Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

“And what do we have here?” he said, staring up at the roofers.

His eyes were dark in the daytime and yellowish at night, something I had never noticed before. They were black now as he spoke to someone on the phone: “You sent me Brazilians. I don’t want fruit pickers. I don’t want illegals!”

The frightened men crept away, carrying their ladder. Other workers came in white overalls. The roof cost seven thousand dollars to fix.

“And you want to protect them! You and that crazy old lady with the animal shelter!”

We said we didn’t, we were afraid, and his meals made us anxious. “Coq au vin,” our father said angrily. “Potatoes dauphinoise.” And in the same breath, “What if they get inside? They’ll crawl into your room and eat your face while you’re asleep. You’re a delicacy to a coon.”

Sam began to cry and said, “I hate them.”

“That’s more like it. That’s what I want to hear. Henry?”

He knew I was resisting him. And so, when he discovered that some raccoons had torn out a board from under the threshold of the side door and were living in the Boys’ House basement, he said, “Henry’ll take care of it.”

He set me to work emptying the basement of lawn chairs and chewed life vests and clawed-open cushions and piles of black scat, so much of it that I thought I’d come down with the pinworm disease. I stopped hating Pa for his cruelty and began hating the raccoons for making me do this filthy job.

Thanksgiving came and went. At Christmas, Pa said, “I was going to make herbed turkey again, with oysters. Savory yam purée soufflé. Stuffed mushrooms — breadcrumbs, cream cheese, and Parmesan. But I’m just roasting a bird and mashing some spuds. You can do the rest.”

The phone rang. We knew who it was.

“Let it ring.”

Emptying the trash that night in the garage, I felt the hot doggy stink of wet fur against my face. We had an old Jeep, Pa’s favorite vehicle, for summer rides. I saw that two raccoons were asleep under the back seat. I knew what he’d say. I opened the garage door and pushed the Jeep into the dark driveway.

Pa saw me from an upstairs window and was soon beside me, carrying his rifle. When he poked the animals with the barrel they shrank deeper under the seat.

I said, “They’ll go away if we leave them. After midnight.”

“You think that’s a solution. To let them sneak out of the Jeep. But they won’t go away. They never go away. They’ll stay and have babies. Where will that leave us?” He raised the rifle but didn’t fire it. “How can I? This vehicle is a classic.”

The next day, in sunlight, they were gone. Yet we knew there were too many of them to trap, that we’d never get rid of them. Knowing they were around made us fear Pa the more. Pa got pleasure out of killing them, even if he wasn’t winning. He said that he’d find ways of making them die slowly — poisoning them, dunking them in a three-quarters-full barrel of water and watching them exhaust themselves, starving them in the trap. “Know what? I’d like to crucify one.”

He had one subject only. He’d strike up conversations with strangers just to hear their views on raccoons. “Got any coons over your way?” Or, instead of “coons,” he’d say “vermin” or “bandits.” If they didn’t agree with him, he raged.

“Everything is sorcery,” he said one morning. His eyes were reddish. He hadn’t slept. He’d stayed awake at night to spy on the animals. He’d begun keeping raccoon hours. “Business. Law. Religion. All sorcery.” He took a deep breath. I thought he was going to cry. He said, “And all of this.”

Until now he’d kept Ma away — refused her calls or put the phone down. But one night after dinner, we heard him say, “You again,” in the whisper we recognized from before.

I signaled to Sam to duck down by the window. We couldn’t see him, but we could hear him clearly.

“You think I don’t know you’re back,” he said. “But I do. I could smell you before I saw you, and now you think you’re going to take over the house while I stand idly by.”

We became hopeful. Ma was home. He was talking with the bullying confidence of a lawyer, facing the darkness outside the screen door where a shadow was apparent.

“You think I’m just going to throw my hands up and surrender after all the work I’ve done,” he said. “It’s not going to happen. I warn you — I’m dangerous.”

Fearing for Ma, we crept around the house to the door, and it was then we saw the masked face and the snout and the greasy fur.

He made sketches for a complicated mobile trap that was built into our van, that would lure them inside, and once they were inside he’d poison them and drive them to the dump. “Efficiency.” He knew, as we did, that they were intelligent: they could smell a trap, and they were smarter in their way than Pa. And sometimes it seemed as though they knew that Pa was after them and they were deliberately targeting him as a result, out of pure spite — chewing his chairs, fouling his vehicle, clawing the weatherstripping at his office door.

They were a nuisance, but Pa called them evil, and in his frustration and fear he seemed worse. All that the raccoons knew was what raccoons knew, but Pa had the advantage of being a whole man, a once powerful attorney. He’d lost interest in investing, or maybe the investors had lost interest in him. Sam and I didn’t pity him anymore. He slept in his chair during the day and stayed up at night, monitoring his traps, and he’d stopped his gourmet cooking, or any cooking.

“I eat anything that fits into my mouth.”

He woke up after we got home from school. “You can fix yourselves something. Just don’t make a mess.” But the house was always messy, and the outside was booby-trapped. He did not repair the clawed shingles or bitten doorframes anymore. He wanted them as proof, he said, to justify his methods.

One of his cuff links went missing. “They like shiny things.” He believed that a raccoon had taken it, and his keys too, when he couldn’t find them.

I tried to recall our first sight of the raccoons, as furry masked cuddly creatures. But I couldn’t. I could only see them as vicious and bewildered and pathetic, like Pa.

Sam stumbled into a trap and sprung it and cut his leg on the sharp metal edge.

“Serves you right,” Pa said. “Now I have to set it again.”

One winter day Pa’s chair creaked as he sat up straight. He had been sleeping but heard something, a car in the driveway. He squinted as though a raccoon was approaching, and he eyed Ma slipping out of the car as if he had eyed an animal.

When she came inside the house, he said, “Where’s your friend?”

“Away,” she said. “For various reasons.” We hadn’t seen her for a year. She was wearing a warm fleece jacket that we recognized, and ski pants, and sturdy shoes. But her face was sad and pale, and she seemed uneasy. “What’s that funny smell?”

“They have scent glands in their armpits,” Pa said.

She hugged us, and when I felt her arms I could tell she was thinner. She pressed her head against us as if in prayer, then said, “Let’s go outside.”

The day was still and cold, ice crusts on the brown grass, frozen dewdrops on the dead leaves, an animal smell in the windless air.

“We’ve got raccoons.”

“I wish I could help,” she said, but she looked nervous.

Pa had followed us out to the gravel path. He said, “Everyone’s got raccoons. You’d just make it worse.”

Ma stared at him, surprised, as though seeing a stranger. That was not the sort of thing he’d ever said to her before. He was awarded custody because he was kind, reasonable, helpful, forgiving — nurturing, was how he put it to the judge. But he had a thin, mean face now, dimly lit and sunken eyes, unshaven cheeks, and discolored teeth. Normally he would not have been awake at this time. Ma had disturbed him.