a heart at all.
Although he was convinced that disease had not played a role in the
behavior and death of the raccoons, Eduardo could not be certain of his
diagnosis, so he took precautions when handling the bodies. He tied a
bandanna over his nose and mouth, and wore a pair of rubber gloves. He
didn’t handle the carcasses directly but lifted each with a
short-handled shovel and slipped it into its own large plastic trash
bag. He twisted the top of each bag, tied a knot in it, and put it in
the cargo area of the Cherokee station wagon in the garage. After
hosing off the small smears of blood on the front porch, he used
several cotton cloths to scrub the kitchen floor with pure Lysol.
Finally he threw the cleaning rags into a bucket, stripped off the
gloves and dropped them on top of the rags, and set the bucket on the
back porch to be dealt with later.
He also put a loaded twelve-gauge shotgun and the .22 pistol in the
Cherokee.
He took the video camera with him, because he didn’t know when he might
need it. Besides, the tape currently in the camera contained the
footage of the raccoons, and he didn’t want that to disappear as had
the tape he’d taken of the luminous woods and the black doorway. For
the same reason, he took the yellow tablet that was half filled with
his handwritten account of these recent events.
By the time he was ready to drive into Eagle’s Roost, the long twilight
had surrendered to night. He didn’t relish returning to a dark house,
though he had never been skittish about that before. He turned on
lights in the kitchen and the downstairs hall. After further thought,
he switched on lamps in the living room and study.
He locked up, backed the Cherokee out of the garage–and thought too
much of the house remained dark. He went back inside to turn on a
couple of upstairs lights. By the time he returned to the Cherokee and
headed down the half-mile driveway toward the county road to the south,
every window on both floors of the house glowed.
The Montana vastness appeared to be emptier than ever before. Mile
after mile, up into the black hills on one hand and across the timeless
plains on the other, the few tiny clusters of lights that he saw were
always in the distance. They seemed adrift on a sea, as if they were
the lights of ships moving inexorably away toward one horizon or
another.
Though the moon had not yet risen, he didn’t think its glimmer would
have made the night seem any less enormous or more welcoming. The
sense of isolation that troubled him had more to do with his interior
landscape than with the Montana countryside.
He was a widower, childless, and most likely in the last decade of his
life, separated from so many of his fellow men and women by age, fate,
and inclination. He had never needed anyone but Margaret and Tommy.
After losing them, he had been resigned to living out his years in an
almost monkish existence–and had been confident that he could do so
without succumbing to boredom or despair. Until recently he’d gotten
along well enough. Now, however, he wished that he had reached out to
make friends, at least one, and had not so single-mindedly obeyed his
hermit heart.
Mile by lonely mile, he waited for the distinctive rustle of plastic in
the cargo space behind the back seat.
He was certain the raccoons were dead. He didn’t understand why he
should expect them to revive and tear their way out of the bags, but he
did.
Worse, he knew that if he heard them ripping at the plastic, sharp
little claws busily slicing, they would not be the raccoons he had
shoveled into the bags, not exactly, maybe not much like them at all,
but changed.
“Foolish old coot,” he said, trying to shame himself out of such morbid
and peculiar contemplations.
Eight miles after leaving his driveway, he finally encountered other
traffic on the county route. Thereafter, the closer he drew to Eagle’s