Frank Kowalski sat outside his trailer every evening with a beer and watched the raccoons come out of the woods. There were three of them now—big ones, the kind that live in trailer parks and learn to open trash cans and don't care if you're watching.

He used to have a cat. A calico. She died two years ago and he didn't tell anyone. Not Dave. Not the daughter. He just dug a hole behind the water heater and buried her and went back inside and drank a beer and sat there until the sun came up.

Every evening, Frank threw scraps of food on the ground. Leftover pizza from the gas station. Ham from the dollar store. Sometimes he bought ground beef on sale and threw it on the gravel. The raccoons came. They ate. They didn't come close. They never came close.

Sometimes a rat came too. Big one. Black. It watched the raccoons eat and waited for them to leave and then came forward and picked at the leftovers. Frank didn't like rats. But he threw food for them anyway. Because why not.

Dave came over one evening with a beer of his own and sat on the bumper of his pickup truck and watched the raccoons. "You know they're just using you, Frank?"

Frank didn't look at him. "I know."

"Then why do you keep doing it?"

Frank thought about this. He thought about the cat. He thought about the daughter who called once a year on Christmas and always canceled at the last minute. He thought about the steel mill that closed in 2003 and never opened again, and the town that had been shrinking for forty years, and the way the sky looked every day, the same color, the same weight, like a dishpan that had been washed too many times and was starting to show through.

"I don't know," he said.

Dave nodded. He didn't press it. They drank their beers and watched the raccoons eat and the rat wait for its turn.

One evening, the raccoons went crazy. They ran through the trailer park—actually ran through it, knocking over trash cans, climbing fences, biting at Dave's dog. Dave came out with a baseball bat and yelled at Frank. "What did you do?"

Frank didn't know. He didn't do anything. The raccoons just started running, and the dog started barking, and Dave started swinging.

Frank went back inside his trailer and sat on his couch and drank a beer and watched the TV without listening to it. The news was on. Some politician was talking about bringing jobs back to Youngstown. Frank laughed. He laughed until he was crying. Then he drank another beer.

The next morning, Frank woke up on the couch. His cat was dead—he forgot about that for a second, then remembered. The cat died last week. He didn't bury it yet. He stood up and looked out the window. The raccoons were gone. The rat was gone. There was trash all over the trailer park from yesterday—knocked-over cans, torn bags, pieces of things he couldn't identify.

Frank went outside. He picked up a trash bag and threw it in another trash can. He went back inside. He drank a beer.

There was no mudslide. There was no disaster averted. The raccoons hadn't warned him about anything. They were just raccoons, acting like raccoons, and he was just a man sitting outside a trailer in Ohio, throwing food at animals that didn't care about him, never had cared about him, and never would.

The cat was still dead. The daughter still hadn't called. The steel mill was still closed. The beer was still cold.

Frank sat on his couch and watched the TV and drank another beer and waited for evening so he could go outside and throw food at animals that would come and eat and leave and come back and eat and leave, over and over, like nothing mattered and nothing ever would and that was all right because nothing mattered and that was the easiest thing in the world to live with.

He threw food at the raccoons the next evening. And the evening after that. And the evening after that. They didn't come close. They never came close. But he threw the food anyway.

Because what else was there to do?