Guts

As soon as I was old enough to babysit my little brother, my mom enrolled in college to get her R.N. degree. My father was a highway patrolman. We lived in a small blue-collar town full of taverns. Between traffic accidents and emergency-room admittances -- the details of which were often the dinnertime topic -- I became at once numbly clinical about and coldly interested in matters of blood and guts. While I did miserably in chemistry, physics, and math, I excelled in biology. The sight of blood didn't faze me, and I took pride in that. But violence and anger, a fight on the playground, would reduce me to tears.

Fast forward, then, to my ex-, who'd been known to faint at the sight of blood and grew dizzy when confronted with a steak or a roast. This man I wound up with for a time was a hippy to his Buddha core. My parents adored him, but they were baffled by his eating habits; providing a rare steak at dinner time was the pinnacle of their esteem, and no matter how many times I explained that he couldn't bear the sight of red meat, the concept was so foreign to them that every time they made us a meal, the main course was always bloody.

Like my parents, my ex- was fascinated with the biological world, the bone and gristle, the tooth and flesh of it. Which is one thing on the page. He loved to read books by Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, and especially Gary Snyder, who wrote about discovering road kill and salvaging the pelts. Then, one foggy morning on highway one, we happened upon some very real roadkill we smelled before we found it -- a skunk. My ex- pulled onto the shoulder and cut the engine."Before you even consider what you're thinking," I said, "know that I am not going to skin this thing for you."

He was working his hands into a pair of stiff leather gloves. "Just help me open the tailgate." He trudged off into the fog and when he returned, he was carrying the skunk by its tail. It had been hit clean, across the snout, its body whole and not flattened by a tire.

From a distance, the smell of skunk isn't so bad. They visited our yard regularly, as did raccoons, stray cats, lizards, and mice. When a skunk sprayed in our vicinity, we shut the doors and windows. But the skunk we transported that day reeked. It's funny how you get used to a thing and it doesn't seem so bad.

We got the skunk home, and as I knew from the start, my ex- couldn't begin to approach it with a knife.

And that's how I ended up skinning a skunk. I don't recall exactly how I was tricked into it; I know we had an argument that ended in a dare. Being somewhat competitive and a bit too proud, I didn't back down. Instead, I bolted for the local used book store to read up on skinning and tanning. Next, wearing a pair of surgical gloves and wielding a Swiss Army knife, I slit the creature from anus to throat and across the body from paw-to-paw, uppers and lowers. It was a smelly job and one that I completed alone while my ex- sat inside, nervously humming a tune and watching the Olympics, as present for me as he could be under the circumstances.

The work wasn't grisly, as I remember it. Removing a pelt is something like peeling off a long glove or a pair of silk stockings. What lay beneath was a little shocking, but hanging from hooks in the markets of China I'd seen plenty of fly-covered bodies stripped of their pelts. I'd seen elderly women get into fist fights over the price of a corpse.

So once I'd removed the entire pelt, I nailed it to the side of our shed to dry. I'd learned that in order to tan a hide and keep it supple, one need only take the creature's brains and smear them all over the raw side. But no, I'd had enough, and this hide was bound to dry out and harden. I'd proven my point. I was the tough one. He was the smart one.My ex- helped me dig a deep hole where we buried the denuded, tailless nightmare. For a year, the pelt stretched out on the side of the shed was a mecca for stray cats. For a year, the fur bleached out in the sun. And then we bought a house of our own and left the pelt behind.

Now every time I smell a skunk I'm reminded of everything I've managed to avoid. I'm reminded that life is brutal.