“It’s the devil, Señor Pay.” Ruiz crossed himself.
“It is not a devil, dammit!” Pilkington roared. “It’s a menace, and I am not gonna put up with it for one more second! To hell with Granny! I’m gonna take care of those damned critters!”
Bob Lerner leaned over the counter of the Club Hardware store and shook his head as Pilkington finished unspooling his litany of woes.
“Sounds like you have a big problem, Ide,” he said. “Raccoons are tenacious little bastards. Once they get the idea you’re feeding them, they come around forever, and they tell their friends.”
“I’ve tried every damned thing I can think of,” Pilkington said. “Nothing works. I’ve tried poison. They don’t take the bait. I’ve tried snares. I’ve tried deadfalls. Got one, that was all. What I need are traps, leg traps.”
Lerner shook his head. “Sorry, Ide. They don’t make ’em any more. They’re brutal as hell. The fish and wildlife people brought me a video on a laptop. It was pretty horrible. What they do to animals—and what animals do to themselves when they get caught in them . . .” He shuddered. “I wouldn’t sell them even if I had them, and I’m a man who doesn’t shrink at shooting deer or gaffing fish every year.”
“But you had some a few seasons ago,” Pilkington protested. He smacked a hand down on a shelf across from the counter. “They were right here.”
“They’re illegal everywhere. I couldn’t sell them.”
“So what did you do with them?”
Lerner shrugged. “Took ’em down to the dump. Good riddance.”
Pilkington eyed him. “Where in the dump?”
Lerner shook his head. “Sorry, buddy, but you’ll have to find another way. I’ll ask around, see if anyone has any ideas. Say, have you thought of putting out a few apples or something? Like a gift to the little people?”
Pilkington felt his jaw drop. “Not you, too, Bob!”
Lerner looked sheepish. “Well, I’ve heard what some of the other guys say when they’ve had a few beers. Doesn’t seem to hurt. Nature’s a funny thing, Ide.”
“I’m not going to let a few raccoons push me around, or one crazy old woman, either. Thanks anyhow.”
Lerner gave him a nod. “Good luck, buddy.”
It didn’t take Pilkington long to figure out where in the “county recycling center” Lerner was accustomed to discarding unwanted merchandise. He drove along the winding passage between buried mounds of trash and sorting stations until he saw a heap of boxes with the Club Hardware logo still on them. Underneath bushels of rotten gaskets and rusty nails he found what he wanted. In spite of their months out in the elements, five of the six toothed, metal bows cranked open and snapped shut like sharks’ jaws. Pilkington regarded them with grim satisfaction. He piled the traps into the back of his pickup under a tarp. He didn’t want anyone to see what he was up to. Lerner was starting to sound like one of them PETA people. Even some of his hunting buddies cringed at anything but a clear kill-shot. What the hell was this county coming to? They weren’t the ones staring bankruptcy in the face. They could mouth morals at him all they wanted, but would they pay his mortgage?
He’d have to wait until dark to put the traps out, then
find an excuse for keeping his workers out of the area where he’d planted them. A few nights of surprises, and the critters would be telling each other to stay away.
The sweet smell always drew the hungry ones. Wriggling meat there was in plenty beneath the soil, frogs in the ponds, fish in the streams, but the raccoons loved sugar. Their sensitive tastebuds, much more than humans’, could appreciate even small amounts in ripening fruit and grain. It took too long to wait for full ripeness. A long winter had melted away the fat stored up under their molting pelts, and a long spring nursing young had left them with insatiable appetites.
Under the moonlight, the rounded shapes with the thick ringed tails held low looked like lines of fat beetles swarming toward their objective. Each female was accompanied by anywhere from one to seven offspring, usually no more than three or four. The baby raccoons, their snubbed ears and tails rounder and shorter than the adults’, had to be reminded to stay within range of their mother. Still, like young of every species, their curiosity led them to sniff their way off the path. With their little black noses, they investigated the stalks of plants, or followed the trail of a slug that had crossed their path sometime earlier in the day. Their mothers summoned them back with snarls or nips. While the parents nosed carefully up and down the heady-smelling plants looking for tomatoes to eat, the litters of babies engaged in wrestling matches with their brothers and sisters, dug up grubs and roots, and tasted anything that came their way with alacrity. In their experience, nothing had ever happened that did more than surprise or momentarily frighten them. Nothing had ever hurt them. Not yet.
SNAP!
A shrill cry from one of the tumbling youngsters
brought one of the browsing females to a halt. She threw up her head, then went running toward the sound.
The rest of her babies were milling around, bleating near the body of one that hung upside down in midair from a metal hoop. It was limp as a hunk of moss. Blood ran down its belly onto the roiled earth beneath. The mother nosed the baby frantically, touching its ears, its nose, the side of its neck, refusing to believe her ears and eyes. It didn’t move. Taking the scruff of its neck in her teeth, she backed away. The body did not come loose. She could not leave her child in this human-smelling thing. She pawed at the metal jaws of the trap. She could not budge them. Her heart pounded and she panted out her panic. What should she do? The rest of her children milled alongside her, fearful that the evil would befall them, too. There were no trees to climb, no burrows to race into. She was their only protection.
She was almost too upset to pay heed to them, but she did not want to lose any more. Where could they go that was safe? It was a long way back to the hollow log that was their home. Should she stay with the dead one or abandon it?
The other raccoons were upset and frightened by the baby’s death. They ran around hysterically, hissing and growling at each other.
SNAP! SNAP! More of the metal teeth leaped out of the earth. One strong young male tried to leap as he felt the soil give beneath his feet, but the jaws closed on his neck. A young female lost part of her tail. An older female, too slow to get away, was crushed between the toothed hoops. Her lone kit ran around, crying, bewildered, and terrified.
At last, the dowager female of the pack took charge. She was the smallest of the adult raccoons, but she
had seen more summers than any of them, being the mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother of all but a few newly arrived males. She chivvied them away from the terrible field. The mother of the dead baby didn’t want to go, but her grandmother herded her away with bites and nips at her back. Her remaining youngsters followed. All the raccoons were shocked and frightened.
The elder female looked back, torn. One male was left alive and struggling in the last trap. He would follow later if he could chew his foot off and escape, but his strength was waning. The others must not stay in case the threat wasn’t gone yet. The raccoons were still hungry, but hunger was not as strong an instinct as fear. They must go back to their safe place, the safest place they knew.
They streamed away over the field, until they could no longer hear the whimpers of the male they had to leave behind.
Pilkington was in the middle of the morning briefing to his employees when Granny, immaculately neat in a pressed pink denim shirt, blue jeans, and rubber boots, got out of her ancient station wagon and marched up to him. The top of her head only reached his breastbone, but he felt he was the one who had to crane his neck back to look at her.
“What do you want?” he growled.
“Give me the bodies,” she said.
Pilkington glanced at the shocked looks on the faces of his men, then turned a stern face to her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Her blue eyes glared at him like a lightning strike. “You ain’t been able to lie to me since you were a child. I know what you’re hidin’. Save me the bother of lookin’
for ’em and makin’ you a bigger fool than you are. Give me the bodies.”
Pilkington felt like marching her back to her car and making her leave, but the farmhands were all looking at him with shocked curiosity on their faces.
He snarled, “Get to work! This is just a pile of crap.”
Sill opened his mouth to say something but snapped it closed when Pilkington scowled at him. He signed to the others to follow him. The Mexicans closed ranks behind, whispering to one another in Spanish.
“Well?” Granny asked. “Perfidy don’t get any better in waiting.”
“You got a lot of nerve coming here and saying something like that in front of my people!”
“Better they know what kind of trash they’re workin’ for,” Granny said. “Take me to the bodies. Right now.”
There was no sense in arguing with her. He took her by the arm and steered her around the side of the hay barn to where the men dumped the organic trash like dead vines and branches they intended to burn. He kicked aside a canvas tarpaulin and stepped aside. He had gotten up before dawn and buried the dead raccoons, traps and all, figuring to set the whole thing on fire. No one would ever know what he had done.
But someone had told her. He refused to believe it could have been the raccoons. Someone must have seen him!
In the nest of rotting hay and leaves, the bodies looked pathetic, not dangerous. The black masks wore a tragicomic aspect. The largest of the trapped animals was a big male. Blood stained the sides of his jaws. His handlike paw was a mass of torn tissue and blood below the teeth of the snare. He must have tried to chew it off before he died. Guiltily, Pilkington recalled what Bob
in the hardware store had said about the video the Fish and Wildlife people had made him watch.
Granny dropped to her knees beside the bodies and keened aloud. She looked up at Pilkington, tears in her eyes.
“O woe unto you, who have sinned against God! Weep for the children! That youngster isn’t more than three months old. Poor little pup. This is the child of the one you killed before.”
“You’re a crazy old woman. You can’t know about wild animals. They can’t talk!”
Granny’s voice was husky. “I know. I know them all. And her! It was her first season out! Your poor wife, may God keep her at his right hand, would have been so ashamed of you!”
Pilkington felt hot fury boiling enough to blind him.
“Now it’s my time to tell you to get off my land, you crazy old bitch!” he roared. “Go on. You saw them. Now, go!”
Granny took her time prizing each trap open flat and easing each of the ragged bodies out. She rose to her feet and looked around. A wheelbarrow was propped against the wall of the barn next to the waste pile. She retrieved it and piled the small corpses in it. Pilkington watched her stonily.
“That was a crime against decency,” Granny informed him, as she settled the last body. “Against Mother Nature herself. You can make amends.”
“I ain’t gonna make amends to a bunch of thieving varmints, and I sure ain’t gonna make them to you.”
“You’re gonna pay for that, you idiotic Ide Pilkington. May God have the mercy on you that you didn’t have on none of His natural creations.”
Pilkington had had about enough of her preaching. “I
don’t care what kind of delusion you have. I gotta make money to make a living, to keep this farm going. If this is what it takes, then I’d do it again.”
Granny regarded him sadly. “We all have to live, unless we forfeit the privilege.”
“Well, that’s what your varmints did.” Pilkington let righteous indignation overwhelm the chill he felt. “They uprooted my plants. I had to make them stop. Well, they stopped. Now, get out of here. We might be neighbors, but we ain’t friends.”
Granny shook her head sadly. “You could’ve lived in harmony, Ide Pilkington. Your pop would have been so ashamed of you. It’s a good thing he’s dead.”
“Don’t you dare talk about my father,” he exclaimed. “He shot plenty of critters.”
“No. He never laid a baby to rest that did no one harm. He never destroyed nothin’ that wasn’t mad or an outright danger. You’re a disgrace, and I am sorry you set your own destruction in motion.” She picked up the handles of the barrow and started back to her car.
Pilkington shook a hand at her. “You try anything, and I will sue you for every inch of land you have.”
Granny didn’t even look back. “You talk big about the land, but you don’t understand what’s important about it. I feel sorry for you. Goodbye, Ide. I think this is the last time we’ll meet on this earth.”
Granny had to dig the grave herself, as none of the night-walking animals would be out for hours. She made the hole big enough for all the critters, so they wouldn’t get lonesome in the twilight, until they went back to nature. She picked up the baby. It fit in her two outspread hands like a puppy. Gently, she settled it into the hollow of the young female’s body. They weren’t mother and child, but they were kin. It would do.
The hardest one to soothe to sleep was the male with his mangled paw. His mask was twisted into a rictus of agony. Granny stroked his forehead before closing his eyes.
“Good night, children. You’re safe here, I swear it.”
She went to stand over the other grave and folded her hands together.
“I am sorry from my heart you don’t get to sleep, but that youngster who died was one of yours. I figure I got to give you the chance. I’d prefer you rested in peace, but that’s your decision to make. Do what you feel is right. If you leave it be, so will I.” She opened her hands. A globe of milky light dropped from them and landed on the patch of earth. It began to sink in like oil. It would take some time until her question could find that wandering spirit, but vengeance was just. She had to lay the truth before God and let nature take its course.