Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

“There’s too many of them,” Pa said.

“Too many people, you mean,” the woman said.

“They have diseases.”

“People have diseases!”

“Whose side are you on?” Pa said.

The woman had been sitting quietly, but now, blinking in anger, she looked insulted and hurt. She said, “I have a shelter for them. I care for them. They are living creatures. Killing them is cruel.”

Pa said, “Maybe it would be cruel if I were killing them without a reason.”

The woman had been reaching into her bag and stirring the contents. She took out a leaflet and gave it to Pa and left in a hurry. She said, “I know who you are”—probably because of the well-known child custody case. Pa opened the leaflet, a brochure for her animal shelter, where she was shown nursing a baby raccoon with a nipple bottle.

The raccoon he’d let go at the marsh returned to our house, as the garage man had predicted. Pa knew that because he caught it again in his trap. He said it was not a boar; it was the mother raccoon. He released it even farther away, on the far side of the highway. Then he went to the Town Hall with Sam and me, and talked to the wildlife control officer to ask for advice.

The man in Fish and Game wore a khaki shirt with epaulets, a brass badge on his pocket. He looked like a scoutmaster, his hair a buzz cut we called a wiffle. He said, “There’s a two-hundred-dollar fine for what you did.”

“What did I do?”

“You moved it. Against the law.”

“Oh, right. I’m illegal. They’ve got rights.”

“Section twenty. Relocation of wildlife. That’s an offense.”

“You’re protecting coons?”

“We’re too busy for that. Coyotes are the real problem,” the man said. “But raccoons out in the daytime might have rabies.”

“What if I catch a rabid one?”

“You could call us. Or you could deal with it the way we do. Which is destroy the animal. You employing a suitable trap?”

“Yes. A kind of cage trap.” Pa smiled unhappily. “Sometimes I bait it with squashed tomatoes. They don’t eat them. Fussy!”

“Omnivores. Eat anything that fits in their mouth. But the acid in tomatoes doesn’t agree with them. Use peanut butter on crackers.” The man stood to give himself room to explain with gestures. He pushed up his khaki sleeves and said, “Get yourself a barrel. Yay big. Fill it to the brim with water. Making sure the trap is well sprung, immerse the trap containing the animal in the filled barrel. Problem solved.”

The sight of a pop-eyed clawing raccoon fighting for its life, drowning at the top corner of a mostly sunken trap, was something Pa wanted us to see. What I saw was that it is a silent animal except in desperation, and the gagging sounds it made, of hissing and harsh gasping, baring its yellow dog-like teeth, terrified me. It clutched at the cage with hands like mine, black fingers hooked in the mesh.

“Bobby,” I said.

Pa scowled at me, then turned and watched with satisfaction, seeming to relax, as the animal died and sank in its own bubbles, and that night, much happier, Pa made one of his special meals, short ribs, serving the dark meat with, “It’s a delicacy.” But I couldn’t eat, and Sam hardly touched his. Pa said, “All the more for me.”

He reported what he’d done to the wildlife control officer, who said, “Could have had pinworm. Roundworm. You don’t want that. Your raccoon is a host to a lot of parasites.”

And he explained that anyone breathing the dust from the scat of an infected raccoon might die a horrible death from organ failure. Pa bought rubber gloves and a mask and acid, and he went after the scat, scouring it from the decks. After that, whenever someone questioned him for killing the raccoons, he showed his teeth and said, “Pinworm!”

We should have been glad that Pa had something to care about, to take his mind off Ma, but his mood got darker as the raccoons became harder to trap. Judging from the scat piles and the scratch marks, they were just as numerous. Infuriated, muttering “They don’t like tomatoes,” Pa would bait a trap with the remains of one of his meals — herb-crusted salmon, the pounded lobster shells he’d used for the bisque — and the raccoons would eat them without tripping the door latch of the trap, or worse, would trip it without being caught.

“In effect, by sheltering them and feeding them my own food I’ve made them lazier,” he said. “They think they belong. They are eating my house. They do no work. They are living off my labor.”

He put out poison in a dish. They ate it all — rat poison heaped like the pellets and crumble we had fed the wild turkeys. Within a week, the dungy dead-dog smell hung over the deck. We had to pry up the boards to locate the corpses of the raccoons that had hidden themselves under the deck to die.

The animals seemed to fight back. The ones that Pa had poisoned we buried in the garden, but they were dug up and eaten, torn apart by other raccoons. In the stink, the flies, Pa, flailing with his shovel, hissed, “Cannibals.”

We saw more of them in the daytime. “Rabid!” They climbed onto the roof and crept down the chimney. One rainy November day we saw across the yard some wet raccoons, their heads poked above the chimney of Pa’s office, staring down at us.

We didn’t tell Pa. In the past we would have alerted him, but now we knew that he’d stiffen and howl, he’d hurry the meal, burn the croutons, forget the sauce, collapse the soufflé, or else he’d serve us leftovers. Yesterday’s mac and cheese looks the same, but the leftovers of a gourmet meal are unrecognizable and garbage-like. If we objected, he’d insist that we were at war and demand that we help him. He wanted us to be like him. So: we saw evidence of raccoons all the time — scat, scratch marks, chewings — but we became secretive and didn’t say anything.

Sam said in the dark, “I miss Ma.”

I said, “She’s with her friend.”

One night, to cheer ourselves up, we played “Shanghai Lil” on the wind-up.

The door flew open and Pa came in and snatched the phonograph arm so hard he dragged the needle across the record.

“That’s enough of that!”

This was like an invasion: he’d never come into the Boys’ House before. He must have been crouched outside, listening in the dark. But at midnight?

Pa began fighting with the neighbors, and the talk became abusive. He got estimates for a perimeter fence. But when the salesman from the fence company heard what the fence was for, he said, “They’ll climb it. They’d get over it even if it were twenty feet high. They’ll tunnel under it. Hey, I want to sell you a fence, but no fence will keep them out. Fences are porous.”

Pa sent him away, and the next raccoon he caught he kept in the cage, starving it until it could barely move. Then he released it, and when it stumbled he killed it, hacking it with the blade of a shovel.

He bought a powerful air gun. He unpacked it and unfolded the leaflet of directions. “ Cette arme n’est pas un jouet, ” he read. “ La supervision d’un adulte est requise. That’s me. All we need is a coon.” He tried out the gun on the next one he trapped, but the animal cringed, clutched itself, and buried its head in its fur. And didn’t die. Then Pa bought a.22 rifle and fired through the mesh of the trap until the animal was motionless and leaking.

But he knew he was losing. He had been so busy with the raccoons he neglected the usual chores. It was well into fall and he forgot to remove the screens from the sliders. The raccoons clawed and tore holes in them. When Pa got the bill for the repairs to the screens he lectured us loudly on loyalty and vigilance.

In the cold weather, climbing the tree next to the Boys’ House, raccoons got onto the back roof and clawed and chewed the shingles, trying to get into the attic. Pa cut down the tree and called a contractor to send some men over to reshingle the roof.