To Skin a Cat

THE ROAD ATLAS

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.

From the window over the sink, he could see two irrigators cross the hillside carrying rolled-up dams on their shoulders; the ends of the fabric blew in the drying wind. One man had a shovel, and a small red heeler dog bounced behind them. Maybe Elizabeth and I can make something out of all this, he thought.

Bill made the sandwiches. News briefs from the theatersized screen threw parti-colored shadows around the trailer walls. Quarterlies piled by the recliner chair were wedged inside each other to mark the places Bill had left off. Elizabeth knocked on the door and came in. Bill was putting the lunch on the table. When she closed the door, the aluminum walls shook.

“How are you?”

“I’m great,” she said. She was a strong-featured brunette in her late twenties. Her hands were coarsened by outside work, but it made her more attractive. She was a widow.

She came for lunch fairly often and sat right down and began eating. She and Bill both liked ice water, and Bill put a chiming pitcher of it on the table. He gazed around at the condiments.

“What do you want?”

“Oh, darling,” he said.

“Come on.”

“Hot sauce.”

She reached him the Tabasco from behind the ice-water pitcher. They ate in relaxed silence. This is really nice, thought Bill. “I’m not getting anywhere with my brothers and it’s my fault,” he said.

“What are you trying to do?”

“I don’t know, make a contribution. I’m just not a team player, and it’s killing me.”

“Why is it killing you? You’re getting by.”

“It’s like not being able to get in the mood. I feel something is passing me up and I don’t know what it is. John and Walter are so vigorous compared to me. I see my vital interests drifting into growth areas. It’s platitudinous. I wish I could see myself as subsisting … tied to the land or some God damn thing.”

“You need to be more romantic.”

“I’m not romantic, am I?”

“Not about anything,” Elizabeth said. “It’s your highest limitation.”

“I know you’re right,” said Bill. “But God damn it, this is Big Sky country, this is the American West. It shouldn’t be a problem.”

“It’s a problem if you’re so defeated by it.”

Bill wished they could make love after lunch. All energy would pass to his abdominal nerves. But it was out of the question. Volition would fill the air. And it seemed he didn’t want that.

Bill and Elizabeth had a lot in common, not as much as Bill would wish, but many things: a love of reading, a wryness, superfluous lives on land that had gone up in value while losing its utility. It could seem to him that her bereavement was her real location. She sustained in her actual home the air of a life lived elsewhere just as Bill’s education had removed him. More than that, they faced lives that could be behind them. Bill thought that while it terrified him, it might well have consoled Elizabeth to know that the struggle for love and wholeness did not have to be gone through again. He even thought it was mean-spirited to view her beauty and merit as something wasted because it was not offered up to use. Still, all these considerations produced cloudiness and an irresolute foreground.

“I met a girl at that little gift shop who wanted to meet you. Karen. Said she could come out. I’m sure she’ll sleep with you.”

“I’ll have to look into it,” Bill said wanly. His brothers weren’t like this. They’d show merriment for Karen. They’d want to get them a little and not think it over. Bill reached across and took Elizabeth’s hand. It was strong. It weighed something. He wished she wouldn’t smile when she looked at him. She wasn’t pornographic. Sometimes when he went volitionless, her eyes glittered as though a little victory were at hand. What victory? Watching someone pull himself out of a hole?

A small cloudburst hit the trailer, the kind you can see all the way around in the mountains. Bill got up to look out. It hit so suddenly that the drops of water threw dust in the air. His two horses swiveled their butts into the wind, and their tails blew up along their flanks. Then it stopped and Bill opened the door to let the air, fragrant with cedar, fill the trailer. He sat down and refilled their ice water.

“Let’s do something this year. I feel my life is almost over,” Bill said.

“You always feel your life is almost over. What do you want to do?”

“I’d like to go to Monticello,” said Bill. But suddenly he could not understand why it had to be impossible for him and Elizabeth to be happy in an ordinary way. Then it subsided.

“Why don’t we make a real trip,” he said. “We’ll take the horses and go to Texas. That’ll get us south and sort of east. We’ll be almost there.”

“The Texans will be funny. We can go to the Alamo.”

“If it’s all right, I’d like to visit Bunker Hill.”

“Then let’s leave our horses at home.”

“I don’t feel like eating,” said Bill.

“I really can’t appeal to your needs, can I?” said Elizabeth.

But as the days went by, the trip did acquire some actuality. They bought a road atlas, even though Bill had often said the road atlas had ruined American life. But the road atlas made it clear that their trip was pretty much of a zigzag. Still, they spent frequent evenings in the trailer foreseeing the meaning of their destinations.

John and Walter asked if they could all have a drink at the hotel. When they got there, Bill was already seated next to the pensioners in the lobby. An old cowboy with a tray bolted to his electric wheelchair shot in and out of the bar delivering drinks. The three sat around a table that gave them some distance from others and moved their whiskey thoughtfully on coasters like Ouija styluses. John produced a sentimental appearance in his bow tie, his hair parted closer to the crown than was currently fashionable. Walter, astonished gull-wing eyebrows and dark jowls, looked the power broker he was with his wide tie and grim suit. They weren’t such bad fellows, Bill thought. They have the advantage of the here and now, and Bill was man enough not to blame his slipping gears on them.

“What’s the deal on the cows?” Walter asked.

“I’m going to can about thirty head.”

“How come?”

“Old, dry.”

“Ship all the steer calves?”

“I don’t think so,” Bill said. “The market’s not very good, but it has to get some better. Fifty-five counties in drought relief. A lot of cattle went through early. It’ll come back a little by fall. But I want to hold the heifers over and sell them as replacements. I don’t see two droughts in a row.”

“It could happen,” said John wisely. He reset his glasses with thumb and forefinger, then squeezed the wings of his nose.

“It could happen,” Bill repeated.

“What’ll you do after you ship? You going to feed them yourself?” Walter said with an ironic smile.

“No, Walter. I’m going to hire that out,” Bill almost shouted.

“Easy, big feller,” said Walter. “Be cool.”

“Refill?” asked John, holding his arm up. A little circular gesture told the old cowboy to scoot into the atmospheric lighting of the bar. John began to talk with his air of halting introspection. He was very likely to say something specious, but the appearance of its having been tugged from the depths of consideration made him difficult to contradict.

“Walt and I have been kind of forging ahead all year as though we had your proxy.”

“So you have,” Bill said. He gave a vast sigh.

“We take it that things can’t stagnate altogether and the day will come when you’ll want to take ahold, but that day is not here now.”

“That sort of describes it,” Bill said. “And it sort of doesn’t. I see the three of us as being fortunate, don’t you?”

“What we have long understood,” said Walter, “is that you feel a mandate for greater meaning, and we don’t oppose that. John and me are just two little old MBAs. We want more of what we’ve got, and we’re too old to change. When we get this thing right, we — or one of us — might run for office. That’s where significance as we see it kicks in.”

“But,” John cut in, “by way of reassuring you, Bill. We’re thriving on all the fronts we have chosen to fight on.”

“What about the gasohol plant?”

“We dialed it down to an enriched feeder deal. The pig guys are knocking our door down.”

“I thought maybe you trapped yourself there.”

“Did not.”

Superfluously, Bill thought of the cleverness of the pig, his rambling ways. Gasohol was cloudy, pig feed clear. Drink Two permitted him to ask, “Do you want to buy me out?”

“Not necessarily,” said John, indenting the bows of his tie.

“In other words, we could disagree about valuation.”

As soon as John began to demur, sinking his chin into the softness of his neck, Walter cut across and said, “Let’s say that’s the case.”

“Ten times earnings,” Bill said.

John’s and Walter’s disparaging chuckles were hair-trigger affairs that gave them away better than anything Bill could have made up. Bill saw himself as Jefferson while John and Walter were the twin halves of Hamilton’s brain.

“Come on, you crooks, give me a number,” said Bill, and his brothers raised their eyes to the plaster ceiling. Just then, Bill felt a gust of power in the room, a brief touch of the thing that held these men’s interest, and he did not necessarily despise it any more than he would despise weather. If he ever worked it out with Elizabeth, he might not want to have mishandled this.

“The trouble with this sort of thing,” said Bill, “is you never know who the Honest Johns are, do you? I mean, we hang it on profits, and the company suddenly goes into a long-range development plan and the profits go down.”

Walter was hot. “How do you go into long-range development retailing RVs and selling pig feed?”

“You’d find a way,” said Bill.

Before things got out of hand, John spoke up. “You’ve got the performance to date. Our little-bitty deal couldn’t stand hostility. We could never move around with that hanging over us.”

“Rest assured the cows aren’t going into long-range development,” said Bill. “I’m holding my end down.”

“Don’t be a son of a bitch,” said Walter. Walter didn’t give a damn right now and you had to listen to him.

“It’s clear the both of you view me as a remittance man. An interference.”

“No, we don’t,” John chimed in. “But your search for meaning is a bore.”

Bill felt trapped by the characterization. These brutes were sincere. Walter and John got to their feet. This was going nowhere. “Go fuck yourselves,” said Bill.

“You go fuck yourself,” said John.

“I see your point,” said Bill.

In despair over all this, Bill went to the gift shop and introduced himself to Karen, who was busy signing Italian pottery that had come in without pedigree from the sheds of Missoula. He supplied her with imaginary Tuscan monikers while she endorsed the bottoms with a little paintbrush. By the time she got through the ashtrays and vast number of coffee mugs, they were great friends. They had lunch at the B & G and had a quick “my place or your place” conversation while Bill scrutinized her through the smoke of his Camels.

“I don’t know anyone who still smokes,” she said.

“I’m very ancient in my ways,” said Bill, paralyzed by ennui. An hour later, they had gone from a comfortable missionary position to the kind of three-point stance used by football players. After making love, he had a spell of dullness like the two weeks that make the difference between a bad and a good haircut. As Bill drove off he thought, I hope I get the clap. I’ve betrayed the only woman who means anything to me.

Bill had hired an acid casualty to feed cattle for him, an ideal hand who never looked to the right or the left and kept his mind firmly on a job it was very hard for most people to keep their minds on. He called himself Waylon Remington, though Bill was quite sure that was not really his name. All that was left of Waylon’s hairdo from the good-time days was a long goatee. He talked to himself.

It had taken Bill a long time to get used to lining Waylon Remington out on a job. He would give Waylon his instructions and get no reaction whatsoever. It was fairly disconcerting until Bill realized that Waylon heard him perfectly well and would act as instructed. But Bill felt very solitary telling him what to do as though making a speech in an empty room.

Today, he explained to Waylon Remington how he wanted his stack yard arranged. “Just get the big hay panels from near the house and wire them up in a square around the stack. Make sure your entryway is on level ground so you can get in and out with the tractor” Bill and Waylon were driving down through the hay meadow as Bill spoke. “And use plenty of steel stakes on those panels around the entry, or the whole shitaree will fall down. Remember you have to drive that tractor all the way around the stack to get ahold of the round bales.” Waylon Remington stared at the hood ornament.

“Now,” said Bill as they reached the irrigation headgate, “let’s get out here.” The two got out and went to the flume. It was about half full. The water took off toward the south, split up a couple of times, and fanned onto the field. “Now, Waylon.” Bill glanced over at Waylon Remington, just two feet away. His mouth was open and Bill could hear the breath in his teeth; his lower lip was cracked and dry. “I need for you to be moving those dams just once a day from now on because we’re starting to lose our water for the year. Keep moving them twelve steps at a time but once a day instead of three.”

He went down alongside the Parshall flume. “Keep track of these numbers on the gauge. If you see a big change, either up or down, come get me and we’ll read the tables and make another plan. You never know when they’ll shut down the center pivots upstream. So, it could change.… Waylon?”

Bill wanted to get the horses but he wasn’t confident Waylon could keep a horse moving; so he put the truck into four-wheel drive and took him around four or five more projects. Tighten about a mile and a half of fence, adding clips and stays as he went. Fix the chain in the manure spreader. Add hydraulic fluid to the front-end loader and hit all the grease points. They drove past the salt blocks set out in old tractor tires, checked fly rubs, tanks, and springs. This didn’t require Bill to talk, and it got pretty quiet in the cab. Then Waylon Remington began to hum. He hummed songs from Jefferson Airplane. Bill began to panic. Could he really leave?

Bill put five yearlings into the pen and warmed up Red Dust Number Seven in front of them. The young horse was cinchy and liable to buck the first few minutes. He stopped him and rolled him back a couple of times.

Bill trotted Red in a circle. He had him in a twisted wire snaffle and draw reins, and he kept Red’s head just flexed enough that he could see the glint of his eye on the inside of the circle. Red was getting so that if Bill took a deep seat and moved his feet forward in the stirrups he would start down into his stop. Then he’d likely as not run his head up and be piggy about turning. This was where Bill thought he was the roughest. Red kind of straightened up when he had a cow in front of him.

Bill cut a yearling out of the small herd. The steer just stopped and took things in. The steer moved and Red boiled over, squealing and running off. Bill took a light hold of him, rode him in a big circle, then back to the same place on the steer. This time, Red lowered himself and waited; and when the cow moved he sat right hard on his hocks, broke off, stopped hard, and came back inside the cow. Now he was working, his ears forward, his eyes bright. This little horse was such a cow horse, he sometimes couldn’t stand the pressure he put on himself. The steer then threw a number nine in his tail and bolted. Red stopped it right in front of the herd. He was low all over, ready to move anywhere. Bill tipped his head and saw the glint of eye and the bright flare at his nostrils. Bill cut another cow.

This one traveled more and let Bill free Red, moving fast across the pen. Bill was pleased to be reminded that this was a horse you could call on and use. After a minute more, Red was blowing and Bill put his hand down on his neck to release him. The colt’s head came up as though he were emerging from a dream, and he looked around.

First, they were going to drive, then a nervousness about being gone so long came over them. Bill said, “Why are we going on this trip anyway?”

“I wanted to go to the Alamo, and then you wanted to go to Monticello, I think, and Bunker Hill.”

“What happened to that?”

“You said the Texans would be funny and let’s skip Texas. And then we were going to go — I don’t know, something about Thomas Jefferson.”

“That seems inappropriate. We’d spend the whole time explaining to strangers what we were doing.”

“Well, we’ll just go somewhere else,” Elizabeth said. She was looking long and hard at Bill, who was clearly in some kind of turmoil. He knew that, even while they talked, his brothers were making things happen. Bill didn’t seem to want what he and his brothers owned, but he didn’t want it taken away.

“I don’t know about Monticello,” he said. “It’s just a big house. The Alamo and Bunker Hill speak for themselves.”

“Oh, Bill.”

Bill felt serious failure very close now.

“Listen,” she said, “I’m going to take this trip.” In her green cotton shirt, she seemed mighty. Bill didn’t say anything.

“You ought to come, Bill. But I’m beginning to think you won’t.”

“I’m going to miss you.”

“I’m going to take the road atlas.”

“You think I’ve just quit, don’t you?”

“I don’t know whether you have or not,” she said. “But I can’t. Something’s got to give.”