Mr. Bones by Paul Theroux

“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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œServes 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?”
    â€œAway,” 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?”
    â€œThey 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.
    â€œWe’ve got raccoons.”
    â€œI wish I could help,” she said, but she