Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [210]
“Yes, I can see what you’re doing,” Krumholtz said. Would this scene provide him with the opening of his article? “A winner not afraid of blood!”
“And then what you do is, you put your gloves on and then cut with a gut hook—damn, the light should be better—from down here, the genitals, up to the sternum. But you don’t cut too deep because if you do, you’ll cut into the intestines, and then you’ve got a god-awful mess on your hands, and you’ll smell bad for a week. You cut out the bladder. You can skin the deer at this point, pulling the skin back from the meat. Some do, some don’t. I usually don’t.”
“I see.”
“After you’ve cut the diaphragm away, you get the knife up to cut the esophagus out. Once that’s cut—maybe you could get us a flashlight—you pull the lungs and the heart out, but that’s tricky because they’re attached with peritoneum, and if there’s anything left of the intestines they just go with them. The heart’s good. Always save the heart. You can eat the heart. We do. Skinning comes later. You can help with that. God damn it, the light’s bad. We’ll have to hang this thing up.” He turned around and stood, blood dripping down from his gloves. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m just watching.” He waited. “You said ‘we.’ Does your wife do this, too?”
He turned around. “Another way to do it is, you get the cutting tool up past the rib cage and just sever the windpipe off as far up as you can. When you perform the action properly the heart and lungs will also just come dropping out. Also, there’s the blood, maybe you want to drain the animal. Blood, yes … blood. Sausage? If the thing is a male, you cut the reproductive organs and then you also—”
Krumholtz couldn’t be sure that he was hearing James Mallard properly. The man’s words weren’t making any sense. The winner seemed to be slipping into a verbal salad, a garble of ejaculations and non sequiturs as he worked. “You push! Bloody the flashlight, slipcase the meat sauce, bloodstop the tenderloin—and offal! A whitetail—umph!—sealing intestines sausage blood wedding drool! A house marine edible brains! Venison salad pepper cake? Or not?”
Perhaps he had misheard. He hadn’t had anything to eat after gulping down that drink in the airport lounge. His heartburn was acting up again. Feeling light-headed, Krumholtz backed away from Mallard and let himself into the house. In what appeared to be a sitting room close to the central hallway, he deposited himself onto a coal-black sofa. On the opposite wall another work of art had been installed, an enormous monochromatic study of what appeared to be human teeth reconsidered in a post-Cubist style, close-up, so that they resembled mountains. Krumholtz, turning his gaze away, looked down at the floor and noticed that he had tracked dirt in from the backyard through the hallway and onto the carpeting in the sitting room. He felt tired and hungry. For a moment, he closed his eyes.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw Angus and Ping standing in front of him, staring at him. “What’s the matter with you?” the little boy asked. “You’re as white as a sheet.”
“I felt faint.”
“Sight of blood do that to you?” Ping asked. Who was she? The tutor? Yes, the tutor. She was also possibly, no, probably, another one of the mistresses.
“Well, it’s just that I haven’t eaten since breakfast,” Krumholtz said.
“You want something?” Angus asked. He was tossing a tennis ball up in the air and catching it with his right hand. “I could get you a cookie.” He didn’t move. “In Chinese, it’s bng gn, and in French it’s petit gâteau.”
“Yeah,” Krumholtz said. “I know. Yes. Maybe something to eat.”
“You’re the person who came to ask us questions. Ask me a question,” Angus said. Apparently he wasn’t about to get anything for Krumholtz after all. A request for a cookie meant nothing to this child.
“Okay. Here’s a question for you. How come you get to be happy?”
“How come? That’s a hard question,” the boy said. “I don’t know. I’ll go get Mom.” When he left the room, Ping went with him, smiling mysteriously.