Mr. Hunter's Backyard Our grade-schooler team had lost nine straight capture-the-flag games to the neighborhood middle schoolers, and Zeb had spent a total of twelve hours in their jail. It wasn’t his fault. He was only in first grade, and he’d always get too excited and run to get their flag right away, but he’d always get caught since he ran with a pigeon toe. So our team captain (me) sent our alpha-force squadron (my other younger brother, Carter, and me) to ask Mr. Hunter if we could cut through his backyard. The middle school jail was a little ways behind his back fence, and they’d never expect us to cut through his backyard to rescue Zeb, especially since everyone knew our dad had forbidden us from talking to Mr. Hunter ever since he invited all the home school kids to his house for a pajama party. But it was my job to take care of Zeb, and he had been in jail today for four hours straight. “I would love nothing more than to have all you kids playing in my backyard,” Mr. Hunter said when we knocked on his door. He was wearing flannel pajamas. I almost ran for it. “But it’s unsafe. Entropy’s come undone back there.” I started walking backwards off his porch, telling him thank you and not to worry about it. But Carter didn’t say that. “We’ll go around it,” Carter said. “Around the undone entropy.” “It’s not exactly something you can go around,” Mr. Hunter said. “It’s more of a loophole in the second law of thermodynamics, from what I can tell. Actually, if you kids want to come inside, I’ll pour you a cup of tea while you take a gander at it from the back porch.” Even Carter knew to say no to that. Carter’s extreme. One time he tried four times to jump his bike over the pond, and he didn’t even cry when he broke his collar bone. But even he wouldn’t go into Mr. Hunter’s house. He did stay on the porch though, even though I was saying we needed to go home for dinner. Carter said Zeb was more important than dinner. While we were standing there Mr. Hunter said we should take a seat. So we sat on the bottom steps, as far away from him as we could. “See, normally,” he said, “normally if you have something, like a cool toy, like a Tickle Me Elmo, over time it gets ruined. It breaks, the red color turns pink, the batteries die. That’s because of the second law of thermodynamics. Care for some licorice?” Carter said no, so I had to say yes. Mr. Hunter pulled a stick of black licorice from his pocket. It tasted like bike tire. I had no idea what a Tickle Me Elmo was. “But in my backyard,” Mr. Hunter said, “it’s just the opposite. Your Tickle Me Elmo would get better. The colors would get brighter, the batteries would charge up. Let’s see, do you guys have an old toy or anything you don’t really want?” For our flag in capture-the-flag, we used an old T-shirt no one wore because it had a picture of a pile of soccer and baseballs and said “any balls, any time.” We had hidden it in one of the mailboxes across the street. I ran over, pulled it out, and gave it to Mr. Hunter. “So normally,” he said, holding the shirt up, “an old T-shirt like this, as classy as it is, is just going to get older and more faded, get holes in it, and then you throw it away. But wait just one minute.” He walked inside the house. While we had been talking to him, the middle schoolers had ransacked our territory and put all our teammates in jail. Our team sucked without the Alpha Force. But since the middle schoolers hadn’t been able to find our flag, they had taken our bikes hostage and were jumping them off the curb. One of the seventh graders, Zeke, was riding Zeb’s little-kid bike. It was way too small for Zeke, and he looked like a circus clown, his knees almost hitting his chin as he pedaled. He bunny-hopped it off the curb and landed hard on Zeb’s front wheel. It didn’t break, but it bent almost in half, like a taco. “That was Zeb’s bike, losers,” I yelled at them as they ran off. Everyone liked Zeb. All the neighborhood kids were cool to him, like he was one of the wheelchair kids at school, except Zeb wasn’t retarded. He just didn’t talk. He never learned how, and the speech therapist at school told Dad that Zeb was probably too old to start now. But I was still going to try to teach him. When Mr. Hunter came back he had a new T-shirt, like one straight from the store, without any holes in it. It even looked ironed. But it still had the same picture and words. Carter asked where our shirt went, and Mr. Hunter told him this was our shirt, our shirt after it had gone through his backyard. “Big whoop,” Carter said. “I bet you just have your grandma back there with a sewing machine and an iron, and you had her fix it really fast.” “Exactly,” Mr. Hunter said. “My backyard is like a human in that way. Humans take in broad things like food and air, and turn them into specific things, like music and math and novels and brand-new T-shirts. Just then Zeb walked up, sucking on a leaf. He must have figured out that he didn’t have to stay in jail since the game was over. Good for him. He sat down in Mr. Hunter’s front lawn, which still had white paint on the grass from the time Mr. Hunter painted his lawn like a soccer field, goals and everything, to try to get the neighbor kids to play on it. “So what if we threw a person into the backyard?” Carter asked. “Then would we get all that food and air back?” But right then it really was time for us to go home for dinner. Dad was yelling for us, so we ran from Mr. Hunter’s porch before Dad came looking for us and found out we were talking to Mr. Hunter. Carter grabbed his bike and pedaled down the hill while I checked to see if Zeb’s bike was still rideable. No luck. So I set Zeb on my bike, his feet not even touching the pedals, and let him coast down the hill while I carried his broken bike home. “Come back and play any time,” Mr. Hunter yelled after us. While we were taking off our shoes on the porch, I reminded Carter not to say anything to Dad about us talking to Mr. Hunter. “Whatever,” Carter said. I stepped on his shoelace as he tried to untie it. “Seriously,” I said. “Dad will kill us.” “Whatever,” Carter said. “Dad’s just jealous of Mr. Hunter’s backyard.” Dinner was macaroni. I don’t know if it was because Carter hates macaroni or because Carter was just a punk, but before anyone had taken a bite of macaroni, Carter said, “Dad, the man in the green house up the street, Mr. Hunter, entropy came undone in his backyard.” Carter leaned his chair up on two legs, staring at me. I plugged Zeb’s ears. I thought Dad was going to swear, and I didn’t want Zeb to repeat it and have his first word to be a swear word. All summer I had been trying to teach Zeb to talk. Dad paused for a second, set his fork down with a macaroni noodle still hanging off the end, and said, “You guys know the rule. If you talk to Mr. Hunter, you get raccoon duty for the rest of summer.” It was scarier that Dad didn’t swear. I was almost taller than Dad, but we didn’t mess with him, even though he had white hair like a snow creature and muscles the size of grapes. One time the past winter the four of us were having a Nerf war, kids against Dad, and he jumped on the table and opened fire on us with the flame blaster machine gun. That’s when we agreed to never mess with Dad. “We were just trying to rescue Zeb,” I said. I didn’t want raccoon duty. “Besides, it’s not even that big of a deal. Mr. Hunter didn’t even really do anything. It’s just a thermodynamic loophole.” Dad took two bites of macaroni and got a noodle on his cheek. “I’ll let you guys off with a warning this time,” he said. The noodle crawled down his cheek like a slug. “But next time it’s raccoon duty for all three of you.” The raccoons are Dad’s rapid-evolution raccoons. Raccoon duty blows. Sometimes it’s not that bad. It just depends on what Dad’s having them evolve into. When he was evolving them into swimmers, it wasn’t so bad. Dad put a plastic swimming pool in the backyard, with the raccoons on one side and their food on the other. The raccoons that swam fastest got to eat. The slow ones starved and died. We buried them in the garden as fertilizer for the pumpkins. But by the next day the fast raccoons had had kids that were even faster swimmers, and the fastest of these got to have kids. Within a week Dad had a flock of raccoons that were doing flip turns and the butterfly, and all we had to do was fill up the food dish a few times a day and make sure that no raccoons cheated. But then when Dad wanted to evolve the raccoons into mathematicians, it sucked big time. First we had to give the raccoons calculators, and then we had to watch them the whole time to see which ones even knew how to turn them on. Most of them just tried to eat the calculators. Then we had to watch the survivors and their kids to see if they could add right. It took us a month of watching them and grading their work before we had a crop of raccoons that could even do subtraction. After about six months the raccoons were still working on fractions, so Dad quit the math idea and started evolving them into woodworkers. We hurried through dinner so we could get back outside. Dad didn’t seem mad, but he didn’t say anything for the rest of dinner. Neither did we. But before he let us leave the table, Dad said, “boys, there’s no free lunch. If you remember one thing in life, remember that there is no free lunch. And stay away from Mr. Hunter. I don’t care what your reasons are. He fondles children.” We got out of dinner early, and it seemed even earlier because the days were so long. We still had a good fifteen minutes before the other kids would be back out to play, so we went and sat at the swings at the park while we decided what to do until we had enough people for capture-the-flag. The park looked like a missing tooth in the row of houses, and it was the only way to get into the woods without cutting through someone’s backyard and jumping a fence. Jason, one of the neighborhood eighth graders, told us that a long time ago an old man had bought the park property to build a house on for his kids, but then one of his kids tried to murder him with a coat hanger for his money so the dad murdered them all instead by hanging them with rubber-coated chains, and then to hide the evidence he put their bodies in a wood chipper until they turned into wood chips, then he made swings out of the chains and used the woodchips for the ground, and now when you swing really high and the chains groan it’s the sound of the kids’ ghosts thirsting for revenge. Carter said that he wanted to run through Mr. Hunter’s backyard to see if we’d turn into super heroes or eighth graders. I wanted to try to fix Zeb’s bike. Zeb wanted to fix his bike. We walked back to the garage and tried, but we couldn’t, not even with duct tape and twine. Zeb could only take half a pedal before the bent wheel jammed and tried to flip him over the handlebars. “I bet if we threw the wheel into Mr. Hunter’s backyard, the entropy would fix it,” Carter said. I did feel bad about Zeb’s bike, but I didn’t want to go near the place. I hated raccoon duty. I said so. “Well if you don’t want to, I’ll fix Zeb’s bike for him,” Carter said, and started wheeling the bike up the street on its back wheel. Zeb stayed behind, staring up at me. After a few seconds I ran to catch up with Carter. “At least don’t be stupid, and don’t try to go through Mr. Hunter’s front door,” I said. “Go through the woods instead.” “Well yeah,” Carter said. “That’s what I meant.” “Come on, I’ll show you.” So I went with Carter to make sure he didn’t blow it, and also because I didn’t want Zeb to think I didn’t want to fix his bike. But who knew what Zeb thought. The woods were tall, taller than the houses, with trails going way back to the grade school. Since we didn’t want Dad to see us, we didn’t take the trail that went along the houses’ back fences but instead took one deeper through the woods, by the rusty abandoned car. We were sweaty and scratched when we got there, and before anyone could wimp out we tied the twine to Zeb’s wheel and chucked it over. After counting to ten we started pulling it back over, but the string got stuck between the fence slats. We pulled harder. The string broke. “Not it,” Carter said. “Not it,” I said. Zeb doesn’t talk. He knew the rules, so he started jumping the fence. “Hey Zeb, don’t worry about it,” I said, but it was too late. He was already over and we heard his feet land on gravel on the other side. “Why’d you make Zeb jump?” Carter said. “He’s just a little kid.” “You could’ve gone,” I said. “So could’ve you.” “Why are you being such a punk today?” He didn’t answer and I didn’t say anything, and for a second we stared at each other. I thought he might punch me. That’s when Carter and I stopped being friends. We couldn’t hear Zeb on the other side. “You okay over there buddy?” I yelled. No answer. “He wouldn’t answer anyways,” Carter said, trying not to be scared. “He doesn’t talk.” We were quiet again, but we didn’t hear anything. “What do you think’s over there?” Carter said. “Probably just some grass and Mr. Hunter maybe. I don’t know.” “It’s a bunch of bull anyway.” We were quiet for a few seconds. Then a wheel came shooting over the fence, frayed twine like a comet tail. Carter picked it up. It was the same wheel, but it was round again, not even a crack or a missing spoke, and it looked like it had been pumped up with air. It had extra-deep tread, camouflage beads on the spokes, and a silver skull valve cap. Zeb hopped over the fence, landing on his hands and feet. “Dude, Zeb, your wheel’s fixed,” Carter said. “What was over there?” I asked. “Can you tell me what was over there? Just put your tongue in different places in your mouth and make noises.” Zeb tried, but he ended up just biting his tongue. Then he just shrugged his shoulders, grabbed his bike tire and walked back home with Carter and me following him. When we got back Dad was in the front yard with the raccoons, which were working in the lawn. This was his newest idea for the raccoons. He thought he could turn them into a landscaping crew, have them work on people’s yards, maybe help some of the elderly neighbors. Every few hours he’d take the raccoons that had the biggest pile of weeds or who had cut the straightest lines with the mower and let them go into the backyard to mate. Zeb was still ahead of us, and before I could stop him he ran up to Dad with the wheel in front of him, as if showing Dad a drawing he had done at school. “Hey bud, what’s this?” Dad said. “Did you get some new spoke doodads?” “It was broken, but we threw it into Mr. Hunter’s backyard and now it’s fixed, even better than fixed,” Carter said. I thought he was going to add a “so there,” but he didn’t. Dad didn’t explode like I thought he would. He was quiet for a minute, then he said, “well, it’ll do you good then to spend the rest of the summer with something wholesome like these raccoons, instead of hanging around with that pedophile’s backyard. At least these raccoons don’t believe in free lunch.” That was the first time I thought Dad was a tool. He was a tool for not understanding that we did it for Zeb, to fix his bike. I knew Dad was just jealous of Mr. Hunter’s backyard because it was way cooler than his lame raccoons, which hadn’t ever fixed anything for anyone. He probably made up all that stuff about Mr. Hunter fondling children. Dad went inside while we managed the raccoons for a few hours as they worked in the yard. But then Dad came out and told us there was a change of plans, that the raccoons weren’t going to landscape anymore. He told us to go into the backyard and play soccer or baseball or capture-the-flag like we normally would, but to let the raccoons play too. The raccoons sucked at capture-the-flag. Zeb wasn’t playing that great and Carter was a showboat hog, but we still destroyed the raccoons every time. They kept trying to eat their own flag. After about an hour we heard the ice cream van. I asked Carter to go into the garage to ask Dad for money, but he told me to shove it. I didn’t know what his deal was, so I went, and Dad gave me a twenty. This was unheard of. Maybe he wasn’t really that mad at us. He had put the wheel back on Zeb’s bike, and told me to give it to Zeb. He also told me to buy ice cream for the raccoons too. The ice cream van was just a normal van with stickers on the sides and a boom box in the passenger seat blaring a fuzzy version of “Do Your Ears Hang Low.” Dad had told us never to go to the ice cream van by ourselves, so I brought Zeb with me, riding his bike. A couple of the middle schoolers, Zeke and Jason, had stopped the van and were buying Firecracker popsicles. When Jason saw Zeb, he said, “Isn’t that the bike we—” “The one that we don’t know anything about,” Zeke said. “I swear it wasn’t us. We’re not paying for that wheel. I was at my grandma’s funeral. She died of scoliosis.” “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We fixed it by throwing it into Mr. Hunter’s backyard. No big deal.” “What’d he do,” Jason said, “take it inside for a slumber party?” “No, it’s just a thermodynamic loophole,” I said. “Nothing much. If you put stuff in it, it becomes better. Like if you put a broken bike tire in there, it’ll come out even better than it was before it was broken.” “You’re full of crap.” I shrugged and pointed at the bike. “Whatever,” Zeke said. “We don’t have time for this. Jason’s older brother scored us a Maximum Magazine.” “It’s Maxim,” Jason said as they walked off. “Idiot.” I tried to get Zeb to order his own Choco Taco, but the sound he made sounded like a cough, and the popsicle man didn’t know what that meant. So I ordered our three Choco Tacos. While I was deciding the worst popsicle to buy for the raccoons, Bartholemew, one of the homeschool Christian weirdos from up the street, walked up and ordered a purple Otter Pop. I thought three things. One, this was some sort of omen. I hadn’t seen one of the homeschool kids outside since the butt-ball massacre of ‘01, when all nine kids in their family played butt ball with us and left looking like they had caught a bubonic plague of tennis ball welts. That was right before the big earthquake. And I heard that right after their slumber party at Mr. Hunter’s the power went out for three days. Whenever they came outside, weird stuff started happening. Two, who ordered an Otter Pop from the ice cream man? A terrible choice. Purple? I had heard that the purple ones made your nuts shrink. But they probably didn’t teach that in home school. Three, if I had to buy popsicles for the raccoons, then I was going to buy them purple Otter Pops, 23 of them.
That night I woke up from a nightmare where I was sleeping between two enormous pinecones. In the dream the pinecones were alive. In real life the pinecones were raccoons. Our room was full of them. Two were next to me in my bed, one was by my feet, a few were with Carter in his bed, and the rest were sleeping with Zeb. “Zeb,” I whispered across the room. “Zeb, wake up.” I saw Zeb’s covers sit up and some raccoon eyes shining at me. “Zeb, they can’t be in here. What are they doing in here? Can you tell me what they’re doing in here?” He didn’t answer, but I already knew. Dad was trying to get the raccoons to evolve into boys, so he could replace us. Maybe I’d have the raccoons evolve into a real Dad.
In the neighborhood, games came in phases. For two weeks we’d play foursquare, then one day after school, without anyone saying anything, we’d start playing smear the queer, as though smear the queer was built into us like flying south is for ducks or doing it is for rabbits. Then for a few days, or a few weeks, but never for more than a month, we’d play smear the queer, and then the moment we thought we could only handle a few more weeks before we got tired of smear the queer, someone would bring out a wiffle ball. For three weeks we’d been playing capture-the-flag, but the next morning after Dad went to work and after we finished eating our Froot Loops with the raccoons, through the kitchen window we saw Jason and Zeke leading a pack of neighbor kids behind our fence through the woods, everyone carrying backpacks and bags of old toys and junk, like a traveling garage sale. The three of us walked over to the window to watch them. When they saw us they stopped and yelled, but we couldn’t hear because the window was closed. Carter opened the window. “What?” he yelled. “You guys want to come to Mr. Hunter’s with us and show us how it’s done?” Zeke yelled. “Dad will kill us,” I said quietly to Carter. “I’m not going to be a pansy and let Dad ruin my summer,” Carter said. “I’m not a pansy,” I said. “Wait up,” Carter yelled out the window. They didn’t wait. Zeb didn’t say anything, but he followed us, and the raccoons followed him. I almost told him to not bring those turds with us, but I knew he’d listen to me and then stay with the raccoons, and I wanted him along. I was worried about him. When we caught up to the other kids they were already at the fence behind Mr. Hunter’s backyard. They were about to throw a flat soccer ball over the fence. I told them they better tie a rope to it, or else they wouldn’t be able to get it back without hopping the fence, and if they did they’d shrink into little babies and disappear. “Well yeah,” Zeke said. “We were just about to do that.” The soccer ball, after they figured out how to tie a rope to it, came back pumped up and looking like it had gone through a car wash. Next they threw over a chunk of firewood, which turned into a carving of a tree. A bag of chewed-up Legos turned into a Lego pirate ship. Right when Zeke was about to throw his mom’s cat over the fence, we heard Mr. Hunter’s screen door open and slam shut. “It’s Mr. Hunter,” Jason yelled. “Book it!” We all started running, but Zeb just stood there by the fence, trying to teach the raccoons to tie knots with the twine so they could throw stuff over too. I don’t know why he cared about the raccoons so much. Probably because he was too young to know he didn’t have to listen to everything Dad said. “Are you stupid?” Carter yelled at him. “Run!” But Zeb just stood there, so Carter and I went back to drag him out if we had to, but before we could, Mr. Hunter’s head popped up over the back fence. “Is that the Mickelson boys I see back there?” he said. “We were just looking for our Dad’s raccoons but we found them,” Carter said. “I thought there were more of you kids out here playing?” Mr. Hunter said. “Just us,” I said. “At any rate it seemed you kids were enjoying yourselves, so I brought some refreshments so you wouldn’t have to go home.” “So you mean you don’t care that we were playing in your yard?” Carter said. “Playing with my yard is great. I encourage all of you to play with my yard. I would be fine if every kid in the neighborhood played with my yard every day,” he said. “Playing in my yard, no, I’m afraid it’s not safe.” “But you just walked through it,” Carter said. “I walked around it,” he said. “There’s a safe path along the side of the yard. Thank God, or else I wouldn’t be able to water my rhodies. Would you chaps care for a ginger ale?” The only person I know who drinks ginger ale is our 93-year-old great grandmother, but I was thirsty so I said yes. Carter just said no, not even no thank you. “If you guys want a snack, I’ve got some molasses and soda crackers inside,” Mr. Hunter said. “We have to get home for lunch,” I said. “Thanks though.” While we walked home through the woods with Zeb and the raccoons trailing us, Carter and I wondered about what was in Mr. Hunter’s backyard. “Maybe like a machine, like a microwave?” I said. “Microwaves don’t work without a door.” “Maybe it’s like the fishing game at the carnival.” “Where people on the other side of the wall just put the candy on your hook.” “And it’s Mr. Hunter over there putting stuff on the hook.” “That’s a lot of stuff though.” “We could just ask Zeb, he went back there.” “Zeb doesn’t talk.” I almost said “yeah, and he’s getting younger,” but I didn’t, since I was still mad that Carter was being a punk and that he’d called Zeb stupid. But it was true. Zeb was shrinking. At first I thought I was just imagining it, but then I got him to stand by the fencepost in the backyard where we marked our heights, and he was a good two inches shorter than he had been on his last birthday. His sleeves were a little too long, his shoes a little too big, and he looked chubbier. Zeb had gone in Mr. Hunter’s backyard, and I figured it was making him younger because humans already undo entropy. Undoing an undoer was like multiplying a negative by a negative. You got a positive. So for a person, going backwards meant getting younger. Adults made things. They used their energy to work and build things. Babies didn’t make anything with all their food and energy. They just pooped. Zeb had gone into Mr. Hunter’s backyard to get his bike wheel, and it was making him younger, and I couldn’t tell Dad, and I couldn’t tell Carter.
Every day for the next week all the neighbor kids gathered in the woods behind Mr. Hunter’s fence to go Huntering. Huntering old baseballs made them like new, and we thought of going into business selling new baseballs, but we didn’t know who we’d sell the baseballs to since all the neighbor kids knew about Huntering. Anyway we didn’t need the money when we had Huntering. Huntering a handful of gravel just made one big rock. I never let anyone Hunter live animals, because I was worried that they’d get younger and die. Carter’s Zippo lighter turned into a military-grade flamethrower. Dad confiscated it from us. We didn’t care. We were too busy Huntering. Even though Dad hated us for going Huntering, he never said anything, because he didn’t talk to us anymore. If he needed to tell us what to do with the raccoons, he’d leave a note on the refrigerator. Not that there was ever anything in the refrigerator. Dad had stopped buying us food. This was his way of telling us that if we were raccoons we would be the ones that didn’t get to evolve. He was just waiting for the raccoons to be like real kids before he kicked us out of the house. Zeb didn’t come Huntering with us anymore. He just hung out with the raccoons, playing capture-the-flag in the backyard. I think they were getting along since they were acting about the same age, for now, since the raccoons had become more mature and Zeb was younger. I felt bad leaving Zeb, but he liked the raccoons and I couldn’t stand them, and I had given up on teaching him how to talk. It had just been another phase. Every once in a while Mr. Hunter would come talk to us, or we’d see him watching us from his dark bedroom window. Jason said that this must be the highlight of his sad little life, having all these little kids playing in his backyard. I heard that at night the high schoolers would go there and Hunter their used cigarettes and beer bottles, and that one of the high school girls Huntered her bra. I stayed up all night trying to imagine what it turned into. Huntering was going to be the ultimate neighborhood phase. Everyone kept thinking of bigger and better things to Hunter, then re-Huntering those things, and no one imagined that it could ever get boring. Normally that meant the phase was almost over, but we didn’t know what game could be cooler than Huntering. Humans against raccoons capture-the-flag was cooler than Huntering. Turning gravel into rocks was alright, but trying to sneak into enemy-raccoon territory to steal their flag when at any moment a kid-sized raccoon could drop from the trees onto your face made Huntering seem as much fun as playing Easy-Bake Oven. Zeb had been playing capture-the-flag with them in our yard as part of evolving them into kids, and once they were good enough he decided or, probably, since Zeb was about four years old now, the raccoons decided, to challenge us to a game of capture-the-flag. Zeb hung around by their jail, giving food to the raccoons that brought back prisoners and even more food if a raccoon brought a flag. We won the first couple games because they didn’t know the good spots to hide their flag—in snake holes, under someone’s shirt. But then they figured it out, and started beating us. For a few days we had fun, before the raccoons got violent. It was their rapid evolution—the raccoon MVPs were the ones that weren’t afraid to be aggressive and attack, the biggest and meanest ones, and those were the ones that got their own way with the other raccoons, that got the most food and got to mate the most. Dad and Zeb weren’t feeding them. They had nothing to do with it, except that they had pointed the raccoons in that direction. Evolution would keep making the raccoons bigger, stronger, more vicious, until they could break down doors, find kids and maybe parents hiding in their rooms and bathrooms, and drag them into the woods and gutters to do terrible raccoon things to us. We started coming home with claw scratches across our arms. Then one of the eighth graders got taken to jail and we didn’t see him again. Carter caught one of the raccoons while it was trying to drag a fourth grader into the woods, and he tied it up and drowned it in the bathtub. But within a few days the raccoons were too fast and strong and big for us or even for the adults, and we started hiding inside. The game wasn’t capture-the-flag anymore. The game was stay inside and don’t answer the scratching at the door.
I would’ve asked Zeb to stop them, since the raccoons might have liked him still and he might be able to evolve them into wimps or just normal raccoons, but Zeb hadn’t even gone outside for about four days. He didn’t go near the raccoons anymore. He was too little. I would’ve guessed that he was about three. He spent his time in his bed or watching cartoons or putting blocks in his mouth, and pretty soon he had to wear diapers again. One night I walked upstairs to Dad’s room. I had been staying in Zeb’s room to take care of him. Dad never came out of his room anymore. I hadn’t talked to him in at least a month. I knocked on his door, but he didn’t answer. “Hey Dad,” I said through the door. No answer. “Hey Dad,” I said after a few seconds. He still didn’t answer. “Dad, I know you hate us now and everything for playing in Mr. Hunter’s backyard, but the raccoons are going to kill us if we don’t stop them, and maybe I was wondering if you could stop them, maybe evolve them into nicer raccoons that could be like pets or just normal raccoons, or if they have to be kids they could be nice kids who would do our chores and play outfield for us instead of trying to genocide the neighborhood. They’re trying to kill us.” He didn’t say anything, but I heard his bed squeak, and then a second later the TV turned on. I listened for a minute. It was the Discovery Channel, and the volume was very high. “And Dad,” I said, almost yelling over the TV. “Zeb’s getting younger and will probably die soon if we don’t do something about it. He went in Mr. Hunter’s backyard and now he’s getting younger and Carter’s locked himself in the bathroom because he’s scared you’ll kill him for killing the raccoon and he’s scared of the raccoons. And we need you to help.” I waited for a minute. The TV was still on. Then it turned off, but I didn’t hear Dad get up. Then he said, “none of my business. Survival of the fittest. Which probably isn’t you boys.” Carter was in the bathroom, where he had locked himself in for at least three days. Light was coming from under the door, but he didn’t answer when I asked if he was in there. “The raccoons are going to kill us,” I said. “We’ll be goners by the end of the week when they learn how to break down doors.” “I’d like to see them get into the bathroom,” Carter said. “I’ll spray Glade in their eyes.” “You’re such a wuss,” I said. “Come out and help kill them with me.” He didn’t answer. I heard him tearing toilet paper off the roll, saw his shadow in the crack beneath the door, and watched the crack of light disappear as he sealed it with wads of toilet paper. He wasn’t coming out.
That night I didn’t go to bed. I sat on the edge of Zeb’s bed and looked out his window, watching the raccoons. They were sleeping under the streetlights and on the porches. Every once in a while one of them would get up and prowl around the street. They were huge. They could eat Zeb without chewing. They made normal raccoons look like raccoon fetuses. Around three in the morning, when it looked like they were all asleep, I went down to the garage and quietly took down Dad’s Christmas-light ladder. Carrying it with both hands, I walked out the side door and onto the sidewalk. Raccoons were within ten feet of me, sleeping. I walked quietly, barefoot, as far on my toes as I could, all the way to Mr. Hunter’s house. The ladder clanged as I leaned it against the house. After I climbed to the roof I kicked the ladder into the bushes. It made noise, but no raccoons woke up, or if they did they just went back to sleep. When it was light out I stood on the back of Mr. Hunter’s roof and looked into his backyard. It had flower bushes and flowers along the outside, and lattice with ivy. It looked like a normal backyard, except the grass wasn’t matted down and dead from a Slip ‘n Slide. I sat there for a moment, looking at the neighborhood, at all the balls and Frisbees stuck on roofs. Then I walked to the street-side of the roof and whistled and yelled as loud as I could for the raccoons to come and get me. They did. They ran out of the woods and the sidewalks and streets, over Mr. Hunter’s fence, and into his back yard. I waited. Nothing happened. I thought that I’d rescue Zeb and everyone else, that Mr. Hunter’s backyard would get rid of the raccoons by making them younger like Zeb until they were just babies that couldn’t hurt anyone. But they stayed the same. They weren’t entropy reversers like humans, and they weren’t like toys or shirts that wore out over time. They were just animals. They were neutral. So when they ran through Mr. Hunter’s backyard and tried to climb his house to get me, they didn’t get younger, and they didn’t become better animals. I think the backyard riled them up and made them angrier, but it didn’t change them. Like they were water in a blender. They couldn’t climb all the way up the house right away, but they tried. The raccoons would sprint full speed across the yard and try to scramble up the house. They could only make it about halfway right now, but, I figured, after a few days of evolving they’d be able to climb all the way up. I backed away from the edge. If I tried climbing down, the raccoons would catch me and drag me back to their capture-the-flag jail. Best case was they’d eat me right away. Worst case was that they’d do terrible raccoon things to me, then eat me. So I stayed where I was, sitting on the roof, watching the raccoons climb higher and higher, like an hourglass in reverse. I had a lot of time to think while I was up there. I thought about how no one even knew I was gone. Dad wouldn’t even care enough to check for me. Everyone was afraid of the raccoons, so no one came outside anymore, except every once in a while in their cars. I thought about what the raccoons would turn into. I thought about trying to fit down Mr. Hunter’s chimney, but I couldn’t even get my whole leg in. I thought about our house. If I stood up I could see its chimney five or six houses down. Carter and Zeb and Dad were inside. I wondered how old Zeb was now, if he would keep getting smaller and smaller and then crawl back inside a mom and disappear. I wondered if Carter would try to kill Dad while Dad was asleep. I thought about how everybody in our family hated each other now and didn’t even talk to each other, and about how we all got along great until we started Huntering. Maybe Dad was right about the no free lunch thing. I thought about Zeb. I hoped he survived. Maybe the raccoons would remember that Zeb had been nice to them. But maybe they didn’t care. I thought about eating the moss off the shingles. I thought about Mr. Hunter and what he was doing inside, and wondered if this was how he felt, being by himself all the time, looking out his windows into his empty backyard. Because right then I would’ve done almost anything to get some of the neighbor kids, even Carter, even Dad, to hang out with me. I thought about that girl’s bra and how if I died up here I’d never find out what it turned into. While I was thinking for that first day, the raccoons were trying nonstop to climb the house. In the afternoon a few of them climbed over the fence, and about an hour later, came back with food—some berries and squirrels from the woods, and a golden retriever. The biggest raccoons, which were also the best house-climbers, got to eat. The others went hungry. That night I thought about climbing down, but I didn’t, because I’d have to hang from the roof and drop into the rhododendrons on the edge of the yard, and the raccoons would get me. But that might not be as bad as just waiting for them to eat me. I didn’t see anyone outside all day, and every time I tried to fall asleep that night I was woken up by the sound of raccoon claws clanging against the rain gutter, trying to get a grip. Before the sun came up, while the neighborhood was silent and I was sitting on the chimney, armed with a shingle in each hand to try to fend off the raccoons when they came, I heard an electric garage door opening down the street. I ran to the other side of the roof, hoping I could get the car’s attention when it pulled out of its garage. No car came. Instead, after a little while I saw Dad walking down the street, wearing a big backpack and holding what looked like a big squirt gun. When he got closer I saw that it was the flamethrower we had Huntered from Carter’s lighter. As he walked down the street toward Mr. Hunter’s house, the raccoons stopped trying to climb, paused, listened, then in a flock ran over Mr. Hunter’s front gate and out into the street to try to kill Dad. A few days earlier, I wouldn’t have cared if the raccoons had killed Dad. He would’ve deserved it. But it didn’t seem fair for the raccoons to kill him when he was coming to rescue me, if that’s even what he was doing. But Dad had the flamethrower. When the raccoons were close enough, he shot the flamethrower back and forth across the cement, as if he were watering a row of flowers. The leading raccoons caught on fire and ran down the street, through the park, and into the woods, probably to douse the flames in one of the streams. The rest of the raccoons circled around him, just out of flamethrower distance, while Dad turned in circles, the flamethrower like a rotating sprinkler that left a black circle on the cement. “Get out of here,” Dad yelled. “Get out of that man’s backyard. You’re better than that. Go on to bigger and better things.” Dad charged with the flamethrower, chasing the raccoons, running after them until they scrambled over fences and into the woods, some of them on fire. Then Dad walked the rest of the way to Mr. Hunter’s house and knocked on the front door. I walked over the roof’s peak to the other side, hanging my head down over Mr. Hunter’s porch. Dad rang the doorbell. No one answered the door. “I see you in there,” Dad yelled. “It’s fine if you want to touch those boys, but when you start luring my raccoons into your backyard, that’s where I draw the line.” Dad started burning down Mr. Hunter’s door with the flamethrower. He was going to kill Mr. Hunter, go to jail, and Zeb would grow up without a Dad. Dad deserved it. He didn’t want to rescue me. He wanted to rescue the raccoons that were trying to kill me. Still, I didn’t want to watch him burning Mr. Hunter with a flamethrower. I ran back to the backyard side of the roof, hung off the gutter, and dropped into the rhododendrons. I didn’t break anything, but I got scratched up. I stayed on the edge of Mr. Hunter’s backyard, hopped his side fence, and then ran through deserted backyards, hopping fences until I got to our house. I sat in the living room for a minute. Even though I hadn’t eaten in two days I didn’t feel hungry. The bathroom door was still shut when I walked past it to Zeb’s room. He was just a baby, just a one-year-old. I sat down on the edge of his bed, but he didn’t wake up. The street curved enough that, while looking through Zeb’s window from the bed, you could just see the back wall of Mr. Hunter’s house, where the raccoons had been climbing to kill me. Maybe that’s how Dad had seen the raccoons, because he had been in Zeb’s room. Dad hadn’t been in Zeb’s room for months, that I knew of. Mr. Hunter’s wall was burning. Maybe if Mr. Hunter’s backyard burned down, Zeb would start growing up again. I didn’t want him to grow up thinking his dad was a murderer. “Zeb,” I said. “Wake up, buddy.” I propped him up with a pillow and let him hang onto my finger. He wasn’t crying like babies normally do. He just stared at me. It looked like his eyes had stayed at their six-year-old size. “Can you say ‘the raccoons burned down Mr. Hunter’s house and killed him?” The noise Zeb made sounded more like “Ragu” than “raccoon,” but it was a good start.
Rory Douglas lives near Seattle with his siblings and their lap dog. He works at University Presbyterian Church, where he's working on writing the great American church bulletin. He's the fourth-best yo-yo-er in his family. © 2009 prickofthespindle.com |
||
|