Bobby Walker, Squirrel Traps, and Scottish Brownies in Lynn Abbey's Story
Book: It’s About Squirrels… by Lynn Abbey
So Nic is napping between resume emails when someone bangs on her door. Her first thought is that something happened to her parents. That’s the kind of headspace she’s in.
But it’s Bobby Walker. The “RJ” on the mailbox next door. He’s too old to be a Bobby. Abbey writes that no one over eighteen should be called Bobby unless they’re a professional athlete, and this guy is long past eighteen. Weathered face, squinting like he needs glasses (which would explain why he can’t park his truck), unruly receding hair. But he has all his teeth. Nic notes this specifically. Missing teeth are common enough among people her age in dead-center Florida that a full set is worth noticing.
Bobby’s there to tell her to stop feeding the squirrels. She’s not. He doesn’t believe her. There’s been a “squirrel explosion” around her trailer. At least a dozen, all agitated. He offers to crawl under and check for a colony.
Here’s what I like about Bobby Walker. He reads Nic’s horror at the idea of traps and immediately says “live traps, ma’am.” He sees her as another Yankee without the sense God gave ants. But he helps anyway. Southern hospitality mixed with quiet judgment. Abbey nails this character in three paragraphs.
He spends an hour under the trailer. Thumping. Cursing. Comes back with nothing. No colony, no scat. Just, as he puts it, “a fascination for your front door.” He sets live traps baited with peanuts and corn and promises to check them in the morning.
Then night comes and the story shifts hard.
Nic hears squirrel claws scratching the roof. She lies tense, waiting for traps to clang. Midnight passes. One AM. Then at 1:30, a thud. Not outside. Inside the trailer.
She grabs a broom handle from between her mattress and box spring, a souvenir from an urban survival class. She creeps down the corridor and finds light where there shouldn’t be any.
A gray-clad woman is kneeling by the front door. Glowing. Self-luminous. When Nic knocks silverware to the floor, the woman panics and throws herself at the door. But the trailer doesn’t shake. No sound from the impact. She pounds on the door but can’t figure out the bolt or the doorknob. She touches the curtains but they don’t move.
She is not solid.
This scene is genuinely eerie. Abbey builds it slowly and it works because Nic’s reaction is so practical. Scared but trying to logic her way through something that has no logic.
The woman spots the hard drive box on the floor (it fell off the table, that was the thud). She reaches for it, weeping. Silver tears on a luminous face. Her fingers touch the box but can’t grasp it. Nic puts it together.
“You want what’s on the drive. You want what’s trapped on the drive.”
The woman mouths a word Nic can’t hear. Then vanishes as a streak of light through the wall.
Nic opens the box, considers breaking the seal, but can’t afford to void the warranty. You just witnessed something supernatural and your next thought is about warranty policy. Broke is broke, even when ghosts show up.
Next morning Bobby collects his traps, both stuffed with squirrels. The yard is clear. But Nic barely slept and she asks him something he doesn’t expect.
“Did your mother say what a brownie looked like?”
Earlier, Bobby mentioned his Scottish mother used to say squirrels get crazy because they’re chasing brownies. Now Nic wants details. Bobby shrugs. Little fellows, he guesses.
Then comes the part that got me. His mother went “home” to Scotland when he was twelve. Said it was a vacation. Never came back.
Bobby just says she didn’t like the weather. Missed the rocks and hills and cold, dreary days. He doesn’t dwell on it. He doesn’t need to. You already understand everything about his life from those few sentences.
He also tells Nic that brownies aren’t ghosts. They’re fairies. “Not cute, cartoon fairies, but the nasty kind, one step removed from devils.”
The squirrels come back immediately. New ones appear, throwing themselves at the windows trying to get to the hard drive on the table. Bobby suggests hiding it or giving it to the squirrels. Nic says she needs it for the warranty return.
She tells him about the ghost man and the luminous woman. He dismisses both. But he looks at her and says she’s not crazy, just “someone who doesn’t want to be here and would give anything to be anywhere else.”
Sharp observation from a man Nic initially wrote off based on his pickup truck stickers.
Bobby makes a joke. Bread and milk won’t work because those are for Scottish brownies. Southern brownies need beer and pork rinds.
“That was a joke,” he has to clarify. “You’ve got to laugh at yourself, Nicole Larsens, or whatever’s eating at you is gonna make you crazy.”
“Nobody belongs here,” he tells her. “We’re just passing through on our way up, or down.”
They share coffee. He resets the traps. Something is forming between these two. Not romance. Just the kind of connection that happens when two people stuck in the same nowhere recognize each other. They’re both just passing through. And for now, that’s enough.