Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

“Fella says to me, ‘Wasn’t that song just beautiful? Didn’t it touch you, Mr. Bones?’ I says, ‘No, but the fella that sang it touched me, and he still owes me five bucks.’”

“Who’s Mr. Bones?” I asked.

“Yours truly.”

“No, it’s not,” Fred said.

“Only one thing in the world keeps you from being a barefaced liar,” he said to Fred.

We were shocked at his suddenness.

“Your mustache,” Dad said, and wagged his head and chuckled.

“I don’t have a mustache,” Fred said.

Mother got flustered when she heard anyone telling a joke. She said, “Don’t be stupid.”

“You think I’m stupid,” Dad said eagerly. “You should see my brother. He walks like this.” He got up from the table and bent over and hopped forward.

He did have a brother, that was the confusing part.

“You’re so pretty and you’re so intelligent,” he said, striking a pose with Mother, using that new snappy voice.

“I wish I could say the same for you.”

Dad laughed, a kind of cackle, as though it was just what he wanted to hear. He said, “You could, if you told as big a lie as I just did.” He nudged me and said, “She was too ugly to have her face lifted. They lowered her body instead.”

With that, he skipped out of the room, his hands in the air, and I thought for a moment that Mother was going to cry.

He had become a different man, and it had happened quickly, just like that, calling himself Mr. Bones and teasing us, teasing Mother. She was bewildered and upset. The song he mastered he kept humming, and his jokes, not really jokes, were more like taunts.

“Maybe it’s his new job,” Fred said in the bedroom after lights out.

Floyd said, “It’s this house. Ma hates it. It’s Dad’s fault. He’s just being silly.”

“What’s a minstrel show?” I asked.

No one answered.

Trying to be friendly, Mother asked Dad about his job a few days later.

“They said I’d be a connoisseur, but I’m just a common sewer.”

Then that gesture with the hands, waggling his fingers.

“Said I’d be a pretty good physician, but I said, ‘I’m not good at fishin’.’ Or a doctor of some standing. I says, ‘No, I’m sitting — in the shoe department.’”

Mother said coldly, “We need new linoleum in the upstairs bathroom.”

“And you need new clothes, because your clothes are like the two French cities, Toulouse and Toulon.”

“Don’t be a jackass.”

“ Mister Jackass to you.”

“I wish John Flaherty hadn’t given you that music.”

“Lightning Flaherty said I needed it. Tambo gave it to him. Play it for me again, I need a good physic.”

Mother began to clear the table.

“I love work,” Dad said. “I could watch it all day.”

Mother went to the sink and leaned over. She had turned on the water, her bent back toward us, and I associated the water running into the dishpan with her tears.

He was a new man, even my brothers said so, though, being older than me, they were often out of the house in the evenings when Dad — Mr. Bones — was at his friskiest. He had swagger and assurance, and if I tried to get his attention, or if he was asked a question, he began to sing “Mandy.” He had somehow learned two other songs: “Rosie, You Are My Posie” and “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody”—Lightning’s song, and Tambo’s, so he said.

I was used to my father singing, but not these songs; used to his good humor, but there was anger in these jokes. And he, who seldom went out at night except to Benediction or choir practice, was now out most nights. He stopped asking Mother to play the piano for him; he would simply break into song, drawling it out of the side of his mouth.

When you croon, croon a tune,

From the heart of Dixie…

He didn’t look any different, he dressed the same, in a gray suit and white shirt and blue tie and the topcoat he disparaged as “too dressy.” One day the sleeve was limp. He flapped it at Mother and said, “I know what you’re thinking: World War Two,” as though his arm was missing. Then he shot the arm out of the sleeve and said, “Nope. Filene’s Basement. Bad fit!”

The variation that night and for nights to come was the tambourine he had somehow acquired. When he made a joke or a quip he shook it and rapped it on his knee and elbow and shook it again. Shika-shika-shika.

“RSVP,” he said, holding up a piece of mail. “Remember Send Vedding Present,” and he jingled and tapped the tambourine.

One day after school I went to the store where he worked. Instead of walking in, I kept my head down and crept to the side window to get a glimpse of Dad. He was sitting in one of the chairs in the shoe department, his chin in his hand, not looking like Mr. Bones but sad and silent, a man trying to remember something. Other clerks in shirtsleeves had gathered at the back of the store and were laughing, but not Dad. Were they ignoring him? He paid no attention. He was reading — unusual, a shoe clerk reading. I didn’t know this man either.

I began to be glad that he was out most evenings. At the other, smaller house we’d moved from, he was always at home after work, and in the early days of this new one — the bigger house that Mother hated — he was usually in his chair, dressed in flannel pajamas and a fuzzy bathrobe, reading the Globe under a lamp in the corner. But after that first night, with “Mandy,” and then the jokes, and the tambourine, as Mr. Bones, he was out at night, sometimes didn’t come home for supper, or if he did, it was “Pass the mouse turd” or, holding the pepper shaker, “This is how I feel, like pulverized pepper — fine!”

“The oil burner’s back on the fritz,” Mother said.

Any mention of a problem with the house these days made Dad smile his Mr. Bones smile and roll his eyes.

“Heard about the King of England? He’s got a royal burner.”

“We’ll have to get Mel to look at it.”

“Tambo is a busy man, yes he is. Says to me, ‘What is the quickest way to the emergency ward?’ I says, ‘Tambo, just you stand in the middle of the road.’”

Mother did not react, except to say, “It’s giving off a funny smell.”

“Giving off a funny smell!” Dad said, and put one finger in the air, what I now recognized as a Mr. Bones gesture — he was about to say something and wanted attention. “Mr. Interlocutor, what is the difference between an elephant passing wind and a place where you might go for a drink?”

“I don’t think you understand,” Mother said in a strained voice. “This house hasn’t been right since the day we moved in. First it was the roof, then the paint, then the plumbing. Now it’s the heat. We’re not going to have any hot water. Everything’s wrong. ”

Dad held his chin in his hand, as I’d seen him do at the store. He thought a moment, then looked around the table and said, “Mr. Interlocutor, the difference between an elephant passing wind and the place where you might go for a drink is — one is a barroom and the other is a bar-rooom! ”

He said it so loud we jumped. He didn’t laugh. He drew his chair next to Mother and sang.

Rosie, you are my posie,

You are my heart’s bouquet.

Come out here in the moonlight,

There’s something sweet, love,

I want to say.

Mother looked awkward and sad. She wasn’t angry. In a way, by clowning, Dad took her mind off the problems of the house. She could not get his attention. And who was he anyway? He had a different voice, a jaunty manner.

It wasn’t any kind of joking I’d heard before from him. His teasing was more like mocking and bullying. He wouldn’t call Mel Hankey anything but Tambo, and John Flaherty was Lightning. They had never been close friends before — he had no friends — but now he had Tambo and Lightning and Mr. Interlocutor.