James McKew

“I’m itchier than a dog with butt worms,” he said. “I’m talkin’ federal prison this time around.”

I stopped chewing. “Care to explain Federal prison?”

His eyes drift slowly around the room. “I shot a rare animal of sorts at my house. I was plinkin’ squirrels out the back window…like I do, and I dropped one from the trees. It hit the ground and bounced in a weird way. Turns out, it was frozen stiff, except its eyes blinked at me. I thought it was trying to hypnotize me before biting my nose off.”

“What’d it look like?”

“Darndest thing. It had a head like a house cat, the body of a raccoon, and a skinny tail like a weasel was mixed in there somehow.”

“What’d you do with it?”

“Put it in a sack and drove it down to Doc Holiday’s.”

Doc was our local vet who doubled as the county varmint eradication expert especial. If anybody knew what it was, it would be him.

“Doc took one look and pronounced it a new species. Something like a missing link.”

Scar-fee went all shaky and teary-eyed.

“Good Lord, the only one of its kind left in the world…and I was gonna make buffalo wings out of it.”

Scar-fee put his head in his hands.

“Then what happened?” I asked between bites.

“Doc said he was going to send it to the Smithsonian for an autopsy. Said the Feds would want to see it.”

“And?”

“And I grabbed it from him and ran out the door. Tell me one good thing the government hadn’t screwed up?”

“You still got it?”

“Yeah, in my car.”

We all looked out the window at his dented 1970’s Chevy Chevette hatchback.

“It’s out there? In the back? Spoiling? Maybe you ought to give it a proper burial.”

I looked at Amos, then back at Scar-fee. “But before you say the last rites, I wanna see it for myself.”

“You boys gotta disavow me,” Scar-fee said, swinging his arms like a baseball umpire. “Disavow me right now and be free of my stain on this world. I’m that guy who steps on a pretty flower just to watch it die. The Feds are asking for the gun I used to kill the creature.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“They want it. They’re gonna have to pry it from my cold dead hands.”

“Well, give me a look at the thing before you head for the hills.”

Reluctantly, he went to his car and came back wearing a close pin on his nose and holding the gunny sack at arm’s length. The Gas and Grunt cleared out fast. The weight of the dead animal left a round shape in the fabric.

Scar-fee opened the bag and said, “Feast your eyes upon the bane of my existence.”

Inside the bag was a decomposing creature with glassy eyes staring into space, just like he described.

Scar-fee teared up again. “Lord, help me. I hope that poor animal is walking in a field of heavenly flowers right now.”

“He better be,” I said, gagging, “because what you got there will strip paint off the walls.”

Weeks passed without a word from Scar-fee.

Last we heard, he was moving around the county, slipping into the woods at daybreak and emerging at night to buy a few groceries and gas. And all the while, the Feds were filling the woods with game cameras, placing them every two to three feet along trails, attempting to catch sight of a possible mate to the strange creature. The game cameras caught cheating spouses, arsonists, roaming gypsies, and Sasquatch, but no cat-headed raccoon.

Pest control traps were laid around town in tight clusters, a veritable mine field of wire cages and wet cat food. The cages managed to capture every cat twice over, with still no luck on the missing link. Spring became summer, and no other cat-racoon-weasel-mix creatures were spotted. A team of biology students from Washington State University spent a month slicing open ten thousand stool samples collected from local critters, with not a single DNA hit.

Spy satellites were pointed into our woods and turned up a hundred and eighty-six tax-dodging pot farms. A single one-day sweep by the DEA hauled in enough marijuana to fund the entire Social Security Administration for a week, and still no missing link.

Then it happened.

 At a Labor Day barbecue, Amos took me by the elbow and walked me out of earshot of the crowd.

“This has been bugging me for some time. I got to get it off my chest.”

“Okay, what?” I asked.

“The missing link everybody’s been lookin’ for? It was mine…all mine. I decided to try some backyard do-it-yourself taxidermy using local roadkill. I Frankenstein-ed some things together.”

“You didn’t think to mention this when Scar-fee was around?”

“It was taxidermy gone wrong! Who in their right mind would think it would lead to this!”

“How’d it get in the tree?” I asked.

Amos’s hands shook as he tapped out a cigarette and stuck it between his lips. “It was so bad that I couldn’t stand to look at it another second. I threw it out in the snow behind the garage, hoping a coyote would carry it off. Instead, an eagle swooped in and flew it away. I guess it took it down to the river and dropped it in the trees where Scar-fee shot it.”