8 Bags of Mice. Z.C. Christie
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