Читать книгу 8 Bags of Mice - Z.C. Christie - Страница 19

OLD RATS AND NEW RATS

Rats are vermin. I don’t care how many people keep the nasty creatures as pets and can bore you to tears with stories of their intelligence, playfulness, devotion, blah blah gag blah. They are still rodents with icky naked tails and feet, beady little eyes, and front teeth that never stop growing.

Until I moved to Louisiana, I had rarely seen a real live rat. Maybe in a pet store, sure, trying to appear all cute n’ harmless, running on a wheel or burying themselves in soft cedar shavings. I knew better. I had rat history, you see.

The first time I ever officially saw a rat was when I was a child, living in Clark Air Force Base on the Philippine Islands. The air base isn’t there anymore, incidentally. Mt. Pinatubo erupted on June 15, 1991 and destroyed it, after being inactive for 600 years. (This is also the birthday of my son, Chase, which if you knew him, you’d realize this event sort of matches his personality, but he’s mentioned in different stories.) Where was I… oh, on the island, yes. I was about six years old and my little brother was about three. We were both in our pajamas, lying on our stomachs on the floor, watching television. Paladin: Have Gun, Will Travel, was playing. We weren’t allowed to watch a lot of television except for a few programs at night. Mom approved of Westerns, and so did the Philippine government, they imported a lot of American westerns to their TV stations.

Our television was against the back wall of the living room. My mother was sitting on the couch behind us. I heard my little brother say, “Cat!”

I looked over about the same time that my mother let out a scream, which scared the out of me, for I had never in my life heard her do that. I only caught a glimpse of this big, dark thing walking slowly along the wall behind the television… TV’s were bulky structures that stood on stumpy little legs in those days.

Mom snatched my brother and me off the floor and ran into her bedroom, dropping us both on her bed. She crouched down on the floor and looked under the bed and the dresser, then tucked all the edges of the blankets under the mattress. We were told to stay there and She ran out of the room, slamming the door shut behind her and we did as we were told, we sat huddled together in the middle of the big bed and did not move. A minute later I could hear her yelling into the phone to my Dad to come home immediately, there was a big rat in the house.

Later, as this story was retold, I learned that my Dad had been down in the squadron building with a bunch of the other pilots and flier type guys, and they were all laughing after my Mom’s call.

“She saw some damned mouse,” I believe is close to what Dad had said. A few of the fellows decided to tag along with him on his way home, supposedly to give him moral support, but in reality, just to tease my Mom about getting so hysterical over a mouse.

Not too long afterward, I heard my Mother yelling, as my Dad and his entourage came in through the front door, that the rat had gone into the kitchen. I heard men laughing. I heard my Dad being a smart ass to my Mom. Then it got quiet, all the men must have been going into the kitchen. A few minutes later I heard my Dad yell, “

There was suddenly a of shouting and banging and noise, and I just sat on the bed holding tightly to my little brother. My mother came running back into the bedroom, flinging the door open and then slamming it shut. She got on the bed and held us both.

My dad had apparently been in the kitchen with the guys looking for the mouse, when he was confronted by a very nasty wharf rat, about a foot long, from what I was told later. He told us he grabbed a broom and jumped on top of a kitchen chair, as his stalwart supporters fell all over themselves trying to get out of the kitchen.

Once safely out of the kitchen, they suddenly recalled that they were supposed to be Guys and charged back in to do battle with the giant rat, trying to hit it with chairs, pots, pans, anything they could. They made a tremendous racket and finally killed it. I never asked how and my mom didn’t want to know. They carried it outdoors and called Rat Control, who came to take it away and set rat traps up all over our house.

They caught more huge rats as the weeks went by, ugly things with tails as long as their bodies. One was caught coming through a hole around the drainpipes under the sink. We were forbidden to open any cupboards, and Mom made my brother and me sleep in between her and Dad in their bed for a long, long time.

I had rat history, oh yes, I did.

So when we moved to Louisiana and I saw rats in the back yard, Husband should have believed me. Being a My Wife Overreacts Kind of Guy, he didn’t.

He had a new job, this was a new state, so we did the sensible thing and didn’t buy a house that first year, we rented one instead. It was in a nice neighborhood, we had nice neighbors and it was a decent little ranch style house. It had a beat up, but still standing, six foot tall wooden stockade fence around the whole back yard.

I put our gas barbecue grill on the long cement patio, which was right off the back door, bought chairs and a table at the Walmart and learned quickly that you can’t sit outside very often to eat in the summertime in Louisiana, due to the high heat, intense humidity and multiple king-sized bugs. The grill didn’t get used that first summer, and you’ll know why in a minute or two.

I am sitting out on the patio… determined to get the heck out of the house and away from the endless stacks of cardboard boxes still waiting to be unpacked… idly gazing out into the yard, looking at the strange, tropical trees I didn’t recognize… at the very large elephant ear plants growing next to the stockade fence… at the rats walking on top of those horizontal supports that are on the inside of the stockade fence panels.

Your brain just sort of registers these things as your eyes pass over them, it takes a second or two before it stops cold on the word, Then, it just reverberates itself into your consciousness a few more times.

Rats? Rats?! Yes indeedy-do, folks, , walking along the fence right in my rented back yard, three of them. Not in a hurry and obviously at home there, they proceed to make it to the end of the support beam and then skitter onto an oddly shaped tree growing in the corner of the yard, jammed against the fence.

I skittered right into the house and called Husband, who sighed elaborately and said I was most likely tired from the move and/or unpacking too long, and had probably seen chipmunks. “Did you have your glasses on?”

“Yes,” I answered through gritted teeth, safely on the inside of the glass patio door, “I had my glasses on, and these weren’t chipmunks, they were rats… brown rats.”

“Chipmunks,” he stated patiently, “are also brown, did you get a look at their tails?”

“Yes, naked, icky tails, because these were damn not chipmunks!”

I was informed that rats were nocturnal creatures and didn’t normally come out much in the daytime, so he had no idea what I had seen. Was I sure it wasn’t some sort of squirrel? And he had to go back to work now and couldn’t talk anymore.

His advice was to just not go out in the back yard right now. I didn’t go out in the back yard the rest of that afternoon. I kept watch through the kitchen window off and on all day, and dammit, they were Rats, I tell you, rats, walked back and forth on those fence supports all freaking day long. They ran up into that weird tree, they ran down the tree, they scruffled around in the undergrowth at the bottom of the tree. Husband didn’t come home until late at night, then stood out on the back porch and declared that he didn’t see anything. (no duhsweetheart)

This went on for a week. I made my two youngest sons sit out in the heat with me, to be my witnesses. “Do see the rats?” I would ask them.

“Sure,” they’d answer and point to whatever rat was visible at the moment in the yard or on the fence. They told me they had also seen them on the other side of the house, scuttling up and down onto the roof and running along the canopy which hung over the back patio. They helpfully pointed up at a spot which was directly over my head.

This is where you glance up so fast that you hurt your neck. Drag your boys indoors to once again, call Husband and demand that he He can’t do anything, he is at work and can’t do anything about some creature that he has never seen, he explains.

Husband makes it home early one night, and jokingly asks how many squirrels I saw today.

“Haha, you’re a scream, honey,” I answer.

He decides to barbecue. I follow him out onto the back patio, and watch as he takes the vinyl cover off of the barbecue (which hadn’t been used yet that summer) and opens the lid.

He leaps backwards with a shout as a good sized brown rat and a baby rat leap out from the depths of the barbecue and plop-plop furrily onto the patio, then scurry off into the twilight.

Meanwhile, I’ve screamed and flung myself back into the house, slammed and locked the patio door behind me.

I catch my breath as Husband stamps all over the barbecue cover, in case more fugitive rats are hiding in there, then stare at him through the glass door as he jiggles the locked handle trying to get back into the house.

“How many chipmunksthat, honey?” I ask him as sweetly-nastily as I can manage, as he stares at me through the glass, “Or were they squirrels, baby?”

I unlock the door and let him inside. He doesn’t say a word and goes to call an exterminator.

I tell him to throw out the grill. He says I am overreacting, but sensing that I am on the verge of some Emotional Thing that he doesn’t even want to consider dealing with, he wisely rolls the rat-tainted grill to the curb that very evening.

Now, a lot of the workmen type people in southwest Louisiana are Cajuns. It would take too long to explain exactly what a Cajun is, but a true bayou Cajun will eat an alligator for dinner that he has caught in the bayou his house is built over. Yes, like on stilts. You can call exterminating companies and get a pleasant receptionist on the phone, sure, but the guy coming to your house is probably going to be a gator eating Cajun. They speak in a Southern drawl with a French accent. Wonderfully nice people, but they’re a little… um… well, just read on.

The exterminator guy shows up in a white pickup truck. It has a cab section built over the truck bed with doors on the sides. He opens one of the doors and takes out a lot of cardboard tubes, with sticky stuff on the insides. He walks around to the back yard and over to where we’ve been seeing the rats, and starts to place the cardboard tubes along the support rails of the fence. These, he tells me, will mos’ likely catch the rat I saw.

“Rats,” I correct him. “Not one rat, . Lots of rats.”

He adjusts a tube and tells me, “Thass not real likely, ma’am. If yew see one rat out in da daytime, moh likely mean deres bout a hunnert or moh yew doan see, dey live in cawl-uh-nees.”

“I saw more than one rat,” I repeat, “I see rats all day long, walking all over this fence and in this yard, multiple rats.”

He turns to look at me and adjusts his hat. “Muss mean ya’ll gots a few hunnert or mebbe a t’ousand roun’ heah somewhere close, ma’am. Gonna be real mess on yore hans if dats da case.”

He drives off in his truck and leaves me standing there, staring at the cardboard tubes, as my mind repeats over and over… hunnerts… er… hundreds?

The tubes do not work, the rats are smart and just walk around them or over them. None of the rats are dumb enough to see a sticky rat catching tube and walk into it, gosh no. The tubes stay in place for about a week, until they get rained upon and soggy, or squashed flat by the rats walking over them, causing the tubes to stick together from the sticky stuff inside.

I call the exterminator guy again and ask for some better traps. He drives back out in his truck with bait traps, which he fills with peanut butter flavored rat poison. I am ordered to keep my two small dogs indoors, as dogs love the taste of this stuff. “Bes’ if yew keep yore boys in, too, boys’ll eat a lotta stuff dey shun’t,” he instructs me. So I keep mah dogs n’ boys in.

The smart rats get stupid, to my surprise, and eat the peanut butter poison. They start dying in stages, all over the lawn, one by one. They get disoriented, they stagger, they crawl along the fence supports only to start wobbling and then fall off into the growth below.

I don’t allow the boys out into the yard at all.

I find it hard to even out into the yard. No matter, the twins keep me informed about the ongoing ratocide by descriptive commentary when they are in observation mode, their faces plastered to the glass on the back patio door.

Kid One: Mom… Mom… you gotta see this… one just fell out of the tree.

Kid Two: Where? Where? Did you see it land?

Kid One: Right there. It landed all crooked. There’s its head, see it wiggle?

Mom: Alright, I don’t think you should be watching that. Get away from the door.

Kid One: Look! Mom, are you looking? I bet its only half poisoned, that’s why it’s still moving.

Kid Two: How can it be poisoned, you moron? It ate the bait, that’s why it’s acting like that. It’s just not dying fast enough, that’s all.

Kid One: If it only ate a of the bait, it might not die, jerk face. That’s half poisoned.

Kid Two: It’s totally poisoned. You’re just stupid and don’t understand. Mom, tell him he’s stupid and doesn’t understand.

Mom: Both of you get away from that door. Now.

Kid One: Five more minutes. I wanta see if it gets closer, first. Think it’ll puke or have gross stuff leak out of its body somewhere when it dies?

Kid Two: You’re so dumb. You’re just so dumb, the last ones didn’t do that.

Kid One: We weren’t close enough, Mr. Know It All, so how do know?

Kid Two: Mom, can we go out in the yard and get closer to this one? I think it’s almost dead.

Mom: Don’t you two go out in that yard! And get away from that door!

I dial the exterminator and tell him for God’s sake, to get over here and start picking up these dead rats, I have children here. “Ah’ll git to ya when Ah can,” he says. “Lotsa people got lotsa daid rats dis month, ma’am. Do yew know how minny yew gots?”

I tell him that there is no way in hell that I am going out there and get a body count. He finds this very funny and laughs. I hang up the phone and announce he is weird.

Finally the white truck pulls up into my driveway. I stand next to the garage and wait as he gets out. The boys are down to the truck in a flash, asking if they can watch him pick up the dead rats. “Why, shore,” he says, smiling at them.

Ipronounce, giving them the evil mother eye and ordering them away from the truck. They back up about three inches. “Oh, ma’am,” says the exterminator, “Dem rats ain’t gonna be in no shape ta do nuthin’ ta dose boys. Let em come wid me.”

“You just go get the rats,” I tell him, looking stern and crossing my arms over my chest. So he takes a cardboard box from the front seat and walks around to the back yard. The boys race back into the house so that they can watch what happens through the glass patio door. I go in to watch, too, but not quite as enthusiastically.

I mean, you watch some guy walk all over your yard, picking up dead rats by their tails… your arms fold around yourself and your chin sinks lower and lower on your chest. It’s just so grossly yucky, you can’t help it. The boys poke each other as he gets to the rat that was the subject of so much debate earlier this afternoon.

Kid One: Saw it move, bet it isn’t even gonna die. Shoulda been dead by now.

Kid Two: He picked it up by the tail, of course it moved, dummy. You’re dumber than you were this afternoon. Mom, isn’t he dumber than he was this afternoon?

Mom doesn’t get a chance to answer, apparently the man retrieved all the dead-for-now-rats and is walking out of the yard, back to his truck. The boys tear out of the house and stampede down the driveway to escort him back.

I run after them, shouting for them to get back in the house this stopping about 20 feet away from the man and his vermin filled box.

He’s opened a different door on the back of the truck bed thingie, and has taken out some large, white, paper-looking squares. He places them on the driveway, then reaches into the box, lifts a poisoned rat by its tail and then drops it on the paper square, in God’s name are you hriek, my hands flying up to my face.He looks at me. “Ahm stickin’ da rats to dis trappin’ paper, ma’am. Dey a lot like dose sticky tubes, on’y stronger. Cain’t hev em rollin’ roun in da truck when Ah drives, too hard ta git em out latuh. Dis keeps em in one place, till deys all da way daid.”

“All the way de… all the way Boys! Get back here this second!”

They stay right where they are, the little creeps, knowing full well that I am not about to go one step closer to what’s going on. The exterminator is smiling and talking to them as the rats go splat onto the sticky paper. Seven, for this round.

My hands have crept from my cheeks to my temples, as I stand there, pressing them in on my skull and thinking… He finishes and tosses the now empty box back through the window of the truck to land on the front seat. . He then picks up a sticky, rat encrusted paper by the corners and tips it into the opened door on the side of the truck bed thingie. I cover my ears, not wanting to hear it land. He picks up another paper, tips it in.

My boys are standing on each side of him, and after the last paper full o’ rats is tipped in, they crowd close to the opening and practically stick their whole head in there. I scrunch my eyes shut and just shriek at them.

“Will you for get from that Get your out of there!!!”

The man is scribbling on a clipboard. “Why, ma’am, I tink deys jes tryin’ ta see dat big ole rat dats in dere. One Ah gots from da last place Ah wuz at.”

“Big ole… big ole rat? Bigger than the ones I just saw? BOYS!!!”

“Oh, it not goin’ anywheres. All stuck up on dat paper. Good size rat, prolly go poun’ and a half, two poun’ at least. It prolly mosly daid by now, anyways. Yew boys wanta see?”

The blond demons hop up and down madly. Yes! Yes! Yes! They exclaim in delight, as I take a few steps forward, determined to smack the both of them in the head… maybe I’ll smack the exterminator, too.

Into the truck bed thingie door goes the exterminator’s hand, and out it comes, holding a sticky paper that has a fat,furry brown rat splayed out on it grotesquely, at awful angles. My rat phobia overcomes me at last and I stop dead in my tracks, watching in horrified fascination as he shakes the paper and the stickied-up rat, I start looking around for something to throw at the exterminator guy. Preferably something hard. His radar must have been tuned in to the waves of the impending destruction I was unmistakably flinging at him, because he picks up the paper and tosses the unspeakable object back into the hole from whence it came, then shuts and latches the door. The boys groan in unison.

He tears a copy of the bill off his clipboard and wisely hands it to one of the boys to bring back to me, and winks at them. that wink says.

They trudge morosely back up the driveway, giving me baleful looks that say plain as day, you-never-let-us-do-anything-cool, hand me the paper and then disappear into the house.

The exterminator and I stand and stare at each other for a few seconds.

“Yew not from roun’ heah… are ya?” he says, turning to climb into his truck.I make a face at him and his truck, then turn to go into the house so I can take a long, long, hothothot shower. When I’m finished, I sit down with a newspaper and start the search for a new rental house. Ah cain’t face da sight of mebbe hunnerts moh mos’ly daid rats on mah lawn. Dey done won da Rat War, yup.