As the sun came up, I’d surreptitiously watch my father drive the truck. I liked the specifics of his face. The creases near his mouth, the pockmark between his eyebrows. His skin was sallow, like mine, and oily, with a bristly dark beard on his chin and cheeks. His hair, still wet from his shower, dried into spikes that fluffed up birdlike along the crown of his head.
We raced down the empty streets, passing all the places I knew so well. They looked different in the darkness of early morning, like people I’d never met before. Even our shop was a stranger as we passed, all the lights off, the woodsy front porch with its rocking chairs lonely and dimmed with shadows. It was always good to know that it wouldn’t be that way for long, that soon enough we’d pass all the same places and they’d look friendly and familiar again.
Most of the time we stuck to the highways near town, but I always liked it when there wasn’t anything close and my father took us on the long drive toward Ocala. Fields flew past in green drags, rolls of hay stacked up like pecan pinwheels alongside pinpricks of black cows dotting the distance, peeking up through the mist.
I’d like a cow. I pointed toward one so close I could make out its chewing mouth, imagining the cud lodged inside its cheek.
To eat? He laughed, as if he hadn’t already made that joke a thousand times.
As we passed the cows, all crowded safely together behind their fences, I thought how nice it was. How cozy and sweet to imagine that there were animals alive and kept in pens, not dead ones like we always dealt with. Then my father would remind me that the cows weren’t long for this world either.
You gonna stop eating cheeseburgers? No more McDonald’s for Jessa-Lynn? No steak so raw the blood pools on the plate?
I turned away and pretended to be upset, but I was smiling. Happy to have my father just to myself—knowing that we had these jokes, and these mornings together, and no one else got to share them. They were always going to be just ours.
Then one of us would spot a dark shape in the road. My father braked, and both of us guessed what kind of animal we’d found. He was almost always right. My father could tell from fifty yards if it was a bigger animal, like a deer or a turkey, could even narrow down the smaller kill, tell the difference between a possum and a raccoon.
See up there? Pointing through the windshield, he’d note the buzzards, circling overhead. How many are there?
As I counted, he’d nod along. The more vultures, the bigger the body. The back of his truck was already fitted out with tarps, blue ones he’d gotten for free from one of his better-paying customers, who owned a construction service.
My father decided our order of operations, different for each animal. He brought along garbage bags and nylon rope, the shovel from the garage, usually still coated with dog shit scooped from the yard. He always carried a small handsaw and a very sharp utility knife to separate the gristliest parts.
It was best when the animals were small and still intact. Then we’d load them into black trash bags, me holding the bags open while my father scraped them up with the shovel. Worse were the ones that my father would have to dissect right there on the road, eliciting a foul stench that wouldn’t leave, even after we drove away. I could feel it on my skin, smell it in my hair and on my clothes. My father barely noticed when they were that rotten; couldn’t seem to make himself care about the smashed faces, insides spread out from where the tires had made surrealist art of their organs.
Whole animals, shoveled into bags. If it was something like a possum or squirrel, then it was likely that we’d just leave them, although my father would always move them out of the road. He hated that cars just drove over them, continually, as if they couldn’t see there had once been a live thing there.
There were times he’d hand me the knife or the saw, and then point to the pieces we could use. Always tails of foxes, deer antlers, hawks’ wings. The few times we’d seen an alligator, my father would take only the head—tourists loved the gator skulls and paid good money for them, so we took them even if the flesh was falling from the skulls in mealy clumps. They were always worth our time, regardless of decomp.
Skinning gators is pointless work. My father stood with his boot pressed into one’s back, anchoring the body while the blade sank into the rolls of its neck. The gator’s head flapped up and down while he sawed at the gristle and bone, as if nodding along with what my father was saying.
Wouldn’t someone buy the skin?
I couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t want the entire alligator. I could see us stuffing and mounting the eight-foot monster someone had hit with a car, spun out only a few feet from the edge of the grass. There was a look of surprise on its face, the look of a predator that had not understood there was a larger object that could blink out its existence without a hitch in the motor.
Too much work. Hard to get at the skin without ripping through the fat. He leaned over and ran a gloved finger along the ridges of its spine. It resembled dinosaurs from our textbooks, prehistoric, wandering around since the dawn of time, long before people like us had come along with cars to crush the life from them.
Couldn’t you just price it really high?
I’m gonna finish sawing off this head. He gestured toward the truck. Go get my knife out of the glove box. You’re gonna skin that while I finish this. Then we can talk about it.
The hunk of meat was heavy, but it didn’t have the stench of rot on it. I found the knife, buried beneath folded maps of Florida and fast food restaurant napkins. Then I leaned against the warm grill, digging the sharp, flat blade into the flesh while my father finished up.
It was rough work. So gristly, the flesh unlike that of the mammals we regularly skinned—deer with their coarse hair, wild pigs, raccoons with thick fatty deposits in their stomachs. The gator’s skin was nearly melded to the pink, tight muscle beneath, so brightly hued it resembled fresh tuna. Every time my knife slipped below, it poked through the skin I was trying to preserve. By the time my father had stuffed the gator head into a black garbage bag, I was only a quarter inch into the tip of the tail.
Leave it, he said, climbing into the truck and restarting the engine. We’ve still got about a half hour before traffic starts up and the sun really gets cooking.
I put the tail on top of the gator’s torso. It still looked menacing, even without a head. I wasn’t sure what made me feel so uneasy. But when we got back into the truck and drove past, I noticed no buzzards circled the body.
I was fine with most kill, but there were a few things I couldn’t stomach. There were always too many dogs. Small and large alike, unlucky mutts with mottled fur, too skinny, ribs poking out so far you could see inside their bodies. I couldn’t look at these animals; they made me feel too sad.
My father always stopped for dogs. He gently placed the bodies into whatever patch was grassiest. There were buzzards at dog kills, and my father had to shoo them off to move the body out of the road. Then we’d drive on and the birds would move back in, wings flapping against each other as they made room for themselves over the carcass.
Only once did we take one with us. It was a Sunday morning and there was no one around. The humidity was so thick it almost hurt to breathe. My father was talking about a customer who’d accidentally cooked up his largemouth bass when he was drunk, a fish he’d been saving in his freezer to mount. He was smiling, the sun just peeking up over the horizon like a bright slice of fruit. It colored the skin of his face fresh and bright. He laughed with his mouth hanging open so I could see the backs of his teeth. It made him seem young. It made me want to laugh too.