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Communal Raccoon Suicide

Since it was Sunday morning, I had my church clothes on underneath a pair of manure-stained coveralls and had pulled on some knee-high boots to take me through the black primeval morass that the cow pens had become after a cold fall rain. It was those boots—and the cow bog—that kept me from getting to the house as quickly as I should have, because when Lauren came to the back door screaming for me to come quick, they were killing each other, it seemed like it took a superhuman effort to slurp through the mud and manure, and once out, I ran lead-footed across the backyard, my boots weighed down by pounds of clinging muck.

I did not spend much time considering the question of who could be killing each other; with Michelle already gone to Sunday school like the loyal teacher that she was, it could only be B. W. and Michael, and although Michael and B. W. hadn't had an actual fight since they were little kids, when Lauren's words shrilled across the distance between us, it suddenly seemed to me not only logical but inevitable.

I panted through the back door, boots and all, and on into the kitchen. I arrived between rounds, but I could see well enough what had already happened. A cereal bowl was upended on the table in a small pool of milk; Michelle's antique crockery butter churn had been knocked over; a slow drip of orange juice plopped from table-edge into a growing puddle spreading across the tile floor.

B. W. stood at the far end of the kitchen in church clothes, his tie pulled savagely to one side, his oxford shirt untucked and stained with orange juice. Michael, in sweats and a T-shirt, his back to me, raised his hand to his face, brought it down with a smear of crimson on the fingertips, and looked at it in silence for a moment. Then he said, “I'm going to kill you.”

“I don't think so,” B. W. said, and they stood and glared at each other.

Somewhere in here, both of them became aware of my presence, but in a peripheral way, as though I was a threat of less immediacy, which I suppose I was.

At last, Michael whirled and brushed past me in the narrow hallway. Once in his room, he slammed the door with considerable force, rattling his graduation picture on the hall wall sideways.

The noise continued from inside the room—things being thrown, yanked—as I raised my hands in disbelief, palms up, and asked B. W., “What on earth has got into you?”

At first he dropped his eyes to the puddle on the floor, and I thought we were headed back to universal silence and gloom. “B. W.? Son?”

He looked up at me, shook his head, and said, “I just got tired of it. That's all.”

“Tired of what?”

“Michael was calling him names,” Lauren said. “I heard from the bathroom.”

“I'm not asking you, Lauren,” I said. From Michael's room, the sounds of violence committed on inanimate objects stopped cold, and I turned to assess this new development. “Stay right where you are,” I called back over my shoulder.

“We'll be late for church,” B. W. said. “Mom will think something has happened.”

“Something
has
happened. And anyway, you can't go looking like that,” Lauren was saying as I headed off to befoul new sections of the house. I met Michael coming out of his room with a full duffel bag slung over his shoulder. A black shirtsleeve was hanging out the opening, incompletely stuffed.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I'll be back for the rest of my stuff,” he muttered without meeting my eyes. He tried to push past me, but it was a narrow hall. Only when he couldn't get past me did he look up. “I'm getting out of here. This is a family full of lunatics and losers.” He raised his voice so the last part would carry back toward the kitchen. “Losers,” he repeated, in case we hadn't heard.

“Maybe so,” I said, biting my lip. “But all the same, I don't want you to go.”

“You can't stop me,” he said, and he shouldered his bag as menacingly as a young man of his slender build could.

And I sighed, because he was right, at least short of physical force—he didn't respect me as a person enough to do what I asked, and he didn't revere God enough to honor his father just because it was a commandment. I stepped to one side, he brushed past me, and I settled for talking to his back, a conversational maneuver at which I was becoming disturbingly proficient.

“Michael, you're making too much of this,” I called after him as he pulled the door open. “You don't have to go. We sure don't want you to.”

And, of course, his answer was to slam the door behind him, to slam it, in fact, hard enough to jar the family portrait completely off the wall. It hit the ground with a thud, and the glass cracked from one corner to the other. I picked it up, looked at it: Michael was ten years old in this picture, and he was smiling.

We all were.

I walked back into the kitchen, sank into a chair next to the orange juice ocean, and looked up at B. W., still standing obediently next to the butter churn, his eyes down.

“I'm sorry, Dad,” he said. “I didn't mean for this to happen. Really I didn't.”

I raised my hand in a gesture I recognized with some discomfort as being at least second cousin to Bill Cobb's wave of dismissal. “It's not your fault,” I said. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“He caught me good a couple of times,” he said, and now I could see the beginnings of a shiner under his left eye. “But I'm okay.” He blinked rapidly a couple of times. “I'm really sorry.”

“Lauren,” I called, and she appeared, hovering at the edge of the living room. “I'm prepared to hear your testimony now. What in the world happened?”

She put her hands behind her back, assumed a posture appropriate for recitation, and declaimed. “Michael was making fun of B. W. for going to church. He called him a Baptist wussy. When B. W. told him to shut up, Michael threw orange juice on him.”

“Who threw the first punch?” I asked the room.

“I did,” B. W. said, before Lauren could decide what version of the truth she wanted to honor.

I sighed. God knows I never asked to be a parent: combination judge, counselor, mess cleaner. I sat in silence as they waited patiently for me to hand down a ruling. The clock chimed eleven, the time at which we should have been in our pew in Watonga. The opening hymn would be happening right about now, and I was supposed to help take the offering midway through the service.

“Dad, you should take off your boots,” B. W. said finally. “I'll clean up.”

“I'll help you,” Lauren said.

“We'll all help,” I said. “Let's at least get the house looking decent before your mom gets home.” And for the next hour, we wrestled with messes, the biggest of which was the traveling brown storm spread by my boots. But with some hands and knees scrubbing, I felt like the rug would at least pass muster, even if my fatherhood wouldn't.

Michael's room didn't take much time to set right. All the noise had come, not from furniture being overturned, but from closet doors and drawers being flung open. In fact, it wasn't noticeably messier than the last time I dared to enter, a few days before. All the same, already, there was a trace of absence in the air. His stereo was still on, the headphones dangling from his bedpost. I pulled the headphones out of their jack and was greeted by the blare of vintage Judas Priest: “You've Got Another Thing Comin'.”

Michael couldn't have been more than nine years old when this album came out. For a moment, I wanted to believe all the fundamentalist horror stories about rock music.

Then I decided to take it as an omen. I did have another thing coming.

And probably another thing after that.

When Michelle's Lumina cleared the rise and headed down the driveway toward us at around 12:40, I sent the kids to their rooms. “I'll handle this,” I said, although I wasn't at all sure how I was going to. For the first time, I started to look forward to our three o'clock senior basketball practice at the high school, a miserable hour or two where Bobby Ray and Oz and I would stand around and throw feeble shots up at the backboard and finally shake our heads and go home.

“Hey,” Michelle called out as she came in from the garage. “Family? Where are you? What's up?”

“Here,” I called from the kitchen, which looked surprisingly good considering the abuse we'd subjected it to about an hour previous. She walked in wearing a red and purple crinkly skirt, a silver concho belt, and a purple jacket, and she saw disaster in my face before I could even open my mouth.

“What happened?” she asked, and she dropped her purse on the table and rushed around the table to me. “What's wrong?”

“Michael and B. W. had a fight,” I said, and before she could ask, I assured her, “Neither of them got hurt bad. But Michael stormed out of here with a bag over his shoulder.” I looked down at the floor. “I don't think he's going to come back.”

“Well, why didn't you stop him?” she asked, her eyes glistening. “How could you let him walk out?”

I was willing to give her a moment or two to register the enormity of the situation before holding her accountable, but the words stung. “I tried,” I said. “I asked him not to go.”

“And he did anyway,” she said, and now her face had shifted from anger to sadness to resignation. She sat down across from me and slumped, her head dropping forward. “What did they fight about?”

“I didn't see it,” I said. “But it sounds to me like they fought about everything. About their whole lives.” I stood, went around to her, took her into my arms, and she wept into my midsection, great racking sobs that shook us both. I murmured the usual ineffectual things, “Everything's going to be all right,” and “Hey, hey,” and “We'll figure things out,” but it wasn't anything I said that finally calmed her. I could feel her take a deep breath, and then she pushed me back a step, stood up, and wiped her eyes.

“What are we going to do?” she asked. “Go after him?”

“I don't think so,” I said. “We can let him know that we love him and we want him to come back, but I don't see how we can do anything else.”

“Oh, I think we can do more than that,” she said. “Have you called Gloria's yet?”

“You think that's where he'll be?”

Even in the depth of her despair she had a little energy left for eye rolling.

“Be my guest,” I said, and she sighed and nodded.

“Okay,” she said, resting the phone in the crook of her neck and opening her address book.

“Luck,” I said as she began dialing, and I stood beside her and took her free hand in mine. I heard the far-off buzz of the ringing, then the sleepy “Hello”—Gloria worked nights, same as Michael—and Michelle said, “Gloria, this is Michelle Tilden. Is Michael there?”

I watched Michelle's face as she listened. She began worrying her lower lip with her teeth. When she spoke again, it was with rigid control. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks, Gloria. Tell him that.” And she wearily hung the receiver back on its cradle.

“What?” I asked.

“He's there,” she sighed. “Asleep, she says. Also says he told her we'd call and to tell us he's not coming home.”

“Great,” I said.

“But she said she'd tell him that we loved him, and that we should call her anytime if we wanted to see that he was okay.”

So Gloria was actually some kind of okay. But still: “Big hairy deal. We could just go to Pizza Hut and order a Meatlover's Pizza if we wanted to do that.”

She gave me a rueful smile, and then she lost it. I gathered her into my arms, and we stood there a long time, by male reckoning, before she looked up at me and asked, “So what do we do?”

Like I knew. “Give it some time,” I said. “He'll be back or he won't. Either way, we can let him know we love him.”

She let it sit for a bit—and decided she would let it sit a little longer. “How's B. W. taking it?” she asked.

I snatched a look back down the hall to make sure both the kids' doors were still shut. “Not well,” I said. “I thought I'd drag him off to the gym with me so he wouldn't brood.”

“One brooder is enough,” she agreed. She put her hands on my shoulders. “Hey, are you okay? Are you sure you want to go to practice?”

I shrugged; the weight of her hands felt good. “Hey,” I said, trying to make my voice light, “I've envisioned worse scenarios. I had one where Michael killed us all for the family fortune.”

“You're awful,” she said, leaning in to kiss me. Her face was still moist, and when she raised it to mine, I tasted salt. “Besides, he knows there's no family fortune.”

I remembered Michael's words. “Yes, I think he's well aware we've been complete failures.” I looked at the clock. “You want to go back in with us when we go?”

“Rain check,” she said. “I'd like to sit and think. Say a prayer or two. Maybe listen to some loud music.”

I nodded. It was the equivalent of what I planned to do on the basketball court.

We fixed sandwiches, a tiny meal for B. W. and me since we'd soon be running hard. We ate mostly in silence, and Lauren asked, “We're not mad at each other, are we?” and Michelle shook her head and said, “No, honey, the four of us are all right. Don't you worry.”

In the truck on the way into town, B. W. was silent. I asked, “How do you feel?” figuring that would give him an opening if he wanted to talk, but he said, “Not so good,” and stared out the window as we turned onto Highway 270.

The leaves were starting to change, the various light and dark greens of elm, cottonwood, blackjack, river willow, and walnut turning to golds, browns, the occasional yellow or orange, the red cedars still standing out dark green on the hillsides.

B. W. stared out the window. I stared out at the road.

As we crossed the first of the bridges over the North Canadian River, I saw the body of a raccoon on the shoulder of the road, flat on his back, his paws crossed on his chest. Not twenty feet farther there was another, sprawled on his stomach, limbs extending in every direction. Just before we reached the other end of the bridge there was a third, curled in a fetal ball. Despite appearances, I knew they hadn't actually committed communal suicide; they had probably just come up onto the roadway to find an easier way across the river and individually gone to meet their Maker at the powerful recommendation of fast-moving vehicles. Likely they were family members, come to check on the fallen—and falling themselves.