The Unfinished World (4 page)

Clarence at fifteen tries to be brave, just the once. He takes instruction from Louise, and he is, at first, an excellent pupil. His sculptor's hands have always learned to wing their way through solid substance, and at first, soft rabbit skin is much easier to carve than clay.

But then he vomits into the bucket where the guts go, runs from the room, lays his hot face against the pillow and weeps. For himself? For the hare? Louise does not know. She knows she should go to him, but she is her father in so many ways and when she cannot fill a space with words, she will not fill it at all. She cannot help but scorn his softness.

Louise is working on a blue finch when Clarence enters the room, hands gray as a corpse's with packed-in clay. Are you having any luck? he asks politely. He knows she hates doing birds-in-flight. She can never get the feathers to lie as they should.

Louise sighs and puts her brush down gently. Smoke, she says, and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. She packs them and peels open the top, slides one out and slips it between her lips in a graceful way Clarence always admires. He wonders, sometimes aloud and sometimes not, why his pretty, interesting sister has never married. She just smiles enigmatically in a way meant to discomfit him, meant to grab him by the apron strings and tie him tight to the fluttering strips of heart she still has left.

Clarence, she asks, cigarette dangling, when is Tony coming next?

Thursday, he says. He's dropping off another dog for the Big Man.

Louise laughs. Do we have to call him the Big Man, just because Tony does?

I don't know his real name, says Clarence. Don't even know what he looks like. Big Man is fine with me. I met his wife, though. She came up with Tony last time. She's a rhinestone. Must be half his age. He smiles, a soft, happy smile.

Louise doesn't like that smile.

Their working theory is Russian mafia, but really they have no idea who the Big Man is. He found Louise, and he's brought in a few hunting trophies and paid plenty for them. He also keeps dozens of whippets, and when they die he likes to immortalize them in his vast, unseen mansion.

Be careful, says Louise, and blows smoke in Clarence's face. She leans back and watches it swirl across the air between the two of them, catching and distorting his kind features like a fog. You be careful with the Big Man's things.

Louise's father first taught her how to preserve and make dreams of the dead. But before she was allowed to touch an animal for reconstruction she was made to learn the basics: anatomy, sculpting, painting, tanning. She learned the long history of taxidermy, even took the train with her father to the Museum of Natural History in the city, so that he could show her the work of the best artists in the country.

She studied Carl Akeley, William T. Hornaday, Walter Potter
and Edward Hart, Roland Ward and the specimens he preserved for Audubon. She learned how to cast a form, how the life in eyes died so you had to make new ones from glass, how to glue on whiskers, and how to extract and reattach teeth. She even learned the best way to clean a skull, how to breed the kind of bacteria that would eat all the meat right off the bone. She paced the woods with her sketchbook, storing the kinetic movement of bodies in dead ink, in her living hands. She got used to the smell of blood, the smell of guts, the smell of the meat that had to die before the body could live again.

Shouting outside. Honking. Tony the Tiger and his crew again. She throws a bed jacket over her slip because she has suddenly remembered something: Clarence is sick today. She normally lets him deal with Tony but she will have to do it herself. Her mouth is a moue shape at the thought.

Now she descends the stairs, bridelike in flimsy white, flashing bits of pale skin shot through with green rivers of blood. She fishes around in her jacket pocket to find the key to the carriage house, where the exhibit is crated up and waiting to go home.

At the door, Tony looks her up and down and laughs. He always laughs at her. She doesn't mind but she minds the gun in the car in Jackson's lap and the way the driver stares like a goat in heat. That's why she usually lets Clarence handle this part of the business. He is so tall and looks threatening, though of course really he's as soft and malleable as clay.

Please pull your car up closer, she shouts to the driver. I can't push the crate that far.

The driver just stares, leans out the window, spits. Resumes
staring. Smiles. He has a dark unibrow and broken-off brown teeth.

Animal, she says. Tony laughs, long, loud.

We are all animals. You too, no? He comes closer, stands in her sunlight, makes a dark shadow over her. She starts to back up but he grabs her wrist, pulls hard, touches a finger to her lips. You, for instance. You are bat. You are batshit, yes? He laughs and releases her, and she is suddenly glad Clarence isn't here.

Don't touch me again, she says coldly.

Tony smiles. He is not unattractive, maybe too tanned and leathery but she supposes given his age that's not such a bad thing. Better to be preserved, to be pickled, rather than melt down as slow and soft as candle wax. Better to smile than leer. Her stomach goes rather wrong at the thought of what's behind that smile. Follow me, she says, and she honestly doesn't know whether she'd like him to turn around and go, quickly, or to follow her and then . . . and then. Then what?

I can help you with the crate, he says, suddenly contrite. The Big Man will be so happy to see his friend again.

She is glad to have the help getting the crate onto the dolly. The dog was huge, nearly as tall as she was, not to mention the elaborate scene she'd placed him in. Hunting, perfect butterfly balanced on a flower, stump ringed with tiny ants. The perfect companion for a wealthy gangster. The thing he can't kill.

When the car pulls out of the drive, Louise sighs. Whether in relief or frustration, she doesn't know. Her hands are full of money.

When they were small, Louise and Clarence would put their sleds in the back of the car and drive with their father to a hilly place
where the mountains started to rise. Louise watched the earth dash by under her sled, arms around her father, trusting that the ground would eventually come up to meet them. She loved that feeling of flying. She loved how everything seemed to sharpen in that moment; how the sled's shadow seemed inked onto the snow. How the soft edges of the pine trees could cut their cheeks like razors as they flew by. There was something about that moment that seemed to stamp the hardness of nature into everything—not in a cruel way—only in the cleanest, most Darwinian sense. It was the nature of avalanches, of hard, icy snow and buried footpaths. The nature of the wild dream before man.

Louise remembered how Clarence was always frightened of the initial jump. When they shared a sled he would hold her waist so tightly she felt her lungs close a little, her arms tingle, and her vision blacken at the edges. She would often return to this memory after her parents' death. She wondered if there was that same strange sense of euphoria, if the world seemed so perfectly black-and-white in those last several seconds. She wondered if the last thing her father saw was his own shadow, flying impossibly over the snow.

Louise as a child eventually learned all she could from Thumbelina. She then took to the parlor, sketched the stilled bobcat, the snowy owl, the dancing mice with their little legs akimbo. She would sit there for hours with her drawing pad and her pencils, sketching the fine lines of whiskers, the wet-looking noses, the curved claws, the tufts of hair in the ears.

Other children would have been terrified, alone in that great dark
room with its heavy wall hangings and wine-colored carpets, surrounded by once-living shapes caught in endless predation. Not Louise. Her mother said she didn't suppose Louise could be frightened by anything, that Louise was the only child she'd seen born without fear. Her mother crossed herself as she said it—it seemed unnatural.

But Louise's father used to smile and nod sagely toward his daughter. I've taught her never to be afraid, he would say, and she isn't.

He needed a child who would remain impartial in the face of accurate observation, for without it, what did we have but the terrors of the imagination? It wasn't that her father had no use for imagination—indeed it was essential to his work, to creating the final spark of life. But he also knew what a terrible dictator imagination could be, given unbridled freedom. He had seen it destroy the outer life of his wife, her whole being focused now on what she could dream in her head and keep for her own, the self a prison: just the woman, her pottery wheel, and her stilled and silent tongue.