Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

A few days after he said that, when we were sitting on the back porch, Pa paddled his hands, saying, “Shush.” I thought, and hoped, that he’d seen Ma. He crouched and pointed to a slow hairy shadow moving beneath low juniper boughs, and this big shadow dragging a cluster of shadows behind it, two small ones, her young.

Raccoons. Pa whispered that we were lucky to see them in daylight, the plump mother raccoon with a black eye mask, tottering a little and poking her snout along the edge of the brick apron of the pool, keeping out of the sun. It was as though we were seeing strange visitors. Yet they didn’t seem strange at all, more like self-possessed residents who knew their way around the property.

“There’s a real mother,” Pa said, and sounded tearful. He was still whispering into his hand.

Sam said, “Two kids?”

Pa hissed. “I said, two kits. ”

As we watched, they poured their supple bodies beneath the side slats in the deck that served as a seating platform on the far end of the pool. And now we knew that when we were in the deck chairs we were sitting on top of a family of raccoons.

Pa still wore an amused and even tender expression, but soon he became rueful, with a faded smile, as though thinking about how Ma had gone off with her friend — the worst day of my life. Long after the raccoons had gone, Pa kept squinting at the spot they’d slipped from, as you do a sunset.

That night after dinner, Pa said he wanted to tell us a bedtime story. The Boys’ House was out of bounds to him, so we sat in the library and read from Old Mother West Wind. He put special emphasis on the character of Bobby Raccoon, giving Bobby the even, reasonable voice of a very good boy.

And for the next few days, he’d stop and peer at those slats in the deck from where he sat on the porch; or else, when we’d be eating outside, or playing cards at the picnic table, Pa would glance over, and I knew he was hoping to see them. Even in the shadow of the junipers, the mother had been a strong presence — large, healthy, busy, snouty, and deliberate in her crawl, with an air of belonging. The little ones were frisky, their coats were sleek, and they had a fat side-to-side noiseless way of gliding.

Not seeing them, Pa put out some leftovers for them, describing them in the way he served up food. “Chicken,” he said. “Bones from the stockpot. Some bruised kiwi fruit.”

The scraps were gone in the morning. “Must have been that mother. Or maybe Bobby. Like a pit bull on a pot roast.” I was sure that Pa was sorry he wasn’t able to stand over the raccoons and see them gnawing the bones, eating the chicken, doing a better job of finishing the food than Sam and I ever did, Pa saying to the raccoons, “Citrus chicken with a grapefruit salsa…”

They got into the garden and left symmetrical bite marks on the eggplants. They didn’t touch the overripe tomatoes on the vines. But by now, frosty October, the garden was over. They ate the mushrooms that sprang up overnight in the dampness near the pitch pines.

“Looks tidier without that dog-vomit fungus,” Pa said in the morning, seeing that they had cleared the yard of the growths that were like twisted pieces of dirty Styrofoam. “How do they know it’s not poisonous? Just smart, I guess.”

Halloween was costume time at the Harry Wayne Wing School. Pa bought us black eye masks and furry hats with tails. “Go as Bobby Raccoon.” But we refused and went as pirates.

We eventually found out how many raccoons there were. I was feeling sick and sleepless one night, and wanted some sympathy from Pa. I got out of bed — it was about two in the morning — and, without turning on the light, I opened the front door to our house. In the moonlight on the slightly raised deck in front of our Boys’ House I saw a number of lumpy plant-like shapes, big and small, each one in a different position, sitting, lying flat, creeping, in dark clusters, eight or ten of them — no, a dozen or more, very calm, a nighttime gathering that did not disperse as I watched. Most of them were still, like a whole collection of stuffed toys. Even when I stamped on the deck boards and clapped my hands they hesitated rather than fled, seeming bewildered to see a stranger on their territory. But when I made more noise, waking Sam, the raccoons tumbled away.

The sight of them startled me into health. I went back to bed. In the morning, breakfast in the main house, I told Pa. He just nodded in his preoccupied way, as though he was pretending to listen. It was around this time that Ma had called. I only heard Pa’s side of the conversation, but I knew it was Ma on the line because, between the miao miao at the other end, Pa was saying, “What do you want?… Haven’t you done enough?… We’re cozy, we’re a unit… Just fine,” and hung up.

But he had heard what I’d reported about the raccoons. He put out some leftovers — tomatoes from yesterday’s sauce — then set his alarm. At two in the morning he went out to see if what I’d said was true. He counted eighteen of them, big and small, and had watched for almost an hour.

“They act as if they own the place!” In a sour and disgusted voice he added, “Some of them standing on their hind legs. A few making babies.”

But what seemed to bother him most was that they hadn’t eaten the carefully cooked tomatoes he’d put out. “Those were heirlooms.” He was insulted that, instead, they’d chewed the cedar shingles on the side wall of his office.

Seeing so many of them made him believe that he could smell them everywhere on the property. “It’s a damp and dungy dead-dog stink that I can’t get out of my nose.”

He stopped the bedtime stories, and the talk about “little families” and “good mother,” and now and then went rigid and sniffed and said, “Coons.” And it got worse. Sam left the garage door open one evening after dumping some household trash. The next day we found the barrels we kept there overturned and the plastic bags torn open and picked through — clamshells, Parmesan cheese rind, kale stems, duck bones, and all the rest of the garbage that reminded me that the raccoons were pawing through Pa’s gourmet food, eating some of it but not touching the tomatoes.

“Get a broom, Sam,” Pa said to the garbage scattered on the floor without any emotion, which meant he was furious.

Out of the blue, at dinner that evening, he straightened his head and spoke to the window. “I hate the mindless punctuality of vermin. I hate it that they’re welfare-fussy.” Then loudly, “If those damn people down the hill hadn’t put up those ugly houses and cut down all the trees, we wouldn’t have this problem. I never minded our coons, but we have all their coons, too!”

Three wild turkeys often strutted in the underbrush during the day and roosted in the trees at night. The raccoons killed all three. They didn’t eat them; they clawed at their feathers and gashed their necks with bites.

“Mugged them,” Pa said. “Consider the spite of a fanatic.”

He bought a trap, which was built like a metal cage, and after a few tries — it was sprung without capturing anything — he caught a fat raccoon. In sunlight it was sleepy and pet-like and shy. Pa loaded it into the back of the van and released it at the marsh four miles down the road.

On the way home, he remembered that he needed an inspection sticker for the van. At the filling station, the mechanic asked about the empty trap. Pa told his story. The mechanic smiled and said, “It’ll find its way back. They’re not stupid.”

This was in the office of the filling station, Pa paying for the sticker. Overhearing him, a woman, also waiting, said, “I just hope it’s not a nursing mother.”

“She rescues raccoons,” the mechanic said, laughing.