Mr. Bones

by Paul Theroux

  “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.”

  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.

  “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 e
nough 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.

  “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!”