Pussy (An Explanation)

Deer season of ’86 and our manager, Baxter, walks out of the walk-in freezer wielding a machete, his white smock soaked in deer blood and his little mustache frozen at the tips. He says, “Kilroy, if you’re not out back in five seconds, you’re fired.”

The store is empty except for me and the new register girl, Roxanne. We’ve got a half an hour or so until close. “Get her to do it,” I say. “I’ve got like five hundred filets to wrap.”

“Uh-uh, this is a man’s job,” he says. “So grab your coat and pretend you got a pair.”

Then he walks into the walk-in freezer and is gone. Roxanne glances up from her biology homework. “That guy is such a dickweed,” she says. “Why he was put in a position of power is beyond my power of comprehension.”

I don’t disagree. I button up my ski vest, smile, and head outside.

A full moon hangs like a lone testicle in the parking lot above the butcher shop. The air is smoke. Baxter’s old Ford idles with the high beams on, illuminating at least a half dozen dead deer. Mike, the head butcher, appears with a chainsaw. “What’s he doing with that,” I ask Baxter.

Baxter says, “Mike dabbles in taxidermy. He’s going to cut off their heads, embalm them, mount them on wooden plaques, and sell them back to the suckers who shot them for a large fee. That’s ingenuity for you. The American dream in action.”

Watching Mike decapitating dead deer with his chainsaw, I find myself pondering all the intricate variables that had led me here to witness this vulgar spectacle. The arc of human history. The gnarled branches of a descendent family tree. So there’s a potato famine in Ireland way back and . . . “What the hell are you doing, Kilroy?” shouts Baxter over the saw. I tell him I was contemplating the eternal.

He says, “What?”

I say, “How come God never asks anyone direct questions anymore?”

He says, “Are you high?”

I tell him I am not, which is the truth, because my high wore off hours ago.

Now the deer are headless. Mike picks up one of the heads and chases me around the parking lot with it. “Get the fuck away from me with that thing,” I say, running in a zig zag pattern. Good thing Mike is morbidly obese, because he tires quickly of this game, then he waxes philosophical. He’s cradling the deer head on his shoulder like a boombox. He is absolutely covered in blood. He massages one of the deer’s antlers, “Kilroy, look into its eyes, what do you see there?”

“An abyss.”

He removes the head from his shoulder, flips it around to where it’s facing him. He frowns and says, “You know what I see?”

“No, Mike, what do you see?”

“Five hundred bucks, motherfucker.”

“You mean like five hundred deer, or five hundred dollars?”

“Bucks equals bucks, dumbass. Come on, these things aren’t going to skin themselves.”

We find ourselves in front of Baxter’s truck. He’s piled the torsos next to one another and stacked the heads along the back of the building. “Okay, faggots, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to drag these bastards inside, hook ‘em, gut ‘em, then skin ‘em, ‘kay?”

“Uh- uh,” I say, “I’ll help you carry them inside, but after that I’m history. My shift ended twenty minutes ago.”

“Pussy,” Baxter says.

“Pussy,” Mike agrees.

“I am what I eat, fellows,” I say.

Mike says, “Then that means you’re a giant cock!”

“Yeah,” Baxter says, “You’re either a giant cock or a big pussy.”

“Good one,” I say. “Real funny stuff.”

Just then, Roxanne walks up and asks me for a lift home. This is unusual considering we just met at the beginning of the week. I tell her sure. Give me five minutes. Then I haul a couple torsos into the walk-in freezer, clock out, and find her smoking a cigarette on the hood of my Gremlin. The moon is still full, and her cigarette isn’t the only thing that is smoking. She says, “You could use a shower.”

I do not disagree.

She says, “You could take one at my place.”

“Okay,” I say, letting the car keys jingle tambourine chords.

“My parents are out of town,” she says, the moonlight casting banana streaks in her auburn hair, the reflection of a cigarette cherry glowing in her dark eyes.

And that’s pretty much the story, son. You were born about nine months later.

What about the meat market?

Oh, I quit that bullshit job a couple months later, just after deer season. Your mother worked there a little while longer. Mike and Baxter even crashed our wedding. They showed up, called me a pussy, and said they didn’t think I had it in me and they gave us the strangest wedding present--

The mounted elk’s head with the word “pussy” engraved on it?

Yes, son. I’m that Pussy. Does that explain things?

Yes, dad. Crystal. Hey, question.

Shoot.

Do you think you and mom will ever get back together?

Hard to say. The ball is in her court. You can tell her I said that, too.

Dad?

Yes.

You used to smoke pot?

Affirmative. I still do.

You still do?

I’m high right now.

Unbelievable.

You can say that again.

Unbelievable.