They hooted and laughed all the way back to the car, teasing Milkman, egging him on to tell more about how scared he was. And he told them. Laughing too, hard, loud, and long. Really laughing, and he found himself exhilarated by simply walking the earth. Walking it like he belonged on it; like his legs were stalks, tree trunks, a part of his body that extended down down down into the rock and soil, and were comfortable there—on the earth and on the place where he walked. And he did not limp.
They met dawn in King Walker’s gas station for a rehash of the night they had spent. Milkman was the butt of their humor, but it was good-humored humor, quite unlike the laughter the trip had begun with. “Lucky to be alive. Cat wasn’t the problem; this here nigger was the problem. Blastin away at us while we got a mean cat gettin ready to chew us and the dogs up both. Shootin all through the woods. Could have blown his own head off. Don’t you city boys know how to handle yourself?”
“You country niggers got it all over us,” Milkman answered.
Omar and Small Boy slapped him on the shoulders. Calvin hollered to Luther, “Go get Vernell. Tell her to get breakfast ready. Soon’s we skin this cat, we comin in there with a appetite and she better be ready to meet it!”
Milkman went with them to the back of the station, where, on a small cemented area covered by a corrugated tin roof, the dead bobcat lay. Milkman’s neck had swollen so it was difficult for him to lower his chin without pain.
Omar sliced through the rope that bound the bobcat’s feet. He and Calvin turned it over on its back. The legs fell open. Such thin delicate ankles.
Calvin held the forefeet open and up while Omar pierced the curling hair at the point where the sternum lay. Then he sliced all the way down to the genitals. His knife pointed upward for a cleaner, neater incision.
When he reached the genitals he cut them off, but left the scrotum intact.
Omar cut around the legs and the neck. Then he pulled the hide off.
The transparent underskin tore like gossamer under his fingers.
Now Small Boy knelt down and slit the flesh from the scrotum to the jaw.
Luther came back and, while the others rested, carved out the rectal tube with the deft motions of a man coring an apple.
Luther reached into the paunch and lifted the entrails. He dug under the rib cage to the diaphragm and carefully cut around it until it was free.
Then he grabbed the windpipe and the gullet, eased them back, and severed them with one stroke of his little knife.
They turned to Milkman. “You want the heart?” they asked him. Quickly, before any thought could paralyze him, Milkman plunged both hands into the rib cage. “Don’t get the lungs, now. Get the heart.”
He found it and pulled. The heart fell away from the chest as easily as yolk slips out of its shell.
Now Luther went back into the stomach cavity and yanked the entrails out altogether. They sucked up like a vacuum through the hole that was made at the rectum. He slipped the entrails into a paper bag while the others began cleaning up, hosing down, salting, packing, straightening, and then they turned the cat over to let the blood drain down on its own hide.
“What are you going to do with it?” asked Milkman.
“Eat him!”
A peacock soared away and lit on the hood of a blue Buick.
Milkman looked at the bobcat’s head. The tongue lay in its mouth as harmless as a sandwich. Only the eyes held the menace of the night.
Hungry as he was, he couldn’t eat much of Vernell’s breakfast, so he pushed the scrambled eggs, hominy, fried apples around in the plate, gulped coffee and talked a lot. And, somehow, he had to get around to the purpose of his visit to Shalimar.
“You know, my grandfather came from somewhere near here. My grandmother too.”
“Did? From around here? What’s their name?”
“I don’t know her maiden name, but her first name was Sing. Any of you ever know anybody with a name like that?”
