Zombie Raccoons & Killer Bunnies (2 page)

U
neasily, Ide Pilkington eyed the hollow end of the shotgun. Granny Morrow sighted along it, finger on the trigger, in no kind of hurry. He was a big, hefty, balding man, probably outweighed her two to one, but he couldn’t outrun buckshot. He glanced guiltily at the injured raccoon on the ground between them, then up
at the one sharp blue eye regarding him over the gun barrel. She had the one yellow light on the porch behind her and the light from the full moon overhead to aim by.

“Now, you just move off my land as fast as your miserable bandy legs can take you,” Granny said, her voice low with menace. “And don’t you come back. If I find out you’ve been botherin’ one of my animals again, you will wish that your parents had never met. Git!”

Pilkington held up his hands in protest. “Now, just a minute, Granny. I have a right to go after those varmints been eating my tomatoes, and you know it!”

One bony thumb cocked back the trigger. Pilkington backed up a few paces. He glanced toward the forest just beyond the rail fence. He swore he could see glowing eyes. He bet the miserable furballs were laughing at him. He put up his chin, hoping to stand his ground and regain some of his dignity. Granny didn’t raise her head from the stock.

“They ain’t varmints; they’re my animals. Hurtin’ one of ’em hurts me just as bad as if I was the victim. You been throwin’ stones at ’em, and today you set a spiteful trap. It was too much punishment for a coupla tomatoes, and you know it. I told you, git. I’ll give you to five, then I’ll pepper whatever part’s facin’ me with birdshot. Your choice. One.”

“Granny!”

“Two.”

Pilkington didn’t wait for three. It took him all the way to five to get to the edge of the clearing that surrounded Granny’s white painted farmhouse. The woman was eighty-three if she was an hour old, but she was still the best shot in the county. Even her sons didn’t have
the aim she did. If she could pick it up, she could fire it. He raced across the sparse lawn and plunged into the bushes just as a shot rang out behind him. Twigs and bits of bark rained down on him. He sputtered and batted at his face, but he kept his thick legs threshing.

He emerged onto the gravel road that separated their properties and brushed off his shirt sleeves. Wouldn’t do for anyone else to see him racing around like a scared rabbit. To his relief, no one was around.

“Curse that woman, she’s a witch!” Pilkington said angrily. “Them raccoons told on me! I don’t know how she knew about the stones, but she did! They hadda told her. Damn and curse them to the moon and back.”

Any time he tried to put out snares or poison, he found the traps in a heap on his doorstep and the baited vegetables lined up like a display in a store. The only thing she couldn’t control was what he did himself. It was pure frustration, that’s what brought him to throwing stones and finally designing a deadfall full of stakes that he baited with ripe tomatoes. That raccoon never should have been able to get out of the pit. Not alive, anyhow. And it had gone and told on him before he could stop it.

It was an old feud between him and Granny, one that the neighbors up and down State Route 36 had advised him to forget about, but Pilkington just couldn’t let it go. It wasn’t like them raccoons made off with a tomato or two. The masked rodents bit into every half-ripe fruit they could reach until they found one worth eating. He had lost a quarter of the tomatoes on his vines. The lettuces had been double-decimated by the rabbits. The deer, against all common sense, had nibbled just about every jalapeno that was even close to ripe. He didn’t even want to think about how much damage had been
done to his corn by the ravens. He was going to go broke and lose the farm that had been in his family for generations, and it was all that crazy woman’s fault.

Lennie Edgewater, his neighbor to the south, had advised him to leave out a pile of his best pickings near his back door every night as a bribe, and the critters wouldn’t touch the rest.

“Your daddy was the one who told me to do it,” Lennie had said, the brown eyes in his pouchy, coffee-toned face earnest. “Didn’t he tell you the same? Granny made a pact between us and them animals. I can’t believe you won’t see sense. We get some good out of it, too. I haven’t seen a single hornworm or caterpillar since I started, and there ain’t no aphids on my wife’s roses, either. Make friends with those critters, or it’ll be the end of you. You’re gonna have a heart attack.”

Pilkington admitted he might be stubborn about it, but animals were stupid. How would they understand that meant to leave his crops in peace? What if they decided they had a taste for his prize squashes just before the county fair? How about if they ate down all his corn before the guy from the seed company came by to inspect? What if they didn’t like what he put out, and destroyed his whole crop for the hell of it? How could Granny communicate with varmints anyhow?

He crept back toward Granny’s place. What could she do for a dying raccoon? She came from a long line of witches, so the locals said, and her daughter Hazel was surely one, too. He couldn’t stop himself—he had to see. He slipped as silently as he could through the stand of hickory saplings and peered up toward her house.

The moon lit up everything like a spotlight. Granny had left her shotgun on the porch. She knelt on the grass with a bundle of dark fur in her arms, her white head
bent over it, keening quietly to herself. Pilkington’s rational mind told him that she was just mourning over a critter as though it were a beloved pet. She might just be crazy. No harm in that. She farmed her land and pretty much minded her own business. But it was the sight of the other critters gathered in a circle around her that he couldn’t rationalize in any way, shape or form. Deer, rabbits, a fox, a pair of coyotes, even a bobcat stood among a horde of raccoons. They looked sad, too.

No, he had to stop himself thinking that way! They were dumb animals! They must be standing there because they thought she was gonna feed them, or something like that.

She laid the critter down and passed her hands over it as if she were stroking it, but she didn’t touch it. It lay still. Pilkington felt guilty for a moment that it was dead.

“Rest, pretty one, my pretty one,” Granny said tenderly, her hands working back and forth. “Sleep safe. I won’t call you ’less I need you. Dream of the moon and good harvests. That’s right. Sleep in peace.”

Pilkington blinked. It had to be a trick of the movement, but it seemed as if Granny wove a cocoon of moonlight around the body. He saw the ticked, fawn-colored fur and the ringed tail glow softly. There were marks on its belly where the stakes had pierced it. She turned the raccoon over and tucked its little hand-like paws under its chin as if it were asleep, but the eyes in the striped mask weren’t closed. They glowed directly toward Pilkington. He flinched backward as if the eyes accused him. Then the light faded, and the glow disappeared into the black strip across its face.

Granny sat back on her skinny haunches and rested her hands on her blue-jean-covered knees. She nodded
to the circle of animals. As if they were trained circus performers, a couple of badgers came forward and bowed to her. Pilkington was sure now that he was dreaming. They started digging beside the dead raccoon. In a moment they had heaved up a pile of earth that would fill a wheelbarrow. Granny picked up the body and laid it in the hole. The badgers turned around and began to scoop dirt on top of it. They rolled on the top of the mound like otters and smoothed it out. Granny gave them a pat on each of their flat, wedge-shaped heads as if they were dogs, a move that would cost an ordinary man his hand.

“Go on, git,” she said, but it wasn’t spoken in the same harsh tone she had used with him. She sounded like a mother telling her children to go and play. The wild animals melted off into the shadows. Pilkington felt something small brush past his pants leg as it went about its business. Granny stood alone in the moonlight with her head bowed. She looked up and glared into the trees. Pilkington felt as if she could see him. He started to back away slowly, taking care to set his feet down silently. After a moment, she turned and went back into the house.

That was nothing,
he told himself.
There. Nothing.
Just like he’d thought. She was just a crazy old woman.The animals were easy to explain. Sometimes wild things knew that there was no harm in a person like that, like the old lady he once saw at a nature preserve who charmed a deer to come to her just by holding out her hand.

He went home, shaking his head. She wasn’t no one to worry about. Them damned raccoons was, though.

Low in the bushes, dozens of pairs of glowing eyes watched him go.

Rolling the combine harvester over the yellow-green hayfields was pretty much mechanical: sweep up and
down, keep the rows even, make sure the baler behind him was working smoothly. The roar of the engine was too loud for conversation, something Pilkington es chewed most of the time anyhow, and gave him time alone with his thoughts. Maybe
he
was the crazy one. If somehow the old lady could keep the wild critters from vandalizing his crops, maybe he should go along with it. How many other nutty things did he do for good luck? Cross his fingers? Throw salt over his shoulder?

“Mr. Pilkington?” Walter Sill ran out of the swaying hay ahead of him and shouted over the roar of the diesel engine. The lean farm worker waved his arms. “You got to see this!”

Pilkington threw the enormous machine into neutral and killed the engine. He swung down from the cab. Rain was forecast for later that day. He needed to get the hay harvested as soon as possible and get the covers on it, or it was going to rot. His other employees, mostly Mexican, were following the harvester, pulling bright blue pockets of plastic over the baled hay. He signed to them to keep working. A couple of them wiped their faces and nodded.

He followed Sill over the field until he came to the edge of the tomato field. Sill pointed. Pilkington stared at the place where the deadfall had lain until he had filled it in the other night.

“Practical joke by someone, huh?” Sill asked, with half a grin.

The mound of earth had been piled twice as high as it had been deep, but the new addition wasn’t earth. It was dung, yards and yards of it, fresh enough to still be attracting flies. Pilkington felt his face get hot.

“That damned Granny Lawson!” he snarled. “I went over to talk to her the other evening. She must
have told her grandsons what I . . . I mean, about our discussion.”

“I can just bet,” Sill said, with a grin.

Pilkington fumed. He paced up and down, feeling fury rising in him like indigestion. “Dammit, I am not going to take that from anyone! Go get the front loader.”

“What for?”

Pilkington jabbed a finger toward the pile. “I want you to pick that up, take it over the road, and dump it next to her driveway. If they think it’s so damned funny over there, let them deal with it.”

“Mr. Pilkington, I don’t know if that’s such a good idea . . .” Sill’s voice tapered off, and his lean face wore a sheepish look. Pilkington looked at him in astonishment.

“What’s the matter? Come on, man. You went to Ag school. You’re a college graduate in the twenty-first century. You got a MySpace page. You can’t tell me you believe in her evil eye like some kind of ancient yokel. It was a prank. We’re playing one back. Go do it.”

Sill gave a sigh, but Pilkington could tell he liked the idea of a little mischief, especially if he could blame it on someone else if he got caught. While the hand was off getting the loader, Pilkington took a look around the heap of muck. There weren’t any tread marks or footprints in the crumbly, gray soil to show how it had gotten there. If he didn’t know any better, he might have said that animals had gone there one at a time to make their deposits. But that was ridiculous. That would suggest they were capable of spite. And organization. Too bad. If she was in charge of their behavior, then let her deal with the results. He went back to harvesting hay. Rain wouldn’t hold off for anyone.

Early the next morning Pilkington remembered the
dung incident and felt a little guilty about it. He took the old jeep he used on the property and went for a little ride around the perimeter. Without seeming as though he was looking, he checked out what he could see of Granny’s drive. Streaks of earth from his side to hers proved Sill obeyed orders, but the site where the front loader had stopped was empty. So her grandsons had gone and cleaned it up. Well, one prank deserved another. He was sure that’d be the end of it. He wouldn’t do nothing else unless they did. He rolled back to office and started in on the day’s paperwork. Seemed as though he had as many forms to fill out as plants in his fields.

“Señor Pay?” Pilkington glanced up. His Mexican foreman Esteban Ruiz was at his elbow. Most of his summer employees referred to him by his Spanish initial. Pilkington was too much of a mouthful.

“What’s up, Ruiz?”

“
Los tomates,
Señor Pay. It is a curse!”

Pilkington headed for the old jeep. Ruiz jumped in beside him. Pilkington gunned it in the direction of the low hill covered with rows of lush green plants.

Pilkington couldn’t remember a sunnier month. Rain fell just when it was needed, but most of the time the earth was bathed in hot golden light that was a farmer’s godsend. The crops in his fields burgeoned. Thick masses of green leaves sheltered fat little fruits and vegetables. He was furious that so little of it could be harvested.

Ruiz didn’t have to tell him what was wrong. He could see it. Every tenth plant—he could count it for himself—had been yanked up and left on its side. Most of them were already wilting in the heat. The rounded mounds of semiripened tomatoes poked up through the greenery.

He plucked one half-red, half-green fruit after another. There were fresh bite marks on every one of them. He dashed the last one to the ground. It was still so hard it bounced. He mashed it into the earth with his boot. Those goddamned raccoons!