“Not many yet.” Bastien walked past again, his boots heavy on the linoleum. “These today, that hawk two weeks ago. Some egrets. A red fox, maybe female? Oh, and the kittens.”
“Kittens? You killed kittens?”
“Not me. Lolee.”
There was a moment where I thought I’d need to get up so I could puke, pants around my ankles, urine splashing up into my own face. To think of my little niece strangling baby cats was too much to bear.
“C’mon. I didn’t kill those.” Lolee stopped and smiled in at me. She looked too thin. I worried about her hanging out with Bastien if he was taking her out to kill things in the middle of the night. That seemed like something a serial killer might do. Wasn’t that something they said? That the first sign someone was a sociopath was animal murder?
“What did you do?” I asked, staring at her while she pranced around in the doorway.
“I found them, already drowned. Kaitlyn’s stepdad did it, I think. Just a big, wet sack full of dead kittens. It was really sad. Kaitlyn cried for like a week.”
“Do we have any more toilet paper?” The empty tube rattled under my fingers as I thought of the sweet little kittens with their sleeping faces; the ones I’d sheared and reconstituted just a week earlier. “I thought those belonged to somebody. That we were doing a pet consultation?”
“We’re out. You need to go to the store.” She shoved a fistful of fast food napkins at me. “Don’t flush those.”
Like I didn’t already know better. I sat and wiped with a wad of them. I could hear them both out there, opening drawers, pulling out instruments. There’d be a lot of cleanup. I’d never skinned a whole peacock before, and there were three waiting for gutting.
“Bloody Mary,” I whispered, face dark and wild in the mirror over the sink. I felt slightly buzzed. That helped. “Bloody Mary.” I washed my hands and dried them on my pants. “What the hell are we doing?”
Gear was spread out on the countertops. Lolee and Bastien piled the birds onto the center table, necks knocking into each other loosely.
“This is too much work for now.” I pulled my apron over my head and readied the gut tubs next to the table. “It’s already after ten. Put two back in the freezer. We’ll play around with this one; see what it needs for prep.”
“I think we can do them all.” Bastien slapped a hand against the back of the bird closest to him. Bits of fluff flew off and hung suspended in the air. “Let’s gut ’em tonight, then we’ll scrape in the morning.”
I looked at Lolee, who was jumping up and down on the balls of her feet. “You’re gonna help?” I asked.
She was already pulling on a spare apron—the one I’d gotten from a garage sale that said LORD & MASTER OF THE GRILLE in yellow embroidery.
“Go grab the other table, then. Not enough elbow room here for three.”
We each claimed a bird. I let Lolee choose first, because it reminded me of the first time Milo and I’d crowded around my father at the back of the shop. It was still exciting then, the fun of not knowing, both of us wondering what might happen. The bridge between the living and the dead, operating as the conduit between those lines. I wondered how much of my thirst for nostalgia I owed to my father, a man who’d sincerely loved looking backward, as if the past were a place he could visit any time he wished.
Lolee dragged hers over to the secondary metal table that Bastien had pulled out of the supply closet. I helped her settle the animal, back first, the feathers fanning out until they dipped close to the floor.
“Would’ve liked to read up on this first. Maybe research how to do it before we mangle them.”
“How hard can it be?” Bastien had already ripped into his, slicing slightly below the gullet. Here I’d been thinking that we’d been lucking into an assortment of pricy work, when all along it’d been thanks to the murderous schemes of my nephew. How many animals had I cut into that he’d strangled the breath from? Run down with a car?
Maybe I just hadn’t wanted to know.
But maybe that wasn’t true. I was projecting again, like I always did. He was just trying to help out. Be what I needed, what the shop needed. Helping the family.
Though he was truly mangling his bird. He hadn’t even put on work gloves. Clotted innards stained his hands all the way up to the wrist. I knew from experience that it would take a long time to come off, especially under the nails. Animal blood turned everything it touched nicotine yellow.
“Put these on.” I grabbed some for Lolee and then pulled on my own, snapping them back over my wrists, pulling them up so far that the hair on my arms got twisted up in the latex. It was a good kind of feeling; like coming home after a long day out with strangers.
“How do I do it?” she asked, holding up the scalpel. The blade was neat and clean. “Show me.”
I helped palm the edge, guiding it into her hand. Showed her the best way to make an initial incision; small and neat, something easy to cover with supplementary feathers and small stitching.
“Here’s where we cut. Be tender, don’t press too deep.”
Her fingers were strong beneath mine, wrists corded with muscle, flexing hard below the joint. Bastien grunted as he stabbed into the torso, turning it into a sloppy mess we’d have to cover with a ton of extra stitching. It was unusual for him to jump right into butchering. Normally he stood back with me and assessed the situation. He made slow, specific cuts. But the kind of slicing he was doing now was rudimentary, a true hack job. He looked gleeful, hair stuck up in the back like a little kid. I wondered if it came from the thrill of running the birds down with the truck. His smile was too wide; his shoulders too tight. There was a dimple in his chin that dug in below the scrape of his beard. He looked like his mother whenever she got worked up over fight scenes in movies. Kind of bloodthirsty.
“If you go too hard you can mess up the torque of the neck.” I said it loud enough for him to hear, but he just kept sawing. Lolee leaned into me and I could smell the unwashed scent of her hair, the soft dairy smell of her skin.
What was happening here was illegal. It was absolutely against the law. And I wasn’t the only one who stood to benefit. My brain worked hard, flipping the idea over, rubbing at it like a coin between my fingertips. There was something else we could get out of this. Money aside, my mother had been working on pieces from the shop. Had possibly even used some of the illegal stuff for her art.
They couldn’t put on a gallery showcase using illegally acquired animals.
Right?
Inside the peacock was a fascinating mess. We widened the slit large enough for Lolee to reach inside, pulling out innards as gently as she could: the twisting, looping swing of intestines, dark with feed and insects and bits of greenery; gristle and tendons; the fatty bits behind the haunches where all domesticated birds picked up weight.
“Open it a little wider, but careful. Flay it like a jacket.”
As she pulled the knife downward, the skin slit seamlessly. I leaned down and pressed my cheek to her hair. She felt warm; her body heat radiated feverishly against me until I felt as if I were standing beside an open oven door.
“I can do it,” she said, taking the knife from me and opening the bird the rest of the way. It lay spread, wet insides tender and red.