Stuffed (2 page)

Chapter 2

W
hen the Great White Hunter returned from his safari through the northeast, he’d bagged a plethora of raw caribou racks, the somewhat grim vestige of Alaskan spring floods. The skullcaps smelled a bit funky, but after a good emulsifier bath, a stiff brush, and a thinned application of antler stain, I’d mount the twenty racks on hardwood plaques and unload them for perhaps three hundred apiece. Also in the larder was a bobcat with his butt ripped off. He was only twenty bucks and otherwise a nice mount posed in a sitting position, head tilted, paw raised, fangs bared whimsically, or so I thought. I figured I’d stick the bad end in a nicely finished stump and sell him for two hundred, easy. What can I say? I was feeling cheap and creative. Which is not to say that I didn’t nab a few finished pieces.

African stuff is always prime cut, so I sprang for a stout kudu head with massive, curving horns and a matching pair of hoof bookends. In fact, I had to break the bank on that deal because I bought him as a set with a howling coyote, a nasty-looking barracuda, and a wolverine with a small marmot in its jaws for two grand.

And of course it was my pal Rodney—the guy who’d turned me on to Gunderson’s—who sold me that whopper of a sailfish. He’s not a taxidermy specialist but a sleigh/carriage/sea-chest restorer and dealer. I like Rodney, but sometimes he’s a little over the top, the very character flaw that got him booted out of college in our senior year for commandeering a university police car for a trip to Biffy Burger. We were pretty tight in those days, memorable mostly for every extracurricular idiocy possible in a sleepy North Carolina town. You know, like painting ourselves in luminous poster paints and lurking around the cemetery. Or Saran-Wrapping roadkill and slipping it into the meat case over at the Dixie King. And I’ve still got a snapshot of the giant cardboard squid strangling the college clock tower.

After Rodney’s untimely departure, he bought a motorcycle and went off to Alaska to find his destiny. The exchange of postcards dwindled, and in the decade that followed college we lost track of each other. I rediscovered Rodney some years later nestled among his sleighs and sea chests at the Brimfield antiques fair. Two wastrel English majors reunited, not only by our dubious past association, but by our shared passion for swindling people out of their junk. We’re buds, and I stop in on him when on safari whether he’s got anything for me or not.

My safari came to an end in Rangely, with my billfold ransacked. I loaded up the trailer and got home in time for Angie’s birthday.

Birds like me and Angie roost on Manhattan’s somewhat cheaper, industrial fringes, which in our case is the west teens. Way, way west. However, we’re lucky enough to be on the ground floor of a soot-streaked tenement. Hey, 150 years of grime lends a unique patina to the brick, an architectural style we call brown
stain.
It’s near enough to the corner to have a storefront, which is where we live. Used to be a soda fountain, and when we signed on it still looked like one inside.

Nowadays the marble soda bar along the living room is an open kitchen and the back, off the storeroom, is the bedroom. We partitioned half of the main room into Angie’s and my studios, and the front where booths still sit in bay shop windows is the living room. We frosted the huge front glass panels halfway to the ceiling for privacy. Metal grating shadows a diamond pattern on the frosted glass from the outside, just to keep folks from throwing a trash can into our living room during the next blackout. What had been a really cool black and white tile floor was destroyed, but a yellow pine floor lay beneath, which after a titanic effort and a bunch of polyurethane now looks like butterscotch.

Yeah, we know it wasn’t too bright sinking moola and effort into a place that isn’t ours. But how else are we—a couple of freelancers—going to get the apartment of our dreams without a sizable down payment? You can only imagine the look a loan officer gives you when you say that you freelance in used taxidermy. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I arrived home at four-thirty in the afternoon, just dodging the worst of New York’s rush hour because I was going against the flow. I got a space right in front of my building, a feat roughly comparable to a suburbanite finding a space next to the handicapped spots at Sears on a Saturday morning during a white sale.

There are basically two kinds of people who live in New York. There are those who take cabs to work, park their Land Rovers in garages, have their laundry “done,” and buy their doorman a cashmere scarf for Christmas. The kind found in Woody Allen movies who really aren’t affected by the mundane urban complications encountered by those of us who take the subway and have to brave the opening of our own doors.

The vast majority—myself notable, I like to think, among them—has to put up with a lot of crap. We live in a city governed not by laws but by penalties. Every day New York sticks it to you somehow. There’s Saturday at the Wash-O-Mat fighting with Broom Hilda in a housedress who’s holding on to a dryer for half an hour just to dry one sock while my pile of wet laundry and I cool our heels. Sunday you can’t get the game on TV because an errant backhoe cut the cable. Monday you tangle with an impotent MetroCard at a subway turnstile; Tuesday the newspaper machine robs you; Wednesday you spend an hour looking for a parking space; Thursday you slip on and almost fall into a pile of stray vomit. And Friday you get a ticket from the sanitation department because a passerby tucked a newspaper into your metal-recycling trash can. It’s one kick in the teeth after another. I’m sure suburbanites have their sundry mishaps at the strip mall, food court, or waiting for tee times, but nobody can deny New Yorkers have more than their fair share of hassles.

We’re a stoic lot. That is to say, New Yorkers don’t get mad, they get even. We do what it takes to stick it to the city or someone else to offset these penalties, usually in some sleazy, compensatory way. Cops might eat free at the deli and offer protection by their presence. Firemen might drink free at the bars that pass fire-code inspections despite basements overflowing with oily rags and loose wiring. Petty criminals jump subway turnstiles, and the defiantly indigent randomly harass commuters out of sheer perversity.

Me? When a newspaper box rips me off one day, I prop it open the next day so a local entrepreneur can make off with the rest. When I get a parking ticket, I move my car to a legal spot, take a Polaroid, and plead not guilty by mail. Hey, even if it doesn’t get me out of the penalty, at least the city loses whatever it anticipated in the cost of processing my plea. And when I need a parking space at my apartment, I establish my own parking rules.

For the price of a cordless drill, I park with impunity in front of my abode. A signpost directly between my building and the adjoining warehouse has a
LOADING ZONE
—
NO STANDING
7
AM TO
7
PM MON
–
SAT
sign pointing up the block. The sign mounted below it, pointing in front of my building, says
NO PARKING HERE TO CORNER.
An absurd sign, which if posted in front of some guy’s trailer outside Kalamazoo would surely result in someone going postal at the local Parking Violations Bureau. Instead, I simply remove the offending sign when I get home and put it back up when I leave. Hey, it’s part of the American dream to have a parking space in front of your home, practically part of the Bill of Rights. While my block isn’t heavily trafficked, I suppose some locals may have noticed my handiwork. But New Yorkers—every blessed one of them part mobster at heart—don’t rat.

I unlocked the front door to my apartment and sensed Angie wasn’t home by the cigarette smoke hanging in the air.

“Otto!” I yelled, hefting the crow onto the soda counter. “You’re smoking!”

“Ah, vhat you do!” Otto tossed aside the curtain leading to the back workshop. “My God,” he gasped at the crow. “Eetz good, eh?” He stepped up and slapped the bell jar, then took a step back and tweaked his sharp little beard, scrutinizing my acquisition.

“You were smoking in the house, Otto. Bad. No smoking in the house.”

“I dunno. Eet not lookink.” Otto was still squinting at the crow, his heavily wrinkled face scrunched in deep thought. “Maybe ve must new vood, eh? Bird maybe new vood.”

I stepped up to my little Russian wacko and grabbed him by his chinny chin chin.

“No smoking in the house! Backyard.” We’ve got a patch of soot out back just for him.

“Vhat smoke?” He threw out his hands. He gave me his puppy look, like I should be ashamed of swatting him over the nose with a newspaper.

“C’mon, you nincompoop,” I snorted, waving him to follow me outside to the car.

“I dunno. Vhat ninipoop?”

Angie’s a freelance jeweler, so Otto helps her with her piecework—soldering, polishing, etc. And he fixes up some of my taxidermy—combing, cleaning, mounting, painting, etc. He’s what you’d call an old-world, Soviet-refugee artisan, as handy with a brush as with a rotary hobby tool. More important, he’s old-world cheap, though often very annoying. Angie discovered him in the subway back when she commuted to a diamond-setting job on 47th Street. On a crowded subway platform, he’d assemble one of those suitcases on folding legs that contained a traveling workshop. He billed himself as
Otto Figs It. Wail You Weight
and actually came to do brisk business soldering brooch pins, adjusting watch bands and eyeglasses, sewing stray dangling coat buttons, and tightening loose ring settings. But after shooing him out a few times, the cops decided to bust him one morning. Angie came forward, bailed him out, and paid his fine. He had no money to repay her, so the post-Soviet gnome was indentured to help Angie with piecework jewelry. As it happened, he also demonstrated a talent for primping used taxidermy. After his debt was paid, well, I guess you’d have to say we’d gotten attached to him, like a barn cat.

Within the hour, Otto and I had everything unloaded and the trailer folded once more into the Lincoln’s trunk. When we got back inside and Otto had a chance to inspect the new stuff, he became riveted by the possibilities posed by the bobcat with the missing butt.

“Garv, ve must maybe special. Ket, eetz good, eh? Maybe, ket, eet out come vater, for bird, eh? Maybe, Garv, ket in mouth of great large bear. Great large bear eat ket, eh?”

“Tree stump. Cat from tree stump.” I handed him a cup of coffee. “All these antlers, caribou. Clean. You clean antlers. Understand?”

Otto looked aghast. “Yes, of course. But ket, eet maybe in small car, eh?” He flashed his stainless-steel Soviet-era dentistry at me. “Very amusink, eh? Keety ket in keety cat car?” He burst out laughing, slapping his knee. His booming laugh is very literal:
haw, haw, haw—

The door slammed. Angie was home.

“Yay!” She dropped her bags and threw her arms around me. “My favorite birthday present: my boyfriend! What’s with him?” She jerked a thumb in Otto’s direction. He was still in the grips of hilarity.

“Hiya, kiddo.” I gave her a kiss. “He’s out of his tiny, infinitesimal mind, that’s what.”

She tossed her coat over a caribou rack. “Wow, lotta stuff you got.”

“Ket, eet maybe in balloon . . .”
Haw, haw, haw . . .

“Otto, did you finish that polishing?” Angie sniffed the air. “Otto, no smoking in the house!”

Otto stopped laughing. “Polishing. Of course, yes, I polish. Ket, eet very good, yes?”

I hooked Angie’s arm. “One of these days, if we can afford it, one of us is going to kill this evil little man. Bury him in the backyard.”

“Yangie, maybe I go to smoke, eh?” Otto tromped back behind the curtain. We heard the back door creak and slam.

I wheeled Angie in front of the bird. “Happy birthday.”

“Oh, Garth.” She gasped. “It’s fabulous!”

I could tell she really liked it.

“How old do you think it is?” Her green eyes brightly admired the specimen, turning the jar on the counter.

“Probably done in the forties by a bird fancier. Too nice to have been done by a hobbyist—Dudley the fastidious exception.” I cocked my head and admired the bird’s hunched stance, partially spread wings, and open beak. An apt posture for the vociferous crow.

She looked closely into the bell jar. “Looks like he’s mounted on cedar root, to keep the bugs out, and under glass to keep the dust off. And a good heavy hardwood base to keep it from getting knocked to the floor. Perfect, sugar, perfect. I love it.” Angie brushed her short blond hair from her face and carried the bell jar over to her other crow, the black one, wings spread and mounted on a spooky-looking branch I found in Washington Square Park. I’d salvaged him from the remainder of a tourist museum diorama on Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds.

“A bit smaller than the last one you gave me?” Angie squinted.

“Albinos run a bit small. They thought it was a raven. Can you imagine?”

Angie answered with a scrunched face, the one that transmitted derision.

“Who?”

“Gunderson, the guy I bought it from, and another guy. But it’s a crow.”