Hummingbird Salamander(27)

The place made me sad. My hangover made me sad. How “Jack” had ditched me colored my mood, too. I kept telling myself I shouldn’t care because I’d never intended to sleep with him. Yet sad manifested as reckless, I guess. I could cover my tracks leading to the shop all I wanted. But I didn’t have a set plan for what to say or do once there.

I lingered in the front area, staring at window displays so covered in dust, you could tell they hadn’t been changed out in years. I felt clammy. My hands sweated. Velvet-upholstered chairs. Porcelain dolls slumped over small tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It struck me so palpably that this could’ve been a scene out of the living room at the farm in the last years I was there that I felt sick. I had to look away. As if my mother had lived in the window display since her death.

Slowly, I made my way through the junk to the corner devoted to taxidermy. A desiccated bobcat. A fox with a strange gleam to the eyes and a sparkly lacquer to the fur that I realized after a moment meant someone had petted its back so much the fur had changed texture. Deer antlers. Spent shotgun shells. I guessed the best stuff was behind the back counter.

Books on taxidermy and related subjects, too. I picked one up as cover, pretended to read it. Then actually began to read it. Oddly Enough: From Animal Land to Furtown, from the 1930s. Even a glance told me it was perverse, wrong, possibly evil. Something an anthropologist studying cultural bias might study.

“We, as the fur bearers of the world, in order to be enthusiastically welcomed to your fur industry, must live a determined double life. First, we exist as ‘an animal’ following the vigorous paths planned by nature. When we depart from this existence as ambassadors of the wild, we will then live our second glorious and commercial being … a life as a fur.”

Did the hummingbird on a pedestal exist separate from this philosophy? Silvina would say it didn’t. That “fur” was a separate religion from “taxidermy.” Yet, somehow, that paragraph made what had been done to the hummingbird more grotesque.

“Transpose what is done to an animal onto a human,” Silvina said in the video. “If it is disgusting, wrong, unethical, immoral, then you know what the truth is.”

I took the book to the back, to the guarded high counter. The man behind the counter had craggy white hair and a ruddy, deeply lined face, wore a plaid lumberjack shirt and jeans, with a vest over the shirt, in an unironic way. He was almost my height, and, if I’d had to guess, mid-sixties, and had spent most of his life outdoors. He had a sleepy left eye.

“You’re Carlton Fusk,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s me. The one and only. That all?” he asked in the gruff voice I expected. Smoker, or ex-smoker.

“No.”

“What else?”

“I have a question about taxidermy.”

“The book’s about fur.”

“The question’s about taxidermy.”

“Sure. I know something about taxidermy.” Said like we were somewhere in Upstate New York and I was a clueless tourist.

“You ever seen something like this?”

I unfolded a color printout of a photograph of the hummingbird, from the internet café.

Fusk took the photo from me without breaking eye contact. Then looked down with caution, as if I might be dangerous. When he was done looking, he let it fall from his hand onto the counter. For some reason, I’d thought he wouldn’t give it back.

“And there’s this,” I said, pulling out a photo of the “R.S.” on the bottom of the hummingbird’s stand.

A flicker of interest? Maybe.

I pulled out my photograph of Langer. “And what about him?”

Fusk’s bad eye widened. Then went slack again.

“You a cop?” Fusk asked.

“No. Detective. Private eye.” I said it without thinking. I couldn’t tell you why, except it seemed like the truth. Pursuing a mystery made me a detective.

“Identification?” Fusk asked.

“I don’t have to give you that.”

“Then I don’t have to answer your questions.”

I sighed, like this scene had played out before. Even if my heart beat fast.

“I’m out-of-state. You don’t have to answer, but then I’ll liaise with the police department and maybe you’ll have to talk to them instead.”

A huge adrenaline rush as I said the words. Overwhelming. I had to steady myself, as if a wave was about to knock me over.

Fusk considered that. I’d never play poker against him, but something shifted in his expression. I’d shifted it with my threat.

Then he turned to the shelves behind him, found a book, turned back to me.

It was a second copy of Furtown. In much better condition.

“The one you’ve got isn’t a first edition,” he said. “This one is. It’s five hundred bucks, not thirty. You should really get this one.”

I started to argue that I didn’t care what edition I had, then understood.

“Sure.”

Five hundred dollars. Why didn’t I hesitate? Why didn’t I walk away? Because: I had five hundred dollars on me. In fact, I had a thousand. Just in case. I hadn’t known what I would need or when I would need it. Withdrawn from the bank before I’d left the West Coast.

I counted out the bills on the counter, let him pick them up. Then he slid the book across to me, took the other one back. I wondered if Furtown had been a big seller back in the day.