Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (thriller books to read .TXT) 📗

"You had to stir it up!" Bruce shouts. I retch and gag.

"Oh, you sound like one of my daughters ... and my son!" David howls, grinning. With his knobby hands, he lifts the skull out of the tub. The meat easily peels off the bones. He'll scrape the rest off with a toothbrush. It buoys his spirits.

Bruce shakes his head in disgust and walks over to a big plastic industrial bucket filled with saline pickle for tanning small animals. Tanning breaks down the skin's oils and stiffens its meshed fibers so the hair won't fall out. "That's where your squirrel is going to go after it's skinned," he says. "Smell it! Put your head in there!" Bruce is a big guy with a booming voice. He's not joking.

Reluctantly, in the name of journalism, I lower my face into the blue bucket, my gag amplified in the confined space. At the bottom I see a jackass penguin slated for a touch-me exhibit at Jenkinson's Aquarium in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey. Through several inches of pickle, the penguin looks distended and bloated, as if it had drowned. (It actually died by swallowing its nest material. When it was necropsied, the aquarium found a long stick in its gullet.) The penguin smells less rancid, more fishy and pungent, than the bison skull, but I gag again.

An animal can last in pickle indefinitely. The Schwendemans once pickled a porcupine for twenty-two years. This penguin's been in pickle for a month or so, which is average. Tomorrow Bruce will mix three gallons of fresh pickle using a secret family recipe.

"While you're used to the smells, I'll show you the freezer," Bruce says, and we trudge through the basement, which is strewn with coarse salt, to the walk-in industrial freezer. It is so crammed with bagged carcasses—some have been in there for years—that (thankfully) there's no room for us (although Bruce does keep an ax inside in case he gets trapped). The furry arm of a four-hundred-pound black bear dangles from a garbage bag; its long claws are as sharp as knives. The bear is already fleshed and salted (salt inhibits bacterial growth, which would make the hair loose). It's too large to tan here, so Bruce will ship it to a California tannery in a leakproof UPS box marked GREEN SALTED HIDES. Tracking a bear—or any specimen, for that matter—is complicated and requires special permits and tags. Every animal in the shop, including my squirrel, is tagged and numbered. This bear's ears were tagged by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at a weigh station during New Jersey's recent bear hunt. To track the bear further, its lips are tattooed and its skin is punched and coded with an awl. If one skin gets mixed up with another skin, federal authorities could potentially close down the shop.

The basement is crammed with dusty deer heads, heaps of caribou and moose antlers, tanning drums, rusty tools, jars of sand, artificial snow, mica for bases, various bones and teeth, driftwood, aquarium stones, seashells, stoneware crocks, and galvanized tubs. There is a darkroom, where two polyester lamprey eels are posed mating. Past a pile of old patterns from which Mum-Mum made ear liners is a shooting range where local hunters and Milltown police officers used to shoot for target. It's coated with dust, but I can make out the rusted iron stars clothespinned to a wire, which we follow to a back wall that is pitted with bullet holes. A sign says:

SHOOT AT YOUR OWN RISK

Range Prices

.2 cents per shot rifle

.2 cents shot pistol, includes ammo

"I don't think Mum-Mum ever shot for target," Bruce said. "That would have been too wasteful. She only shot for necessity—rats, muskrats, that kind of thing."

Our basement tour fails to make the impending dissection more palatable. I want to race home, eat a salad, and soak in a hot bath. "It's not that gross; you'll see. You don't attack it like a...," he says, pausing. "Even butchers are delicate in how they do things. It'll be fun," he adds consolingly.

The next morning is the day before Thanksgiving. I pull up to the shop. The air is brisk, and the sky is filled with high wispy clouds. The sycamores that line Main Street are bare, and an American flag hangs from nearly every house. Through the plateglass window, I see Bruce setting up his window display, an eastern wild turkey (mounted) and two human skeletons (fake).

Bruce, in a denim apron and jeans, has a backlog of projects to finish before Christmas, and the workshop is filled with half-mounted birds and beasts. I sit at the worktable, which is strewn with scalpels, knives, poultry shears, scissors, razor blades, a sharpening stone, and a thawed Milltown gray squirrel shrouded in paper towels. Attached to the squirrel with a rubber band is a bank deposit slip on which is written "Milltown Squirrel 9/10/03 DJS. Drowned. OK. Juvenile. Female."

Bruce wipes the blood and condensation off the squirrel, prepping it for skinning. "I want this to be a nice specimen for you," he says, placing it on newspaper in front of me. The squirrel, when I inspect it, is nothing like the plump squirrels in the AMNH diorama. It is bone thin and has a mangy tail, a bloody nose, and a stained bib. Its cloudy, sunken eyes are (thankfully) shut, and its meager whiskers need mascara.

"Only one tooth?" I ask. Bruce points out its other brown incisor. Then he says, "When he's pickled and washed and fluffed, you'll be surprised."

"If it's really nice, I can enter it into the World Show," I hear myself say. It's a joke, but Bruce says why not.

When David shuffles in from his nap, he explains how he had baited a trap for groundhogs (they were eating his tomatoes) and caught two squirrels instead. "I let one go, but this one I'm fed up with," he says, settling into his rocker.

"What kind of trap?" I