Annie Neugebauer
The dogs hadn’t barked.
Debra knew because she’d been up all night fuming about the fight she’d had with Mike. Even if she had caught a few minutes of sleep here and there, she still would’ve woken up. A little whining or whimpering would’ve done it, but the dogs hadn’t made a sniff. As she stared at the strange animal shape on the electric fence, she wondered why.
When she came out to the porch in the predawn dim with a mug of coffee so hot she had to hold it by the handle, she thought at first that a calf had gotten stuck on the fence somehow. It wasn’t surprising that the fence’s charge was down. They were constantly behind on something, and the fence was as finicky as a housecat in the barn. Truth be told, the place was too big for the two of them. A hundred and thirty acres for two people with no kids was ludicrous, but when the love of your life tells you this is his dream, you make it work.
And so they’d bought a gorgeous house on some land in Anderson, Texas—a town so tiny Debra instead called it by the nearest small town’s name: Navasota, ten miles southwest and still in the boonies. It was the type of property people called “land,” not a ranch or a farm. It was the lifestyle of those wealthy enough to be nostalgic for the good old days they’d never experienced.
They’d stocked it with cattle, a chicken coop, a few horses, two dogs, innumerable cats, and even some fish for the little pond. With two people to maintain everything, and Mike still working as a vet, it was no wonder the fence was dead as often as it was charged.
The dark shape against the fence didn’t move. Debra stared, trying to force it into a recognizable form. After a few moments, she began to think it had no head. She went back inside to grab a flashlight. She shucked her flip-flops, got a pair of socks, and shook out her boots before sliding them on.
Grasshoppers vaulted as she walked through the yard. Her flashlight beam caught their movement like the backsides of tiny fleeing ghosts. The most persistent crickets of the night creaked out their cryptograms, and the air was ripe with the scent of sulfuric water but no under-notes of manure. The cattle hadn’t been up to the house in a while. So what was this thing without a head?
Her light traced it, and soon she realized it wasn’t actually an animal but a pelt draped over the fence. In the off-yellow beam of her flashlight she couldn’t determine a color. Something middling, probably, not black or white. It was large but not overwhelmingly so. It was the pelt only. The feet, head, and tail had been detached, so Debra couldn’t pose a guess at what type of animal it had come from. Why was it here?
Debra reached out to touch the fur but hesitated. Was it drying, or curing, or whatever the process of preserving an animal hide might need? And if so, why on their property? Neither she nor Mike hunted. Was it a message of some kind? Someone had to have placed it here, which meant that someone had walked over a mile from the road and their gated drive. And she’d looked out at this portion of the property last night, from their bedroom’s French doors. Wouldn’t she have seen it then? Had someone hung it here in the middle of the night?
She saw the random, vivid image of the animal, whatever it might be, still out there running around without its fur or skin. An unidentifiable living hunk of muscle, fat, and veins. A sound escaped her, something she’d intended to be a word that instead came out formless. She felt suddenly worried, threatened, and lifted her light.
The fence looked whole, wooden posts of about chest height holding up the four lengths of wire. She didn’t see any obvious downed spots or gaps, but that didn’t mean anything. It was obviously off or the pelt would’ve caught fire. Beyond it the land sloped gently downward to clusters of oaks. As she moved her light to the right, she saw the dark silhouette of the pond, the pale length of the drive, more trees, and then back to the house behind her, sweeping over the concrete portion of the drive and their truck parked there, the garage and its swell into the two stories of the actual house. The kitchen light was on, but the bedroom was dark, quiet. Mike was still asleep.
Should she wake him? He had work today. With their squabble last night, Debra didn’t feel like begging any favors. He’d be up soon to feed the horses before driving into town. She left the pelt where it was and went inside.
Debra stared blankly out the window over her kitchen sink. From this spot she could see the back of their yard from the vegetable garden to the dog runs, but her eyes didn’t focus on any of it. She was slumped in contemplation, a swirl of thoughts that didn’t connect: the pelt, the fight, the dawn breaking.
“HELLO?”
Debra gasped, whirling. She brought her hand to her chest and forced a laugh, staring at the parrot in his cage next to the dining room table. “Shakes, you scared the crap out of me.”
“HELLO?” he squawked again. Then he paused. “Oh, hiiiiiii.”
She shook her head hard enough for the tip of her short ponytail to brush her cheek. She walked over to his large wire cage that had its own stand and bent to look at him. Shakespeare danced on his perch, little head bobbing. “I’ve got the spooks,” she told him.
“Okay, talk to you later,” he said. “Bye-bye now.”
“It’s that damn pelt.”
“What pelt?”
Again, Debra whirled. This time it was Mike standing in the doorway from the living room. He looked all sexy-sleepy with his sweats hanging low on his hips and his dark chest hair ruffled and gleaming. She had a compulsion to say something. Anything. Just enough to dissolve their argument and let them move on today without the cold shoulders. It had been a misunderstanding, that was all. A poor choice of words that had blown out of proportion and left her confused all night.
Instead, she said, “I’ll show you. You’ll want to put some shoes on.”
It looked different in the sunlight. It seemed larger. It hung symmetrically, spine aligned with the top fence wire, and the lowest dip in its belly almost reached the third wire. The ends of the legs, cut before they would become paws or hooves, nearly reached the ground.
“What is it?” Debra asked.
Mike shook his head. He didn’t seem surprised or half as concerned as she was.
“Could it be a deer pelt?”
“Nah. The fur’s too long.”
“A bobcat?”
“Not the right patterning.”
“Coyote?”
Mike shook his head. “Too big.”
“Mountain lion?”
“Not the right color. Cougars around here are tawny. This is gray, and too patchy.”
Debra made a sound of dismay in her throat. He was the vet. Shouldn’t he know what animal it came from? “Then what the hell is it? A horse? A buffalo calf? A bear?”
He quirked a smile at the bear option, but still he shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t know what it was.”
Neither of them had touched it yet. The morning sun was already gaining steam, and Mike’s lack of emotion over this odd intrusion bothered her. “Well who left it here? Someone had to come onto our property for this.”
“It’s probably a gift. I’ll ask around today at work. Maybe one of my clients thought it would be nice.”
Debra restrained a scoff. Hey, I brought you part of this dead animal didn’t seem like much of a gift to her. The anonymity of it was baffling. Why wouldn’t they leave a note? Why not tell them what it was?
From the corner of her eye, she saw Mike smirk. An unexpected rush of anger spiked through her. “Did you do this? Is this some kind of a joke?” she accused.
“No.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
Was he lying? The thought bothered her, especially on the tail of last night’s fight. He almost seemed like a stranger, standing there in his work clothes, simpering in the sunlight. She had a strong and sudden urge to slap him into a reaction she could recognize, but the thought shocked her into guilt.
Sugar meowed at them from the corner of the house, where she rubbed against the brick. Debra shook her head, walking toward her. She’d already fed the cats this morning.
Over her shoulder she said, “I would appreciate if you moved that thing before you leave. And we need to get the fence back up and running soon.”
Her only answer was Sugar’s erratic little mewings—something wrong that couldn’t be told.
In this part of Texas the sun sunk tiredly, slipping below the high points of their land as if relieved. Dusk found Debra pacing the kitchen, circling the large center island countless times, talking to Shakes. By the time Mike got home she had all but convinced herself the pelt came from a wild hog. They were quite the nuisance and could be shot any time as vermin.
Mike walked in from the garage through the short utility hallway that led to both the walk-in pantry and the powder room, and hung his Stetson on the hook in the kitchen. There was a crease around his sweaty forehead from the hat band.
“It’s hot as balls out there,” he said, grinning.
Half of Debra’s anxiety slipped away. He certainly had a way with words. He used “what the crap” so much it had been the parrot’s first phrase. Mike had said, “He’s a regular Shakespeare, ain’t he?” and from then on that had been his name.
Debra felt a return grin tugging at her lips, but she was still mad. She bit her cheek to hold it back and turned toward the island. “Did you find out who left the pelt?”
“Well hello to you too.”
“Wild hog!” Shakespeare screeched. “Wild hog! Itza wild hog!”
Debra turned in time to see Mike raise an eyebrow. Had she said it aloud so often today?
“Could it be?” she asked, voice softened.
“Wildhog!”
Mike shook his head, wiping his eyebrows with the backs of his hands. “It’s about the right size for some of the big bastards, but the legs’re too long to be a hog.”
Debra’s stomach clenched. “God, Mike. What is it? Did you find out who put it there?” Why wasn’t he as worried about this as she was?
“Wild!”
“If someone had left it as a gift early in the morning, they probably would of called during the day to let me know. I didn’t hear from anyone. I asked around a bit, but I just can’t figure out what kind of critter it was.”
Debra pulled her ponytail down then put it back up.
Shakes began to do the bouncing lurch he sometimes did when he got worked up. His voice could be ear-splittingly loud in their tiled kitchen and dining room. “Wild-wild! Wild-wild!”
“All I can think,” Mike continued, “is that it’s something not from around here. Maybe a kind of deer or gazelle or something from a colder climate with the longer fur. Or a small moose. A feral dog? I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s something boring, not exotic, or we’d recognize the coat pattern. It’s probably some sort of herbivore.”
“Wwwwwwwwwi-uld!”
“But why was it left on our fence?”
“WwwwwwwI-ULD!”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it seems well cured, no gashes or anything. Whoever skinned it must have known what they were doing. Anyway, I’m gonna go hop in the shower.”
Debra watched Shakes churn and bob on his perch, pausing occasionally to preen. What would he look like without his skin and feathers? She supposed that underneath, everything pretty much looked like so much meat.
“Wwwwwwww-aiy-o! Why-o!”
Mike slept. How? How could he sleep amidst this? Didn’t he have dozens of questions swarming his head like she did? Didn’t he care at all? It infuriated her.
It had been the same last night. Debra had stayed up in a roil of emotions and he had snored peacefully. He didn’t used to snore.
The fight was stupid. She knew this, but it didn’t change the reality of her feelings. Her casual “Ready to watch the show?”—so ordinary, so habitual—had been met instead with “I don’t even like that show.”
Debra had laughed. His response was so ridiculous that laughter was her only option. Of course he liked it. They’d been watching it almost every week for three years now.
“Come on,” she urged. “I know you’re tired, but it’s only an hour. Forty-five minutes if we fast-forward through the commercials.”
“No, I’m serious.”
Her smile died, because she could see on his face that he was telling the truth. “What do you mean?”
He’d gone on a tirade about the show and all its flaws.
She was stunned by how badly it hurt her. It wasn’t about the show. Debra didn’t care about TV, not really. It was the dishonesty. How could he have misled her for so many years? What was the point of sitting on the couch with her week after week to laugh and discuss it if he secretly thought it was crap? Why not just suggest a new show? And if he had some good reason for the deceit, why tell her the truth now?
Perhaps most startlingly, how could she not have known?
The sound of cattle mooing in the distance brought her back to the present. Their calls were low and urgent. Was there something wrong with the cows?
Debra climbed out of bed and padded to the French doors. The cattle weren’t near enough to the house to see from here, but nothing appeared to be wrong nearby. The fence where the pelt had hung was empty. She wondered where Mike put it. What animal had it come from? Were there more of them out there, lurking in the darkness, stalking over their land? Was some mysterious beast upsetting the cattle?
Or was it whoever had brought the pelt? Someone on their property?
Debra turned away from the glass to see Mike on his side facing her, still snoring. In the shadows she couldn’t make out his features, the familiar jaw line or the dark arches of his brows. He could be anyone, lying there. He could be a complete stranger who vaguely resembled her husband in shape and form.
Could Mike have left the pelt? She’d never known him to hunt or skin an animal, but then again for three years she hadn’t known he was humoring her by doing something he detested. Maybe Mike didn’t go to work some days. Maybe he went out and hunted, field dressing animals before spreading and curing their hides to keep the fur as some sort of trophy. Were his veterinary skills enough to account for that?
How hard was it?
Without looking again at Mike’s silhouette, Debra left to turn on the computer in the back office. From there his snoring blurred with the distant lowing until both were indecipherable. She spent the entire night researching how to make a pelt. The whole time she pictured Mike’s strong hands doing these things, but she didn’t know why.
“Gooooood morning!” Shakespeare sang.
Deborah stood from behind the lower cabinets to see Mike walk into the kitchen, already dressed for work.
“Morning, buddy,” he said to the bird. Shakes bobbed his head. Mike turned to her. “You making something?” He eyed the knife drawer, which sat on top of the counter.
“Just time for them to be sharpened and oiled.”
He moved toward his hat on the hook, so she stopped him with a question.
“Mike, have you ever been hunting?”
He cocked his head at her. “You know I don’t hunt.”
“But even once? Maybe as a kid?”
He shook his head. “Only quail.”
“Quail!” Shakes belted. Debra and Mike both jumped. “Quail!”
“Where’d you put the pelt?”
He squinted at her. “I hung it in the stable.”
The answer seemed canned, meaningless, almost anonymous. It was like he wasn’t even Mike at all, just some stranger borrowing his skin.
Shakespeare started to rock back and forth.
“I made you some coffee,” Debra said on a whim. She pushed her travel mug, which she had taken earlier to check on the cattle, toward him. All of them were fine.
Mike picked up the mug. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” Shakes chirped. “Gotta go into town.”
“I put some sugar in it this time,” she said. “For a nice little change.”
Mike paused. He always drank his coffee black. “Oh.” How odd, the small disruptions. How unsettling. How would this stranger reply? “Well thanks, I guess.”
Debra nodded. It wasn’t Mike. She was sure of it.
He took the hat and left.
Shakespeare was silent.
The pelt hung from a nail in the stable the way a robe hangs from a hook on the back of a door. Debra examined it, studying it for clues, but it gave up nothing. It smelled similar to leather, but mustier and sharp enough to taste in the air.
Mysterious, maddening, ineffable. But not meaningless.
Try as she may, she couldn’t picture the animal that fit this pelt, exotic or not. The fur was thick, a mixture of soft undercoat and coarse longer hair. The hide on the inside was indeed smooth and free of nicks. She ran one finger along the edge, where the blade had separated the flesh.
The horses whinnied and hooved the ground. Debra fed them, but they did not quiet.
She studied the pelt from every angle.
When he finally woke up, his eyes opened very wide. They roved to look at the restraints holding him to the bed, then stopped on her. “What is this?” he asked. “Did you . . . slip me something?”
“Slip me something?” she repeated. The shape of the words was strange in her mouth. “I slipped you something.”
He pulled at his arms and legs, but he wouldn’t be able to get loose. She’d tied him securely. “Why?”
She sat beside him, on the edge of the bed. He wore only the sweats he went to sleep in. The dark patch of fur on his chest shone dully from the moonlight streaming in the French doors. She wanted to run her fingers through it, but didn’t.
“Say something Mike would say,” she commanded.
“Say some—huh? Debra, what? I am Mike! What the hell is going on?”
That wasn’t what Mike would have said. Mike would have said “what the crap” or “come on baby.” This was someone else. A stranger. Who?
Was it the person who left the pelt? Had they taken Mike’s skin? Was Mike out there, hideless, wandering around?
And what in God’s name had the pelt come from?
The stranger in Mike’s skin continued to thrash. “Look, Debra. I know you’re mad, but this isn’t funny. I don’t know what you’re trying to prove here, but this is too far.”
“This is too far,” she echoed. The words didn’t even mean anything. There was nothing behind them.
She pulled out the gloves and the butcher knife. It wasn’t quite the right kind, but it would have to do.
The person on the bed started to cry.
When she began her process of field dressing, starting with a careful incision near the pelvis, the crying turned to screams. Blathering. Phrases, words, incoherent sentences. Complete gibberish.
Finally, when she got to the ribcage and split it open like she’d learned, the noises stopped and she was able to work in peace.
It was her first time to skin anything, but she thought she did pretty well. She didn’t have to worry overmuch about tainting the muscle, since she wasn’t going to eat it, nor tearing the hide, since she didn’t care to keep it. All she wanted was to see inside—to see what had been wearing her husband’s skin.
When she was through, the pelt, organs, head, and extremities sat in a steaming pile on the tarp on the floor. The room smelled raw and metallic. She stood, removing her gloves, and looked down at what remained on the bed.
It was acutely indistinct. Meaty. Still. Not her Mike. She’d been right.
She didn’t recognize what was underneath at all.