To Skin a Cat

LIKE A LEAF

I’m underneath my small house in Deadrock. The real estate people call it a “starter” home, however late in life you buy one. It’s a modest house that gives you the feeling that either you’re going places or that this won’t do. This starter home is different; this one is it.

From under here, I can hear the neighbors talking. He is a successful man named Deke Patwell. His wife is away and he is having an affair with the lady across the street, a sweet and exciting lady I’ve not met yet. Frequently he says to her, “I am going to impact on you, baby.” Today, they are at one of their many turning points.

“I think I’m coming unglued,” she says.

“Now, now.”

“I don’t follow,” she says with a little heat.

“All is not easy.”

“I got that part, but when do we go someplace nice?” She has a beautiful voice, and underneath the house I remember she is pretty. What am I doing here? I’m distributing bottle caps of arsenic for the rats that come up from the river and dispute the cats over trifles. I represent civilization in a small but real way.

Deke Patwell laughs with wild relief. Once I saw him at the municipal pool, watching young girls. He was wearing trunks and allergy-warning dog tags. What a guy! To me he was like a crude foreigner or a gaucho.

Anyway, I came down here because of the rats. Read your history: they carry Black Plague. Mrs. Patwell was on a Vegas excursion with the Deadrock Symphony Club.

When I get back inside, the flies are causing a broad dumb movement on the windows. We never had flies like this on the ranch. We had songbirds, apple blossoms, and no flies. My wife was alive then and saw to that. We didn’t impact, we loved each other. She had an aneurism let go while carding wool. She just nodded her pretty face and headed out. I sat there like a stupe. They came for her and I just knocked around the place trying to get it. I headed for town and started seeing the doctor. Things came together: I was able to locate a place to live in, catch the Series, and set up housekeeping. Plus, the Gulch, everyone agrees, is Deadrock’s nicest neighborhood. A traffic violator is taken right aside and lined out quick. It’s a neighborhood where folks teach the dog to bring the paper to the porch, so a guy can sit back in his rocker and find out who’s making hamburger of the world. I was one of this area’s better cattlemen, and town life doesn’t come easy. Where I once had coyotes and bears, I now have rats. Where I once had the oldtime marriages of my neighbors, I now have Impact Man poking a real sweet gal who never gets taken someplace nice.

My eating became hit-or-miss. All I cared about was the World Series after a broken season. I was high and dry, and when you’re like that you need someone or something to take you away. Death makes you different like the colored are different. I felt I was under the spell of what had happened to me. Then someone threw a bottle onto the field in the third or fourth game of the Series and almost hit the Yankee left fielder, Dave Winfield. I felt completely poisoned. I felt like a rat with a mouthful of bottle caps. All my sense of fairness was settled on Winfield, who is colored, like I felt having been in the company of death. Then Winfield couldn’t hit the ball anyway, and just when Reggie Jackson got his hitting back, what happens? He drops an easy pop fly.

What were my wife and I discussing when she died? The Kona Coast. It seems so small. Sometimes when I think how small our topic was, I feel the weight of my hair tearing at my face. I bought a youth bed to reduce the size of the unoccupied area. The doctor says because of the shaking, I get quite a little bit less rest per hour than the normal guy. Rapid eye movement, and so on.

Truthfully speaking, part of me has always wanted to live in town. You hear the big milling at the switching yard and, on stormy nights, the transcontinental trucks reroute off the interstate, and it’s busy and kind of like a last-minute party at somebody’s house. The big outfits are parked all over with their engines running, and the heat shivers at the end of the stacks. The old people seem brave trying to get around on the ice: one fall and they’re through, but they keep chunking, going on forward with a whole heck of a lot of grit. That fact gives me a boost.

And I love to window-shop. I go from window to window alongside people I don’t know. There’s never anything I want in there, but I feel good because I am excited when somebody picks out a daffy pair of shoes or a hat you wouldn’t put on your dog. My wife couldn’t understand this. Nature was a shrine to her. I wanted to see people more than she did. Sit around with just anybody and make smart remarks. Sometimes I’d pack the two of us into the hills. My wife would be in heaven. I’d want to buy a disguise and slip off to town and stare through the windows. That’s the thing about heaven. It comes in all sizes and shapes.

Anyone in my position feels left behind. It’s normal. But you got to keep picking them up and throwing them; you have got to play the combinations or quit. What I’d like is a person, a person I could enjoy until she’s blue in the face. This, I believe. When the time comes, stand back from your television set.

I don’t know why Doc keeps an office in the kind of place he does, which is merely the downstairs of a not-so-good house. I go to him because he is never busy. He claims this saves him the cost of a receptionist.

Doc and I agree on one thing: it’s all in your head. The only exception would be aspirin. Because we believe it’s all in your head, we believe in immortality. Immortality is important to me because, without it, I don’t get to see my wife again. Or, on the lighter side, my dogs and horses. That’s all you need to know about the hereafter. The rest is for the professors, the regular egghead types who don’t have to make the payroll. We agree about my fling with the person. I hope to use Doc’s stethoscope to hear the speeding of the person’s heart. All this has a sporting side, like hunting coyotes. When Doc and I grow old and the end is in sight, we’re going to become addicted to opium. If we get our timing wrong, we’ll cure ourselves with aspirin. We plan to see all the shiny cities, then adios. We speak of cavalry firefights, Indian medicine, baseball, and pussy.

Doc doesn’t come out from behind the desk. He squints, knowing I could lie, then listens.

“My house in town is going to work fine. The attic has a swing-down ladder and you look from a round window up there into the backyards. You can hear the radios and see people. Sometimes couples have little shoving matches over odd things, starting the charcoal or the way the dog’s been acting. I wrote some of them down in a railroad seniority book to tell you. They seem to dry up quick.”

“Still window-shopping?”

“You bet.”

“If you don’t buy something soon, you’re going to have to give that up.”

“I’ll think about it,” I say.

“What have you been doing?”

“Not a whole heck of a lot.”

“See a movie, any movie.”

“I’ll try.”

“Take a trip.”

“I can’t.”

“Then pack for one and don’t go.”

“I can do that.”

“Stay out of the wind. It makes people nervous, and this is a windy town. Do what you have to do. You can always find a phone booth, but get out of that wind when it picks up. And any time you feel like falling silent, do it. Above all, don’t brood about women.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Trust aspirin.”

“I’ve been working on my mingling.”

“Work on it some more.”

“Doc,” I say, “I’ve got a funny feeling about where I’m headed.”

“You know anybody who doesn’t?”

“So what do I do?”

“Look at the sunny side. Anyway, I better let you go. There’s someone in the lobby with Blue Cross.”

So I go.

By hauling an end table out to the porch, despite that the weather is not quite up to it, and putting a chair behind it, I make a fine place for my microwave Alfredo fettucini. I can also watch our world with curiosity and terror. If necessary, I can speak when spoken to, by sipping my icewater to keep the chalk from my mouth.

A car pulls up in front of Patwells’; Mrs. Patwell gets out with a small Samsonite and goes to the house. That saves me from calling a lot of travel agents. The world belongs to me.

I begin to eat the Alfredo fettucini, slow, spacing each mouthful. After eating about four inches of it, I see the lady from across the street, the person, on the irregular sidewalk, gently patting each bursting tree trunk as she comes. Since I am now practically a mute, I watch for visible things I can predict. And all I look for is her quick glance at Deke Patwell’s house and then a turn through her chain-link gate. I love that she is pretty and carries nothing, like the Chinese ladies Doc tells me about who achieve great beauty by teetering around on feet that have been bound. I feel I am listening to the sound of a big cornfield in springtime. My heart is an urgent thud.

To my astonishment, she swings up her walk without a look. Her wantonness overpowers me. Impossible! Does she not know the wife is home from Vegas?

I look up and down the street before lobbing the Alfredo fettucini to a mutt. He eats in jerking movements and stares at me like I’m going to take it back. Which I’m quite capable of doing, but won’t. I have a taste in my mouth like the one you get in those frantic close-ins hunting coyotes. I feel like a happy crook. Sometimes when I told my wife I felt this way, she was touched. She said I had absolutely no secret life. The sad thing is, I probably don’t.

I begin sleeping in the attic. I am alone and not at full strength, so this way I feel safer. I don’t have to answer door or phone. I can see around the neighborhood better, and I have the basic timing of everybody’s day down pat. For example, the lady goes to work on time but comes home at a different hour every day. Does this suggest that she is a carefree person to whom time means nothing or who is, perhaps, opposed to time’s effects and therefore defiant about regularity? I don’t know.

Before I realize it, I am window-shopping again. Each day there is more in the air, more excitement among the shoppers, who seem to spill off the windows into the doors of the stores. The sun is out and I stand before the things my wife would never buy, not risqué things but things that wouldn’t stand up. She seems very far away now. But when people come to my store windows, I sense a warmth that is like friendship. Any time I feel uncomfortable in front of a particular store, I move to sporting goods, where it is clear that I am okay, and besides, Doc is fixing me. My docile staring comes from the last word in tedium: guns and ammo, compound bows, fishing rods.

When I say that I am okay, I mean that I am happy in the company of most people. What is wrong with me comes from my wife having unexpectedly died and from my having read the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson when my doctor and I were boning up on immortality. But I am watching the street, and something will turn up. In the concise movements of the person I’m most interested in, and in the irregularity of her returns, which she certainly despises, I sense a glow directed toward me, the kind of light in a desolate place that guides the weary traveler to his rest.

Today, she walks home. She is very nearly on time. She walks so fast her pumps clatter on our broken Deadrock sidewalk. She swings her shoulder bag like a cheerful weapon and arcs into the street automatically to avoid carelessly placed sprinklers. She touches a safety match to a long filter brand, as she surveys her little yard, and goes in. She works, I understand, at the County Assessor’s office, and I certainly imagine she does a fine job for those folks. With her bounce, her cigarettes, and her iffy hours, she makes just the kind of woman my wife had no use for. Hey! It takes all kinds. Human life is thus filled with variety, and if I have a regret in my own so far, it is that I have not been close to that variety: that is, right up against it.

I need a break and go for a daylight drive. I take the river road through the foothills north of Deadrock — a peerless jaunt — to our prison. It is an elegant old dungeon that has housed many famous Western outlaws in its day. The ground it rests on was never farmed, having gone from buffalo pasture to lockup many years ago. Now it has razor wire surrounding it and a real up-to-date tower like out east.

One man stands in blue light behind its high windows. When you see him from the county road, you think, That certainly must be the loneliest man in the world. But actually, it’s not true. His name is Al Costello and he’s a good friend of mine. He’s the head of a large Catholic household, and the tower is all the peace he gets. The lonely guy is the warden, an out-of-stater, a professional imprisoned by card files: a man no one likes. He looks like Rock Hudson, and he can’t get a date.

Sometimes I stop in to see Al. I go up into the tower and we look down into the yard at the goons and make specific comments about the human situation. Sometimes we knock back a beer or two. Sometimes I take a shot at one of his favorite ball clubs, and sometimes he lights into mine. It’s just human fellowship in kind of a funny spot.

But, today I keep on cruising, out among the jackrabbits and sagebrush, high above the running irrigation, all the way around the little burg, then back into town. I stop in front of the doughnut shop, waiting for the sun to travel the street and open the shop, and herald its blazing magic up commercially zoned Deadrock. Waiting in front is a sick-looking young man muttering to himself at a high relentless pitch of the kind we associate with Moslem fundamentalism. At eight sharp the door opens, and the Moslem and I shoot in for the counter. He seems to have lost something by coming inside, and I am riveted upon his loss. By absolute happenstance, we both order glazed. Then I add an order of jelly-filled which I deliver, still hot, to the lady’s doorstep.

I’m going to stop reading this newspaper. In one week, the following has been reported: A Deadrock man shot himself fatally in a bar, demonstrating the safety of his pistol. Another man, listening to the rail, had his head run over by every car of a train that took half an hour to go by. Incidents like these make it hard for me to clearly see the spirit winging its way to heaven. And though I would like to stop reading the paper, I really know I won’t. It would set a bad example for the people on the porches who have trained Spot to fetch.

“Did you get the doughnuts?” I called out that evening.

Tonight, as I fall asleep, I have a strange thought indeed. It goes like this: Darling (my late wife), I don’t know if you are watching all this or not. If you are, I have but one request: Put yourself in my shoes. That’s quite an assignment, but give it the old college try for the sake of yours truly.

I know they’ve been talking when I see Deke Patwell give me the fishy look. I cannot imagine which exact locution she used — probably that I was “bothering” her — but she has very evidently made of me a fly in Deke’s soup. There is not a lot he could do, standing next to his warming-up sensible compact, but give me this look and hope that I will invest it with meaning. I decide to blow things out of proportion.

“You two should do something nice together!” I call out.

Deke slings his head down and bitterly studies a nail on one hand, then gets in and drives away.

You think you got it bad? Says here a man over to Arlee was jump-starting his car in the garage; he had left it in gear, and when he touched the terminals of the battery the car shot forward and pinned him to a compressor that was running. This man was inflated to four times his normal size and was still alive after God knows how long when they found him. A hopeful Samaritan backed the car away and the man just blew up on the garage floor and died. As awful as that is, it adds nothing whatsoever to the basic idea. Passing in your sleep or passing as a pain-crazed human balloon on a greasy garage floor produces the same simple result year after year. The major differences lie among those who are left behind. If you’re listening, please understand I’m still trying to see why we don’t all cross the line on our own, or why nice people don’t just help us on over. Who knows if you’re even listening?

“So,” I cry out to the person with exaggerated innocence, illustrating how I am crazy like a fox. “So, how did you enjoy the doughnuts?”

She stops, looks, thinks. “That was you?”

“That was me.”

“Why?” She is walking toward me.

“It was a little something from someone who thinks somebody should take you somewhere nice.”

My foot is in the door. It feels as big as a steamboat.

“Tomorrow,” she says from her beautiful face, “make it cinnamon Danish.” Her eyes dance with cruel merriment. I feel she is of German extraction. She has no trace of an accent, and her attire is domestic in origin. I think, What am I saying? I’m scaring myself. This is a Deadrock local with zip for morals.

I decided to leap forward in the development of things to ascertain the point at which it doesn’t make sense. We are very much in love, I say to myself. I recoil privately at this thought, knowing I am still okay if not precisely tops. I am neither a detective nor a complete stupe. Like most of the human race, I fall somewhere in between.

“Tell you what,” she says with a twinkle. “I come home from work and I freshen up. Then you and me go for a stroll. How far’d you get?”

“Stroll …”

“You’re a good boy tonight and I let you off lightly.”

Mercy. My neck prickles. She laughs in my face and heads out. I see her cross the trees at the end of the street. I see the changing flicker of different-colored cars. I see mountains beyond the city. I see her bouncing black hair even after she has gone. I say quietly, I’m lonely; I had no idea you were not to have a long life. But I’m still in love.

I call Doc. I tell him, You can put your twenty-two fifty an hour where the sun don’t shine, you dang quack. John Q. Public says, walk the line, boy, or pay the price. Well, John, the buck stops here. I’m going it alone.

She stood me up and it’s midnight.

I have never felt like this. This house doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the person, and I’m lying on her bed viewing the furnishings. It’s dark here. I can see her coming up the sidewalk. She will come alongside the house and come in through the kitchen. I am in the back room. I guess I’ll say hello.

“Hello.”

“Hello.” She’s quite the opposite of my wife, but it’s fatal if she thinks this is healthy. She’s in the same blue dress and appears to view this as a clever seduction. “It’s you. Who’d have guessed? I’m going to bathe, and if you ask nice you can help.”

“I want to see.”

“I know that.” She laughs and goes through the door undressing. “Just come in. You’ll never get your speech right. Do I look drunk? I am a little. I suppose your plan was a neighborhood rape.” Loud laugh. She hangs the last of her clothes and studies me. Then she leans against the cupboards. “Please turn the water on, kind of hot.” When I turn away from the faucets she is sitting on the side of the tub. I think I am going to fall but I go to her and rock her in my arms so that she kind of spreads out against the white porcelain.

She looks at me and says, “The nicest thing about you is you’re frightened. You’re like a boy. I’m going to frighten you as much as you can stand.” I undress and we get into the clear water. I look at the half of myself that is underwater; it looks like something at Sea World. Suddenly, I stand up.

“I guess I’m not doing so good. I’m not much of a rapist after all.” I get out of the tub, a tremendous stupe.

“You’re making me feel great.”

“That Deke has caused you to suffer.”

“Oh, crap.”

“It’s time he took you someplace nice.” I’m on the muscle now.

I am drying off about a hundred miles an hour. I go into the next room and pull on my trousers. I don’t even see her coming. She pushes me over on the daybed and drags my pants back off. I am so paralyzed all I can do is say, Please no, Please no, as she clambers roughly atop me and takes me, almost hurting me with her fury, ending with a sudden dead flop. Every moment or so, she looks at me with her raging victorious eyes.

“Just don’t turn me in,” she says. “It would be awful for your family.” She bounces up and returns to the bathroom while I dress again. There is a razor running and periodic splashes of water. Whether it is because my wife has to sit through the whole thing or that I can’t bring her back, I don’t know, but the whole thing makes me a different guy. In short, I’ve been raped.

She tows me outside, clattering on the steps in wooden clogs, sending forth a bright woman’s cologne to savage my nerves. I see there is only one way my confused hands can regain their grasp: I burst into tears. She pops open a small flowered umbrella and uses it to conceal me from the outside world. It seems very cozy in there. She coos appropriately.

“Are you going to be okay now?” she asks. “Are you?” I see Deke’s car coming up the street. The Impact Man, the one who never does anything nice for her. I dry my tears posthaste. We head down the street. We are walking together in the bright evening sky under our umbrella. This foolishness implies an intimacy that must have gone hard with Impact Man, because he arcs into his driveway and has to brake hard to keep from going through his own garage with its barbecue, hammocks, and gap-seamed neglected canoe, things whose hopes of a future seem presently to ride on the tall shapely legs of my companion.

I can’t think of something really right for us. The only decent restaurant would seem as though we were on a date, put us face to face. We need to keep moving. I feel pretty certain we could pop up and see Al Costello, my Catholic friend in the tower. He always has the coffeepot going. So we get into my flivver and head for the prison. It makes a nice drive in a Tahiti-type sunset, and by the time I graze Staff Parking to the vast space of Visitors, the wonderful blue-white of the glass tower has ignited like the pilot light on a gas stove.

“I want you to meet a friend of mine,” I tell the lady. “Works here. Big Catholic family. He’s a grandfather in his late thirties. It looks like a lonely job and it’s not.”

The tower has an elevator. The gate guards know me and we sail in. The door opens in the tower.

“Hey,” I say.

“What’s cooking?” Al grins vacantly.

“Thought we’d pop up. Say, this is a friend of mine.”

“Mighty pleased,” Al says. He has the lovely manners of someone battered beyond recognition. She now glues herself to the window and stares at the cons. I think she has made some friendly movements to the guys down in the yard. I glance at Al and evidently he thinks so too. We avert our glances and Al says, “Can I make a spot of coffee?” I feel like a fool.

“I’m fine,” she says. “Fine.” She is darn well glued to the glass. “Can a person get down there?”

“Oh, a person could,” says Al. I notice he is always in slow movement around the tower, always looking, in case some geek goes haywire. “Important thing I guess is that no one can come here unless I let them in. They screen this job. The bad apples are soon gone. It takes a family man.”

“Are those desperate characters?” She asks, gazing around. I move into the window and look down at the minnowlike movement of the prisoners. This would have held zero interest for my wife.

“A few, I guess. This is your regular backyard prison. No celebrities. We’ve got the screwballs is about all we’ve got.”

“How’s the family, Al.” I dart in.

“Fine, just fine.”

Everybody healthy?”

“Oh, yeah. Andrea Elizabeth had strep but it didn’t pass to nobody in the house. Antibiotics knocked it for a loop.”

“And the missus?”

“Same as ever.”

“For Christ’s sake,” says my companion. We turn. He and I think it’s us. But it’s something in the yard. “Two fairies,” she says through her teeth. “Can you beat that?”

After which she just stares out the windows while Al and I drink some pretty bouncy coffee with a nondairy creamer that makes shapes in it without ever really mixing. It is more or less to be polite that I drink it at all. I look over, and she has her wide-spread hands up against the glass like a tree frog. She is grinning very hard and I know she has made eye contact with someone down in the exercise yard. Suddenly, she turns.

“I want to get out of here.”

“Okay,” I say brightly.

“You go downstairs,” she says. “I need to talk to Al.”

“Okay, okay.”

My heart is coated with ice. Plus, I’m mortified. But I go downstairs and wait in a green-carpeted room at the bottom of the stairs. There is a door out and a door to the yard. I think I’ll wait here. I don’t want to sit in the car trying to look like I’m not abetting a jail break. I’m going downhill fast.

I must be there twenty minutes when I hear the electronics of the elevator coming at me. The stainless doors open and a very disheveled Al appears with my friend. There is nothing funny or bawdy in her demeanor. Al swings by me without catching a glance and begins to open the door to the yard with a key. He has a service revolver in one hand as he does so. “Be cool now, Al,” says my friend intimately. “Or I talk.”

The steel door winks and she is gone into the prison yard. “We better go back,” says Al in a doomed voice. “I’m on duty. God almighty.”

“Did I do this?” I say in the elevator.

“You better stay with me. I can’t have you leaving alone.” He unplugs the coffee mechanically. When I get to the bulletproof glass, I can see the prisoners migrating. There is a little of everything: old guys, stumblebums, Indians, Italians, Irishmen, all heading into the shadow of the tower. “We’re just going to have to go with this one. There’s no other way.” He looks crummy and depleted but he is going to draw the line. We have to go with it. She will signal the tower, he tells me. So we wait by the glass like a pair of sea captain’s wives in their widow’s walks. It goes on so long, we forget why we’re waiting. We are just doing our job.

Then there is a small reverse migration of prisoners and she, bobby pins in her teeth, checking her hair for bounce, waves up to us in the tower. We wave back in this syncopated motion which is almost the main thing I remember, me and Al flapping away like a couple of widows.

As we ride down in the elevator again, Al says, “You take over from here.” And we commence to laugh. We laugh so hard I think one of us will upchuck. Then we have to stop to get out of the elevator. We cover our mouths and laugh through our noses, tears streaming down our cheeks, while Al tries to get the door open. Our lady friend comes in real sternlike, though, and we stop. It is as if we’d been caught at something and she is awful sore. She heads out the door and Al gives me the gun.

In the car, she says with real contempt, “I guess it’s your turn.” Buddy, was that the wrong thing to say.

“I guess it is.” I am the quiet one now.

There is a great pool on the river about a mile below the railroad bridge. It’s moving but not enough to erase the stars from its surface, or the trout sailing like birds over its deep pebbly bottom. The little homewrecker kneels at the end of the sandbar and washes herself over and over. When I am certain she feels absolutely clean, I let her have it. I roll her into the pool, where she becomes a ghost of the river trailing beautiful smoky cotton from a hole in her silly head.

It’s such a relief. We never did need the social whirl. Tomorrow we’ll shop for something nice, something you can count on to stand up.

There for a while it looked like the end.