236 animal, vegetable, miracle
person in America. It gave a certain pizzazz to my days, I thought, as I
went about canning tomatoes, doing laundry, meeting the school bus, and
here and there writing a novel or essay or whatever, knowing full well that
kind of thing only leads to trouble. My thrilling new status had no impact
on my household position: I still had to wait till the comics were read to
get the Sudoku puzzle, and the dog ignored me as usual. Some of my he-
roes had turned up much higher on the list. Jimmy Carter was number 6.
“When you’re seventy- four, you try harder,” I now informed my friends,
as I reached high up into the turkey’s chest cavity from the, um, lower
end. I was trying to wedge my fi ngers between the lungs and ribs to pull
out the whole package of viscera in one clean motion. It takes practice,
dexterity, and a real flair for menace to disembowel a deceased turkey.
“Bond. James Bond,” a person might say by way of introduction, in many
situations of this type. My friends watched me, openly expressing doubts
as to my actual dangerousness. They didn’t think I even deserved to be
number 74.
“Hey,” I said, pretty sure I now had the gizzard in hand, “don’t distract
me. I’m on the job here. Destroying America is not the walk in the park
you clearly think it is.”
Someone had sent me a copy of this book, presumably to protect me
from myself. A couple of people now went into the house to fetch it so
they could stage dramatic readings from the back jacket. These friends
I’ve known for years uncovered the secrets they’d never known about me,
President Carter, and our ilk: “These,” the book warned, “are the cultural
elites who look down their snobby noses at ‘ordinary’ Americans... .”
All eyes turned fearfully to me. My “Kentucky NCAA Champions”
shirt was by now so bloodstained, you would think I had worn it to a
North Carolina game. Also, I had feathers sticking to my hair. I was
crouched in something of an inharmonious yoga pose with both my arms
up a turkey’s hind end, more than elbow deep.
With a sudden sucking sound the viscera let go and I staggered back,
trailing intestines. My compatriots laughed very hard. With me, not at
me, I’m sure.
And that was the end of a day’s work. I hosed down the butcher shop
and changed into more civilized attire (happy to see my wedding ring was