To Skin a Cat

TWO HOURS TO KILL

It was about a mile by car to the corrals and kennels. The trees were as tall as the pines in the North, maybe taller. But there was Spanish moss on them and on the cable guys that held up the telephone poles going along the road and turning up toward the house. Off to the north there were strips of lespedeza and partridge peas and some knocked-down field corn with crows flocking in it, tilting wedges of black in the autumn light. The weather that fall afternoon was still and warm, though the sun had the muted feeling of late in the year.

John Ray was waiting at the side of the corrals, a walking horse tied to an oak limb where he stood. He had called Jack at the dealership and given him the news of his mother. Jack had asked John Ray to get him a horse.

“I know you’re shocked at me,” Jack said, “but they can’t get anyone out here for two hours, and I’m just not going to go up to that house.”

John Ray always looked starchy in his khaki working clothes but he twisted around in them in a self-deprecatory way, as if to say that it was all one to him. There was a big bell on the side of the tack shed, and Jack asked him to ring it when the ambulance came.

“What did you find when you went up there?” Jack asked quietly.

“It wasn’t no answer.”

“So you just let yourself in?”

John Ray worked the bill of his cap in his fingers. “Yes, sir.”

“Seem to go quietly?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“In bed?”

“No, off in the side room there.”

Jack looked over at the kennels. Pointers were jumping up and down the chain-link sides of it and barking. “Get Tess and Night for me, John, and I’ll saddle up.”

Jack went into the tack shed and pulled down an old worn trooper saddle with rings on it to tie canteens and check cords. There was a waterproof tied to it that hung down behind the stirrups like a shroud; dust had collected in the folds. Jack saddled the horse and put on its bridle. It was a great big, dignified-looking shooting horse with a roached mane and a long homely head like you saw in old cavalry pictures, a smooth-mouthed bay that had been branded by four or five owners. Jack thought that when the courts were done with the estate, when his sisters came down from Cincinnatti and his brother from Anchorage, this horse might collect some more brands.

John Ray brought Tess and Night on a forked check cord. The two lunged and stretched out on their hind legs as John Ray helped Jack tie the end of the check cord behind the saddle. The two dogs then jumped out in front of the horse at the end of the rope while Jack mounted and started down the road behind them. The dogs dug in and seemed to strive to tow the horse, who sauntered along, absorbing the jerks as he had done with hundreds of other broke and unbroke bird dogs in the course of acquiring the four or five brands on his hip.

Jack went about a half mile off the end of the road. There was an overgrown sorghum field that practically abutted a stand of longleaf pine, and beyond that it was all broken up little fields, some clearcut; and where it had grown brushy, the hedgerows were laced up shut with vines and brambles of kudzu and wild honeysuckle. It was still too green and early. Jack normally waited until it had frozen and the frost-killed foliage had dried in the cold, because the dogs couldn’t smell as well when it lay on the ground and rotted.

Jack got down off the horse, which stood empty-saddled holding the straining dogs. He walked down the check cord and whoaed the two dogs, vaulting at the end of the rope toward the quail fields beyond. “Whoa, Tess,” he said. “Whoa-up now, Night.” The dogs stood on all fours staring ahead and, except for the trembling that shook them, did not move when Jack unsnapped their shackles. He made them stand while he coiled the check cord carefully and walked back to the horse and tied the coil to the back of the saddle. They continued to stand while he remounted and sat for a long moment looking down at the waiting dogs and finally said, in a long-drawn-out utterance, “All right, now.”

The dogs shot off on separate but somehow communicating angles, tails popping, heads high, as they ran through a small field of partridge peas and wire grass and shoemaker berries. They used up this field and cracked through a tall hedge, obliging Jack to canter along after them, losing them at the hedge and picking them up again in the next field, his shotgun slapping up under his left knee and coming out the far side with a strand of honeysuckle trailing from the trigger guard.

A big runoff ditch came up in the red soil, a place Jack normally rode out around, but he took it at a canter today and vaulted over it, seeing the big dark channel fly under him as he sailed into the rough growth. Jack thought about that ditch and wondered if he would jump it coming back. I’ll jump it at great speed, he concluded.

When he came into the next field, the dogs were on point, Tess forward and Night behind at an angle, honoring. When Jack reined the bay past the low sun, the light flared red at the edge of the horse’s nostrils. He stopped and got down, pulling the double-barreled gun from its scabbard, breaking and loading it while he kept one eye on the dogs. Night catwalked a couple of steps, and Jack made a low sound of disapproval in his throat and the dog stopped. Jack walked past the dogs, watching straight ahead for the covey rise. He presumed the birds were on the little elevation of ground under the old pines.

There were no birds. The dogs were still on point, and Jack pulled off his hat to run his hand across his forehead. He didn’t understand it. He went back and stood next to Tess and tried to figure out what she was pointing. Both dogs were quick to honor any shape that might be another dog on point. He got down on one knee and saw the gravestones. Bird dogs back any white shape, and Tess and Night were absorbed in distant knowledge. Jack shouted at them and gestured harshly with the gun. “Get out!” he shouted, and the dogs cowered off and watched him. He got back on the horse and pointed out ahead. The dogs resumed, a little slow at first.

Jack felt the blood recede from his face. There had been a community of tenant farmers here raising shade tobacco. The town was gone, the tobacco was gone, the church burned. Except for the graves, the people were altogether gone. Maybe they have heirs, he thought angrily, maybe they have rich sons of bitches living in Boca Raton.

There was a clear little swamp a mile or so farther on. It was circled by trees, and lily pads floated with their entirely green stems clearly visible for many feet underneath them. Quail had come out to feed, and the dogs pinned them down about forty yards south of it. Jack got down off his horse once again, prepared his gun, and walked the birds up. When the quail roared off, he dropped two of them. The rest of the covey made a whirling crescent into the trees. He tried to watch them down, at the same time calling Tess and Night in to retrieve—“Dead birds! Dead, Night; dead, Tess”—and, as they worked close, coursing over the ground the birds had fallen on, “Dayy-yid” and “Dead!” when Tess picked one up, and a triumphant “Dead!” when Night found the other and the two dogs brought them to hand.

He was sure he had watched the covey down fairly well when the bell began to ring, carrying pure as light turned to sound in the still trees. He stopped and gave it a listen. The music resumed and he felt its pressure, a pressure as irritating as a command to begin dancing. He climbed on the horse and reined him toward the down covey.

Then the bells came again, this time without any of their music, like a probe or like the light that went on in his office, in the roar of the air conditioner, that meant “Customer.” I don’t want this customer, he thought. He rode toward the swamp and felt a wave of courage that quickly receded. He wheeled the horse and yelled, “Tess, Night! Come here to me!” It’s nearly dark, he thought, too dark to see that ditch. The dogs shot past, and in a moment he could not see them. He broke the horse into a rack until he saw the brush irrigated by the runoff. He pricked the horse lightly to set him up, released him, and felt as if he were going straight to heaven. The horse went down into the ditch, and Jack was knocked cold by impact as the horse scrambled without him, scared backward forty feet, and then turning to run home, dragging the broken reins.

He woke up in the ambulance. The driver was straight ahead of him, a black silhouette. The paramedic was next to him, a woman with a braid pinned up under a cap. Beside Jack was another figure, entirely covered.

“Don’t drop me off first,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, “but it is important that we drop you off first.”

“I don’t want to be dropped off first,” said Jack.

“You we drop first,” the woman said.

City lights licked across the two in front. They arose, penetrated the windshield, and passed. Jack tried to anticipate them, and once when the ambulance was flooded at a stoplight, he looked over.

They wheeled him inside. He was in a room that sounded like a lavatory. People walked around him. When a doctor put a needle in his arm, he explained, “I really didn’t want them to drop me off first.” And then it came, a miracle of boredom, and he was out.