girls at school and disrupted the most official fire drills. No one used the drinking fountain without the fear that Buck Emery might push their teeth down on the chromium water jet.

“Just write a statement saying Abraham Lincoln was yellow and you go free,” said Bill excitedly.

“But your knife is gone,” said Dalton, “never to be seen again.”

They left me with a pencil and a lined tablet in case I wanted to make a confession. I was given matches, a saucepan, a jug of water, and a box of Quaker Oats.

I saw the sun cross the sky and go into the swamp. The sound of frogs came up; not just the unpunctuated singing of the common green frogs but the abdominal bass of bullfrogs. The whippoorwills lasted an hour or two and the screech owls came out. A cold spring moon mounted high above the piano crate, and I fell asleep as its white light poured through the slats.

When I woke up, I was chilled deep down. It was just first light and Buck was staring in at me.

“Do any writing?”

“No, and I won’t.”

“It’s your funeral,” he said in his thudding way. He bent his face to better see me. Then he was gone.

I dumped the oats into the saucepan and let them soak while I pulled down rough handfuls of splinters from the crate for a cooking fire. I had to have this to do. I was frantic inside the small box, getting close to battering myself against its insides. The morning light glittered on the links of chain holding the crate shut, and the frogs were silent in the cold. My hand shook when I lit the matches, not so much because I was chilled, or that I could not repudiate Lincoln, but because the box had seemed to shrink to an intolerable size and my heart was trying to pound its way out of my chest. When the fire was going, I threw the gruel that was meant for my breakfast out of the box onto the ground. It dripped slow and cold from the chain while the tongue of fire reached out from the splinters. I tore more wood loose and threw it atop the fire, forcing the flames to the side of the box and wishing it were the battlements of Vicksburg with the slavers inside watching their kingdom fall. The smoke rolled over me and I grew faint. I remember thinking as I hovered between terror and opportunity that the sparks were like a shower of meteors on a winter night. I was quite certain I was burning up for glory.

The next thing I was in the Emery parlor, a plain room with antlers on the wall and a great painting of a waterfall so huge that the little tourists at its base seemed to cower at its majesty. I reeked of wood smoke. The stairs to the second floor went up at a steep angle like a ladder. The carpet runner was just nailed to the risers. There were a lot of chairs, no two alike. Bill, Buck, and Dalton were in three of these chairs and their father was standing over close to me where I was stretched out on the lumpy divan. Mr. Emery was little and hard and he had already cut a switch. He may very well have used it before I woke up, because the three looked like the most ordinary schoolboys you could picture. I was even scared of their old man.

I tried to tell from the way we walked as we went outside what he thought of me, but all I knew was that he was thinking, as we used to say, “in his mind.” I caught a look of the boys watching. “They’re not like you, are they,” said Mr. Emery, almost to himself.