Thomas McGuane - To Skin a Cat

“Don’t come crying to me.”

They talked about farm price supports and the drought in eastern Montana. David could see the road like a band of silver. “What a mess this is, they all exclaimed,” said David sadly.

“You don’t sound so good yourself,” said Rita’s father.

The old rancher left a couple of hours before his daughter came home. When she returned, Rita put her foot through the screen. “God damn son of a bitch,” she said.

“Rita, what’s the matter?”

“I want a nice home, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Whether you care to put your shoulder to the wheel or not.” David thought she’d gotten this odd locution from Neville.

“But I’m actually paying for it,” said David.

“Boola,” said Rita, definitely from Neville.

At work, David tossed a fifty-pound block of iodized salt from the loading dock into the truck, and the rancher was out of the cab and in David’s face in one second. “That could have gone right through the bed, my friend.”

“I’m not your friend.”

“What? I need to talk to someone about you.”

At lunch the manager looked at David, exhaling cigarette smoke through his teeth. “I can’t wait until your honeymoon is over,” he said. “You ain’t worth a shit.”

“Fair enough.”

When he got home, Rita’s Runner-Up Miss Montana two-horse trailer was parked in front of the house. He undid his shirt and shook the loose hay out on the sidewalk. When he opened the door, it struck Rita’s suitcase. She skitted out of the way and buttoned her western blouse over her tanned bosom.

“What I bought you is,” she said, “a microwave.”

“For what?”

“For batching it.”

“For batching it? What is this?”

“And there’s a big stack of dinners in the Igloo. We go to Helena to appeal. The state supreme court. Neville says we’ll leave no stone unturned. We’re going to bomb that whore back to the ice age.”

“The ice age,” said David, like a student in English-as-a-foreign-language. He thought of Mrs. Callahan stooped under the weight of her neck brace. She was impossible but she was all alone, while Rita and Neville had not only their enthusiasm but their goal of ruining her. David made a mental note to call the computer technician school and the Navy recruiter. Too, if he got away from the grain elevator, he could quit snoose. You couldn’t dip and work on precision electronics at the same time. He thought of these possibilities with hatred, wondering if they had beaten the deadline for annulments.

David heard something outside and went to the window to see Neville hooking up the horse trailer to his Buick. He asked Rita what they needed the trailer for. For horses, she said. How were the horses needed in the appeal process? he wondered. For trail riding to keep their spirits up.

“I can hardly believe this is happening to me, he noticed,” said David. Neville came in for the bags. Rita trotted to the car and that was that. In two days, she called to say that Helena wasn’t buying her story. They were going to Elko to heal up, play the slots, get their minds off things. “They admitted it was a bad call,” said Rita. “But they have to look out for each other. I can see where they’re coming from.”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t.”

Hearing that the marriage was shattered, Mrs. Callahan returned the furniture. She sent a note which made reference to the goodness of her heart. “I wanted,” she wrote simply, “something to remember my father by.”

When Dean Robinson finally made partner at his law firm, his life changed. Edward Hooper, one of the older partners, did everything he could to make the transition easier. Between conferences and dinners with clients, the days of free-associating in his office seemed over for Dean.

“You’re certainly making this painless,” Dean told him one hot afternoon when a suffocating breeze moved from the high plains through the city. Dean had felt he ought to say something.

“An older lawyer did the same for me,” said Edward.

“I hope I can thank you in some way,” said Dean, concealing his boredom.

“I thanked mine,” said Edward, “by being the first to identify his senility and showing him the door. It was a mercy killing.” Dean perked up at this.

Edward Hooper’s caution and scholarly style were not Dean’s. Yet Dean found himself studying him, noting the three-piece suits, the circular tortoiseshell glass, and the bulge of chest under the vest. It fascinated Dean that Edward’s one escape from his work was not golf, not sailing or tennis, but the most vigorous kind of duck hunting, reclined in a lay-out boat with a hundred decoys, a shotgun in his arms and the spray turning to sleet around him. At Christmas, Edward gave the secretaries duck he smoked himself.

Friday evening, Edward caught Dean in the elevator. Edward wore a blue suit with a dark-blue silver-striped tie, and instead of a briefcase he carried an old-fashioned brown accordion file with a string tie. One side of the elevator was glass, affording a view of the edge of the city and the prairie beyond. Dean could imagine the aboriginal hunters out there and, in fact, he could almost picture Edward among them, avuncular, restrained, and armed. Grooved concrete shot past as they descended in the glass elevator. The door opened on a foyer almost a story and a half high with immense trees growing out of holes in the lobby floor.

“Here’s the deal,” said Edward, turning in the foyer to genially stop Dean’s progress. He had a way of fingering the edge of Dean’s coat as he thought. “One of my clients wants me for dinner tomorrow night. Terry Bidwell. He is the least fun of all, and I’d like you to walk through this with me. He’s the biggest client we’ve got.” Edward looked up from Dean’s lapels to meet his eyes with his usual expression, which hovered between seriousness and mischief. For some reason, Dean felt something passing from Edward to himself.

“What do you see me doing?” Dean asked.

“I see you massaging this fellow’s ego, forming a bond. It’s shitwork.”

“I’ll be there,” said Dean, thinking of his ticket to elevated parking. It occurred to him that being the only unmarried partner was part of his selection, part of his utility as a partner. But being singled out by the canny and dignified Edward Hooper was a pleasure in itself.

Dean left his car in town on Saturday night and rode out to the Bidwells’ with Edward. The house was of recent construction, standing down in a cottonwood grove where the original ranch house must have been; the lawn was carefully mowed and clipped around the old horse corral and plank loading chute. There was a deep groove in the even grass where thousands of cattle had gone to slaughter in simpler times.

Dean and Edward stepped up to the door, Edward giving Dean a little thrust of the elbow as though to say, “Here goes,” and knocked.

There came the barking of deep-throated dogs and the door parted, then opened, fully revealing Georgeanne Bidwell. She flung her arms around Dean, then held him away from her. She was an old girl friend, actually his favorite one.

“I can’t believe it!”

“Neither can I,” said Dean, feeling the absurdity of his subdued reply. Georgeanne, whom Dean had not seen in a decade, took him by the arm as though she needed it for support. “I haven’t seen this man since spring break in nineteen-what.”

Terry Bidwell appeared at the end of the front hall and blocked off most of its light. He took in his wife, clinging to Dean’s arm. “A little wine,” he said, “perhaps a couple of candles?”

Dean thrust out his free hand. “Dean Robinson,” he said. “How do you do?”