Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1) (5 page)

“Just get back to work, will you. Just deal with it.”

“Yes, sir.”

***

Before Mr. Carver’s complete decline, I found pleasure in keeping his art high quality. I helped make each animal beautiful by salting, pickling, and tanning the skins; transforming the protein skins to non-protein; and preparing them for rehydration. The process was a delight —no spoilage and so purifying, leaving each body germ free.

“Always,” he said, “keep them out of the sun and direct heat. Gelatinization and hardening; hair slippage is irreversible. Never stack skins.”

I learned to rehydrate the skins in 5% solution, to keep the pH below 2.2. “But not too long,” he’d say checking on me. ”It loosens the hair.”

I handled all the acids, dressing the fur with Formic acid, bleaching with Oxalic, the poisonous powdered one, and Hydrochloric —muriatic is what he called it— which evaporated easily if I wasn’t careful. Those fumes were lethal and the drops would eat away the skin.

“Your skin,” he said, “if you aren’t mindful.”

He appreciated my fastidiousness and rarely complained regarding my work or my presence, though he seldom complimented me or looked at me when he spoke, usually keeping an eye on an otter or a black bear as he skinned or sewed or stuffed, as much as he hated that word. “Talk to your subject and it will help guide your hands,” he said without looking up.

And it did take me a while, when he broke the silence, to understand that most of the time he wasn’t talking to me.

I peeked from the workshop through the space between the hinges and the door, and I saw the delight of his customers as they picked up their trophies, their beautiful things.

As he held on to the skinning, and with diminished coordination he could do less and less of it —he even tore a few skins, ruining them— he began to lose business, and his customers died off.

But I was able to learn a lot about beauty in those nine years, especially in conjunction with Internet research. For instance, in 1883, a guy named Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, was the first to experiment with categorizing faces. A photographer, he wondered if certain groups of people —vegetarians and criminals— had certain facial characteristics typical to each. A strange choice of categories, but anyway . . . He determined that there was no such match, but he also determined that the composite vegetarian and criminal faces were found more attractive than their component counterparts.

This led to more recent research that I found useful: Exactly 100 years later Grammer, K., & Thornhill, R. ran experiments on “Human facial attractiveness and sexual selection: the role of symmetry and averageness” in the Journal of Comparative Psychology. Their research suggested that a symmetrical face is the most attractive to the most people, and that the features needed to be average, a consensus derived by the greater population, just as Darwin’s cousin had suggested with his photographic experiments. In other words, no bloated lips, no mile-wide nose, and certainly no large, brown puddles splitting the face.

***

Experiment & Observation: Crafting a symmetrically-faced animal
.

A dead skunk came in for taxidermy. “No skunks or mother-in-laws,” said Carver, but I convinced him I should give it a try. They’re beautiful animals. It took special deodorizer and extra degreasing but I managed. I even did the skinning. I gave it a perfectly symmetrical face. It looked diabolical and mean.

“No, no,” said Carver. Despite his failing health I thought he was ready to throw me out physically. “It’s
too
static. Beauty is being alive. Make it alive!” He
sounded
like Dr. Frankenstein, but I understood. What I learned: It needed a small touch of fluctuating asymmetry, but not too much.

***

I put away money those years, working full-time till I was twenty-seven, even paying Momma when she raised the rent and used some of it for Carly, because Carly
did
get the hockey scholarship and she did need nicer clothes for college, especially as she was one of the stars of the team.

“It’s part of the mystique,” Momma said, something she must have read in one of her magazines.

Lyle still lived at home. Well, in and out without warning, always carrying his prized Martin D-35 guitar and singing for whatever he could get in the Bemidji bars, especially the most notorious —the once grand Markham Hotel— where he scored his drugs until it closed. He started hanging in the Hotel Hell area in Nymore, by the tracks.

Momma couldn’t see any of it happening. “His voice will be his savior.” But in the latter years she didn’t say it with much conviction.

In my little free time I kept swimming and getting stronger. I checked books and the Internet for new research, and I continued my own research scrapbook, a thick three-ring binder of body parts clipped from Momma’s magazines, with pages categorized and devoted to celebrity eyes, ears, noses, hair, mouths, facial hair, skins and chins. I’d never thought of chins previously.

But feeling useful to Mr. Carver sustained me as much as the money and the developing research, which was a shift for me. It added the one-on-one human element that I’d never had. And it buoyed my confidence for other encounters.

One Saturday, late in the summer of my fifth year with Carver, I was preparing to leave a bit earlier than usual to see a lecture titled “Endless Forms Most Beautiful” by a PhD named Sean Carroll. I’d been anticipating it for weeks. I’d hoped Mr. Carver would already be gone, but he seemed intent on mounting a moose head.

I waited, time running out. Bent over his workbench he didn’t appear to move —at all. I spoke across the room to him. He didn’t budge. I came closer and called his name again which jerked him out of his statue-like existence. He was shaky and disoriented.

“Mr. Carver, are you okay?”

“What? Yes.” But he wasn’t. He eyes scanned his workbench, bewildered.

I thought about Dr. Carroll’s lecture: Darwin’s dangerous ideas, mutations, hetero vs. homozygotes —fascinating explorations for my research. Carver stumbled off his stool.

“Maybe I should close up today, Mr. Carver. You look tired.”

“What?”

“Can you drive?”

He stood taller. His eyes took on some clarity. “Of course, what do I look like?”

I didn’t want to say. “You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Okay, you close up today.” He grabbed his keys, snorted a lungful of the chemical-infused workshop and left his usual sour mood hanging in the air, along with the hint of choking hydrochloric acid.

There’d be no lecture for me that night. But I felt faithful to myself for taking care of Mr. Carver. I liked the feeling. I know it sounds strange but it gave me a sense of accomplishment, and I proposed to use it as a guide in the future, it felt
that
good.

The August moon rose up almost full. Something moved in my chest and I grabbed it. “What?” I said to the workshop.

It had been years since I’d had one of ‘my visits,’ and even if there had been others I’d passed them off as stress or the result of Momma’s superstitious brainwashing. I had to stay focused. They usually passed quickly.

“What?” Something might have moved in the shadows, but all I saw were partially dismembered bodies. The smell of the acid burned my throat. The sound of the crickets jumped threefold. As if guided by their chirping I went out back to breathe before locking up.

A thick, humid night, frequencies radiated around my heart
.
The crickets grew louder still, calling me to follow the narrow path deeper into the slough where, from time to time, I’d thrown off my clothes after a long day, waded into the water, and glided magically through as if I was the lake’s natural inhabitant. Bemidji was a beautiful place.

It was only a quarter mile from the road, which ran along the slough and then forked north as the slough became Kingdom Lake. By the time I passed the fallen jack pines on the left, the crickets had gone silent. The sudden stillness unsettled me as I came to the glade, though the towering flame grass plumes, as always, bade me to join them in romance.

“You want me?” I whispered.

The water lapped against the bank and out beyond the tall grass. The moon rippled over the lake’s smooth skin. I pulled off my shoes, folded and stacked my clothes neatly under my favorite white cedar, then waded into the slough, the water gathering around me as it would around any nymph, welcoming my return.

I was in just below the curve of my pubic hair, the moon illumining my naked body, silver in the water’s reflection, and my head still in the shadow of the cedar, when I heard the first grunt. Aware of how sound magnifies and travels across water, I covered myself and receded farther into the lake.

Something large and wild waded without grace into the water, then paused. Violent animalistic retching cracked the space, echoing above the lake. I treaded water. The grunting and splashing resumed not more than fifty yards from me, heading toward me as I swam out into the lake. I froze as the silhouette of a man cleaved recklessly into the deeper waters.

“What do you want?”

“You,” he grunted. Strong and athletic despite his careless strokes, it shocked me how quickly he gained on me. I continued to retreat.
Across, he’ll never catch me across.

When I stopped and turned back to look, all was still on the water and on the shoreline. Leaves rustled delicately. I allowed myself a breath.

The man shot to the surface next to me, grabbing at my shoulders and breasts, trying to mount me. “Mermaid naiad!” he croaked and tried once more to have me. He slipped over me. He took in water, then spluttered, gurgled, and fought to stay in the moonlight. He went under once, and I frantically swam away toward the shore.

After a few yards I glanced over my shoulder. The water began to settle. His arm pierced the surface. He reappeared, gasped for air, and went under again.

Damn it!
The lake was watching me. I had to double back. I swam carefully and soundlessly toward him, fleet as if the crickets still serenaded my gracefulness, only his thrashing to spoil the storybook night.
The Little Mermaid had saved Prince Eric
. Every thought of the millions that swam in my head every moment day and night, emptied away from me as I came closer and grabbed him.

He fought to climb upon me, pulling me under, now without desire but in desperation. I struggled free and resurfaced. I made a fist. I hit him as hard as I could, once and then twice. My own strength surprised me. He went limp. I took him under the crook of my right arm and swam for shore, dragging his mass beside me.

My heart hammering, I took in deep breaths and his, which was rancid with alcohol and vomit.
Blind drunk
.

On the shore I lay his body down in the moonlight, my legs very nearly collapsing. I tore open his shirt and pumped his chest. A mermaid tattooed on his abdomen. I pumped again. Spittle erupted from the corner of his mouth. That once beautiful mouth.

I leaned closer. It had been almost ten years since I had seen him: his face distorted by the years, by the alcohol, puffy but still roughly handsome. It was Victor King.

My hand aching from the blows, I gathered my clothes and walked unsteadily back to Carver’s before slipping them on and beginning my long bike ride home.

The feeling of fulfillment I’d felt with Carver, that feeling of helping another, had dissipated, leaving me uncertain again about my own species. And how faithful could I be to myself, really, in the midst of them?

CHAPTER FIVE

The hockey rink at Bemidji State was an unwelcome place for visitors during practice. Cold, the lights kept low and the sharp clatter of bodies hitting the boards, sticks slapping the puck, the puck striking the boards. The jangle. The delicious chill. The controlled anger. A place I could manage, the shelter of The Beaver suit no longer an option, Carver’s catacombs now boarded up, Carver in his grave, not preserved.

I’d spent eight years in college studying part-time, cleaning the locker rooms after hours, acquiring research, and tending to Momma; thirty-two seasons coming and going as every leaf unfolded, then fell to the ground to be blown and covered in snow —though to Momma, they were all winters. Secluded years. The quaint magical thinking left in Kingdom Lake that night many years before. Now simply to be around people without being noticed, as long as I stayed in the highest, darkest regions of the bleachers.

“What’s ‘phlebotomy’?”

I looked up from my book. Players skated in loops, practicing coming off the boards and taking shots at my sister in goal. Carly the coach, Carly the improbable teacher. Carly the Wizard of Fun. Carly the Beautiful. Amidst thuds and grunting, echoing voices and clacking of sticks, I looked over my shoulder, only to find empty bleachers behind me. It took me a moment to understand that someone was talking to me and not looking away.

In that startled instant, his tiny face appeared. “You seem so intent,” he said in a whisper. He nodded at my book but didn’t take his eyes off me, as if he needed more time to take in my thickness.

His eyes were set so close to each other that at first glance they appeared lopsided. His body pole-thin. His dark suit out of place and ill fitting, and the shirt beneath it a comical candy cotton blue, buttoned at the top but with emptiness surrounding his neck. No tie. His skin had the look of deflated pudding with crevices —like he’d been kneading it.
Not attractive
.

“I’ve seen you here before, but you don’t watch.” He moved from one foot to the other like the bathroom was calling him. “Studying?”

Neither pushy nor shy, he looked at me like he was holding a fine cut crystal to the light, a naïve eagerness around his eyes. I liked it, I distrusted it.

His breath caught and he squeaked, reminding me of the screen door at the back of our farmhouse. “Harold Cloonis, you probably know me ‘cause my dad is Kiwanis with your aunt.” He held out his sausage fingers.

Naturally, I withdrew.
Unclean.
In pain. A Tusser, a goblin.
Foolishness,
I corrected myself,
but . . .

Down through the rows of worn gray bleacher planks, I searched for more darkness than the hockey rink already provided. I couldn’t breathe, had to get away.

Never as fluid as in the water, I stumbled getting up. I stepped on my own foot and fell backward, my heavy, expensive textbook cascading to the row below and the next, before falling all the way down and meeting the wet rubber floor at an angle, splitting the spine. An excruciating sound, the book damaged and useless. I tumbled toward the next set of planks.

He grabbed my hand. Not my arm, my hand.
How did he do that?

“You okay?” he asked.

I knew better than to play into Harold’s game.
He
was a prank. There had been a few of those: years back, a fake invitation to the high school prom. Momma cautioned me. Taking a chance, I found one of momma’s old dresses and Lyle watched me put it on with naked eyes. “You got a nice body,” he said. “Big trumpets.” I waited. No one picked me up. The boy had a frightful accident sometime later, something about his brakes failing, his car into the slough where he drowned in ten feet of water.

Once on Valentine’s Day flowers arrived from a “secret admirer.” After a few days the flowers started to smell like shit. The flowers had been planted in human excrement.

“Let go of me,” I said.

Harold let go. “Have coffee with me.”

He seemed gentle and the way he
looked
at me. But I had considered comfort, if not love before Harold. It was treacherous. I’d seen the practical foolishness of finding someone to hold me. Desperate people found other desperate people for themselves and that was not who I imagined for myself. I had a mission; it came above all else.

“No,” I said.

***

The next time I was at the hockey rink he started again. “You’re breathtaking.”

Oh please
. Not in thirty-six years had anyone equated me with breathlessness. “Please leave me alone. I’m not interested. I have a lot to study.”

“They look like research papers.” The whisper appeared to be his natural manner.

“They are.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Are they interesting?”

Please stop
. “Yes.” I bit the inside of my cheek.

“Tell me.”

“Really?” He kept ogling me with those googley pea eyes, that pathetic face. “Visual cues of good genes; Scheib, Gangstead and Thornhill.” That ought to shut him down.

“For instance?”

I blew a long hot deep breath. I wanted to stop the intrusion. I wanted to push him backward, much harder than I pushed Irene Kelmer. Let him tumble down the damn bleachers. “Do you know what phenotypic plasticity means?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“But I’m willing to learn.”

I closed my book. I clambered down the bleachers, without tripping this time.

“Hey!” he yelled.

I didn’t look back. But deep down, even if it was a prank, I appreciated his resolve.

***

He was persistent, so persistent. After five weeks of calling almost every day and tracking me down at the hockey rink, I cautiously accepted an offer for coffee. Why, I have no idea. Curiosity maybe. Always one of my downfalls, I should have known by then.

I insisted on a quiet out-of-the-way place. I got what I deserved. The coffee had been sitting for hours; disagreeable on my tongue, acidic and chewing at my stomach.

“Now where were we?” His eyes were soft and attentive.

“Phenotypic plasticity. It means the ability of an organism to change its observable characteristics in response to environment. In this research, women choose mates based on body and facial features.”

He nodded undeterred. The man was a piece of work and seemed to have no shame.

“There’s a lid for every pot,” he said pouring a mountain of sugar into his cup.

“Listen,” I said trying to be efficient with my time, “why did you ask me out?”

My bluntness didn’t produce the shock I expected. He looked thoughtful. “You’re unique.”

“Well,” I said chuckling, “I suppose that’s true, but still . . .?”

“Maybe I’m looking for a mate.”

My mouth dropped open. “A mate?” Mating with him and inheriting his genes was not only impossible but (were it possible) would create something for a sideshow or a large jar of Formaldehyde.

“Why not?” he said.

I placed my hands on the table, just to stabilize.

He continued. “Look at me. What do you see?” He sat back in his chair, folded his arms, then became aware of them and let them drop.

Despite the strain of the albinism I could see him up close: stubby fingers, dewy, sorrowful eyes, beak nose, undersized mouth, pouty like a child’s. He didn’t add up. He didn’t satisfy any of the
attractive
research I’d been following.

Even putting aside the obvious sexual dimorphism (the difference between male and female of a species), he looked like a goblin. Momma’s admonition about the family dying in poverty ghosted by me. I added cream to my coffee. It still tasted like canvass.

Finally, when I didn’t answer, he asked, “You
are
interested in why people mate?” He balanced challenge and hope.

Oh god
. Be kind. I settled my breathing and observed the frequencies around my heart.

“No,” I said, happy he let me duck away from physically defining him. “I’m interested in human beauty. I’m not sure beauty currently has an actual purpose, but I’m going to give it one. I plan to find the coordinates of beauty. And I’m certainly
not
looking for a mate.”

“Coordinates? For what purpose?”

At least he showed interest. “It may be possible to create a genetic map. For future generations . . . to be beautiful to the bone.”

“Genetically-engineered beauty?” He seemed to understand the concept. “That’s quite an undertaking.”

That was it, if not a goblin then an undertaker, that’s what he reminded me of. Terrible, I know. “It’s a long road, but what’s the point of all these theories on beauty if, once confirmed, they aren’t applied?”

“Hmm.”

“What does that mean?” Was he smirking?

“Nothing. Have you found the coordinates?”

“Not yet, but there’s more and more research. I’m doing my own as well.”

“That’s where I come in.” He leaned forward, immediately changed course. “I think you will. I think you’ll find the coordinates.”

A true piece of work. “Well, well, thank you for the coffee.” I started to get up.

“Appalling.”

“What!”

“This coffee. Next time I’ll get you better.”

I walked out unsure why I found him interesting.

***

I sat in a corner waiting for him. Out the window I watched a flock of low-flying, newly-mated King Cans returning from the south. Perhaps a storm was coming.

Harold entered and I watched people watching him, watching the slow, nervous contractions of his body. They disappeared when, as he sat, he took my hand and rubbed it, apparently confirming something, a satisfied look on his face.

“Can we go someplace?” he asked.

It was almost sixty-one years to the day that James Watson and his colleagues presented the molecular structure of DNA to the world, reaching into the primordial swamp and saying
we are all in there
. The day should’ve been a commemoration, a celebration. Harold’s invitation implied as much.

I said yes.

He drove me south to the forest where we walked surrounded by green new growth. A weekday, hardly anyone else around. I knew it was an exploration.

He tucked his hand around my waist. I didn’t shake him off. He turned me around so we faced each other. He cupped his hand behind my neck and pulled me into him, hungry for my lips. I accepted. And his tongue. The hardness between his legs rubbed against my belly. I accepted.
I’ll take away his pain
. I grounded him.

***

Still, I had doubts. I made lists. I tried to stay rational. But it was such a grand experiment
,
to have conversation, to dangle ideas, to theorize, to question — and not only about science.

“He’s an accountant but not dry, he’s not simply about numbers,” I said to my bedroom wall and to Michael Landon’s replacement: an enlarged newspaper photograph of William Schroeder leaving the hospital with the first artificial heart. “Harold’s not dry at all. Maybe not beautiful, but he’s clean. It’s all research, ay William?”

Soon I was having the fun I’d always imagined. Well, almost.

“Please move your things off the table.” He pointed to make way for his satchel and slammed the front door.

“Is it okay that I let myself in?” His edginess entered my body in disagreeable ways, mostly my chest.

“Sure. Of course.” With a quick-but-passionate bite of my neck, he went to his stack of accounting ledgers.

“What’d you do today?”

“The usual,” he said. “Clients.”

Researchers are undecided if smarts impact facial beauty —they doubt it— but they agree that “openness” reflects positively on facial attractiveness. So far he wasn’t very open. He rarely left the office except to visit his clients or the house, and then only after much coaxing from me. I got very few details.

He paged through a ledger, his shoulders hunched.

“You look stressed.”

“Something’s not right.”

I wandered over to him and massaged his neck. “Can I help?”

“Not really.” His fingers rested on column after column of scribbled figures. “There’s just so much of this . . . I’m going to have to go over every one of these damn numbers again, and I’m running out of time.”

“I’m pretty good with numbers.” I rubbed his shoulders. “At least I can add and subtract. How about I take on some of those columns, cut down your load. Can’t hurt, can it?”

“But your studies.”

“They can wait for a few hours. Let me be useful.”

And after a couple of hours of calculating the two of us found the error. He breathed easier. “You’re a life saver.” He sat back and let his head dangle.

I ran my fingers down his back. “And I’m taking you out to dinner tonight.”