Thomas McGuane - To Skin a Cat

But something quite different began to happen. Word got out that Dean had stood up to his client. Evan Crow, an estate planner, seized Dean’s hand silently one afternoon. And when Dean suggested the whole thing didn’t sit very well with Edward Hooper, Evan got out his actuarial tables and, massaging the bridge of his nose, pointed out that Edward wouldn’t live long enough to make his opinion matter. Other lawyers in the firm stopped by, leaned into his office doorway clutching papers, and winked or left brief encouraging words that could be reinterpreted in a pinch. “Giving my all for love,” Dean reflected, “seems merely to have advanced my career.”

Finally, he bumped into Hooper once again. “Edward,” said Dean, speaking deliberately through his bandages. “I don’t know if you realize how low the water supplies are in the prairie provinces. But in case you don’t know or don’t want to, let me tell you that the old potholes that made such a lovely nursery for waterfowl are very much dried up. Wheat farmers are draining the wetlands in the old duck factory.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Do as you wish,” Dean drawled. “But I think that it is very much in your best interests if you never shoot another duck.”

Early one morning, before the coffee was made, before the messages from the day before were distributed through the offices and the informal chats had died out in the corridors, Dean’s phone rang. It was Edward Hooper. Dean hadn’t talked to him in months.

“Can you come down?”

“Of course.”

Dean had just put the jacket of his suit over the back of his chair. He started to put it back on but on second thought, ambled out the door toward Edward’s office in his vest. He gave the closed door a single rap.

“Come in.”

One hand in his pocket, he eased the door open. Edward was at his desk. Under a wall of antique duck decoys sat Terry Bidwell, elbows on the arms of a Windsor chair, fingers laced so that he could brace his front teeth on the balls of his thumbs. He seemed thoughtful. He tipped his face up and said, “How are you?”

“Never better,” said Dean, “and you?”

“I’m fine, Dean.”

Edward smiled with a vast owlish raising of his brows as if to say, “Where’s the end to all this surprise?”

“Terry,” said Edward measuredly, “asked to see you.”

“My size has gotten to where I need to see everybody,” Terry said.

“I’d heard you were clear up to Alberta,” said Dean.

“And the desert the other way.”

“How’s Georgeanne?”

“She’s off to the coast for a cooking seminar. Hunanese. And we bought us a little getaway in Arizona.”

“All that cactus,” Dean sighed.

“Let’s come to order,” Edward broke in. “I think Terry is looking for a little perspective on his air freight and charter service.”

“No, Edward,” said Terry patiently. “On everything.”

“I mean that,” said Edward.

“As in no-stone-unturned,” said Terry. “Ed, try to stay one jump ahead of me, okay?”

“Okay,” said Edward, looking into the papers in his lap.

“Instead of the other way around, Ed. Okay?”

Sometimes, Dean thought, silence can have such purity. It was so quiet in the room, like the silence of a house in winter when the furnace quits. Edward got to his feet slowly. He’s going to leave this building, thought Dean.

Edward shaped and adjusted the papers in his hand. He looked at them and squared up their corners. He set them on the desk. He gave Terry a small, almost oriental smile. “Good-bye,” he said, “you deserve each other.” He sauntered out, his gait peculiarly loosened.

“I guess we’ll have to take it from here,” said Dean, feeling the solitude and bitter glory of the partnership.

Across the way, a woman was posting the special in the window of the hotel. It was hot all along the street, and the sky was hazy from the evaporation of irrigated fields. Bill Berryhill came out of his brothers’ office and looked for his car. He was wondering why he could not get through a common business discussion with them without talk of level playing fields, a smoking gun, a hand that would not tremble, who was on board and what was on line. When he got up from the table and said he had other things to do, Walter, the eldest brother, took the cold cigar from his lips and dangled it reflectively.

“Billy,” he said, “this is a family. Without your interest we’re clear to the axle. What are we going to do?”

Bill enjoyed the iridescence of this sort of thing and never meant to bring it to a stop. Walter was being a little bit dull, though, looking at Bill’s eyes for his answer.

“I’m not a team player,” said Bill. “It’s sad, isn’t it?”

The middle brother, John, wearing a bow tie and blazer, busied himself with papers, jerked his chin with a laugh.

“Where does that leave us?” John asked, clearly expecting no sane reply.

“You’re going to have to thumb it in soft,” said Bill.

Now he was looking for his car. He turned it up next to the hardware, a pink parking ticket fluttering under the windshield wiper. Beneath the other wiper blade, old tickets curled and weathered. The car, a Cadillac of a certain age, had a tall antenna on its roof. Inside, a big radio was bolted to the dash with galvanized brackets. Bill Berryhill relied on this for his cattle and commodity reports. On the back seat, a Border collie slept among receipts, mineral blocks, and rolls of barbed wire. He had a saddle in the trunk.

“I seem to lose my energy in those meetings,” Bill thought. He fished a Milk Bone out of the glove box, and the Border collie got to her feet. “Here, Elaine,” he said and reached it back. She snapped it away from him and he started the car. A glow of irrigation steam hung over everything. A breeze, an August breeze, would make it more comfortable but less beautiful. A woman ambled by, loosening the armholes of her wash dress. Bill angled the vent window at himself and drove through town, dialing at the big radio. He swept through the band before finding Omaha; he slumped down and took in the numbers.

He drove way out north of Deadrock and up through the sage flats to his trailer house, trying to hit the Maxwell House can with his snoose. The trailer sat on a flat of land under a bright white rim of rock. It seemed to belong there. There was a spring above the place, which Bill had improved with a screen box. There was a chain-link kennel that held his dogs, and a horse corral with shelters and a steel feeder for hay. He had his cutting horse in there and a using horse. The cutting horse was called Red Dust Number Seven and the using horse was called Louie Louie. There was a windowbox with some dope plants and a neat row of mountain ash around the front of the trailer. On the rimrock above the trailer sat the video dish, and it provided great reception for Bill’s favorite shows: Wimbledon, the World Series, the Kentucky Derby, the American’s Cup, prizefights, and elections. He went inside.

He turned on the Turner Superstation for the news loop and called Elizabeth on the phone, and asked her for lunch. He started a small sandwich assembly line. “As against apathy,” he told himself, “I have the change of seasons, the flowing waters, the possible divestiture of my brothers.” Bill had wanted a sensible mix of conservative investments he wouldn’t have to think about. But John and Walter had got them into an RV distributor, a cow herd, a gasohol plant, and a grain elevator. Bill wasn’t interested in these going concerns and he felt guilty about shirking all the fellow feeling. If only he could interest himself in keeping up with the Joneses, he could head off the cloudiness that troubled his days.