Troubadours
The Troubadour flayed a thick strip of drywall above the electrical outlet. With a flashlight clamped between his front teeth, his arm crooked like an arcade claw, he removed a white squirrel by the scruff of its neck. He laid the squirrel on its back, touched its chest, tipped his cowboy hat back with his thumb.
“This feller's been poisoned,” he said. “No doubt about it.”
The Troubadours were an a cappella singing group, first and foremost. Extermination was a part-time gig, a way to pay the bills. And while we would have preferred your run-of-the-mill exterminator, they were the only ones in the city who’d agreed to come on such short notice.
“Did you poison this here squirrel, sir?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I guess I must have. I put a bowl of poison pellets in the corner last week, but I didn’t think any of them had taken the bait. I know the rest are alive. They’ve been tearing at the insulation. I can hear them.”
The second Troubadour kneeled beside the squirrel, gently closed its eyes. “Sleep now.”
The head Troubadour, the baritone, stood up, popped his flashlight in his belt. “This ain’t your run-o’-the-mill squirrel. This here critter is a White Algonquin. A squirrel that spends its entire life in the wild, fending off predators, scavenging for food, weathering the vicious, unceasing winters of this region, only to find someplace warm and safe to spend its remaining days. What you did to this poor soul,” he pointed to the bone-white squirrel on the floor, “is nauseating.”
The two subordinate Troubadours shook their heads in disgust.
“I didn’t hire you to pontificate.”
“But you did hire us,” the head Troubadour said.
“What you need to understand, sir, is that we’re ethicists. We don’t genuflect to the proclivities and whims of our employers. We’re our own men. We answer to a higher authority,” the third Troubadour said.
“Our job is to get rid of what doesn’t belong – whatever seems least deserving of the space it occupies,” the second Troubadour said.
“And what doesn’t belong?”
They were quiet.
“You’re saying I don’t belong.”
“We never said that,” the third Troubadour said.
“Only insinuated it with our weighty silence,” the second Troubadour said. “But none of this should come as much of a surprise. You must have known it was only a matter of time before we found you.”
The second and third Troubadours aimed a nozzle at each of my ears, a shrivel of the finger away from a head full of poison gas.
“But, hey, we’re feeling generous today. How about we let you sing for your life? The first ten measures of ‘Danny Boy’. Is that there agreeable?” the head Troubadour said.
“Is there any other way?”
“Nope.”
They stood, waiting.
I puffed out my chest, clasped my hands over my stomach, and sang. My voice ribboned in and out of notes, high and low, carried out lush, velvety runs and long, knee-wobbling vibratos, ending off with a short improvisation that seemed, at once, natural and necessary and fiercely contemporary in a way that neither demeaned nor compromised the integrity of the piece of music.
The head Troubadour cleared a tear from under his eye. “That might have been the most gosh darn beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. You could be the countertenor we’ve been waiting our entire exterminating careers for.”
The second and third Troubadours lowered their nozzles. The third Troubadour fished out a ten-gallon hat from the duffel bag by his spurs. He slapped it around a few times. Swirls of dust fled from the felt. “Join us,” he said, extending the hat.
I took the hat, turned it over in my hands. “Do I have time to set my affairs in order?”
“We’re late as it is.”
“Time is of the essence.”
“Come with us.”
I pulled the hat tightly over my head, worked the crease in the brim until it was good and straight, and followed them outside, to the basketball hoop, where our horses were hitched and waiting.
Ravi Mangla lives in Fairport, NY. His short fiction has recently appeared in Storyglossia, Pear Noir!, Hobart (web), Northville Review, and Wigleaf. He collects lists at readreadreadreadreadreadread.blogspot.com.