8 Bags of Mice. Z.C. Christie
she kept repeating, “It’s winter out there.”
“For it’s winter,” I kept answering. “For us transplanted Northerners, this is a summer night. My kids don’t even put a sweatshirt on until it’s about 30 degrees. In their last school, the teachers didn’t even let the kids inside to play during recess until the temperatures dropped below zero. Not 32… zero.”
school,” she insisted, “No teacher or principal would be so cruel to a child.”
“Oh, we’re very used to the cold,” I re-assured the poor woman, but I took pity on her and made the boys wear sweaters to school in the mornings until the Louisiana winter ended in February.
HANDY HINTS ON OTHER STUFF
Fire ants are evil, vicious insects straight from the Bowels of Hell. Their sting is 20 times stronger than a wasps, and burns like a fire under your skin. There is no cure, and the pain lasts for weeks. These ants are tiny, black, and mean. Those little sandy mounds you will see on the ground all over down South? They are nests. Alligators can and do bite you and don’t mind eating you for lunch, either. Please do not get suckered in by the weirdo’s on Discovery or Nature channels on TV, who state that these creatures are misunderstood or harmless. Alligators only do two things: they either eat you, or they don’t.
You can indeed fry an egg on the hood of your car in Louisiana in the late summer, when temperatures are at their hottest, but it’s really hard to get it off afterwards, so don’t be as stupid as I was when you try it. Be smart and fry it in a frying pan that’s placed on the hood of your car.
LAST, BUT CERTAINLY NOT LEAST…
The three stories that come next are about events in Louisiana that stood out in my mind. Well, everything about the time down there stands out in my mind, but these three incidents are kind of related to each other, in that they all involved mini dramas around three different types of Louisiana critters.
You might read them and think afterwards, did she make these up, or did they actually happen?
Yes, they happened. Really.
You might ask, did these people actually say all that stuff? Well, who the heck recalls each and every word that they’ve spoken ten years ago? Conversations are verbatim in a whole lot of places; in others, the basics of what was said is absolutely there, as best as I could reconstruct it. Go with the flow, as my Mom used to say.
(Okay, I actually uttered a more profanity when some of this stuff happened… but I didn’t want you thinking I was too bitchy, so I cleaned some of my curse words up, geeze. Sue me…)
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