The Racoon Family Problem

On the golf course, even when dad tries to cure or cut it, the chalk tree covered in sores or black spots, always grows up and keeps cursing his view of the green and fairway behind the house. Because the chalk tree looked dead ever since we moved to that house with the view of a country golf course, I swear it pulled the burn everything to black to purify the land on itself every morning only when two headlights from the groundskeepers drove the rock paths in their go-karts. Then the sun rose and it was chalky and cocky again, having seven horns and a large wingspan.

The coons were more, probably the family doing the purity burning to the tree, dad said. Maybe the keepers’ go-karts could have sped over the noisy raccoon packs and stopped the raccoon family problem, which would be a much better way to drive them out of the playing fields because with all the tries to use poison things or mad clubbing irons, they always just came back and gathered at the tree. That or I could shoot my brother’s bee-bee gun in their masks. I shot the bee-bee rifle to a wood pecker from mom’s window because she couldn’t be still on Monday mornings. She needed sleep and asked me to shoot the gun at the bird because she took dad to the airport before day every week so he could work in the tall office in another city a million miles away. The woodpecker would stir me too, but I slept, dreaming of it as the lawyer neighbor riding a John Deer through his grass. I sniped like a World War American and beaned the woody, and it fell and barely jumped away with wings flapping on the grass, so then I felt bad for the way it wouldn’t fly anymore, but then my mom started sleeping until 1:00 in the afternoon, and I was a dead eye.

Year after year as summer breaks threw me into another grade at my good money school and my dad got a lot more stressed or frustrated, when the sun should have turned that one shriveled tree into dust, the tree clawed back reaching out and up to the sky, not dying and not being bound. Sunday afternoon on his newly stained deck, dad scowled his big brows at all trees that swayed just beyond our staked, but fenceless yard in our subdivision called Wilderness, and they were reaching again, not yet to his property, but maybe extending closer at the green of the course. Off the deck and down the hill he trotted slowly and looked like a giraffe from lawn to fairway to green to rough. He was going to cut that kind of dead looking tree one last time, and the raccoons would go with their black spotted tree uprooted.

Through the kitchen windows I saw dad fighting through tall grass, and I held frozen waffles, and then the garage door roared again, and my twiggy sickly brother, high or desperate and older looking again, sprang through the door and looked my mother always sitting at the crumby table.

“Hey! Happy Birthday! Are you just stopping by?” Mom got up slowly and gave him a hug. He kissed her with his eyes spinning around the yellow room.

“Is the mail here?” I didn’t know. I hoped he wasn’t asking me.

He spied the low leaning pile of mail. Most were bills. Should he have found one with his name on it, that would surely take his mind off asking me for just twenty dollars.

“I think there’s one from Grandma,” my mother said.

He found it because of the old scribbles of ink. He ripped it open not remembering for the right way mother said to open letters because he was ravenous. We watched him open the card, but his white face skin brushing against his bones got really heavy and red in spots when he opened it.

“What?” He panted at my mother.

“When your cousins got older, we stopped sending money.”

“But it’s Grandma. I’m freaking broke.”

I wouldn’t give away twenty dollars for my brother again because it didn’t come back just like my mother and dad said, so I went outside to try to play with dad.

“What are you doing, stupid? Can you do that? It’s not even on your property,” I said.

“I can see it, can’t I? It blocks the view. It needs to be cut back.”

“Has our neighborhood or the ones in charge of golf ever caught you doing this?”

“Probably not.” I watched him clenching the jaws of his trimmers. He said that he wanted to tell me something funny. But he first waited for confused golfers putting to drive away.

“Idiots! Oh yeah… You know how blacks…uh… make up words sometimes?” “What?” I paused and smiled a little.

“You know what I’m talking about, right?”

“Sometimes my friends make up words.”

The branches were not ever brittle on this tree that now looked like it was sweating with dad. And his trimmers were dull. The limbs dangled when he tried snipping at them.

“Well, you know what I mean. I was watching The Judge today and there was this huge black woman trying to defend herself. I mean, she and this other woman were trying to settle a case about…” A branch finally fell to the ground after I scurried a step back so my school clothes wouldn’t get dirty.

“There we go!” His face now focused at the point on the very tip of the highest, longest branch that looked like a spiraling briar, thorny and everything.

“Anyway, but you know how black people make up words?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

My eyes were directly into his and I looked really concerned for what he was saying and didn’t really want to hear his story anymore.

“Oh come on. You know me. How dare you accuse me? Show respect.” He grew menacing and started to yell over me. “That’s just offensive. I’m just trying to tell you something funny.”

But I heeled. His face grinned at the charred branch with no leaf as he reached up and tangled his arms around the tar, leaving his collared shirt a long stripe of charcoal. He cut it. This one fell on his face, leaving rings and smeared cuts of dark dirt on his eye bags. He dropped his teethed trimmers and used his short arms in an L shape rub his face.

“Might as well just chop it down. I’m going to do that when I come home next weekend. Anyways. On The Judge, the plaintiff and defendant were going on about this fight that the black woman had started because her window had been shattered by the TV Control, and then the car. And guess what? Of course they would get the car involved and of course it ended up through the victim’s legs or knees and turned one into a gimp.”

He dug his Adam’s apple into a husk down his throat, and he was getting ready to mock as I watched him making a gas laughing breath because his chest was getting bigger.

“Ya know when I drink I lose my emissions.” He said like a black woman or something, making up a word, and smiling.

“Emissions?” He made his voice deeper or something smarter or manly because he was the judge now.

“Do you mean inhibitions?” Dad broke into laughter after stopping the role-playing. That was the story dad told me about making up words.

“Yup.” I smiled, and turned from his pile of freshly dead tree arms. I broke across the tall grass and then off into his house. I pictured my dad black so I could laugh, but he was playing. I felt like sleeping so I went up to bed. After not dreaming, I got up naked and jumped into my mother’s bedroom across the hall, and I found the bee-bee gun by the window to take, so I pumped it hard and scampered through the house with it in my teeth, and then under the roaring garage door. I crouched in the tall grass with good view, and sniped to shoot dad’s temple because we had the raccoon family problem and that would get rid of it for at least just a while. He fell slowly and crawled on his short arms to the house.

The raccoons came back to then gnaw the dead looking tree down I heard. The groundskeepers probably hauled it off in a stretcher by now, but now I don’t have to deal with giving my high or desperate, hungry or sick brother money anymore.