Still Life Melissa Milgrom (notion reading list .txt) 📖

and fat. "These are my favorite tweezers. Don't bend them!" he booms. With chopsticks dexterity, I take small puffs of tow and pad the "bones" under the skin. The squirrel needs considerable plumping, it turns out. I plump and I plump. Lost in thought, still plumping, I'm jolted alert by David's voice: "Don't lump it up!" Watching me from his rocker, which is held together with duct tape, he shakes his head and raises his eyebrows. "Okay, Petunia. Do you have a needle and thread?"

I spend several hours sewing it up. (Stitching paw pads is a very strange sensation. Imagine stabbing a needle through a thin eraser.) Then I move on to the finishing work, the part where a taxidermist can play God or Mother Nature by deciding whether his or her replica will look pensive, content, or vicious. Regretfully, I forgot to study the preskinned squirrel's face, so I have no choice but to approximate. I trim off the excess mouth skin, then tuck the loose flaps into the crooked mouth slot (tight as military sheets, I'm afraid). A slight frown, perhaps, but the wonder of taxidermy is the zillions of magic tricks it offers, enabling you to alter nature. A sprightly tail and eager, wide eyes should compensate, I hope, for the grimace. I slide the eyelids up and down on the glass eyes, making the squirrel look drunk, then guilty, then panic-stricken. I surgically enhance the eyebrows with papier-mâché paste to give them definition and make the face cuter. The legs are a bit lopsided, and the shoulder padding has slipped down inside the arm as if it were a furry sleeve, but my fingers are too cramped to open the thing back up and resew it. So I shine up the eyes with cotton dipped in gasoline, then stick long pins into the face to immobilize the skin while it dries.

On my last visit to Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio, I coat the paw pads, lips, and nose with a secret Schwendeman's beeswax concoction, then sculpt and paint them. Finally, I dot the corners of the eyes with shellac until they glisten with the dew of heaven, and the squirrel springs to life. "It looks great," David says. I smile with pride.

Before I go home, Bruce wires the squirrel to a dowel so that I can transport it back to Brooklyn. Once it's affixed to the rod, I can picture how amazing it will look inside the display case I've designed for it. The squirrel will be racing across a black wire above the doorway of a seedy basement apartment that is lit by a bare yellow bulb. I've named the case Gray Squirrel, Yellow Dawn.

10. GRAY SQUIRREL, YELLOW DAWN

IN 2005, EMILY MAYER was competing in the World Taxidermy Championships for the first time. When she arrived at the Crowne Plaza in Springfield, Illinois, a bellhop looked at her and said, "So you're a rock star?"

"No! A rat star!" she snapped, and walked inside.

I followed her through the lobby (buffalo heads on baggage carts; deer heads on escalators) to room 407. We were sharing a room for the next five days, and we were both uneasy about the competition. She set her stainless steel rat case on one of the beds, grabbed a beer from the minibar, and rigged up a work area near the window. Then she unhinged the case and extracted four extraordinarily succulent Rattus norvegicus specimens with translucent feet. "Bloody hell!" she shouted. A fluorescent light bulb for one of her displays had broken in transit. "Oh, bugger!"

A minute later, Paul Rhymer showed up with my squirrel. He had driven it from his house in Maryland so I wouldn't have to take it through airport security. Rhymer's Smithsonian ID serves as something akin to diplomatic immunity in the eyes of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents. When Mayer had landed at JFK International Airport two days before, customs officers had seized her rat case, and she'd had to spend an entire day filling out paperwork to get it back. Mayer's "USFWS Form 3–177: Declaration for Importation or Exportation of Fish and Wildlife" listed eleven items:

FOUR Rattus norvegicus (brown rat)

ONE Oryctolagus cuniculus (European rabbit fetus)

THREE Mustela nivalis (weasel)

ONE Micromys minutus (harvest mouse)

ONE Canis familiaris (domestic dog)

ONE Melopsittacus undulatus (Budgerigar parakeet)

I introduced Rhymer to Mayer. He glanced at her BITCH.COM T-shirt and said, "I want to make a T-shirt that says IT'S JUST TAXIDERMY!"

She nodded. "I want to make one that says I DO IT WITH DEAD ANIMALS."

He sat on one of the beds watching as I removed the squirrel from its cardboard travel box. The squirrel looked great, I thought; its fragile ears and tail had arrived intact, if a tad mangy. It was impressive for a first mount. Rhymer was silent.

The last time I'd seen him was at the Behring hall ribbon cutting, when I was admiring the orangutan he had painstakingly de-pickled. Now he was examining my juvenile Sciurus carolinensis. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. His eyes roved from whisker pad to paw pad and back again. He was clearly puzzled by something, but he uttered not a word. Then, finally, he sprang up off of the bed and yelled, which is uncharacteristic of him.

"Wax!" he hollered.

Wax? He bent down, inspecting the squirrel more closely. His eyes lingered on its waxy brown lips. (They were a bit bumpy, I guessed. I'd never noticed that before.) He scrutinized its tiny paws with their sharp brown claws. He shook his head dourly. Then he grinned from ear to ear. He said nothing except, once again, "Wax."

Then: "That's old, old, old, old! The only taxidermist at the Smithsonian who used wax we called a waxidermist." Suddenly I understood what was going on. The Schwendemans had let me enter the most elite taxidermy event in the universe with a history lesson! The squirrel was perfect—for 1938. But it was not 1938. Suddenly, I remembered the day Bruce had sent me home with