Bainwarble
and I were sitting on the terrace, obtrusively rendering a few
choruses of “..I wanna go home with the armadillo, the music of
Amarillo and Abilene..” when an apparently annoyed raccoon tipped
over the Sanitation Nation outhouse in the alley. You laugh, but an
angry forty pound raccoon, using the fence for leverage, and having
his way with a hundred and eight pound plastic pooper…well that’s
something you just can’t unsmell.
Bainwarble
was upset. He threw a tumbler of good scotch at the beast, and
chased his offering with a steamy stream of Welsh word work that I
never want to learn. The tumbler bounced off of his camper and
rattled to the ground unbroken. (All our stuff is plastic. Fortune
smiled on us when we learned that good libations are unspoiled by
humble surroundings.) Meanwhile I called the cops for animal
control.
They
said they already knew about the problem—the neighbors had
called—and then gave me some nonsense about it being 3:30 in the
morning and a disturbing time of day even for Gary P. Nunn. I’m
sure Ducky Bumps would have told me, but she was sound asleep on the
next chaise with a Gloc a few inches from her fingertips, darkening
her pretty summer dress.
I
noticed the neighbors gathering by the gate with flashlights,
probably concerned about what must have seemed a highly toxic spill.
Heartwarming thing, I thought, for a butler who speaks little English
to see—neighbors coming together like that.
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