Mostly Dead Things Read online

  “It was obscene,” I said. “My mother’s going through a rough time right now.”

  The woman was a foot taller than me, lean and angular and handsome. She stopped next to the boar and kneeled beside it, assessing its face. One long finger probed the broken tusk. “I’m Lucinda Rex,” she said, cupping the animal’s face. “I run the gallery over on Morse.”

  “Jessa Morton.” I poured myself a cup of the weak coffee that still sat in the bottom of the pot in order to give myself something to do with my hands, which were suddenly sweating.

  “It’s fascinating stuff.” She looked up from where she crouched beside the boar. Her eyes were dark and thickly lashed. “You did these yourself?”

  “Most of them. Some my father did.”

  “They’re very lifelike.” She unfolded from the floor and continued standing beside the boar. Its broken tusk pressed into the smooth skin of her leg and left behind a pink scratch.

  Lucinda was the kind of lady I liked to look at, but generally avoided because they were way too classy for me. My usual type was a messy woman, the kind of person who’d go out with me on a date and inevitably leave the bar with someone else. “Was there something you needed?”

  “Yes. How much for this one?”

  “How much?” I repeated, watching her pet the boar’s head. Her hands were slender and her fingers were very long. I imagined them touching my face, stroking a line across my collarbone. “How much.”

  “I’ll give you three grand for it.”

  “What?” The most anybody had ever spent in our shop was just over a thousand, and that was on custom work.

  Frowning, she brought her purse over to the sales counter. “Is that not enough?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not right—the tusk is broken, see? I’ll have to fix it.”

  “I can’t even tell.” She wasn’t looking. “I’d love to see what your mother could do with something like this.”

  She had to be joking. “Yeah, right.”

  “I think it looks fine.”

  It obviously did not. “I’d need to fix it up first.”

  “Of course. But let me go ahead and buy it from you now. I’ll just pick it up later.” She looked appraisingly at me, lips set in a thin line. “Or do you deliver?”

  “Sure, we can do that.” We never did that.

  “Wonderful.” She unearthed a credit card from a giant pile of them, an assortment stacked up like playing cards. “I’ll expect you tomorrow afternoon.”

  I spent the rest of the day sprucing up the boar. Its tusk was shot to hell and the coat was worn down and scaly from sitting in the dust and sun for so many years. Patching the holes was rough work without suitable scraps. It made fixing fuckups a hell of a lot harder, but I wasn’t about to sell Lucinda something wrecked. For a solid three grand, the work would have to be pristine.

  My father had patented a few of his own tanning recipes, stuff that he’d perfected over the years, tricks he’d learned from his own father. Left to my own devices, I couldn’t do half the work he did. I didn’t have the connections or the experience. Most of what I created was based on gut feeling, what he called my natural talent. It had served me well in the past, but that was with my father there to pick up the slack. When I asked him to teach me, he always put it off.

  It’ll be faster if I just do it, he’d said about his special glazing technique for trout. Takes longer to teach than for me to just get it done.

  I’d had to turn down three different jobs because I didn’t know the glaze and he had never thought it was the right time for me to learn. Since his death, I often wondered if he didn’t teach me those tricks because he still wished he had the right son to share them with.

  It was a pointless concern. All I could do was what I’d been doing: running relentlessly, every day, until my brain shut down. I worked until my hands slipped and I nicked the pads of my fingers. Gutted fish until my clothes stunk of the lake. Scraped until my muscles screamed. Then I could sleep again and wake the next day, thrust back into my endless cycle of trying, trying, trying. Being what he needed.

  Need. It was a word that my father seldom used. I’d heard him say want, and expect. But there was never anything like need, a word that implied helplessness and frailty. A word that made him seem farther from me than ever, drowning, thrashing alone while he waited for someone to save him. For me to save everything. So I worked. It was what my father would have done. The best way to get through anything at home is just to stay at work, he’d say, smiling over the top of a mount. We’d laugh about it, him talking about my mother that way. That she would ever be too much for him to go home to. That he would ever need a break from a person who took care of everything for him so he could do the things he loved the most.

  “Focus,” I said, examining the boar’s legs. “Don’t fuck this up.”

  My mother hadn’t been too careful posing it, likely because the animal was double her weight. There were long rips along the belly that required re-stitching and one that I needed to resurface completely. I drank unending cans of beer, my mind switching to autopilot, as it always did when I was re-creating. I let my hands do my thinking for me, building something from the tangle of hide and padding and wires. I cleaned the coat. Glossed the hooves. Patched the slippage along the ears. I thought about Lucinda: her long fingers, her long legs. The way her mouth had looked when she half smiled at me in the shop. Wondered if she’d be pleased with the work, then felt aggravated with myself that I wanted to see her again. I generally never wanted to see anyone, and that’s how I liked my life: simple, no mess.

  Milo stopped by around nine the next morning, carrying a coffee in each hand. I took both from him and sat with my legs splayed out on either side of the table. I smelled sour, my hands stained with dye from where I’d tried to match up scraps on the underside of the animal. It wasn’t exact, but I comforted myself with the thought that Lucinda wouldn’t know any different.

  “Can’t believe you’re getting rid of him.” He petted the boar on its wrinkled snout before inserting two fingers in the nostrils and wriggling them around. “It’s like selling a family member.”

  I slapped his hand away, worried he’d screw up the paint. “The money will help me sleep at night.” The first coffee I sipped from was full of cheap, syrupy creamer. I handed it back to Milo, who chugged some before setting it on the metal table next to my tools.

  “Don’t you feel bad that it was a Prentice Morton original? Not too many of those left.”

  Sighing, I rolled my shoulders until my spine cracked. “The two of us are the only originals that matter. At least we’re getting paid.”

  He grabbed a chair from the desk and brought it over to the other side of the boar. His face scrunched up as he assessed the side, squinting deep wrinkles beside his eyes. “It looks good, but it’ll never be like Dad’s. There’s something wrong with the coloring, it doesn’t match up along the neck.”

  What the hell did he know about any of it? He’d never had to spend hours in the shop, matching dyes, sweating buckets into the pelt when it didn’t want to stretch right. “Fuck you, nothing’s like Dad’s.”

  Milo held up his hands. “Just saying you can’t do all this yourself.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” I asked.

  He shrugged and leaned back, drinking more coffee. “Took a sick day.”

  Since we were kids, my brother was the flexible one, the person who listened and empathized. He’d been home with my mother while my father took me places: out together on early morning fishing and hunting trips, down to the Home Depot to collect gear for a garden-bed project in the backyard. He’d never asked my brother along; he’d considered him whiny and too prone to crying. Your brother’s a little too sensitive about everything, he told me one day over lunch, digging pickles off his pastrami and passing them to me. He has too many feelings. I love him. I just don’t understand him, that’s all.

  “You okay?” Milo asked, leaning cl
oser to me. He’d shaved, finally, and there was dried blood dotting his chin. “You should eat.”

  “Sorry, I’m just tired.” I set down the coffee and stood up. The world blackened to pinpricks for a moment and I waited until the dizziness passed before continuing. “Help me load this fucker in the truck.”

  We each grabbed an end and maneuvered it through the back of the shop and into the alleyway. Down the street, light gleamed off the lake like a line of silver glitter. It was steamy out and bordering the high eighties. I anticipated that it would soar into the nineties before long, and didn’t relish leaving the boar in the back of the bed. The glue and tanners had a tendency to melt in the heat. More than once we’d lost antlers or eyeballs when someone left our work in the car while picking up groceries. Our father always told people to treat taxidermy as they would a live animal: never leave a dog in a locked car; never leave a mounted deer head in the front seat.

  I took a blue tarp from the back of the shop and we laid it over the boar, pinning it down with bungees in all four corners. The animal’s tusks and back poked up, propping up the middle of the tarp in a bright bulge that made me feel nervous for its safety. We climbed into the truck and Milo pulled down the alley and into the street.

  “Let’s get something to eat. You can’t live off beer.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Our father would never have left a taxidermied animal in the back of a truck, but he also never would have delivered one to anybody. “The boar might get fucked up.”

  “It’s already fucked up, and we need breakfast.” Milo rubbed a hand against his concave stomach. He was wearing an old T-shirt from high school, a rose-colored one with a front pocket stretched out from storing chewing tobacco. His coloring was more sallow than usual, a sickly unnatural hue. I hadn’t been spending much time with him lately—too busy with work and avoiding the spillover of his feelings—and realized he looked worse than I did. How is he taking care of his daughter if he looks like this? I wondered. How is Brynn’s kid getting fed?

  Even thinking Brynn’s name made my brain swim with images of her: crooked teeth and wide red mouth, a girl with so much light in her it almost hurt to look at her face. The one who’d taken up my thoughts since childhood. Memories of Brynn put razor blades in my stomach, never butterflies.

  But I forced those images down and focused on food. I could do food. I nodded at Milo and he smiled, turning left, down the street to the diner.

  “Maybe it’s time to talk about selling the business.” Milo steered with his left hand, elbow jutting out the window while he punched gears with his right. “The economy’s not great, and there’s no money from life insurance, since . . . you know.”

  My brother had never saved a dollar in his life. He looked so smug, talking about something he’d never had to care about. The closest thing he had to a savings account was his daughter’s orange-and-blue UF piggy bank. I wanted to smack him. “What do you know about running a business?”

  “You’ll end up losing everything you’ve saved. You need to be realistic.”

  I’d already put most of my savings into financing the shop, but I wasn’t about to tell Milo that. Being realistic meant facing our situation head on, and the fact of the matter was that I was the only one taking care of things. There was no one for me to turn to for help. It made me angry, that my brother could drive me to breakfast and tell me what to do when he never had to deal with any of the shit that came with it. He hadn’t found our father, head leaking brain matter onto the metal table where we’d cured our first hide.

  “Maybe you could chip in a few bucks,” I said, peeling at the paneling that was beginning to separate from the dash. “It’s your family too.”

  Milo’s grip tightened on the steering wheel, and I stared out the window. I knew it wasn’t fair to say something like that. It wasn’t his responsibility to help pay for a shop that our father had never wanted him to help with. I might not have understood our mother, but at least she always showed she cared. My father treated Milo like an inconvenience, an acquaintance he didn’t like all that much, someone taking up space in the house.

  “I’m trying to help,” Milo said, tentatively putting his hand on my knee. That kind of touching felt forced, not like anything we’d ever done with each other. He and I were handshake buddies. We slapped each other on the back when we hugged.

  “Let’s just drop it,” I said. “I’m too fucking tired.”

  The parking lot of Winnie’s was already half-full. I scrubbed at my gluey eyes and blinked to free an eyelash that had lodged itself beneath a lid. The sun beat down on me as I climbed out of the truck, and I spared a glance at the boar, nestled beneath a sea of blue plastic sheeting.

  “You good?” Milo scratched at his bedhead and squinted at me.

  “He’ll be fine. In and out, right?”

  The diner smelled like burnt toast and bacon grease. Milo led us to the very back, next to the kitchen. Brynn and I had come to Winnie’s for years, just the two of us, and then we’d brought Milo. Then two again: the two of them without me. Waitresses flew through the swinging doors, indistinguishable from each other aside from their brassy hair colors: coppery penny, corn-silk yellow, the magenta of an especially fiery sunset. One bright head stopped at our table with her notepad already jammed down into her apron. Her hands were birds; one fluttered up into her neckline to fiddle with a button, while the other tugged at an earring.

  “You guys want the usual?” she asked, mouth slick and red. Her voice was low and scratchy, like she needed to clear her throat. “Regular? Some coffee?”

  “Maybe double that, Molly. Jessa had a late night.”

  Unlike Lucinda with her cool prettiness, these women were aggressively sexual. Milo and I both had a type and Marsha looked a lot like it: predatory, confident, voluptuous. Brynn was long gone, but stuck between us like a divider we couldn’t quite pull down. My best friend and Milo’s wife, a woman we’d both known our whole lives. She still dictated how we saw each other. How we saw other women.

  He worked his wedding ring around his finger in slow, methodical pulls. She’d been gone for years and he still wouldn’t take it off. He’d already gotten the best girl; he’d married Brynn, who was curvier and funnier and meaner than anyone. Marsha slid a hand along his neck and Milo laughed that weird, high-pitched giggle he got whenever anyone paid him too much attention.

  I stared out the window and kept my eyes on the boar.

  SUS SCROFA—FERAL PIG

  There wasn’t room on the bed for another body, but that didn’t stop Brynn Wiley from climbing in behind me. She curled up next to the wall, legs still striped with cocoa butter that hadn’t yet sunk into her skin. One socked foot insinuated itself between my calves as I lay perfectly still and tried to pretend my heart wasn’t preparing for flight beneath my rib cage.

  Two of our friends were propped in front of us on the floor while we watched a movie in my bedroom. It was my sixteenth birthday and I hadn’t even asked for a car; I’d wanted fleshing kits and a chance to work a little on the boar we’d gotten into the shop.

  Why are you always so warm?

  Lips sticky with gloss stuck to my ear. I’d find a red stain there later and wish it were permanent; that it would smear there forever.

  You need to shave. Fingertips tapped my knee, dry and scabbed. You’re disgusting, you know that?

  It was hard to know what was happening in the movie when someone touched me in a way that made my skin feel peeled. Every nerve ending was exposed and frayed. Suzanne and Lizbeth laughed, and then one of them passed the popcorn bowl up onto the mattress beside my head. A hand slid beneath my T-shirt. The cold from Brynn’s skin radiated all the way to the bottom of my pelvis.

  Her hands ghosted, plucking indiscriminately at my flesh. She found the knobs of my vertebrae, pressed her fingers between the slats of my ribs, cupped her palm around the bulge of my hip. The music from the movie wasn’t loud enough to cover the sounds my mou
th wanted to make: wounded animal noises, whimpers pulled from deep in my chest. I sat up and folded my knees under me, putting the popcorn bowl between us. Brynn smiled, crooked left canine glowing radioactive blue in the light from the television set. She opened her mouth and I practiced tossing popcorn kernels inside, one by one.

  When the movie was over, we made a frozen pizza in the microwave because we were too lazy to preheat the oven. Brynn pinched pieces off and threw bits to my mother’s Pomeranian, Sir Charles. He gagged the fourth one up on the living room rug next to the quail family of four my dad and I had stuffed two years prior.

  We should go out. Brynn was in a Garfield nightgown that she’d had since the fourth grade. It only skimmed the tops of her thighs. Garfield’s face was so stretched out over her breasts that he no longer looked like a cat. When she leaned her hip against the kitchen counter, I could see part of her ass hanging out in pink polka-dotted boy shorts.

  Milo’s bedroom was down the hall from the kitchen. I could just make out his lean shape in the glow of the light from his ceiling fan. He was almost fifteen and already six feet tall, lanky to the point of emaciation. I knew he liked Brynn, knew he liked her because he looked at her the way I did. We talked less as a result, both of us shying away from our unwanted feelings, not willing to disclose the emotions we both wanted to shed like peeling, sunburned skin. Brynn stretched, arms pulled over her head until Garfield’s face elongated into a Halloween ghoul, and his door clicked closed again.

  Brynn wanted us to take my father’s beer and drive to the shop. Brynn wanted us to drink the beer and look at all the taxidermied animals. Brynn wanted us to play hide-and-seek there with all the lights off. It was my birthday and what I wanted was Brynn.

  I rode in the front seat of her hatchback while the other girls huddled in the back. We rolled down the windows and let in the humid night air. Bugs approached the car at forty miles per hour, catching the headlights and smashing liquid on the windshield. Brynn smoked and gave me puffs from where her red lips left heart prints. She pulled into the lot and parked up front. We got out and each had a beer, then immediately opened seconds. I let us in the back door, lights off. Feeling along the wall, everyone stumbled behind me, except for Brynn, whose small hand had found the center of my back. Fingers spanned my spine until I swore I could feel all the metacarpals and tendons. When I finally had her, I’d map her skin. Undressing her, I’d know her joints, her frame, intimately understand the mechanics of her body; what it felt like flush with mine.