1978 Ford Econoline “Cruising Van,” black with white and orange trim, and adhesive reflective-parallelogram letters spelling out PHILO CALLAHAN WILDLIFE CONTROL on each side; buried, along with the corpses of one adult male human and several animals, ten feet beneath the wild grasses, chicory, and phlox of a privately owned hillside overlooking Onteo Lake, in the township of Noxi, New York.
The winter before my marriage dissolved, a skunk took up residence, or at least refuge, in the crawlspace underneath the bedroom. We knew this because it sprayed its scent often, far more often than we’d later learn was normal. Sometimes it would happen multiple times in one night. Upstairs, the children were sometimes able to sleep through it, and would only notice what had happened in the morning, when they woke up. But the stink made sleep downstairs impossible. A skunk’s spray, at close range, is cataclysmically intense; near its epicenter, the smell of decay has a scorched quality, like burning hair, almost as if the spray was a kind of explosion, a fiery blast that has incinerated its author. And powerful odor, arising suddenly in the night, almost makes a noise, the noise of the explosion, in the sleeping mind; it creates an invisible, searing light. Before you’re fully awake you think the house is burning down. But it’s just a skunk, a skunk right underneath your bed.
The infestation went on for weeks. We kept hoping the skunk would just go away: surely the animal didn’t feel safe where it was and would move on to a place where it didn’t have to defend itself all night long. We were wrong, though. So, after a few minutes of web searching, I called Philo Callahan, of Philo Callahan’s Wildlife Control. The Skunk Whisperer, people called him.
The name made me picture an action hero type, maybe from a seventies western: handlebar mustache, square jaw, comically long pistol. The honeyed voice of the woman who answered the phone (Philo Callahan’s granddaughter, I would soon learn) did nothing to disabuse me of the impression. So it was with great surprise that, a couple of hours later, I received a diminutive elderly man in a rusted-out Ford van with a platform extension on the back, to which a dead buck was affixed with nylon rope. Through the van’s tinted windows I could make out stacks of dirty animal cages, but also shirts on hangers and stacked cases of bottled water. He solemnly shook my hand, then drew from the passenger side a pair of thick work gloves and a small bent cage. “Where’s the little darlin?” he asked me, and I led him around to the back of the house. On the way—it wasn’t far—he told me about some other skunks he knew, and tried to clear up a few misconceptions about the creatures (they’re not aggressive, it’s normal to see one in the daytime, etc). His walk was tentative, and he had a bit of a tremble, which came off not as a symptom of illness or advanced age but the physical expression of the strong emotions he seemed to feel about skunks.
When we reached the patio, I pointed at the narrow space underneath our bedroom. The room was a former porch, converted to a year-round living space; as a result the nights of our marriage had been conducted at a quarter-inch-per-foot pitch, as though we might roll out of it at any time. Philo set the cage on our picnic table, then assessed the situation, hands on hips. I assumed he would need to reach into the space with some kind of snare on a long pole, but, to my surprise, he threw himself to the ground and wedged himself into the gap with a sinuous wiggle.
He was under there for a while. At some point my wife texted, I’m going out with the kids. We were long past the point of telling each other where or how long. Reflexively, I raised my thumb to send a thumbs-up emoji, then resisted. I put my phone away.
Philo emerged feet first, and only when he stood up and turned did I realize he was cradling the offending animal in his gloved hands. Reflexively, I jumped back, and earned a scolding glare. The skunk was very cute and appeared extremely distressed. Philo enlisted me to steady the cage as he transferred the animal into it, an operation I was certain would result in both of us being doused with musk. This didn’t happen, though—there’s a high threshold of anxiety, he explained, that must be crossed in order to trigger a spray. “He don’t want to do it,” is how Philo put it to me. “He don’t like it neither.”
Once the skunk was safely locked away, Philo leaned close and spoke to it in a low voice for a long time, as though I weren’t standing there. After a minute or so of this, I wandered off—it seemed too intimate and personal. A few minutes later I met him at the van, paid him in cash, thanked him, and said goodbye. In response, he raised the cage up between us, clearly meaning for me to bid the skunk farewell, too.
“So long, friend,” I said.
Philo nodded, apparently satisfied. I watched him drive away, assuming I’d never hear from him again. A few nights later I stopped sleeping in the bedroom, and a few weeks after that, in the house. By fall I was living in a condo at the edge of town, overlooking some hiking paths and the reservoir, where I’d sometimes accommodate my still-bewildered kids, but mostly was alone. I would often wake in the night to the smell of burning—an intense, pervasive sear. I’d jump out of bed, turn on the lights, and stalk through the rooms, seeking its source.
The stovetop in this place was electric, with a flat glass surface, underneath which the heating elements would glow red, then orange, when switched on. But I could never really convince myself that it was turned off. I feared that it was secretly hot, and that something would fall onto it—a dishcloth or cookbook—and catch fire. So, when the smell woke me, I always suspected the stove; I ran downstairs and slapped my palms down on the burners, as though daring it to hurt me.
But the stove was never on; in fact, by the time I reached it, I couldn’t even smell the smell anymore. The smell could only be detected in the bedroom. That’s because it didn’t exist—or, rather, it existed but had no source. It was an olfactory hallucination. It was the smell of the skunk, but with the skunk removed, leaving behind only the illusion of a house on fire.
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Around the time the grounds around my condo started accumulating piles of red and orange and yellow, and I was routinely awakened by the howl of leafblowers, and whitetail deer began to appear outside my big window browsing for acorns, Philo Callahan called me on the phone to update me on how the animal was doing. As it happened, the two had formed a bond and Philo had decided to keep it as a pet, in his home. The skunk, he told me, was suffering some illness. “He’s got a, I guess you’d say a partial paralysis,” Philo told me. “He seems okay for a while and then his whole back legs don’t work.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
“I’m worried about him. I might take him up to NYTech, see if they can take a look,” he went on. He was referring to the clinic at the local college’s veterinary school. “Though I don’t know if they want a skunk in there.”
He must have taken my politeness as interest, because he kept calling. Over several calls I learned that death seemed near for the animal, and then it got a little better, and then much better, though it walked with a limp. Then I didn’t hear from Philo for a little while. When my phone finally lit up with his name again, just as the first snow flew, I heard a woman’s voice. I recognized it immediately. “Who’s this?” she said. I told her. “I’m calling because it looks like you and my grandpa are close?” I suppose, I said. “Well, I’m real sorry about this, but he died on Tuesday.” It turned out Philo was ninety-seven years old and had keeled over on the job. “And I’m clearing out the house and the van and he wanted me to give you some stuff.”
We arranged to meet. Heidi Cooper-Callahan came to my condo driving Philo’s van. She was an attractive, sandy-haired woman in her forties, also recently divorced, who smelled like woodsmoke and coffee. She introduced herself and told me what the stuff in question was. It was, of course, the skunk and his accoutrements. The animal looked up at me through the mesh of the cage with curiosity and intelligence. “Grandpa wanted you to have him. He made this list of what to feed him.” On the paper she clutched, I could see words scrawled in an unsteady hand: fruit, eggs, carrots, brocaly, boiled chicken.
I wanted to please this woman. But I said, “I can’t have pets here. I mean, other than dogs and cats.” I was making this up, but it could have been true. She said, “Yeah, I figured, it’s kind of a difficult ask.” We both stared at the animal staring up at us from its cage. “Look,” she said. “You gotta help me get rid of this thing. I’ve got so much shit to do with regard to the funeral and whatnot, you have no idea.” The morning’s chill and blowing snow had given way to a balmy breeze, and all around us the dusted white was glimmering in the sunlight and slowly disappearing. I said, “Well, we could just let him go.” She nodded. “Yeah, I thought of that. I mean, can he survive out here?” I said, “He’s a wild animal, why not?” And she opened her mouth, doubtless to argue that a big part of nature was getting killed by other nature, and maybe we would be consigning the creature to a painful doom, but instead she cleared her throat and said, “Yeah, sure, I mean, sure.” We walked out behind the condo complex and followed the path down towards the reservoir, then angled off into the woods until we reached what seemed like a bucolic little glade without any obvious predators around. Heidi set the cage down and opened it, and then we stepped back to wait.
“My folks are both dead,” she said to me. “My brother moved to Australia with his wife. So I have to do all this. The house was, like, Hoarderville, USA. He was living in the van.”
“I guessed as much.”
“In the will, he left me whatever was in his savings, but the account was wiped out. I guess he wasn’t making much money at the end there. Get this, though. There was a safe deposit box with cash for his funeral. You’re not going to believe how he wanted to be buried.”
After she told me, I briefly considered advising her to just keep the money and give him a more conventional funeral, or none at all. I got the idea that this was why she was telling me—she was on a knife’s edge, deciding which way to fall, and wanted a nudge. Specifically, a nudge towards keeping the money. But if I told her to do that, I sensed, she’d think less of me. She might not sleep with me. I said, “I’ll help you.”
The skunk had taken a few tentative steps into the snow and was looking at us over its shoulder. Heidi sighed. “Yeah?”
“Sure.” After a moment, I added, “You’ll always feel guilty if you don’t do it.”
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At the graveyard, over many hours, we oversaw the backhoe operator’s excavation of a hole large enough to inter the van, and her surprisingly delicate and precise formation of a ramp to guide it down. The location was a large, gently sloping hillside with a lake view, a “natural cemetery preserve” that promised an “organic return to the earth,” so Philo would be wrapped in muslin, along with three sick animals Heidi had been instructed to euthanize upon his death. It seemed ironic that Philo’s “natural” interment should take place inside a filthy van, and that this sacred ground should be defiled with its oil and rust, but he knew the guy that ran the place, a longtime customer.
The following day, Heidi was the one to pilot the van into the hole, before an audience of seven or eight of Philo’s friends—more than I expected, I’m embarrassed to admit. The side doors couldn’t be opened, so she had to exit through the back, over the dead lying in their shrouds. The sight of her climbing out in her black mourning dress was thrilling. She said, clapping dirt from her hands, “I’m sorry, but that was creepy as hell.” At a respectful distance, the backhoe operator placidly smoked while she leaned against her front loader, waiting for the ceremony to end.
We moved a few towns over the following year, into a place big enough for my kids to comfortably stay, with a pond and a barn full of old junk. But I still return to the paths behind the old condo and visit the glade. There has never been any sign of the skunk, though I once found speckled eggshells and imagined he might have raided some nest for them. A fallen log there makes a good place to contemplate the mistakes of my first marriage, and to strategize avoiding them in my second. “He don’t want to do it,” I whisper to the silent forest. “He don’t like it neither.”
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JRL is the author of eleven novels and three story collections. He lives in central New York state.