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At home, Janie peered out the window as I hurriedly unloaded the boxes from the bed of my pickup truck and brought them around back away from the view of the neighbors. Janie leaned out the back door as I opened the lid of one box, then leaned back in and contorted her face, “Where’d you get THAT?”I don’t know what I had been thinking, but as I searched for an explanation far more impressive than the truth, I realized there was nothing to be said. Janie knew I didn’t hunt. Janie knew me better than anyone, and though I longed to impress upon her the potential magnitude of my manliness, bringing home another hunter’s kill didn’t exactly bolster my macho image. “Do you remember Rick Da---?” I started.
“Rick Dangerfield? Oh God, yes. I mean, isn’t he the Director of Health and Safety for Fish and Wildlife?”
“Um, yeah.”
All evidence of disgust fled her face as she beamed, “That was so nice of him! How sweet! We should write him a thank you note right away.”
“Yeah. Sweet.”
“Ooh, but you’d better do something about… about… those,” once again overcome with expressions of nausea, she waved her hand as if to brush the geese off the back porch. “What are you going to do with those, anyway?”
“Mark’s coming over to show me how to strip them.”
“Mark who?”
“Mark. Mark Lomax?”
She stared blankly.
“Mark Lomax – my best friend? Has a wife, Marie? They were here last week for dinner?”
“Uh-huh. Whatever. I’m going to go look for my good stationary. Ooh, maybe I should bake him some thank you muffins instead. Or a pie. Which do you think?” But she disappeared into the house before I could tell her what I really thought.
Mark arrived with Marie promptly at 6:00 p.m. The temperature had dropped unfathomably, and we were both wrapped so heavily in sweaters and coats that our arms poked helplessly outward away from our sides like fluffy stick figures. We stood and examined the boxes. He looked none too thrilled, and frowned even more when I showed him my surgical tools: a serrated butcher knife, a well-worn paring knife, and a small, rusty pair of pruning shears that I had unearthed in the garage. They were no longer sharp enough to trim the rose bush, but I thought perhaps they could be of use now.
“That’s it? That’s all you have?” Mark shook his head.
“Well, I have a bread knife inside if you think—“
“Never mind. Where do you want to do this?”
“What’s wrong with right here?””Too small,” he surveyed the back porch, “We’re going to need to get two trash cans up here.”
“What for?”
“Feathers.”
I tried to envision filling two trashcans with feathers. It hardly seemed possible.
“How about the back yard? Do you have a light back here?”
I bit my lip, immediately regretting the act as the moisture was icily whisked away, “The only light is on the front porch.”
“The front porch is big enough.”
“But the neighbors.”
“We’ll have to do it as stealthily as possible. Plus, it’s not like your neighbors have nothing better to do than look out at your front porch.”
He didn’t know my neighbors.
We brought the geese, cans and tools to the front porch, which had nothing but a three-foot brick railing and an additional half-foot rise of jagged juniper bushes to obscure our clandestine procedure.
“What now?” I asked.
“Now we pluck one.”
“Can’t we just cut into it?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I just hunt quail, Brian. I suppose it depends on how you want to serve it. We might be able to filet it.”
I thought of all the wasted parts, and how pathetic a filleted goose would look on the Christmas dinner table. I pictured myself carrying a platter to the table, amidst oohs and ahs of hungry family, and the piece de resistance looked something more like a big, browned whole turkey. “ I think I want to bake it,” I asserted.
Mark shook his head once more, and we commenced the joint plucking of the first bird.
The volume of feathers was astonishing. I kept pulling at a patch on the belly, each time removing a fist full of fluff, with little evidence of headway. No wonder jackets and comforters are filled with goose down. Why, I could have made two pillows, a duvet and a winter parka from this one goose. We held the bird over the trashcan and plucked and plucked but got nowhere. It wasn’t long before I couldn’t feel my fingers from the cold, and I was grateful for the numbness. I looked over my shoulder at the thermometer by the front door: ten degrees. Down floated around the garbage can, and blew gently into the driveway. The mess grew. After about forty more minutes we had exposed its belly. Another half hour saw the removal of the majority of feathers from its torso on every side.
“Now what,” I sighed.
“Now we remove its guts.”
“Like, how?”
“Like you’d do with a store-bought turkey, I guess,” Mark shrugged.
“Oh, yeah. Right.” I’d never cleaned a bird before. “So, like, how?”
Mark made a circle with the forefinger and thumb of his left hand, folded the fingers on his right hand together, and pushed them through the circle.
“You’re kidding.”
“Up the butt, man.”
“Alright. You do this one, I’ll watch and do the next.”
“Nuh-uh. Your bird. Your job. I’ll hold it and spread its legs.”
“Shouldn’t I use some kind of lubricant?”
“The blood will work fine,” he assured me as I recoiled. “C’mon man, it’s freezing out here,” he urged.
“Fine.” I located the port of entry, grabbed the bird by its floppy but stiffening neck in my other hand, turned my head away and pushed.
“Harder,” Mark said.
The sheer act of it was surreal to me. We were violently defiling one of God’s little creatures by porch light. I pushed harder, but my little bird friend seemed to have clenched pretty good in its death throes.
“Harder!” Mark said.
I couldn’t help it -- I broke out laughing as I thrust my pinched hand into the goose. ‘Yeah? Like that? Huh? You like that? HUH?”
“Harder!” Mark chuckled.
“C’mon! You know you like it, baby. C’mon!” I laughed. My hand broke through into the body cavity and I stopped laughing. The expression of revulsion on my face, however, caused Mark to double over with laughter, and he lost his grip on the bird.
The Venetian blinds on the front window separated as Janie and Marie looked out to see what the commotion was about. I turned around to face them, my new goose glove slid on up to my wrist, poised in the air over the trashcan. I smiled. The girls shrieked and the blinds snapped shut.
When Mark returned to his senses, he told me to extract everything I could from the body cavity. I began groping about inside, grabbing squishy lumps and pulled them out by the bloody handful. The second extraction left my hand and wrist covered in something black.
“Probably bile,” Mark said casually, but slowly began to ponder something.
I shoved my hand back inside and rooted around, ripping free anything that didn’t seem permanently attached. I pulled out another fistful.
“Keee-ripes!” My back arched and I extended both the bird and my hand as far away from me as possible, “What is that smell?” We were overcome by a putridity so foul that it escaped definition. It seemed to originate inside the bird, but most definitely extended to my bloody, blackened hand.
“Oh yeah,” Mark said from behind a gloved mitt that covered his nose and mouth, “You want to be careful when pulling the innards out. They have a musk gland or something in there that you don’t want to rupture.”
“You think?” I gagged.
“It’ll ruin the meat,” he added.
“So now what!”
“I don’t know. Start over with the other bird?”
“No way. Nuh-uh. I’m over it. Talk to me about filleting this damned thing. Can we cut into it?” I handed him the butcher knife with my clean hand, he put the bird on the porch floor and tried to find a way to approach the incision.
“I need more light.”
“We’ll have to take it inside.”
“It won’t fit on the counter.” With its wings now flopping freely from its torso, it must have been a good five feet wide. We resolved to remove the wings, and once again held it over the trash can, but the pruning shears were far too dull, and only seemed to crush cartilage and bone near its goose shoulder as Mark twisted and tugged at it. I handed him the butcher knife once more and he began to saw. “Pull on the wing and I’ll hold the body,” he said, cutting through the joint, the bird wobbling in a creepy lifelike fashion with each stroke. “Pull harder. It needs to be more taught.” I pulled harder. “No, harder.” He sawed away and sighed, “This knife sucks. Let me have the shears again.” I traded him the shears for the knife and he began pruning bone once more. “Pull harder!” he demanded through gritted teeth.
We were both fully back on our heels as though engaged in a twisted tug of war when the wing ripped free. He fell on his butt, mutilated bird landing in his lap, and I reeled backwards without footing, flailing my arms to gain balance, waving a massive butchered wing overhead.
The blinds parted right before the wing collided with the front window, causing the girls to shriek wildly. It must have been quite a sight for Janie and Marie, Mark on the ground with a one-winged butchered bird in his lap and me dancing about the porch, waving a three-foot wing in one hand and a butcher knife in the other, a cloud of pinfeathers swirling at my feet. They didn’t open the blinds again.
