Thomas McGuane - To Skin a Cat

With a sudden gesture, he sent the dummy floundering onto the floor. We were all in shock. And scared.

“Who would like to save this person who cannot speak, who cannot breathe, and whose heart is at a standstill?”

Albert Buckland stepped forward, pursing his lips and adjusting his pants.

“Ooh la la, is this what policemen and firemen do?” he asked.

Ted Contway, the instructor, smiled across the room at the assembled faces: half of them in the heart attack zone. Jack Dolan blew thoughtful plumes of deep lung smoke into the circle. He seemed to be in a rapture, as I was, thinking about — well, not being here anymore. Even though we all felt the drama of emergency, maybe we were hoping that Albert would louse things up and keep us from having to think about passing into the next world. At the same time, like in a play, we sort of believed in the dummy, which was a big rugged test item. We wanted the dummy to get better.

It was soon clear that Albert had managed to evade the general feeling. We could tell he thought this was a pretty dismal convocation. But he got right into it and straddled the dummy. “Don’t despise me, love,” he said. “I am but a man.” In a heartbeat, his pants were down, and it was a trial for the rest of us to see who least wanted to watch the assault.

We all ran out of the room and clustered in the reception area with the secretaries. I think we were actually afraid of Ted Contway, who had been almost like a minister bringing word to us of something better. It was shocking that one of our group plan would have acted like this.

There was a disturbance, almost a scuffle, in the boardroom. Albert Buckland came out in his overcoat and went straight through to the street. I tried to say something decent to Ted Contway when he came out. I told him that I thought we had all learned a lot. But he didn’t hear me.

“I’d like a paper towel,” he said. It was winter.

After lunch, I went over to my own office. I am a cattle trader and I was receiving a thousand head for a client’s warm-up lot, and there was paperwork, mostly brucellosis, Bang’s vaccination certificates, and brand inspections. Milk River range cattle going from the prairie to steroids to the fast-food lines.

Albert called me in midafternoon, and he was sober. “I got a room at the Murray,” he said. “Someone called Diana and told her what I did. I got pitched out. You’ve got to go over for me. Diana likes you. She knows you’ve done crazy things but she likes you. She’ll buy your story. Call me, I’ll be right here.”

There were narrow windows on the side of the Buckland front door. After the bell stopped ringing, the face of Diana appeared in the one on the right. She opened the door for me and I followed her into the drawing room. She sat down in a flamed silk armchair in the winter light that came through the curtain. Reflexively checking to see if I had tracked up the rug, I sat down and angled my Stetson between my knees.

“Where do I start?” I said. I could see she wasn’t going to budge. Diana’s features were immobilized and her mouth was a mark. I told her that no one wanted that class in the first place and that it had made everyone nervous. “Besides, we’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t.”

Diana adjusted her head in the light. The furnace turned on in the basement. I had this instant of hope that someone had pulled up. The curtains stirred faintly at the registers. Diana had not moved at all. I felt I couldn’t really face the situation the instructor wanted us to believe in. Finally, there was a bit of movement, a focusing of Diana’s gaze. She turned and looked straight at me.

“He fucked the dummy,” she said. I stood and said I thought I had better go. She didn’t respond to that. So, I went.

I called Albert, and he was drunk all over again.

“I didn’t get anywhere.”

“What did she say?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Hm. You have time for a bite to eat?” I realized that there was a difference between eating and getting something in your stomach but I accepted. I think I was starting to be irked with Albert.

The Sport was crowded and we were lucky to get seated. There were four doctors at one table and next to them a crowd of merry ranchers from up the valley. Next to us were two handsome couples in their seventies. In their faces was this old-time social excitement.

Albert reeled to his chair, counting the house with a magnanimous gaze. He looked anesthetized. We sat down.

“Do you know,” he said, “that I am the heir to Blair Castle in Scotland?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I am the real Duke of Athole and a spurious cousin has stolen my castle.”

“I see.”

“And no one in this dump knows it!” he shouted. Heads jerked up. The Duke of Athole caught their faces and asked them if they even knew when Blair Castle was built. They didn’t.

“Twelve sixty-nine!” he bayed, flagging the barmaid. We got in two orders at once. I should’ve cut him off, but the prospect of more liquor calmed him. When the drinks came, Albert drank his immediately. I was trying to think how to get out of this wreck when one of the couples at the adjoining table stood to go. The woman, perhaps seventy-five years old, had a full-length coat which my friend the Duke of Athole sought to help her with. He held it up like a bullfighter’s cape.

“Why, thank you,” she said and backed a bit toward the armholes. The Duke lost his balance slightly. It seemed that her attempts to backstroke into the coat only flushed the Duke in the opposite direction. By the time they crossed the restaurant in this way, the woman was frantic and the owner of the restaurant had Albert by the arm. I wished he’d have beaten him within an inch of his life.

“Give the lady her coat,” said the owner, deftly trading him a drink. Albert downed it on his way back to the table. I hate discourtesy, and my appetite was shot. Albert stared at me from his secret place in the universe.

“I,” he said, “am going to be sick.” He got up and made his way to the rear, shoving people as he went. After a bit, I followed, hoping to find him dead, but instead I found him fervently embracing the base of the toilet, his chin on the seat. He was real sick.

I went back into the restaurant and got one of the doctors. I told him that Albert had a heart condition and that he was fibrillating to beat the band, on the verge of cardiac standstill. “Can you help?” I pleaded.

The paramedics wheeled Albert through the silent restaurant, those walls lit up over and over with the lights of the ambulance out front. When the gurney went past my table, I said to Albert, “If you have to go, go first class.” I’d had enough. I called his wife and told her coldly that Albert had been taken to the emergency room at the hospital. She slammed down the phone in panic. It was as though someone or something had come between them, and this way they would get a chance to talk.

We kept the perch we caught in a stone pool in front of the living-room window. An elm shaded the pool, and when the heavy drapes of the living room were drawn so that my mother could see the sheet music on the piano, the window reflected the barred shapes of the lake perch in the pool.

We caught them from the rocks on the edge of the lake, rocks that were submerged when the wakes of passing freighters hit the shore. From a distance, the freighters pushed a big swell in front of them without themselves seeming to move on the great flatness of the lake. My friend that year was a boy named Jimmy Meade, and he was learning to identify the vessel stacks of the freighters. We liked the Bob-Lo Line, Cleveland Cliffs, and Wyandotte Transportation with the red Indian tall on the sides of the stack. We looked for whalebacks and tankers and the laden ore ships and listened to the moaning signals from the horns as they carried over the water. The wakes of those freighters moved slowly toward the land along the unmoving surface of water. The wakes were the biggest feature out there, bigger than Canada behind them, which lay low and thin like the horizon itself.