Clifford Simak - A Death in the House - And Other Stories

I tried to sneak up on them, but I kept stumbling over old tin cans and empty bottles and I decided then and there, come morning, I’d get that yard cleaned up. I had studied on doing it before, but it seemed there always was some other thing to do.

With all the racket I was making, the three dogs outside the thicket scooted off, but the one that had pushed into the lilacs was having trouble backing out. I zeroed in on him and smacked him dead center with the broom. The way he got out of there—well, he was one of those loose-skinned dogs and for a second, I swear, it looked like he was going to leave without his hide.

He was yelping and howling and he came popping out like a cork out of a bottle and he ran straight between my legs. I tried to keep my balance, but I stepped on an empty can and sat down undignified. The fall knocked the breath out of me and I seemed to have some trouble getting squared around so I could get on my feet again.

While I was getting squared around, a skunk walked out of the lilac bush and came straight toward me. I tried to shoo him off, but he wouldn’t shoo. He was waving his tail and he seemed happy to find me there and he walked right up and rubbed against me, purring very loudly.

I didn’t move a muscle. I didn’t even bat my eyes. I figured if I didn’t move, he might go away. The skunks had been living under the shack for the last three years or so and we got along fine, but we had never been what you’d call real close. I’d left them alone and they’d left me alone and we both were satisfied.

But this happy little critter apparently had made up his mind that I was a friend. Maybe he was just plumb grateful to me for running off the dogs.

He walked around me, rubbing against me, and then he climbed up in my lap and put his feet against my chest and looked me in the face. I could feel his body vibrating with the purring noise that he was making.

He kept standing there, with his feet against my chest, looking in my face, and his purring kept getting soft and loud, fast and slow. His ears stood straight up, like he expected me to purr back at him, and all the time his tail kept up its friendly waving.

Finally I reached up a hand, very gingerly, and patted him on the head and he didn’t seem to mind. I sat there quite a while, patting him and him purring at me, and he still was friendly.

So I took a chance and pushed him off my lap.

After a couple of tries, I made it to my feet and walked around the shack, with the skunk following at my heels.

I sat down on the stoop again and reached for the bottle and took a healthy swig, which I really needed after all I had been through, and while I had the bottle tilted, the jet shot across the treeline to the east and zoomed above my clearing and the whole place jumped a foot or two.

I dropped the bottle and grabbed the gun, but the jet was gone before I got the barrel up.

I put down the gun and did some steady cussing.

I had told the colonel only the day before that if that jet ever flew that close above my shack again, I’d take a shot at it and I meant every word of it.

“It don’t seem right,” I told him. “A man settles down and builds himself a shack and is living peaceable and contented and ain’t bothering no one. Then the government comes in and builds an air base just a couple miles away and there ain’t no peace no more, with them jets flying no more than stove-pipe high. Sometimes at night they bring a man plumb out of bed, standing at attention in the middle of the room, with his bare feet on the cold floor.”

The colonel had been real nice about it. He had pointed out how we had to have air bases, how our lives depended on the planes that operated out of them and how hard he was trying to arrange the flight patterns so they wouldn’t upset folks who lived around the base.

I had told him how the jets were stirring up the skunks and he hadn’t laughed, but had been sympathetic, and he told me how, when he was a boy in Texas, he had trapped a lot of skunks. I explained that I wasn’t trapping these skunks, but that they were, you might say, sort of living with me, and how I had become attached to them, how I’d lay awake at night and listen to them moving around underneath the shack and when I heard them, I knew I wasn’t alone, but was sharing my home with others of God’s creatures.

But even so, he wouldn’t promise that the jets would stop flying over my place and that was when I told him I’d take a shot at the next one that did.

So he pulled a book out of his desk and read me a law that said it was illegal to shoot at any aircraft, but he didn’t scare me none.

So what happens when I lay for a jet? It passes over while I’m taking me a drink.

I quit my cussing when I remembered the bottle, and when I thought of it, I could hear it gurgling. It had rolled underneath the steps and I couldn’t get at it right away and I almost went mad listening to it gurgle.

Finally I laid down on my belly and reached underneath the steps and got it, but it had gurgled dry. I tossed it out into the yard and sat down on the steps, glum.

The skunk came out of the darkness and climbed the stairs and sat down beside me. I reached out and patted him kind of absent-minded and he purred back at me. I stopped fretting about the bottle.

“You sure are a funny skunk,” I said. “I never knew skunks purred.”

We sat there for a while and I told him all about my trouble with the jets, the way a man will when there’s nobody better around than an animal to do the listening, and sometimes even when there is.

I wasn’t afraid of him no more and I thought how fine it was that one of them had finally gotten friendly. I wondered if maybe, now that the ice was broken, some of them might not come in and live with me instead of living under the shack.

Then I got to thinking what a story I’d have to tell the boys down at the tavern. Then I realized that no matter how much I swore to it, they wouldn’t believe a word of what I said. So I decided to take the proof along.

I picked up the friendly skunk and I said to it: “Come along. I want to show you to the boys.”

I bumped against a tree and got tangled up in an old piece of chicken wire out in the yard, but finally made it out front where I had Old Betsy parked.

Betsy wasn’t the newest or the best car ever made, but she was the most faithful that any man could want. Me and her had been through a lot together and we understood each other. We had a sort of bargain—I polished and fed her and she took me where I wanted to go and always brought me back. No reasonable man can ask more of a car than that.

I patted her on the fender and said good evening to her, put the skunk in the front seat and climbed in myself.

Betsy didn’t want to start. She’d rather just stayed home. But I talked to her and babied her and she finally started, shaking and shivering and flapping her fenders.

I eased her into gear and headed her out into the road.

“Now take it easy,” I told her. “The state coppers have got themselves a speed trap set up somewhere along this stretch and we don’t want to take no chances.”

Betsy took it slow and gentle down to the tavern and I parked her there and tucked the skunk under my arm and went into the place.

Charley was behind the bar and there were quite a lot of customers—Johnny Ashland and Skinny Patterson and Jack O’Neill and half a dozen others.

I put the skunk on the bar and it started walking toward them, just like it was eager to make friends with them.

They took one look and they made foxholes under chairs and tables. Charley grabbed a bottle by the neck and backed into a corner.

“Asa,” he yelled, “you take that thing out of here!”

“It’s all right,” I told him. “It’s a friendly cuss.”