To Skin a Cat

A MAN IN LOUISIANA

That Winter, Ohio Exploration had its meeting at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Alabama. Barry Seitz went along as special assistant to Mike Royce, the tough, relatively young president of Ohio Exploration. Barry knew spot checks could happen any time, and as this was his first job that could go anywhere, he memorized everything. The range of subjects ran from drilling reports in various oil plays in the Southeast to orthodonture opinions concerning Mike Royce’s impossibly ugly daughter. It was Royce’s thought that the girl’s dentist was “getting the teeth straight, all right, but blowing her profile.” Barry was to “mentally note” that Mike Royce wanted to get together some three- and four-year-old snapshots of the girl and arrange a conference with the dentist. Barry didn’t envy the dentist. The girl had inherited her father’s profile and would always be a rich little bulldog.

The winter meeting was going to be shortened and therefore compressed because Mike Royce had just decided that he hated the South. So everyone was on edge and the orthodonture issue seemed quite inflamed the longer Royce contemplated his daughter’s mouth. Barry could see the pressure forming in his boss’s face as he stared past the crab boats making their way across the dead-slick bay. Barry arranged to have some pictures same-day delivered, and he was with his boss when he thumbed through the snapshots.

“I could shit,” said Royce from a darkening face. “These kids around here have straight teeth and their folks can’t change a lightbulb.”

A number of the things Mike Royce said were irritating to Barry, and when Royce was angry he expressed everything in a blur of exposed teeth that made part of Barry think of self-defense. But Barry saw himself on the cusp of failure or success. At thirty, a backward move could be a menace to his whole life; and while he knew he wouldn’t be in Royce’s employ forever, he wanted to stay long enough to learn oil lease trading so that he could go out on his own. Once he was free he could do the rest of the things he wanted: have a family, tropical fish, remote-control model airplanes. The future was an unbroken sheen to Barry, requiring only irreversible solvency. One of Barry’s girlfriends had called him yellow. She went out with the morning trash. Having your ducks in a row does not equal yellow. Barry was cautious.

On the last day of their stay at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Alabama, Mike Royce rang for Barry. Barry went down to his room and found Royce in a spotted bathrobe, his blunt feet hooked on the rungs of his chair, staring at the photographs of his daughter arranged chronologically. The little girl’s square head did seem to change imperceptibly from picture to picture, though Barry could not tell the influence of hormones from the influence of orthodontic wire. From left to right, the child seemed to be losing character. In picture one she was clearly a vigorous young carnivore, and by picture seven she looked insipid, headed nowhere. It seemed a lot to blame on the dentist, who, Mike Royce pointed out, would be on the carpet Monday first thing. Barry wanted what Mike Royce wanted. So Barry wanted those teeth right.

Now Royce turned his attention to Barry. He did not ask Barry to sit down but seemed to prefer to regard him from his compressed posture in his bathrobe.

“Billy Hebert,” he said. “Remember him?” He was spot-checking a mental note.

“Lake Charles,” said Barry.

“That’s right, a feature player in that deal down there. Now Billy’s main lick, for fun, is to hunt birds.” He reached Barry a slip of paper. “That dog is in Mississippi. I want you to get it and take it to Billy in Lake Charles.”

“Very well.”

“If you remember back, we need to be doing something out of this world for Billy. Anyway, chop-chop.”

Barry could see the rows of private piers from Royce’s window. A few people had gone out carrying crab traps, towels, radios. They seemed to mock Barry’s dog-hauling mission with their prospects. But it was better than hearing about the girl’s teeth.

A late fall haze from the paper mills outside Mobile hung on the water. The causeway bore a stream of Florida-bound traffic. Bay shrimpers plied the slick, and play-off games sounded from every window of the resort. He knew cheery types lined up in the lobby for morning papers. It wasn’t that Barry had less sense of fun than anyone else. He had once alienated a favorite lady friend by yelling “wee!” during sex. But when riding mowers hummed with purpose on a December day in the Deep South, it seemed cruel and unusual to have to haul a dog from Mississippi to a crooked oil dealer in Louisiana.

The road to the small town in Mississippi on Royce’s note wound up from the coastal plain past small cities and shanty-towns. Barry ate at a drive-in restaurant next to an old cotton gin and drove up through three plantations that lay along the Tombigbee in what had been open country of farms and plantations. Arms of standing water appeared and disappeared as he soared over leggy trestles heading north. Barry began to be absorbed by his task. Where am I? he thought. He liked the idea of hauling a dog from Mississippi to Louisiana and didn’t feel at all demeaned by it as he had back at the Marriott. He passed a monument where the bighearted Union Army had set General Nathan Bedford Forrest free, and he felt giddily — no matter how many GTOs and pizza trucks he passed — that he was going back into time, toward Champion Hill and Shiloh. It seemed every third house had a fireworks stand selling M80s and bottle rockets, and every fifth building was a Baptist church. Oh, variety! he thought, comparing this to Ohio.

He reached Blue Wood, Mississippi, shortly after noon and stopped at a filling station for directions to the house of Jimmy F. Tippett, the man who had advertised the dog. Hearing his accent, the proprietor of the filling station, a round-faced man in coveralls, asked Barry where he came from.

“Chillicothe, Ohio.”

The man looked at Barry’s face for a moment and said, “Boy, you three-fo’ mile from yo’ house!”

He took a dirt road out past a gas field, past a huge abandoned WW II ammunition factory and rail spur. The town of Blue Wood had the air of an Old West town with its slightly elevated false-front buildings. Half the stores were empty, and the sidewalks had a few Negroes as the sole pedestrians. Barry drove slowly past the hardware store, where a solitary white man gripped his counter and stared through the front door waiting for customers. “My God,” Barry murmured. He couldn’t wait to grab that bird dog and run. The teeth of Mike Royce’s daughter were behind him, familiar and secure.

Jimmy F. Tippett’s house was on the edge of a thousand-acre sorghum field. It was an old house with a metal roof and a narrow dogtrot breezeway. Because of its location, Barry thought it had a faint seaside atmosphere. But above all it spoke of poorness to Barry, and dirty stinking failure; his first thought was, How in the world did this guy lay hands on any dog Mike Royce would buy? Hunching over in the front seat after he’d parked, Barry gave way to temptation and opened Royce’s envelope with a thumbnail. Inside was two thousand dollars in crisp hundreds. This, thought Barry, I’ve got to see.

He got out of the car, walking around the back of it so he could use it as a kind of blind while he looked things over. There were great big white clouds in the direction past the house and a few untended pecan trees. There had been a picket fence all around, but it looked like cattle or something had just walked it down into the ground. Here and there a loop of it stood up, and the pickets were weathered of most of their white paint and shaped at their ends like clubs in a deck of cards. Barry tried vainly to relate this to his career. In fact, how would Mike Royce and his accountants view this trip? He guessed it would have to be Travel and Entertainment.

The pattern of shadows on the screen door changed and Barry interrupted his thought to recognize that one of the shadows must now be Jimmy F. Tippett. So he strode up to the house, gulping impressions, and said, “Mr. Tippett, is that you?”

“Yes, sir,” came a voice.

“I’m Barry Seitz. I represent Mr. L. Michael Royce. I’m here about a dog.”

The screen door opened. Inside it stood a small man about sixty years of age, in khaki pants and starched white shirt. He had an auto insurance company pen holder in his pocket and a whistle around his neck. His face was entirely covered by fine dark wrinkles. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He looked Barry over as though he were doing a credit check. “Tippett,” he said. “Come in.”

Barry walked in. It appeared that Tippett lived entirely in one room. “I can’t stay but a minute. I’ve got to get this dog to Louisiana.”

“Have a seat,” said Tippett. Barry moved backward and slipped into a chair. Tippett watched him do it. “I’ll get the whiskey out,” said Tippett. “Help you unwind.”

“I’m quite relaxed,” said Barry defiantly, but Tippett got down a bottle from a pie safe that held the glasses too.

“You want water or S’em-Up?” asked Tippett.

“Neat,” said Barry.

“You what?”

“Just straight would be fine,” Barry said. Tippett served their whiskey and sat down next to his television set. His drink hand moved slightly, a toast. Barry moved his. It was quiet.

“You go to college?” asked Tippett.

“Yes,” said Barry, narrowly avoiding the words Ohio State. “And you?” he asked. Tippett did not answer, and Barry feared he’d taken it as a contemptuous question. Nevertheless, he decided not to go into anything long about college being a waste of time. In fact, Barry had a sudden burst of love for his old college. He felt a small ache looking around the bare room for days of wit and safety before he’d been our and about on unfathomable missions like this one. Dogs, tooth pictures, oil crooks, a secure future. Tippett was humming a tune and looking around the room. I know that tune, thought Barry, It’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” You bastards fired on our flag first. Fort Sumter.

“What’s that song you’re whistling?”

“Oh, a old song.”

“Really! I sort of remember it as a favorite of mine.”

“That’s nice. Yes, sir, that’s nice. Some of these songs nowadays, why, I don’t like them. They favor shit to me.” There was a worn-out shotgun in the corner, boots, a long rope with a snap on it.

“Let’s have a look at this famous dog,” said Barry.

“Ain’t famous.”

“Expensive.”

“Expensive? I got about twenty-five cents an ar to wuk the prick.”

Tippett whistled through his teeth, and a pointer came in from the next room on his belly and laid his head on Tippett’s knee. “There he is, Old Bandit.”

“He’s good looking,” said Barry.

“He get better lookin’ when you turn him a-loose. He’ll slap find birds. He a gentleman’s shooting dog De Ville. Use a section bean field in five minute. Fellow need enough country for a dog like Bandit. Bandit a foot dog, a truck dog, and a horseback dog. Bandit everything they is. He broke to death but he’ll run off on a fool, now.”

Barry had caught up on the word gentleman. A gentleman’s dog. He could see all this, somehow, in the words of the ardent old Tippett. He looked at fidelity writ large in the peaceful bird dog’s anciently carved head and was entirely unable to picture the kind of fool he’d run off on. This was a landowner’s dog, he sensed, and he mildly resented having to pack him to Louisiana.

“I wish I owned this dog,” said Barry.

“I do too,” said Tippett, staring once again at L. Michael Royce’s money. “This any good?” he asked, holding it up. Barry just nodded. He was entirely in the world of Tippett, feeling the senselessness of trading the money for Bandit. Now the atmosphere was heavy with the idea of lost dog.

A long silence followed. Barry felt that a kind of intimacy had formed. This man had something that he and Royce and the man in Louisiana wanted, but now he had gone over to the other side. When he took the dog to the car on a lead, Tippett said, “I was sixty-six in August. I’ll never have another dog like that.” When he went to the house, he didn’t pet Bandit; he never looked back.

Barry started down the road with Bandit on the seat beside him. As he went back through Blue Wood, the huge clouds he had noticed driving to Tippett’s seemed to enlarge with the massive angular light of evening, and the empty buildings of the town looked bombed out and derelict. A man was selling barbecue from an outdoor smoker. Barry stopped and ate some pork and slaw while he looked at the four-way roads trailing off into big fields. He thought, I’d like to give that dog a whirl. The man rolled down the lid on the smoker.

“Like anything to drink?”

“S’em-Up,” said Barry. He had decided he would run Bandit.

Barry drove alongside the vast soybean field with its tangle of stalks and curled leaves and long strips of combined ground. There were hedgerows of small hardwoods wound about with osage orange and kudzu. Some of the fields had gas wells, and at one county-road corner there was a stack of casing pipe and a yellow backhoe as battered as an army tank. When the road came to an end, the bean fields stretched along a stream course and over low rounded hills as far to the west as Barry could see. This is it, he thought, and stopped.

Bandit stirred and whined when the engine shut off. He sat up and stared through the windshield at the empty space. It made Barry apprehensive to not quite understand what riveted his attention so. I wish I had more information, he thought, a little something more to go by. Nevertheless, he turned Bandit loose and thought for the short time he saw him that Tippett was right, that he got prettier and prettier, in his burning race over the horizon.

He was gone. It was as though Mike Royce towered up out of the Mississippi horizon to stare down at Barry in his rental car, clutching the orthodonture photographs and Barry’s employment contract.

He got out and started running across the bean field. He ran so fast and uncaringly that the ground seemed to rise and fall beneath him as he crossed the hills. He hit a piece of soft plowed ground and it sapped his strength so quickly he found himself stopped, his hands gripping his knees. Oh, Bandit, he cried out, come back!

Just before dusk, he came through a grove of oak on the edge of a swamp. A cold mist had started up in fingers toward the trees, and at their very edge stood Bandit on point, head high, sipping the breeze, tail straight as a poker, in a trance of found birds. Barry thought he cried out to Bandit but he wasn’t sure, and he knew he didn’t want to frighten him into motion. He walked steadily in Bandit’s direction. The dog stood at his work, not acknowledging him. When he was about a hundred feet away, the covey started to flush. He froze as birds roared up like brown bees and swarmed into the swamp. But Bandit stood still and Barry knew he had him. He admired Tippett’s training in keeping Bandit so staunch and walked to the dog in an agony of relief. Good Bandit, he said, and patted his head, Bandit’s signal to go on hunting: He shot into the swamp.

The brambles along the watery edge practically tore his clothes off. His hands felt sticky from bloody scratches. By turns he saw himself strangling Royce, Tippett, and the man in Louisiana. He wondered if Royce would ever see him as a can-do guy again. From Cub Scouts on he had had this burden of reliability, and as he felt the invisible dog tearing it away he began to wonder why he was running so fast.

He reached higher ground and a grove of hickories with a Confederate cemetery, forty or fifty unknown soldiers. He sat down to rest among the small stones, gasping for air. What he first took to be the sound of chimes emerging distantly from the ground turned out to be his own ringing ears. It occurred to him that some of the doomed soldiers around him had gone to their deaths with less hysteria and terror than he had brought to the chase for this dog. Maybe it wasn’t just the dog, he thought, and grew calm. Maybe it was that little bitch and her crooked teeth.

It was dark and Barry gave himself up to it. A symphonic array of odors came up from the ground with the cooling night, and he imagined the Confederate bones turning into hickory trees over the centuries. Shade, shelter from the wind, wood for ax handles, charcoal for barbecue. S’em-Up. Bones.

But, he thought, standing, that dog isn’t dead yet; and he resumed his walk. He regained open country somehow and walked in a gradual curve that he thought would return him to his car. He thought his feet remembered the hills but he wasn’t sure and he didn’t care. His eyes recorded the increasing density of night until he could no longer see the ground under him. The moon rose and lit the far contours of things, but close up the world was in eclipse. In a while, he came to the edge of a pond. Only its surface could be seen like a sheet of silver hanging in midair. As he studied it, trying to figure out how to go around, the shapes of horses materialized on its surface. He knew they must be walking on the bank, but the bank itself was invisible and the only knowledge of horses he had was the progress of their reflection in the still water. When the horses passed, he walked toward the water until he saw his own shape. He watched it disappear and knew he’d gone on around.

Back in the bean field, Barry felt a mild wave of hysteria pass over him once more, one in which he imagined writing a memo to Royce about having been knee-deep in soybean futures, much to report, et cetera, et cetera; by the way, couldn’t seem to lay hands on Louisiana man’s dog, et cetera, et cetera. Hope dog-face girl’s teeth didn’t all fall out. More later, yrs, B. After which, he felt glumly merry and irresponsible.

When he got to his car, it occurred to him that this had all happened a couple of miles from Tippett’s house. No great distance for a hyena like Bandit. So he drove over there, to find the house unlighted and silent. He walked to the door. A bark broke out and was muffled. Barry knocked. The door opened and Tippett said, “I thought you went to Louisiana.”

“Hand him over,” said Barry.

“Come in,” said Tippett. Barry walked into the empty room. Tippett had a loose T-shirt on, and his pants were held by the top button only. Barry looked all around and saw nothing. He felt uncertain.

“Didn’t Bandit come back?”

Tippett didn’t answer. He just sat down and poured from the whiskey bottle that was right where he’d left it earlier. “You lose that dog?” he asked. Something tapped across the floor in the next room. He doesn’t want to go to Louisiana, he thought, and he surely doesn’t want to go with me. A wave of peace came over him.

“Yeah, I did,” said Barry, rising in his own esteem. The old man studied him closely, studied his face and every little thing he did with his hands. Barry raised his glass to his lips, thinking only of the movement and the whiskey. He quit surveying the old man’s possessions and wondering what time it was somewhere else.

“What do you suppose would make a trained dog just go off and leave like that?” Barry asked.

The old man made a sound in his throat, almost clearing it to speak something which must not be misunderstood. “Son,” he said, “anything that’ll eat shit and fuck its own mother is liable to do anything.” The two men laughed as equals.

Barry thought of the men down in the Confederate graveyard. He considered the teeth of Mike Royce’s daughter and his own “future.” Above all, he thought of how a dog could run so far that, like too many things, it never came back.