Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

“Morrie Daigle said he’d help you fix the roof.”

“Mr. Interlocutor is too hot to do that. He is so hot he will only read fan mail.”

That was how we found out who Mr. Interlocutor was.

“Have you lost your wallet?” Dad said to Floyd.

“No,” Floyd said, and clapped his hand to his pocket.

“Good. Then give me the five dollars you owe me.”

Floyd made a face, looked helpless, thrashed a little. It was true that Dad had given him five dollars, but he had not brought it up before this.

Dad said, “Hear about the Indian who had a red ant?”

I didn’t understand that one at all. I pictured an Indian with an insect. It made no sense.

There was something abrupt and deflecting in his humor. He made a joke and seemed to expand, pushing the house and his job aside. He’d been at the new job for six months now and never mentioned it. I had seen him in the store, not working but sitting in the chair where the shoe customers were supposed to sit, and instead of waiting on them, or talking to the other employees, he was reading.

Mother seemed to be afraid of him. Before, she had always made a remark, or nagged, or blamed. But these days she relented. She watched him. When he made a joke she became very quiet and blinked at him, as though she was thinking, What do you mean by that?

Floyd was on the basketball team, Fred played hockey, so they were out most evenings — practicing, they said. I knew it was an excuse to stay away from home and Mr. Bones. Rose was just a little kid of seven, and she actually found Mr. Bones funny, and let him tickle her.

But I had nowhere to go, and I didn’t like the angry jokes or the cruel teasing. Mr. Bones was always laughing or singing, and he never listened, except when he was thinking up another joke. He was a stranger to me, and for the first time I began to think, Who are you? What do you want?

What happened next was more shocking. Dad’s change was a surprise, but when he changed again he seemed monstrous. We thought, What next? It frightened the whole family, but maybe me especially, because I went to bed thinking, Who are you?

The light went on and I had the answer.

Most of the lights in the house were bare bulbs with no shades, hanging on frayed black whips from the ceiling — another source of Mother’s complaints — and the brightness of the one dangling in my bedroom made it worse. I had been woken up, so the light blazed and half blinded me. Yet I saw enough to be terrified.

A disfigured villain from a horror comic was bending over my bed — I realized only later that it was Dad — his whole face sticky black, a white oval outline around his lips. He wore a cap that even afterward I could not imagine was a wig, a red floppy bow tie, a yellow speckled vest, and a black coat, and he was emphatically holding his hands out in white gloves. He was smiling under that blackness that shone on his face, and he leaned over me and spoke, seeming to shriek.

“Give us a kiss, sonny boy!”

Then he laughed and stood up and waved his gloved hands again and jerked the light chain, bringing down darkness.

His voice had matched his face. He was so black that I dreamed he was still in my bedroom, standing there invisible in his floppy tie: Mr. Bones. I had not heard the door shut.

I even said into the menacing gloom, “Dad — are you there?”

Giving no answer was just the sort of thing he’d try as Mr. Bones.

I said again, “Dad?” And in a trembly voice, “Mr. Bones?”

I had not heard him leave. For all I knew he stayed there to scare me. But in the morning the room was empty.

At breakfast he was eating oatmeal as usual. He had a decorous way of holding his spoon. I looked closely at him and saw some streaks of black makeup caked in the lines on his neck. I sprinkled raisins on my oatmeal.

“Pass me the dead flies, sonny,” he said in his Mr. Bones voice.

These days his remarks silenced the room. We all felt the effect of his angry humor. I didn’t know how deeply Mother was upset — though I knew she was. Floyd and Fred were startled but sometimes pretended to find it funny, and occasionally they teased back. When Dad made his “Toulouse and Toulon” joke, Floyd said, “Well, you’re like a town in Massachusetts — Marblehead.” Instead of being insulted, Dad smiled and said, “I like that.”

But he kept on worrying Fred about college, and Floyd about trumpet lessons. We didn’t know what was coming next. We had not foreseen the songs or the jokes; we had not expected the black face. Maybe there was more.

His voice was hoarse from practicing, and now every night he came home in black makeup, his wig like a too-big woolly hat. He talked about Tambo and Lightning and Mr. Interlocutor, and he told the same jokes. Hearing it again and again, I came to understand the one about the Indian and the red ant — red aunt was the point of it. We never pronounced it “ant,” always “awnt.”

I felt embarrassed and fearful. We were afraid to ask him about his job in the shoe department these days. If Mother mentioned the house, that there were drips to be fixed, the oil burner to be mended, linoleum to be laid, painting to be done, I didn’t hear it. All our attention was on him, who he was now, Mr. Bones. To almost any question, he began singing.

A million baby kisses I’ll deliver

If you will only sing that “Swanee River”

The rhythm was there, a confident slowness and drawl, yet his voice was strained from overuse. He lifted his knees and did dance steps as he sang, and he raised his white gloves. And Mother sat at the piano, looking anxious, playing the melody.

It seemed so wrong, I was always glancing at the door, scared that someone — a neighbor, the Fuller Brush man, Grandpa — might come in and see him swaying and singing with a black face and that wig.

He had another song too:

When life seems full of clouds and rain,

And I am filled with naught but pain,

Who soothes my thumpin’ bumpin’ brain?

He would always pause after that, and lower himself and put his head out and say, “Nobody!”

His voice was gargly and cross, as though he was in pain. The weeks of rehearsals had taken away his real voice and given him this new one.

When all day long things go amiss,

And I go home to find some bliss,

Who hands to me a glowin’ kiss?

He was standing over Mother at the piano, and her bleak plunking notes, and smiling angrily, his wig tilted, one glove in the air.

“Nobody!”

The next time I sneaked after school to the window of the store and looked in, I saw him sitting where I’d seen him before, in the chairs reserved for customers, reading. He was not in blackface, yet his assurance, his posture, the way he sat, like the owner of the store, made him seem more than ever like Mr. Bones. He looked thoughtful, his fist against his mouth, a knuckle against his nose. And the other clerks and floorwalkers seemed to avoid him, talking among themselves, as though they knew he was Mr. Bones.

At a funeral in church one Saturday, I stood beside Ed Hankey, both of us altar boys, in starched blouse-like surplices, holding tall smoking candles, preparing to follow the coffin down the main aisle. The priest was swinging a thurible — more smoke — and the relatives of the dead man were howling.

Hankey said in a whisper, “You going to the minstrel show?”

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“My old man’s in it. So’s yours.”

“I don’t even know what it’s supposed to be.”

“It’s a wicked pisser. Just a bunch of old guys singing, like a talent show,” Hankey said.

Then we saw the priest glaring at us. We straightened our candles and approached the coffin.