Authors: Jonathan Raban
“I’m a terrible dancer,” I said. “My legs feel too old.”
She came from Muncie, Indiana. She worked in a hospital in Dubuque. “My friend—oh, he’s going to be in right along—
he
says I’m too brilliant, much too brilliant, to work in a town like this. I tell him,
Look, I lived six months in New York City. Six months. I lived in one of the most socially desirable areas in New York. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t
stand
it.”
“Where did you live?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t know. It was one of the most socially desirable areas. I mean, I had a wonderful apartment and all.… It was, it was …” I could see her trying to assemble a drunken inventory of New York place names. “It was … in the Village. You know, Greenwich Village? Well, it was right there. Hey …” She switched track hastily. “Don’t you think Americans are all so
vulgar?
I think American men … I been to Yerp. In Yerp … Yerpean men … They got … manners. I mean, in Yerp, they treat you like a
woman
. I
want
to be treated like a woman. I want men to open doors for me and offer me their seat … you know?”
I said that if I were a woman I’d be tempted to clout men who opened the door for me, even though I was a man who always opened doors for women.
“You don’t believe in
Women’s Lib?
” Ellie said.
“I don’t think it’s a matter of believing in it. It’s not a faith.”
“They got Women’s Lib in Yerp now?” she asked. She made it sound like leprosy.
“There’s probably more of it about in England than there is in Dubuque.”
“I think Women’s Lib is a load of …” Then she remembered, and revised her phrase: “… cold water.”
Her complaining voice filled my head like sticky fudge. At thirty-second intervals I nodded and gruffed and tried to keep one small sane space open in my mind.
Think of the river. Think of wing dams. Think of wakes
. It seemed like hours before deliverance came. “I’ll be right back,” she promised. “I just gotta powder my nose.” As soon as she’d gone, I grabbed my book and escaped. Outside, there was just one storefront still lighted. At first I thought it contained model Mississippi steamboats; then I saw that they were plaster wedding cakes. A holstered cop was staring into the window with the deep concentration of a man engrossed in a movie. He never heard my footfalls on the street, but stood there, hunched, his hands on his knees, studying the silver bells and little brides and bridegrooms, the butt of his pistol sticking out from his hip.
My taxidermist lived at an oblique angle to the rest of Dubuque society, out on a bluff to the southwest of town. Jerry Eiben wore a scarlet T-shirt saying
I’M A TAXIDERMIST … I’LL MOUNT ANYTHING
, with the
words framing a picture of an elderly maniac in dubious congress with a long-suffering elk. His pretty suburban house was a dead zoo of squirrels, coyotes, coons, skunks, beaver, fish and pheasants. He and his wife, Cindy, ran their taxidermy business in the basement. Cindy specialized in eyes and paintwork, while Jerry emptied the frozen bodies of their guts, cleaned them, slid them over molds of rubber and polystyrene, and sewed them up. Outside in the yard, their baby daughter bounced up and down on a trampoline, leaving her parents to bloody their hands in the flesh trade. We passed a family of racoons, reduced to absurdity by the strips of cardboard that had been fixed around their ears to keep them in shape and by the bristle of pins and clothes pegs that decorated their mouths and whiskers. Cindy, with mechanical affection, let her hand dawdle through the fur of the mother coon.
“They were road deaths,” she said.
Jerry opened one of the two gigantic refrigerators. “Spare parts,” he said. I saw wings, fins, legs, heads, paws, tails, laid out on the shelves like the ingredients for a bizarre dinner party.
“Have you ever read the Book of Revelation? You’ve probably got all the right bits to make the beast with seven heads and ten horns.”
“You never know when you’ll need like a walleye head or a duck’s wing. They’ll all come in useful, sometime.”
Cindy settled down to an eight-color airbrush job on a dead fish. Jerry showed me how to mount a coon, easing the wet skin over the mold. There was indeed a parallel with psychoanalysis. In life, these animals had possessed the particular identity of their personal quirks and disorders—their sagging bellies, twisted hind legs, scraggy rumps. Taxidermy restored them all to the standard shape of a normal, well-adjusted coon. The molds came in different sizes but made no allowance for any variety of diet or behavior. A coon was a coon was a coon.
“That’s why we always say no when folks ask us to mount their pets. You can never get a dog or a cat to look like their owners remember them. It just doesn’t work out. Then you get into a heartbreak situation, you know?”
Cindy brought out a tray of glass eyes. Even out of their sockets, they had an unnerving look of watery appeal, these staring irises of flecked hazel, pink, ultramarine, dull gold and umber. I picked one up. Deep behind the glass cornea there were red veins on cream, and the dark pupil gazed back at me from my palm with steady melancholy and boredom.
“Coyote,” Cindy said. “Skunk …” She fingered a rolling eye on the tray. “Wood duck … possum … deer …”
“That’s the thing about taxidermy …” Jerry Eiben was wiggling the empty coon’s head over its rubber form now, drawing out the damp creases in the pelt around its neck. “It’s always something different. You been doing fish all week, say, and you think, What the hell, I’m sick of goddamn fish. Okay, so the next day you go do a bird.”
“Right now,” Cindy said, “we’re into creative groups. Like, see that coyote carrying off a pheasant? Or the otter with the fish. Creative groups. That’s where taxidermy turns into an art form.”
“Who are your customers?”
“
Everybody
,” said Jerry. “You get the guy off the line at the John Deere plant with a coon; then you get doctors, lawyers, all the professional people—they all got trophy rooms.”
“There’s a woman lawyer downtown, you ought to see her trophy room. It’s bigger than our whole house. She’s got everything. Giraffes. Elephants. Oryx. Moose. Bears. Doesn’t she have a rhino, Jerry? I think she’s got a rhino in there too.”
So the Eibens kept the world of Alpine supplied with lachrymose bucks and snarling polecats; in the trophy rooms of the stucco mansions, wild things with glass eyes and rubber flesh served to remind the city’s aristocrats that they were frontiersmen at heart. The Eibens themselves, though, were outsiders. They were Protestants from northern Minnesota, “strangers” to Dubuque.
“This is a Catholic city,” Jerry Eiben said. “It’s kind of clicky. If you don’t go to the Catholic church, if you haven’t been to the Catholic high school or gone to the Catholic college, or you’re not a member of one of the Catholic clubs, then you’re out. All our friends here, they’re newcomers too. You know, they’re from Des Moines … Decorah … La Crosse … Timbuktu. I guess that’s one of the things I really like about taxidermy. It’s kind of a social thing. You get to know the other taxidermists around, you visit with each other at folks’ homes, you talk taxidermy … Me and my taxidermist friends, we swap bodies.”
I wanted to make my way in Dubuque. If I wasn’t a Catholic, at least I could climb hills. Up on Locust Street I found the Redstone, a cocktail lounge where the people looked distinctly more Alpine than the desolate singles of Buddy’s Bar. The men wore tweed jackets frogged and elbow-patched with suede trimmings, giving them a curiously apposite resemblance to a group of yodeling Austrian woodcutters. The women smelled of Chanel No. 5. I paid an alpine price for a beer served in a balloon glass that should have held brandy.
“You look like Tom Wolfe—” She was Ms. Alpine to the life, with
a puffy spray of French lace at her neck, and a face and hair which revealed less about her than about the dedicated toiling of the beauticians and coiffeuses who kept them regularly serviced. “I know you’re
not
Tom Wolfe, because Tom Wolfe wouldn’t be in Dubuque. But you look like Tom Wolfe, and if Tom Wolfe was in Dubuque he’d be doing just what you’re doing.”
“What am I doing?” I’d thought I was in a state of suspended vacancy.
“You’re watching people from under your eyelids and spinning that pen around between your fingers. Just like Tom Wolfe. Hey—” Ms. Alpine rescued a doll-like child with ringlets from under her bar stool. “This one’s mine. Say hello to the gentleman, honey.” The infant looked at me with practiced distaste. Its tongue protruded just a millimeter or so from a pair of tiny lips.
“You live in Alpine?”
“Right on the
top
of Alpine.”
She had a degree in journalism from a college in Minnesota. Once, she’d had her own radio show. “It was a phone-in, right? There was me and my goldfish. When no one called in, I used to talk to the goldfish. That was really something else. The goldfish, and all. I was a star. Everyone recognized me. It was the biggest thing in Dubuque.”
The top of Alpine … the biggest thing in Dubuque … I was touching heights I hadn’t dreamed of.
“What are you doing for dinner tomorrow?” I asked her.
“I have to watch my step. My ninety days aren’t up yet. When I get to the end of my ninety days, I’ll be a free woman again. Right now, though, I practically have to have a chaperon before I can say Hi to my own brother on the goddamn street.”
“You’ve got a brother?”
“No. Just figurative. I got an ex-husband. Almost-ex. The worst.”
We ran through the list of all the restaurants in Dubuque. Some were too public, others too glaringly clandestine. We fixed on one that was suitably upright and discreet. After Ms. Alpine left the bar, I spent a long time trying to decide whether I was elated or just plain frightened at the prospect of my date.
The Dubuque Packing Company was right down in the Flats. I walked through streets of low houses built of smoky brick, oddly at home. They might have been back-to-back terraces in Hull or Sheffield, with their run-down corner stores and children scuffling on the sidewalks. The wind brought the smell of the stockyards over the houses, and the troubled booming and stamping of the cattle in their pens. Then I
saw the great, windowless, rust-colored slab of the Packing Company. It looked like the worst sort of Victorian cathedral.
In an upper office, the hog king of Dubuque was at home. R. C. Wahlert spanned the city from top to bottom: he had a mansion high up on the bluff, he was boss of the Flats, he was Catholic, he was German, and the cigar he was smoking was as big as a submarine sandwich. I was lucky to see him at all; to judge by the clocks which were crammed into his small office, his time was obviously a very precious commodity indeed. There were wall clocks, table clocks, a speaking clock which operated from a button built into his oak desk, and a glass clock in which one could watch steel balls run down chutes, trip levers and register the passing of time like the score on a pinball machine. Young men in Redstone clothes ran around him with little bits of paper. “This needs your signature, R.C.” “When you have a moment, R.C.…” “Oh—you busy, R.C.?” Meanwhile his clocks ticked and rattled and talked; in the Dubuque Packing Company, a minute was a long time.
“I got a problem,” he said. “Next week I got a passage booked on the
Queen
. We’re supposed to be going to London. Then Alexandria. Wanna see the Pyramids and Sphinx. There’s a hitch, though. Same day, I got an invitation from the President; meet the Pope at the White House. Gonna be a job to fit all that in.”
“Tell the
Queen
to sail a day later,” I said. Wahlert laughed. He had two bangs of bristly white hair on either side of a bald red skull. His goatee and mustache glistened at their points; they managed to suggest a past crowded with deviltry and shenanigans. “I guess it might be easier to fix the President,” he said.
He pressed the button on his desk. “The time is nine forty-seven,” said a woman’s voice. “Just checking,” Wahlert said. He removed a ceramic pig from his blotter and put it beside a plastic statuette of the Virgin, then reached for a toy London taxi. “I just bought one of those—a ’66 Austin. Getting it restored here in Dubuque. Thought it’d be kind of fun to run around the city in a London taxi. I love those things. You can turn ’em around on a dime.”
His phone rang. Wahlert delivered a five-minute tirade into the mouthpiece. I couldn’t follow what it was about. Had the bottom fallen out of the meat-packing business? Whatever it was, it was clearly a disaster.
Wahlert hung up, furious. “That was my accountant. This year they’re trying to put up my property taxes by five hundred dollars—”
“Five hundred dollars sounds like a pretty small drop in your financial ocean.”
“It’s not the goddamn five hundred, it’s the principle of it. Hell, this year you let them have five hundred, next year they’ll be trying to screw you for a million.” The smoke from his stogie hung over him in a thundercloud. “I won’t let those guys get away with five unnecessary cents.”
I tried to steer him away from his property taxes and onto the subject of Dubuque as a Catholic city. I had learned from the Eibens that the Wahlert family had endowed the Catholic high school.
“My uncle put a lot of dough into that school. Hell,
I
put a lot of dough into that school. Oh, yeah, in the old days, there used to be big fights down here in the Flats between the Catholics and the Protestants. But we’re all ecumenical now.” He put on his most winning smile. “The good thing about this city is …” He quickly touched the wood of his desk. “… there are no blacks. ’Cept for a few that John Deere had to bus in for the race laws.”
“Why are there no blacks?” It was true, and had puzzled me before. Since leaving Minneapolis, I had seen hardly any black faces; this part of the country was a vast white ghetto.
“I don’t know why that is. I guess they just don’t like the climate around here. I don’t blame ’em.
I
don’t like the climate. The winters here, they’d freeze the ass off you. Hell, it’s a goddamn awful climate. But it’s a
wonderful
climate for hogs. You know we’ve got ten times as many hogs as people? Two million people in this region; twenty million hogs. And that’s about the size of it.”