Mr. Bones

by Paul Theroux

  “I’m glad you called,” Grace said. I could hear music in the background and a man talking excitedly, a fishbowl babble, aqueous party voices. I started to cry but she interrupted me with a real hard voice. “Everything I did was legal. Mother gave me power of attorney. I never want to see you again. And you will never undo it.” Unfortunately for me, that was true.

  Giulio and Paulie

  Giulio was recommended to me as a hard worker, a good man, very skillful in all sorts of building. This proved to be the case. When I praised him, he said, “I come from Sicily. We build the whole house there—foundation, brickwork, framing, plastering, carpentry, roofing, shingles, tiling, plumbing.” He could do anything. He worked one whole summer, first brickwork, then replacing shingles, then glazing the cracked windows, then painting—every job I’d put off at last getting done.

  He was seventy-seven years old. He asked for $40 an hour—a lot of money, the weekly bills were high—but he earned it.

  After the second week, he brought his son Paulie, a big, boyish fellow of forty-three, tattooed, potbellied, very funny, not a good worker but strong. He could heave the big sacks of cement, he dug holes, he lugged the bricks. He was also to get $40 an hour, but some days he didn’t show up. “He’s goofing around,” “He’s sick,” “He’s sleeping,” Giulio would say, seeming both dignified and somewhat ashamed of having to make excuses.

  Then, one day: “Paulie’s in jail.” It turned out he’d been in jail before, spent several years inside for theft, credit-card fraud, and receiving stolen goods. What astonished me was the contrast between father and son: the honest old man, so talented and hardworking; the lazy son, who was a petty thief and a druggie.

  Time passed, Paulie stayed in jail, but as I got to know Giulio better, I realized that he was cheating me on his time sheet, charging me for tools he bought or broke, not quite truthful about the work, carelessly hiding the scrap wood and the mistakes, a subtle thief. And I began to see, first faintly, then powerfully, how prideful Giulio the sly worker was more like Paulie the jailbird than anyone could ever guess.

  Bigot on Vacation

  I left my small village in Norway as a young man—I was hardly seventeen—and became a student in the USA, first in Michigan, where I had an aunt and uncle, then in Massachusetts, where I attended MIT and where I eventually settled. My life’s work has been in developing radar sensitivity—defense work, but I justify it to myself by saying that I was creating a shield, not weapons of destruction. This was not entirely true. Missiles are guided by radar. In this work, my colleagues were from India, Pakistan, China, Korea, Japan, and many other countries. I must emphasize the diverse nationalities and how well we got along—it is important to this story.

  I lived through the 1960s in the USA, working on defense projects. Of course, I was seen as one of the bad guys. I married an American, raised two children. I am proud of the life I have made here. My interests are sailing, skiing, and gardening. I am now retired—a happy man.

  Here is the strange part. About every four years I go back to my village, which is near Bergen. It is always a horrible visit. I become enraged when I see what has happened. It has gotten so bad that I dread going home. The visits disturb me, because I see that I am a bigot. My lovely village is now the residence of Pakistanis, Indians, Africans, Vietnamese—brown people, who have come there as refugees, so called, because Norwegians are so happy to provide houses and welfare.

  When I was a boy, we had one religion, one language, one culture—one race. Now it’s a filthy mess. Skullcaps, shawls, smells. There is crime. So many languages. A mosque! A temple! Not refugees but opportunists. I am so angry when I am there: my lovely village spoiled. I think I will never go back again. I know I am a bigot there, and I hate myself when I am home.

  Mrs. Springer, Old-Timer

  Mrs. Springer, a longtime resident of our facility, was born in 1900. She was vain about the date, being the same age as the century. She clearly remembered the First World War. “I was at school. The school bell rang when the war ended, and we were given the day off.” She remembered talk of Al Capone and Prohibition, the Great Depression and Lindbergh’s flight. She was married to a science-minded German, living in Munich when the Second World War started. Her husband’s family was wealthy—Springer was their name. She volunteered for war work, knitting socks. She told us all her stories. She had met Hitler. “He had very fine hands, small and pale, like a woman’s.”

  She became a refugee after the war. She went to Los Angeles; her husband followed her later, and he became a metallurgist for Hughes Tool Company. He died. She lived alone a few years and then entered our facility.

  We went to her ninetieth birthday party. We predicted that she would live to be a hundred. She accomplished this, but it was a decade of failing health. She lost most of her hearing. Her sight dimmed. At her hundredth she needed to be steered to the cake. We shouted for her to blow out the candles, but she couldn’t hear us or see the candles. Even so, she smiled and said it was a great day.

  Her hundred-and-first she spent in her room. We were away a lot after that, and each time we got back, we were surprised to see her still alive. Her other friends were less attentive too, even a little irritated when they had to run an errand for Mrs. Springer. We missed her hundred-and-second birthday. That year I saw her once. It seemed inconvenient and somewhat unfair, her living into another century. Her nurse called and complained that no one bought her medicine anymore. Her son died, not of any specific cause. “He was getting on,” someone said.

  We forgot about Mrs. Springer, we guessed she had died, and we were astonished to hear that she had a hundred-and-fourth birthday. We were not invited. Only her nurse, her cleaning woman, and—somehow—the plumber were there. She kept to her room. People said she was alert, that she asked about elections and the weather. No one visited her. We were embarrassed and, I’m sorry to say, a bit bored by her, and none of us saw her again until her funeral.

  The Cruise of the Allegra

  It was my first winter cruise. I was a waiter on the Allegra, most of the passengers well-to-do people who spent part of the winter cruising in the warm waters of the Pacific, from Puerto Escondido to Singapore and back, including stops in Australia and New Zealand. That winter we stopped along the South American coast too, from Guayaquil to Santiago, and then to Hawaii via Easter Island. Often the passengers did not bother to go ashore—just stayed on deck and looked at the pier and drank and made faces.

  Ed and Wilma Hibbert avoided the others. They were in their mid- to late seventies, from Seattle. Always dined alone, did not socialize, Ed very attentive to Wilma, who seemed the frail type. I heard whispers. “Snobs,” “Stuffed shirts,” “Pompous,” “Cold.” They must have heard them too.

  Wilma fell ill at Callao, stayed in her suite, and was taken to a hospital in Lima, where she died. Ed Hibbert left the Allegra but did not vacate his suite. His table was empty until Honolulu, where he rejoined the ship.

  And then the invitations began, one widow after another inviting him to dinner, to drinks, to the fancy-dress ball. They were not amateurs but persistent and alluring seducers.

  Amazingly, Ed obliged. He seemed to welcome the attention, not like a bereaved spouse at all but like the most discriminating bachelor. The same women who had made demeaning remarks now praised him and competed for his affection. And I had the feeling that in obliging them, dallying with them, without committing himself, he was having his revenge, perhaps revenge on his wife, too.

  He went on two more cruises, same routine, didn’t remarry.

  Eulogies for Mr. Concannon

  I did not know Dennis Concannon. I was invited to his funeral by a friend of his son’s who needed a ride. As it was a rainy day and I had nothing else to do, I stayed for the service, sitting in the back. The whole business was nondenominational, according to Mr. C’s wishes. The turnout was very large—the church was filled. A reading of his favorite poem, by Robert Frost, with the memorable l
ine “That withered hag.” Several sentimental songs. Then the eulogies. One man got up and said, “I never met anyone else like Dennis. I worked for him for almost twenty-five years, and in all that time he didn’t even buy me a cup of coffee.” He went on—people laughed.

  A woman: “I used to tremble whenever I was called to his office. I never knew whether he was going to make a pass at me or fire me.”

  Another man: “The salesmen put in their expense reports that they’d had their cars washed. ‘Salesmen have to have clean cars.’ But Dennis said, ‘This was the fourteenth of last month. I compared the car washes to the weather report. It was raining that day. I’m not paying.’”

  Someone else: “His partner, George Kelly, would be sitting next to him at some of the meetings. One would talk. Then the other, but saying the same thing. It was terrible. We called it ‘Dennis in Stereo.’”

  There were more speakers, with equally unpleasant stories of this man. At the end of the funeral I knew Dennis Concannon as a mean, unreasonable, bullying bastard who had gotten rich by exploiting and intimidating these people, the attendees at his funeral—not mourners but people who were having the last word.

  Neighbor Islands

  1. Erskine: A Human Sandwich All Hamajang

  This was all twenty-some-odd years ago. What I remember is the sound from my front door, which was shut, just off the lanai, the underwater murmur of voices from a TV set inside the house, and my thinking, We don’t have a TV set.

  I’d been making the run to Hanalei to see my deputy there, on a weekly basis, always on the same day, a Thursday. He was an officer named Barry Moniz, the chief’s cousin, the one who had fished the key of coke out of Hanalei Bay. Usually we talked sports and went over his paperwork. But his voice sounded strange.

  “Ho, get flu, brah. No can talk.”

  So I was home three hours early. From where I stood, hearing those gurgly voices, I could see across the sitting room that Kanoa’s door was shut, the kid probably asleep. Even though I’m trained to be suspicious, I was at my own front door, which smacked when I closed it. The voices stopped. Normally I slipped off my shoes to enter the house, but instead I took out my service revolver.

  The house was very quiet with a holding-your-breath stillness, and the ticking of Verna’s auntie’s old clock was like timing the silence. I kept to the carpet for stealth reasons and walked through the sitting room to our bedroom door, which was not completely shut but ajar, just a crack of light showing.

  I waited about eight seconds, hearing nothing, considering my options, then took a defensive position by the doorjamb and kicked the door open. There on the bed was Verna with two individuals, both men, all of them naked, and they froze like statues.

  The overhead light made their skin very pale, except the men’s forearms, indicating to me they were employed out of doors. This was also a warning of their physical strength, in the event of resistance. They were half hiding their faces in fear, but I could see—studying them, because I had the gun—that they were a lot younger than Verna.

  With those stacked-up bodies of this crazy pile, like kids, and my Glock on them, I could have let off one round and gotten all three, like a 9-millimeter toothpick, right through the human sandwich, all hamajang, except that was my wife in the middle.

  Not a sound came from them. They were barely breathing. I didn’t say anything—didn’t have to. I was aiming at them and in my uniform, even wearing my hat, thinking, This is at least fifteen years in Halawa maximum security before all my appeals are heard and I finally explain my way out. And who are these guys? I’d have to take out all three, unless I separated them and killed them execution style, an idea that was going through my head, with my story, “I saw the hapa-haole guy move his hands in a manner consistent with going for one weapon,” but their nakedness weakened the alibi.

  And I loved this woman. She was weak, always saying “I so kolohe,” such a fool, and younger than me, but up to that time my best friend.

  In police work, in a tight spot, with no backup and not sure of your ground, or don’t want to hurt bystanders, you shout, curse, threaten, “Let me see you hands, you fricken lolo!” and all that. But I was not in a tight spot. I was home, looking at my naked wife with two naked men, and smelled—what?—dope smoke and that sex smell of funky sashimi. Since I had the gun, and they were silent and I wasn’t talking, I had time to think.

  In the silence like a buzzing fly, not a single word, even as I leveled the gun. But the very act of aiming, and the silence, concentrated my mind and made the whole encounter so serious I saw clearly I could not do it.

  I holstered my gun, walked out of the house, drove to my office, slept there that night, and the next day went to the chief’s office.

  “Eh, here my badge.”

  Chief Moniz said, “Skinny, I won’t let you do that,” and handed the badge back to me.

  “I quit, brah. Pau already.”

  “’Sap to you,” he said. But he made a disagreeing face. Then he praised me. “You one real shtrick buggah but you real shtrong.”

  And he begged me to ask him why. I told him everything.

  “Ho, hamajang, brah! Dey no more shame or what. No even close da light!”

  I remembered that one of the men was wearing a baseball cap backward, and I mentioned that too because it bothered me. The chief just shook his head. He said he’d transfer me to the Big Island. Why should I lose my whole pension over a messy domestic?

  Next day the house was empty. I picked up some things and flew to Hilo.

  2. Moniz: One Futless Wahine

  I had known about the whole shibai for a year or more. I was relieved when Erskine gave the reason he was turning in his gun and his badge, because I expected something a lot worse: I’d braced myself for him killing his wife and our losing him, probably the straightest cop we’d ever had. I hadn’t told him about Verna, because it seemed to me that it would send him over the edge, and we’d lose him, or he might go at anyone for telling him.

  “I geevum dirty lickings!” kind of thing.

  I’d hired Erskine when he was a young man, not knowing if a haole could do police work on an island like this. His father, from the mainland, was a hell-raiser. Erskine was closer to his mother. He might have turned out to be a hell-raiser himself—some of them do, from those households—but he was the opposite; and as the years passed he became more and more severe. He even gave the mayor a speeding ticket once. I said, “Skinny, why you so shtrick?”

  “To serve and protect. No exceptions.” And his eyes went dead. “Bodda you?”

  I kind of laughed, but it was a moving violation and the mayor’s insurance company was not too happy. Mottoes are scary expressions, and so is No exceptions.

  I had complaints, not because he was lazy, like the others, but because he was so straight. No exceptions meant a citation to a float with a bad brake light in the Kamehameha Day parade; it meant a night in jail for the man who flipped him the bird, and that man had fought in Vietnam, two tours.

  “Brah, da buggah just bool-liar,” I said.

  “Disorderly conduck,” Erskine said.

  No TV at his house. “If I get, I smash um already.”

  “Why you worry about one TV?”

  “Tings,” he said.

  “What tings? Humbug tings?”

  “Stuffs,” he said.

  He was still living at home, his father having had a seizure, face turned black, and died. His mother lived another ten years, and she died—lupus. At the age of fifty-two Erskine married Verna, who was barely twenty, and she was a local wahine.

  The exception in his life, from Kekaha way, near the landfill, Verna had grown up in a trailer, her father calling himself a scrap dealer, which meant rusty cars in the front yard. She was wild and didn’t make it through high school.

  Erskine must have met her at her dad’s trailer, one of the many domestics he’d been called there for, or might have seen her at Barking Sands, where the kids hung
out. Verna was a handful, but Erskine was not fazed by any situation, and she might have had father issues, since she had affairs with older men. They got drugs and alcohol for her in return for favors. I know that to be a fact.

  She was a little lolo, but “a little lolo” often describes a passionate woman. She was living in Erskine’s family home, sleeping in the bed where Erskine’s mother died, no TV, and eventually a keiki, Kanoa. But aimless, as she said—futless.

  “You futless?”

  “I stay so futless awready.”

  The story was, the kid wasn’t Erskine’s. Erskine didn’t do his homework, or wasn’t doing it very well, because it got around that anyone who knocked at the door when Erskine was at the station would get a friendly welcome, no matter who. And if they had something on board, like killer buds, Verna was like, “Eh, we burn.”

  Drugs are the sickness of this island. Everyone either has them or knows where to get them. It didn’t help that when Erskine and my nephew Barry had seized some controlled substance after hours, Erskine stored it at home, because Erskine didn’t trust his fellow officers. Verna knew that. The famous key of coke floating in Hanalei Bay ended up at his place.

  The key of coke was the start of it all. But Verna would also be happy with a couple of OxyContins ground to powder and used as a suppository, don’t ask me how I know. No TV! One futless wahine, who would say to me, “Skinny think my okole too big. What you tink?” There is only one answer.

  Erskine didn’t know the name of the two kids with Verna that night. One was Ledward Ho, the other Junior—most people knew, I certainly did—Ledward a meth addict with rotten teeth as a result, and Junior had more acid in his system than a car battery. Big-wave surfers gone bad.