“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 closer 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.