Thomas McGuane - To Skin a Cat

The banker came in and played Garry Owen, the old cavalry call, on the bugle while two wives, making like vestal virgins, emptied a vessel of grain alcohol into the punch tank. Mrs. Callahan staggered out of the wing chair and cried, “The chili!” By the time she carried the big drip-baste pot to the table, there was an extraordinary tension about what the condition of the chili would actually be. Was it burned or dry? This was famous chili with cascabels and black olives, and woe betide if it had burned. But then, finally, it was okay, it was fine.

“You stay out of this,” said Mrs. Callahan, shaking her ladle at David. The others lined up all the way to the porch. David got a beer, drank it down, and got another. He sat on the piano bench and listened in around him. A realtor, a rural type, picked at his chili, shuffled, raised his shoulders, and moved his lips real slow in an effort to be a man of few words. He was talking to Anita Baldich, the banker’s wife. “I got this itty-bitty place on the edge of town,” the pitch began. Mrs. Baldich had a sudden fullness around her mouth and her nostrils flared: a concealed yawn.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Callahan was telling of an out-of-body experience she’d had when she banged her head on a rafter as a girl. “Ever since then,” she said, “I’ve seen life from a great distance, a great distance.” David wondered if this was what had made her glom their furniture. “In effect,” added Mrs. Callahan, “I died.”

Said lawyer Neville, as though in reply, “I had an uncle who spoke with a Lebanese accent. As a joke. Gradually, he lost the ability to talk without his accent. My generation of people grew up referring to him as ‘the old A-rab over the store.’ ”

“Oh, come on,” said Mrs. Callahan, “don’t cover up your origins for us.”

“Easy there, Toots,” said Neville. “You’re letting the gin talk.” Loud laughter broke out among the guests, really loud. Neville conducted the noise like an orchestra. The gambling doctor was particularly sarcastic in his laughter, and Mrs. Callahan hurled her bowl of chili in his face. That got it quiet.

“You carcass,” said the doctor. “Remind me to do your next myelogram.” He twisted his handkerchief around his forefinger and cleaned out his eye sockets.

David joined Rita on the sofa, but Mrs. Callahan spotted it. “Out!” she shouted. “Anyplace but that.” They moved to the piano bench. “You’ll regret coming around here,” said Mrs. Callahan from her place in the next world.

Soledad came in at three to one, and the doctor raised his arms like a champ. “Stick with me, kids. What’d I tell you?” Mrs. Callahan patrolled the edge of the party loftily. Suddenly, Rita tackled her. People crowded around screaming. They were on the floor in a heap. The doctor got Rita and pried her loose.

“Call the police,” said Neville in an even tone. David looked at his wife, more strange than anything in the National Geographic , and felt a pride that surpassed anything he’d ever felt, a surprise that lasted long into that night, after they had lain down in the front room of the bare little home. He could hardly believe she was his. Her high, hard breasts were almost more than he could stand. The middle of her body was a blank in the dull light from the uncurtained windows, a blank except for the dark, precise crevice he ran his hand over until it seemed right. Then David got atop Rita. He had a horrifying picture of Mrs. Callahan peering in the window, but it passed in time for him to keep going until the emission. Later, he and Rita pondered what a climax for her would be like. She dabbed at herself with a towel. “I’d sure like to know,” she said, and they went to sleep.

At three or so, the police came around and took Rita to jail. She went off with a red plaid wool shirt over her nightgown. David was paralyzed and helpless.

“You got her into this,” said her father and made David sign an IOU for her bail. But Rita didn’t get out till noon. Her name made the Courthouse Blotter before their marriage was even announced. Mrs. Callahan walked by the house wearing a neck brace. David and Rita went out to the ranch and walked over to the cows, who faced them with their calves behind them, slowly backing up.

“I wish we lived out here,” said Rita.

“We don’t.”

“Get this,” said Rita.

Rita’s father called them by blowing the horn of his Ford a mile away. They ignored him and kept stewing. “I just wish we could enjoy our house,” said David.

“The house. I just got out of jail.” She snorted slightly. “The house.”

“One word from your father about the good life on the ranch, and I break every bone in his body.”

That night when Mrs. Callahan passed the front window, Rita called out from the sink, “I wish you were dead,” David’s respect for Rita’s intransigence reached a point of fear. He suddenly felt less important in Rita’s life than her quest for immediate justice.

“I feel like a second fiddle,” he said.

“Oh, but you are.”

“Why are you being sarcastic?”

“I wasn’t being sarcastic. I’ll fix that whore if it’s the last thing I do.” Now that things had grown so sanguinary, David pined for the sex schmaltz of their courtship. He stared listlessly in the mirror, remembering his grandmother telling him that those black pupils were the home of Emperor Worm. He was prepared to do a lot to get rid of this feeling, change zip codes, anything.

“If this is all too much for you,” said Rita, staring into the sink, “get out of my way.”

“I don’t have to listen to this, he shot back,” said David.

“You aren’t funny.”

“Get me out of this popstand, he pleaded,” said David with no pleasure at all in his voice.

“The trouble with you, David, is you have no love of struggle.”

Neville picked Rita up at seven to go over the details of her case. He was wearing a cashmere sweater, in a deep tomato. He repeatedly smiled like a dog snapping at flies on a hot summer day. The house seemed to arouse in him a meticulously subdued sense of hilarity. When they’d left, David made for himself a potful of corn on the cob, boiling it until it was done. He dumped the cobs into the sink and ate them as soon as they quit steaming. He went out to the truck and listened to the news of hostages and inflation. He turned to a country station and heard a rural quartet with a basso profundo who intoned love ballads like a professional moron. He imagined his and Rita’s story blared by this sap and turned off the radio. He went back inside. He was nervous. He’d rather have had no furniture and no house than the current situation. He sat against the wall and read how to get rid of unwanted bikini hair once and for all, dead nervous. The next day when he got home from work, he found a note on the door. Rita was at the municipal pool. David went straight there in his overalls, covered with chaff and dust. He was breathless by the time he got to where Rita lay in a row of high school girls. When he spoke he was surprised at the pitch of his own voice. “Rita,” he said, “I’d like to know what you’re doing, what we’re doing. What’s the plan, what’s the future, what is going to happen to us?” Rita angled her hand to make a little band of shadow over her eyes.

“I tell you what, David. I like it pretty well here by the pool.”

They could set their clocks by the passing of Mrs. Callahan’s humped figure. “Hasn’t that thing healed yet?” yelled Rita from the doorway. They could just make out a streak of white against the viburnum.

“She’ll see you in court,” said David.

“Get off my case,” said Rita.

Rita was found guilty of aggravated assault and fined. The court attached David’s wages. Neville stopped by to pick up Rita wearing a smart Shetland, in lime. Rita went as she was. They were going to appeal. Rita’s father came by with a card table and a standing lamp and a hall tree. They sat on the front stoop and drank beer. “I think me and Rita got problems,” said David.