GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA
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“It was in that bush,” I said, pointing at a large leafy shrub by the swimming pool fence. “I saw it just before.”
“How long before?” the man from the animal control service asked.
“Before I called,” I said.
The man was dressed in forest-green slacks and a khaki buttoned-down shirt, short-sleeved, which, from a distance, made him look like a state trooper––except for the hat, which was a green trucker with a golden silhouette of a panther on its front. He was using a net to stab at the bush where I’d seen the raccoon. It was the kind of net, a bright cerulean blue and on the end of a long metal pole, I’d used to scoop leaves and other things from the pool.
“It doesn’t appear to be here now,” he said. “You think it was sick?”
“It didn’t look right,” I said tentatively.
“We’ve had a rise in distemper cases,” he said, still hacking at the bush.
“It was moving oddly,” I said. “I want to say with ‘swagger’ but that’s probably not right.”
The man didn’t look up from what he was doing. “I wouldn’t use that word.”
“No,” I said.
He gave up on that bush, and wandered towards the end of the pool and began mussing up some other bushes with his net. “There’s nothing here,” he said, swiping at a healthy agave plant––no hiding place for a raccoon.
The thought of him leaving empty-handed worried me. I didn’t believe the raccoon had just moved on––if I weren’t afraid of it, afraid of whatever disease it might give me if it attacked, I would have rummaged through those bushes myself. I didn’t want the swaggering creature to end up in the pool, and I didn’t want to have to reenlist the help of this or some other animal control service, but, more significantly, I also felt as if in my inability to produce a sick raccoon I was betraying some shortcoming in my person. Maybe I’d misjudged the situation. I didn’t know a sick raccoon from a healthy raccoon. I couldn’t get over it and let the raccoon do its thing. I wasn’t a real Floridian.
“Seeing it out during the day was what made me first wonder,” I said vaguely.
“Do you ever get up during the night?” the man asked. He was stowing his net in the back of his van, and preparing to leave sans raccoon. “If your neighbour saw you up doing things in the middle of the night, would you want them to call the authorities? To have you taken away?”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” I said.
“There’s no such thing as one hundred percent nocturnal or diurnal,” he said. His tone suggested I should take this piece of advice in warning.
This swimming pool is only one I’ve ever housed with, not just visited. It’s a perfect Florida backyard pool. There’s a pool guy, Miguel, who comes once a week to clean it and adjust the chlorine, so besides the sick raccoon I’ve only ever had to give it a daily scoop––mostly to remove leaves, but also pine needles, lizards (alive and dead), frogs (alive and dead), snakes (alive), Spanish moss, branches (after Hurricane Irma), dragonflies (dead), and spiders (alive, dead, and what looked like only skins?).
My husband found the raccoon the day after the man from the animal control service visited. It was in the same bush we’d thought we’d seen it crawl into when it was sick and dying. It was already starting to decompose under the Florida sun. My husband wore his coveralls, industrial-level painting mask, rubber gloves, and protective glasses when shoveling the raccoon from the bush into a trash bag. I watched out the sliding glass door, from the safety of the air-conditioned living room, and wondered, had the raccoon been dead before yesterday? Or had it been crouching there, sick and afraid, and listening to us talking about it while the animal control man stabbed his metal pole at the leaves around it, and then just above its head, and then directly where it lay?