Mr. Bones

by Paul Theroux

  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.

  She said, “I’ve missed you boys so much.”

  We told her we’d missed her too, but in a low voice so that Pa wouldn’t hear.

  “I’ve got a job now. I do counseling. I have a full caseload.” She shoved her cuff back from her wrist and looked at her watch. “I’ll have to leave pretty soon.”

  Sam said, “Can we come with you?”

  She saw that I had the same question on my face. She didn’t say anything. She looked up at Pa, who was standing like a sentry with his hand
s behind his back.

  “Take them.” His eyes were weirdly lit, and he was pale and spiky-haired from sleeping all day. “What good are they here? They think it’s all a joke. They don’t realize how much is at stake.” He turned away. “I’ve got my hands full.”

  Without another word, he crossed the lawn and headed back to the house, leaving the lights off, as he did these evenings, so that he was better able to see the animals. When I looked back, I saw him staring with yellow eyes at Ma leading us away from him.

  Mrs. Everest

  ALTHOUGH I WAS not prepared for it—but how could anyone be?—Mrs. Everest introduced me to the work of the artist Felix Gonzales-Torres, specifically a piece composed of about nine dollars’ worth of light fixtures: two bulbs on extension cords twisted together, hung against a bare wall, and plugged into a socket at the baseboard. I expected her to say, “It’s supposed to make you angry.” But Mrs. Everest called it an eloquent depiction of grief.

  “As an artist yourself, you can appreciate the depth of meaning here.”

  I said, “This means absolutely nothing to me”—the wrong answer, because she then told me that she was negotiating to exhibit this genius’s work at her gallery, and I’d been hoping that she’d show my work too.

  Instead of changing the subject, she reminded me of how little I knew by describing another of his works, this one consisting of 175 pounds of wrapped candy heaped against a wall. When I smiled, trying to imagine this, she said, as though to a child, “It represents his friend Ross, who died. That’s how much he weighed. Gallerygoers eat the candy and make him thinner. See?”

  And the extension cords, Untitled (March 5th) #2, one of a series, was said to depict the two men, Gonzales-Torres and his lover, entwined. Mrs. Everest showed me the catalogue entry from a museum where the installation was on view.

  The work is open to a wide range of interpretations—naked and vulnerable, or poignant and warm. The implicit romanticism of the work’s metaphor of two luminous bodies, tempered by the knowledge that at any second one of the bulbs could burn out, with the other left to shine on alone.

  “When I think of luminous bodies, Andy Wyeth’s Helga paintings come to mind.”

  I dared say this because many of my paintings have been compared to those of Andy, who was my friend.

  Pretending to be deaf is a conventional form of passive aggression—Mrs. Everest claimed she could not hear any of my comments, squinted when I repeated them, and instead of answering merely shrugged, implying that they were too banal to address. In what I realized later was her belittling my work, she talked in her odd chewing way about an upcoming show at her gallery, praised—overpraised—the artist, a man who collected and exhibited used footwear, mainly the shoes of industrial workers.

  This is perhaps the place to say that the art she promoted always needed an explanation: you had to be educated in the circumstances of the artist’s life, the jobs, the peculiarities, the miseries. You felt no solitary aesthetic satisfaction in her gallery; instead you were possessed by a faint dizziness of bewilderment. J.M.W. Turner’s long, eccentric life is unknown to the average museumgoer, yet none of Mrs. Everest’s artists could be appreciated until an immense amount of biographical information was supplied as context, something Mrs. Everest was eager to offer, as in, “His lover weighed 175 pounds.” People gathered around the works, discussing the minutiae of the artist’s life.

  My paintings were praised for their impartial realism, but not by Mrs. Everest, who regarded my portraits and landscapes as so self-explanatory as to be banal, the instant gratification of the human face or a cluttered room. My life was not public, my wife’s weight was her secret. I often painted portraits, but my self-portraits I kept to myself. Every picture I’ve done has a history, but I intended each one as complete in itself. Why would you need to know more?

  She smiled at the idea that I was still using a paintbrush, and I suspected she believed that my work lacked depth. She could be severe with people she disapproved of. “I have a mental list of people I want to kill,” Mrs. Everest used to say, and her gargling old-actress voice made her sound more murderous. “Not die a natural death—I want to deal the fatal blow.” She would then name the wished-for victims: a talk-show host, a celebrity humanitarian, a new neighbor, an art dealer—one of her competitors, usually a woman. “Quite a long list. I keep adding to it.”

  We always encouraged her with our laughter. Isabel and I were among her best friends. In the beginning we thought it was a joke, and later it became too awkward to say anything.

  “I’m putting him on my list,” she’d say at a party, and friends like us always knew what she meant.

  We were summer people on the island. When our house was finished and we moved from the mainland, someone said, “Mrs. Everest wants to meet you.” The implication was that I was lucky she was taking an interest. She was prominent on the island, where she spent the season in a house built by one of her ex-husbands—“the third or fourth,” people said. I was told that she thought highly of my work. “Thought highly” was intended as a kind of catnip. Mrs. Everest was a well-known collector, and art dealer. I had never met her. Though I had been successful in my work, I was on the periphery. Her gallery was busy, the openings always packed with people. Until then I had not been exhibited in her gallery nor invited to any parties.

  I knew she dealt in whatever was in vogue in New York City, installations, giant photographs, acrylic artifacts, rusted hubcaps, even color-coded condoms arranged in menacing mandalas. All of this was a far cry from my monoprint etchings and the portraits of, for example, the people who had worked on my house—the carpenters, electrician, plumber, roofers, plasterers—my Workmen series. No one mentioned these pieces; they talked about Mrs. Everest.

  Whispers tend to enlarge the unmet person. She was one of those people who was preceded by an enthusiastic prologue of buildup, someone whom everyone spoke about and quoted—quotes always delivered with force, but so unmemorable you suspect the enthusiast to be somehow in thrall to the person. “You mean you haven’t met her yet?” And then you meet the person and she never quite matches the talk, but you find so much else that no one mentioned, perhaps didn’t notice, and you wonder why, because it doesn’t seem like the same person at all.

  In the case of Mrs. Everest, the quotes were slight but always repeated with gusto, usually how she had been sharp with someone, teased them or dispatched them with a word, the rudeness repeated with a shiver of approval. “She has a list of people she wants to kill.” I smiled and said I couldn’t wait to meet her, but I was also thinking, I don’t get it.

  Then the party came—the Callanders, her friends, a room full of people, a table of food, waiters offering filled wine glasses from trays. A lull in the conversation and glances at the entryway meant that she had arrived. She was greeted by Biff Callander and his wife, Lara. She took a glass of champagne, but didn’t drink—it was an accessory—and she was shown my way.

  No one had said how tiny she was, and misshapen, slightly bent over, almost hunchbacked—probably her age, some sort of fused vertebrae or twisted spine. She was ugly in a startling way, an ugliness that gave her authority, the ruined face, the staring, wide-open blue eyes, the elderly fingers, the walnut-sized rings, putty-like makeup and heavy jewelry, ropes of beads, dangly earrings. She looked like a crone from a folktale—untidy, her hair tousled, her battered suede jacket a poor fit, and she limped a little. No one had mentioned that she was doddery and uncertain, pawing the air as she shuffled along, or that she tried to make this oddness into a kind of majesty.

  I felt a bit sorry for her. She knew she wasn’t beautiful, was no longer young, was noticeably frail.

  The first thing anyone said about her was the predictable reference to her mountainous name. “One of her husbands” was the explanation—at least four of them, all of them out of the picture. You didn’t think of Mrs. Everest with a man. Her best friends called her “Dickie,” though no one asked how she go
t that name.

  By way of greeting, in that first meeting at the Callanders’, she snatched up a platter and said, “Walter Rainbird! Have some cheese!”

  This disarmed me and made me laugh.

  “You’re so much bigger than I expected. I wish I could have you in my gallery.”

  Some people are blunt because they’re shy. Shyness can even turn them into shouters, if sufficiently riled. Then I thought about her forthright remark, and it became ambiguous: Did she mean that she wanted me, or that she couldn’t possibly exhibit my work? Perhaps she was not so blunt after all.

  No one could tell me where Mrs. Everest came from, or her true age, or what her real name was, or how she’d spent her first thirty or so years. She must have been attractive long ago, and being small, still had the pursed lips of a flirt. In the beginning, I asked about her—just wondering aloud. No one would say more than “I really don’t know.”

  I was struck by her defiant opinions. Her confidence extended to her business activities: her gallery with its looks-like-art was a success, and was a vortex for the best parties. She knew her own mind, so I thought, and never hesitated to damn something. “I hate it,” she would often say of anything she regarded as conventional. I guessed that she hated my work. Yet I represented money to her, and though she had perhaps a smaller net worth than her clients, she had the big investor’s sense of insecurity, the wealthy person’s fear that without warning she might lose it all.

  She respected my financial success more than (if I may say so) my artistic achievement. This was the point: I seldom had shows because my pieces were spoken for in advance, not commissioned but sought-after. Always on the lookout for buyers, she habitually cultivated the rich. She tolerated my wife, Isabel; she never mentioned my work. This was a common occurrence in my life: the way my fame made me a magnet for philistines. People wanted to know me for my success rather than my paintings, because I was good at something and made money off it. As time passed I knew fewer and fewer people who were passionate about art, and more and more socialites, many of them Izzy’s friends, as I smiled in the role of a preoccupied spouse, not a painter at all but rather like someone with a secret vice or a private income.