Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

When the people onstage were taking their bows and the auditorium was still dark, I said, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and ran out and hid in our car.

Back home afterward, no one said anything about the show. Dad was in his regular clothes, with the faint greasy streaks of black on his neck and behind his ears. He was excited, breathless, but he didn’t speak. The strange episode and uproar were over. Later, I got anxious when he hummed “Mandy” or “Rosie” while he was shaving in the kitchen, but he didn’t make any jokes, didn’t tease or taunt anymore. Looking through the side window of the store, I saw him standing near the cash register, in the shoe department, smiling at the front door as though to welcome a customer.

The following year there was talk of a minstrel show, but nothing happened. We had a TV set then, and the news was of trouble in Little Rock, Arkansas, integrating the schools, black children protected by National Guardsmen, white crowds shouting abuse at the frightened black students who were being liberated. The bald-headed president made a speech on TV. Dad watched with us, saying nothing, maybe thinking how Mr. Bones had been liberated too, or banished. It was not what he had expected. The expression on his face was vacant, stunned with sorrow, but before long Dad was smiling.

THEY WERE LIKE hissing animals, blinded by the dark, thinking that no one knew. So we pretended we didn’t and hoped they’d stop. Then he’d say something, and she’d say something, and — Don’t say anything more, I thought, and held my breath — he’d say something sharp, and after a gasp and some crackling, their talk swished back and forth in furious whispers. Sometimes a thump, and a swelling silence that terrified Sam and me more than the hisses.

It was not a question of our being happy or sad, but a condition, worry without a payoff, as though the house was always the wrong temperature. Then one muddy March day Ma said she was going away, she didn’t say where. She looked at us with bright anxious eyes and swallowed whatever she was about to tell us. Soon she was gone, down the driveway, where someone was waiting, under the sky like a low ceiling.

“She’s where she wants to be,” Pa said. “With her friend.”

I did not know it at the time, but that was when our raccoon year started, the first feature of it, Pa stopping whatever he was doing to squint, and wrinkle his nose, with a listening tilt to his head.

“There’s this funny smell.”

He had been an attorney. “My partner Hoyt used to say, ‘I bite people on the neck for a living.’” He smiled. “That wasn’t me.” He had been the first man in our state to gain full custody of his children in a divorce settlement, his best-known case. It happens these days, but years ago it was unheard of, the divorced husband holding on to the house and the children. I was one of the children, my younger brother Sam the other child, both of us still at the Harry Wayne Wing Elementary School in town. Pa was now a financial counselor, working from home, handling investments.

“I’m a bottom feeder in the money business,” Pa said. “Just pawing through it like a scavenger.” But he was more than that: a reasonable cook, sometimes painted pictures, kept a boat on the creek in the summer. He gave us his wind-up Victrola and his collection of old 78 rpm records, which we often played—“South American Joe,” “One Meat Ball,” “Shanghai Lil,” Hawaiian tunes.

After Ma left, he would not hire a babysitter for Sam, or a cook for us, or a cleaner for the house. He waited with us for the school bus on the main road, and then — as he explained in the evening — he cleaned the house, did the laundry, and went grocery shopping. His office was at home, so he could easily combine housework with his business. He stopped sketching and sailing. He took up fancy cooking, the sort of cooking that makes a person bossy, using recipes out of books, talking about his sauces and his fresh ingredients. He used expressions like “my kitchen” and “my garlic press,” and of some dishes, he said, “Those beef tips pair nicely with a Merlot,” or “Anything with a mouth would eat that.”

But there was nothing he could do to fill the empty space that Ma had made by leaving. Watching him trying so hard made me sad. And so I ate the food he prepared with frowning attention, even when I was not hungry.

Our house sat on the brow of a hill, allowing us to see that we had no neighbors. But we had visitors. Just after Ma left, we began to find twists of scat like heaps of blackened sausages in corners of the porch, or we’d forget a plate of half-eaten food — it might be a leftover lump of risotto Milanese on the picnic table — and it would be gone in the morning, the plate licked clean. We found scratchings and evidence of prowlings, clawed earth, overturned buckets, but saw nothing of the perpetrators, as Pa called them. They were like phantoms. Even when he was wrinkling his nose, Pa praised them for being invisible, ripe-smelling ghosts that were about to arrive or had just left, content to live among themselves, never showing their faces, and shadowing us and living on our scraps.

“Probably doing us a favor, cleaning up after us.”

As well as the main house, where Pa slept and cooked and kept his library, we had two other houses: the office house where Pa worked, with a guest room downstairs, and another whole house at the far end of the swimming pool, which we called the Boys’ House. The pump and filter for the pool were in the basement, but the Boys’ House — just bedrooms and a bathroom, no kitchen — had been built for my brother and me. Pa had gotten the idea from his reading about the customs in various places. In parts of New Guinea and Africa, boys our age were housed separately from their parents and sisters in “bachelor houses.”

“Make all the noise you want,” Pa often said. “I don’t want to witness your excesses or your indiscretions.” He would then smile and say, “Nor do I wish you to witness mine.”

Yet there’d been a vibration from their marriage that was unmistakable to us, the way friction sends out a burning smell: we had heard him hissing upstairs with Ma when we were in the main house before meals.

With plenty of space for ourselves in the Boys’ House, and a guest room too, we played the Victrola, stayed up late, lit candles, sometimes smoked, and had our friends over. At mealtimes we gathered at the main house to eat, and after Ma left, to try Pa’s latest dish. “This is a reduction sauce,” and “Osso buco presented on a bed of polenta,” and, holding a forkful of sun-dried tomatoes, “Loaded with micronutrients.”

Later in that first year without Ma we got neighbors, one at the foot of the hill facing the sea, the other one on an adjoining piece of land. We hardly saw them the summer they were building; we only heard the hammering and the country music from the workmen’s radios. But when the leaves were blown from the trees in October, the neighbors’ houses were visible — white, large, and the more conspicuous for the way the owners had cleared their land. They’d cut down all their trees, and they’d already begun to set rolls of sod for muddy lawns. We seemed now to be on our own wooded five-acre island, because none of our trees had been cut.

It was then that we saw more evidence of the animals, more scat, more scratchings, and Pa sniffed and squinted. Driven off the neighbors’ property and robbed of their habitat, the creatures migrated to our land. How many we didn’t yet know: we had not so far seen even one of them.

“You don’t see them during the day,” Pa said, and he seemed to be quoting someone when he added, “They are chiefly a nocturnal animal.”