Thomas McGuane - To Skin a Cat

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.

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, the 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.”