THE SCHEME – OR the Linklater Switch, as it came to be known – was flawless from the beginning. It drew on all the best qualities of raccoons (acquisitiveness, ingenuity, a drive to forage bordering on monomania) and the worst of first graders (complete credulousness, a sincere dependence on sugar).
‘Tell us again, Phineas,’ said Archibald, leaning into the blue-sparking flame of the beach fire.
‘Ah, you young Scuttles are incorrigible – and you have such terrible memories!’
‘Aw, come on!’
Phineas sat in the crook of the largest driftwood log, befitting his status as leader of this raggedy band, and used a quick one-two of his cream-lined paws to remove the crust of salt from his mask. Now his eyes shone like black beacons above the polished leather button of his nose.
‘Alright, young’uns, if you must hear it again.’
‘Bony Creek then was not the sleek, magnificent suburb you remember. It still had its rough edges, its liminal spaces between the thundering expressways. There was still room for a smart young raccoon to operate.
‘Yet still, in what must seem a veritable land of milk and honey, our kind was not trusted. Not completely. After a few notable successes, we achieved a sort of temporary truce with the two-legs; nothing more. Thus, we longed for the acquisition of some useless stretch of earth for our exclusive use, unimpeded by the human world.
‘We found it in a ravine behind the Bony Creek Screech-n-Reach.
‘The warehouse was enormous, its loading dock often deserted, security atrocious. Nor did they seem to realize that the ravine was fed by a small, clear stream, its forgotten scrubland half-canopied by a raft of overhanging trees. It was ideal – overlooked, abandoned, yet brimming with potential.
‘We gathered our forces and took possession. I split the boys into two: acquisition (no great task for even the laziest raccoon) and approach (this second task more demanding – your people were not involved, Scuttle).
‘The ravine was stocked by the magnificent efforts of that first group, emptied by the second.’
‘Oh – what was it for, Phineas?’ asked Archibald.
Phineas sighed.
In the harsh blue flame, throwing stark light across the buttoned snouts of this circle of trash-pandas, was a witchy, twitching quality that scared the younger creatures, but felt somehow right to the storyteller, who warmed to his tale as the night grew cold.
‘Think, boy! What does a raccoon want most from this bitter world?’
There was an explosion of responses, quick as log-knots popping in the fire:
‘Food!’
‘Warmth!’
‘A nest!’
‘Yes,’ said Phineas. ‘Yes, and yes – Scuttle, Bogling, Hunchbutt – you are quite correct. But above all those things, what does a bandit need?’
Nothing broke through the windy, crackling night. From somewhere out at sea came the banshee-wail of an incoming gale.
All shivered, drew themselves in.
‘What bandits truly need, boys, is merely this – reassurance. In this world of strain, even of tragedy, we crave the stable, the known, above all things. When we achieve it, all is well. We nibble at our corncobs contentedly. And yet – well, fellows. That is still not quite the whole story.’
‘The scheme, if I may say, worked beautifully. It had a tripartite basis: one, American mothers – God bless their preoccupation with health! – pressed into their precious offspring’s lunchbox, alongside PB&Js and orange cartons, one shiny life-giving apple, each day. Two, humans seem unable to resist the charms of our kind. Three, the Screech-n-Reach itself never seemed to miss the loss of a Twinkie pallet-or-two to the ravine every week.
‘It was child’s play, boys – positively child’s play!
‘A little before lunchtime, three or four of my best operatives strolled up to Bony Creek’s William Martin Joel Elementary School and secreted themselves about the perimeter fence. Soon the first graders were released in a great shrieking rush, and fanned out across the yard. Each carried a small box-and-flask; each had a favourite corner.
“Hey, kid – that an apple you got there?”
‘It wasn’t the slickest approach, but these little chumps had their heads full of Babar and Curious George. What did they know from a talking raccoon?
“Yeah?” the kid answered, wiping away a runner of snot.
“Wanna swap it for a Twinkie?”
‘If the direct approach didn’t work immediately, the operative would crinkle a wrapper, maybe throw in a fetching grin.
“Yeah!”
“Nice doing business with you.”
‘Snatch, scuttle and there you have it – candy from a baby! Or rather, candy to a baby. After a few weeks, we had a pile of apples positively choking the ravine. Nobody was any the wiser.’
Around the fire sat an awed silence. A log dropped into the fire-bed, scattering hot rocks around their hind-paws like a round of applause.
After a period of reflection, Bogling spat into the coals, then stroked his chin.
‘Impressive, Phineas – very impressive! But I must ask, on behalf of all the boys, why you thought rooking children out of their fruit was a good use of time? I mean, you had access to almost limitless supplies of Twinkies?’
‘We did.’
‘And no two-leg ever showed up to look for them, or set about your skulls with brooms or nothing?’
‘They never did.’
‘Then I’m stumped. You like Twinkies. I, too, love the Twinkie, and Scuttle here’s such a bear for those garbage-bombs, he’d roll around your ravine, jaws chomping, till his stupid belly burst. So why this scheme at all?’
Phineas stood, sweeping the barren, loveless shore with trembling limbs, then fell back, fetching a soul-deep sigh.
‘It was a dream some of us had.’
‘To understand, transport yourself to that long-ago bountiful world of Bony Creek: yes, there was a surfeit of two-legs, myriad metal death-machines, and the hausfraus were far too liberal with their broomsticks, but still there was time to loll and play, dally, to experiment. One balmy summer’s day I wandered the scrubland behind the town hall, sat between a live oak and a smaller tree whose branches were heavy with fruit.
‘Another of our kind had clearly discovered this winsome bower, for here were wandering tracks, claw marks on the trunks, less-than-tidy piles of discarded peel.
‘This last gave me pause.
‘While enthusiastic in our foraging, we are at heart a tidy people. I pushed on, through a scrim of windfalls, to a deeper clearing. Here, the revelation: a raccoon, nameless (nor did I ever learn his name) wandering as though poleaxed, banjoed, toppled by the housewife’s fiercest blow!
“Brother!” he said, over and over again, between hiccoughs and dabbing at the mouth. “Partake – please! There’s more than I can manage!” Then, achieving a mildly graceful pirouette of mask and tail, he dropped to the ground and commenced snoring, a small pile of bruised apples drawn up under his noggin like a pillow.
‘At first, I was nonplussed. What a disgraceful display! Yet, on closer inspection, there cane from him something sweeter, more enticing, than a mere waft of temporary madness. I leant in, sniffed, came away enchanted. It had a high, piercing quality, a kind of enveloping charm, that once it had you in its grip would not let go. I snatched one of the soft apples from snoring boy’s pillow. It had that same fragrance but multiplied tenfold. Without hesitation I bit in.
‘Ordinarily, such damp flesh – bordering on the sloppy – would cause us to spit out that fruit and move on to the next. But here the slippery, sloppy quality was the source of those heavenly fumes themselves. I sucked the flesh dry, discarded the leavings, seized another. This next had not yet been pierced, and when I bit through its skin, a jet of potent liquor squirted down my throat. I drained it, took another. Soon sleepy-man’s pillow was gone, yet my parched throat still longed for the guts of these marvelous, these happy apples! I roamed the clearing, foraging, sucking, wobbling about on paws strangely light and dexterous. I laughed, leapt, capered as merry as our nameless friend.
‘At last, I came upon an undiscovered pile, and there feasted till the urge to dance was extinguished.
‘Did you dance, Phineas?’ asked Scuttle, his eyes brighter than the coals.
‘I did not. I fell in a heap, unreasoning, and slept the sleep of the gods. But in that Lethean soup was born the scheme of all schemes.’
With one hefty, muscled leg – greyer than most, but lively still with furry life – Phineas Linklater pushed the end of his driftwood seat into the fire, cracked every knuckle, then looked upon his band.
‘We made but one mistake, yet here we are – banished. Instead of a fine crew, I must make do with idiots, with dull, matted fur, and duller ideas.’
There was an angry hubbub around the fire, but he didn’t care. Phineas surveyed the extent of his ruined kingdom – the abandoned, Twinkie-less buildings of water-damaged concrete; the biohazard signs, peeling and hanging drunkenly from every post, each knotted bulb of razor wire; the proclamation, by the sad bunker they called home – PLUM ISLAND.
Turning to his disgruntled troops, these cast-offs of polite raccoon society – or what he supposed remained, now the two-legs had their way – and steeling himself against reproach, even fury, he decided to enlighten them.
‘We didn’t think they would tell their mothers.’