To Skin a Cat

A SKIRMISH

The schoolroom was small, and we had the same teacher all day long. You could smell the many coats that hung in the back of the room. The burr-headed boys sat on one side and the girls with their elaborate hair sat on the other. Between the two there was an idle hostility, which did not seem to have anything to do with sex but, rather, a plain and small hatred awaiting transmogrification and secrecy.

Our lunches were all stored on a table in black pails. We lived in such proximity and confinement that we had powerful attitudes about what constituted a proper lunch. Freakish lunches — imaginative preparation, ethnic hints, dainty wrappings — singled out the hapless owner as a pampered twit. I remember vividly how we silently accepted a trick miniature pie that was going the rounds of the grocery stores and could be eaten one-handed. A heartbeat from being singled out, each one of us seemed to arrive the same day with an identical pie.

That year, reproductions of Civil War forage caps, blue or gray with crossed sabers, came into our world. Every boy bought one. Just three boys got the rebel model, because where we lived, the indigenous saint was Abraham Lincoln and he took care of the slaveholders years ago, the men in gray. The three who bought the rebel model were the Emery brothers: Bill, Buck, and Dalton. They had nothing to do with the South. They were what was called common-ass hoodlums, who already had a running battle going with the game warden and a flourishing business in stolen hubcaps. But these hats drew the brothers close for the first time, and entirely away from the rest of us. Bill, the youngest, was thin and humorless and the most daring thief. Buck was feebleminded and got his crewcut by the calendar so he always looked the same. He didn’t appear to have had the same mother as the other two. Dalton, ready to graduate, charming and crooked, was prison bound. When the Emerys found out about my big Lincoln log set, they decided I was the brains behind the Union forces, the men in blue.

When the school bus dropped us off that night, I took the route past the old stone quarry, a place we caught sunfish in summer. A path went around the back of the quarry, so close to the water you could see the shear of stone that dropped into vertical invisibility at the shore. I could see the Emerys drifting along slowly behind me, but I was sure I could make the shortcut to my house before they caught up to me. I was wrong; they made a rush and overwhelmed me at the edge of the sumac. Buck stood flat on the end of my foot while Dalton and Bill pushed me over backward.

My leg was in a cast for two months. But the torn ligaments didn’t really heal until after summer began. My school-work suffered because the Emerys stared at me while I studied and asked to sign my cast, forcing me to refuse, making it appear that I was hostile toward them and the one causing all the trouble.

When my cast was cut off, my leg was thin and white. Across the windblown playground where deer tracks appeared in the muck, Buck Ernery watched my crooked walk.

Buck often rode the bus with me, never taking his dark, stupid eyes off my face. His straight stiff hair was even and short. From any angle there was always a spot where you could see straight through to his white scalp, luminous under the hair with a gristly glow.

There was a sentimental attempt to rehabilitate Dalton in his last term at school. He was so clearly going to do badly in life because of his suave and malicious disposition that it seemed appropriate to put him in a position of authority. It was hoped that a day would come when he would not see petty theft or feeling up girls as the be-all and end-all he viewed them as now. The principal appointed him one of the safety-patrol boys and gave him the crossed white shoulder straps that identified the officers. He wore them with his Confederate forage cap and supervised the boarding and exit of the bus. One day when we stopped at the end of our road, he got off the bus with me and stared fixedly at my blue cap. He asked if I was still loyal to the boys in blue. I said that I was. But I knew he could see I was shaking. He said that if I was interested in my health, I would desert. As scared as I was, I thought of Abraham Lincoln and said, “Never.”

“Have it your way.”

My bedroom was an unfinished addition over the attached garage. The walls were made of what was called beaverboard. There was a window at the far end of the room and I could step through it into a huge, humid elm, go up and see the tops of the woods around us, or climb down into the yard. I had a crystal set in my room and spent long hours wearing the earphones, moving the whisker of wire over the nugget of crystal in its lead enclosure trying to catch the radio signals borne through the air around me. The room had no heat. Instead I had a thin electric blanket whose wires stood through the fabric like varicose veins. The blanket had a white plastic control with a wheel, numbered one through nine. In January, nine just got me through the night; by April I’d be down to four; then in October I’d start back up the dial again. I think the crystal set and the electric blanket supplied me with the largest general ideas about the world I would acquire in my grammar school years, vastly bigger than anything discovered in class, where the glacial communion of the three R’s was held.

The last time that I used the five setting, Buck appeared in my window on a clear night and hung there, arms and legs spread to the corners of the window frame, wearing his cap and staring in at me in my bed. I didn’t move throughout the long time he hung there, and I don’t recall his climbing down. Instead, he seemed to disappear from the hypnotic center of the very fear I felt. I spent the rest of the night watching the same empty window in which I expected one day to see the atomic flash marking the end of the world.

Suddenly it was springtime. Frogs roared in the woods. Jack-in-the-pulpits sprang from black mucky soil in secret. Pike appeared from the big lake and sought the muddy canal that crossed our woods and swamps. I could see them from the high bank gulping water into their wolfish jaws and finning indolently beneath the undercut bank.

I started my paper route, learning all over again to put the three-way fold in the daily edition so it could be thrown like a piece of kindling. Among my newest subscribers were the Emerys. “I didn’t know they could read,” said my father jauntily.

I delivered their paper first. It completely threw my route off. If I rolled my papers before school, I could deliver the Emerys’ paper immediately after school was out and while they were still finishing the chores their father required of them. Their father was in “haulage,” his term for intermittent employment. Chores in haulage might consist of stacking scrap iron or salvaged copper pipe, and it might mean cutting down a wild honey tree the old man had found in the woods while the boys were in school. The Emerys ran a line of muskrat snares and gigged bullfrogs. They could take a copperhead in their hands with impunity and make it strike through a piece of inner tube stretched across the mouth of a mason jar, spitting its poison inside. My father said that the Emerys had ability, which was his way of accounting for those who, though doomed, were undeserving of remorse.

Some days there were no chores. Bill, Buck, and Dalton would be lined up silently on the lawn. I pitched the paper, sailing it past their expressionless faces. Then I made off on my bike, putting all my weight on first one pedal, then the other.

Summer was making its way right over top of us. I played baseball after dinner, every one of the players sick on Red Man. I caught turtles. Because I hated books, my mother bribed me to read the Penrod stories and The Master of Ballantrae. Later, in the hope that I might be an entertainer, she drove me to play Mister Interlocutor in the annual minstrel show. Wearing a swallowtail coat, I read in a hysterical voice from cards she had typed, crazy questions to Mister Bones and others.

When the slow-moving green-to-brown water of the canal got warm enough, we swam in it. We drifted under the fallen trees that stretched over its mirror surface and caught the sunning turtles when they tumbled off. I had five of them, small painted and mud turtles whose cool weight in my hands and striving far-focused eyes thrilled me. The flare of shell, the arrangement of openings for head and legs, their symmetry and gleam of burnished camouflage were aching to comprehend. I took them to school and Dalton Emery, of the safety patrol, tossed them from the bus at forty miles an hour onto the paved road, where they blossomed red for one instant and flew apart. He pointed in his manual to a prohibition of pets on the school bus, an order of the state.

I didn’t deliver papers that week. It seemed half the town called my father about it. I wouldn’t explain myself; I guess I had the feeling that others might be listening. My father looked on in confusion as my paper route was turned over to an Estonian boy down the canal who had recently joined the Confederacy.

I had a path in the sumac that wound through low ground to a bank of cattails where redwing blackbirds flickered and sang. The maroon seeds had a salty taste, and to be undaunted by their rumored poison was part of the heroism of sojourning in the low ground. This same path crossed stands of milkweed with its pods of pagan silk and drew me close to the paper globes of hornets suspended in shadows. On the path I sometimes found a mother opossum with her infants stuck to her underside like stamps. The sumac path wound around and forked into itself. It seemed never to be the same from day to day. I now spent all my time in either the gravity of school supervision or close watching in my own home. My disappearances into the sumac were the only exception to all the unwelcome order.

I always wore my Federal cap on these junkets and carried a Barlow knife. I had wedged a piece of wood inside the knife that kept the blade point slightly exposed, so that it could be flicked open against the seam of my dungarees.

On the ninth of June, I placed my unsatisfactory report card on the kitchen table and headed for the sumac. I wandered down in it until I couldn’t feel the heat of the sun but instead felt the cool breath of air from the mudbanks and sinkholes around me. A small hawk used my path for a whirling departure that cleared cobwebs at face level for fifty yards. At the first fork I found a snare that was meant for me. A powerful elm bough had been drawn down with a piece of old rope, the rope wound with vines, and the loop staked to the ground and covered with last year’s brittle leaves. I tripped the snare with a stick, and the report of the bough carried through the bottom. I sat down and watched the rope snare turn in the air ten feet above me. In the climbing ground, I could hear the diminishing whisper of shrubs against pant legs. Then it was still.

I was taken prisoner the Fourth of July, a day that will live in infamy. My parents left for a long weekend on a cabin cruiser, which was really how summer always started for us, not flowers or south winds so much as cabin cruisers. The Emerys must have known because they took me right at the foot of our road. Dalton got my Barlow knife, and when we reached the canal, Bill threw my forage cap into the water and shot it full of holes with his twenty-two. I was held in a piano packing crate from Mr. Emery’s haulage business.

“If you escape, we’ll know where to find you,” said Buck, with his way of looking through me. Buck was the one who would, years later, live alone with his father and help keep up the trap line. Dalton was in and out of prison. And Bill was killed in a rocket attack on the Mekong Delta. “If we have to go looking for you,” Buck said, “we may finish you off.” I know all this was talk, but there was something to Buck that lay outside of all agreements. He had shoved girls at school and disrupted the most official fire drills. No one used the drinking fountain without the fear that Buck Emery might push their teeth down on the chromium water jet.

“Just write a statement saying Abraham Lincoln was yellow and you go free,” said Bill excitedly.

“But your knife is gone,” said Dalton, “never to be seen again.”

They left me with a pencil and a lined tablet in case I wanted to make a confession. I was given matches, a saucepan, a jug of water, and a box of Quaker Oats.

I saw the sun cross the sky and go into the swamp. The sound of frogs came up; not just the unpunctuated singing of the common green frogs but the abdominal bass of bullfrogs. The whippoorwills lasted an hour or two and the screech owls came out. A cold spring moon mounted high above the piano crate, and I fell asleep as its white light poured through the slats.

When I woke up, I was chilled deep down. It was just first light and Buck was staring in at me.

“Do any writing?”

“No, and I won’t.”

“It’s your funeral,” he said in his thudding way. He bent his face to better see me. Then he was gone.

I dumped the oats into the saucepan and let them soak while I pulled down rough handfuls of splinters from the crate for a cooking fire. I had to have this to do. I was frantic inside the small box, getting close to battering myself against its insides. The morning light glittered on the links of chain holding the crate shut, and the frogs were silent in the cold. My hand shook when I lit the matches, not so much because I was chilled, or that I could not repudiate Lincoln, but because the box had seemed to shrink to an intolerable size and my heart was trying to pound its way out of my chest. When the fire was going, I threw the gruel that was meant for my breakfast out of the box onto the ground. It dripped slow and cold from the chain while the tongue of fire reached out from the splinters. I tore more wood loose and threw it atop the fire, forcing the flames to the side of the box and wishing it were the battlements of Vicksburg with the slavers inside watching their kingdom fall. The smoke rolled over me and I grew faint. I remember thinking as I hovered between terror and opportunity that the sparks were like a shower of meteors on a winter night. I was quite certain I was burning up for glory.

The next thing I was in the Emery parlor, a plain room with antlers on the wall and a great painting of a waterfall so huge that the little tourists at its base seemed to cower at its majesty. I reeked of wood smoke. The stairs to the second floor went up at a steep angle like a ladder. The carpet runner was just nailed to the risers. There were a lot of chairs, no two alike. Bill, Buck, and Dalton were in three of these chairs and their father was standing over close to me where I was stretched out on the lumpy divan. Mr. Emery was little and hard and he had already cut a switch. He may very well have used it before I woke up, because the three looked like the most ordinary schoolboys you could picture. I was even scared of their old man.

I tried to tell from the way we walked as we went outside what he thought of me, but all I knew was that he was thinking, as we used to say, “in his mind.” I caught a look of the boys watching. “They’re not like you, are they,” said Mr. Emery, almost to himself.

“No,” I said, barely touching the word.

“They have to go and show off. I’m out of work, and the boys act like they wasn’t all there.”

I looked at the house. It seemed locked up like a dungeon.

“You’ll always have something you can do,” said Mr. Emery. He had a way of holding a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and curling it in toward the palm of his hand. “My boys will go where they’re kicked. Anyway, why don’t you get out of here where I don’t have to look at you. I won’t tell nobody you tried to burn us out.”

“Thank you,” I said.