Rats in the Attic, Panic

by Neal R. Wagner

Copyright 2004 by N.R. Wagner, all rights reserved.

"How do you get rid of rats?" My electronic friend Jack types this late one night. Jack is a pseudonym, part of his handle, JackPumpkinhead.

I stare at the glowing screen before me. "Like any other nasty software beastie," I type back. "You characterize it, isolate it, identify it, eradicate it."

"These are not invisible computer creatures," he says, "but big, hairy, gray animals that eat through bags of flour and leave droppings. Actual, physical rats."

"Maybe I can help. I had rats in my house five years ago, when I was living with Kathy. You remember all my talk about Kathy. It was a rotten time of my life, but instructive. Do you have a while to listen?"

"Sure. I've got all night and then some. But get to the basics. How do I eliminate them?"

"The best way is the third method I tried." I feel myself tensing. "Poison. Blood-thinning poison. They bleed out and go off somewhere to die. It's a cruel and subtle method, but it keeps your hands clean, with no dead rats to dispose of. There are several brands."

"And did it work? Did you get rid of the rats?"

"That'll be part of the story." I proceed to tell Jack the details.

Kathy and I had moved in together a year before the rats. She of the beautiful blond hair, dark blue eyes, and strange moods, happy and sad -- hard for me to follow. She was an English graduate student, constantly reciting Faulkner, and then saying I needed Hemingway to flush out the Faulkner. I was -- am -- the techno-computer nerd, glad to have someone real and warm to hold at night. We were fresh bright flowers blooming in the sun, and maybe in love. Who knows?

Enter the rats -- an unwelcome visitation for sure. In the late evening of a pleasant Saturday, Kathy saw one running past the French doors at the back of our living room, but inside the house.

"A rat!" she screamed. "A rat just went around that corner. I think it was a rat. It was big. It was gray."

"Maybe it was a possum, or a gray wolf." I went on with a fake farmer's drawl, "Well, Ma, after we get the crops in this fall, we'd best get us a sheep dog to keep the wolves out." I was bluffing, though. I didn't much like the idea of a rat in our house either.

"Not funny. Not even a little funny. It was a rat." She was hysterical. "I can't live in a house with rats."

Later that night, we heard them scampering through the walls, carrying on their mysterious rat affairs. Of course they'd been there for awhile, but this was the first time we'd noticed.

"Do something." Kathy was sitting up in bed. "Now! Do something. Get rid of them."

I was still putting up a male front of unconcern, and besides, it was the middle of the night. Put it off till tomorrow--my favorite motto. "Kathy, we can't handle them tonight. I'll look into it tomorrow afternoon. Jones' hardware store must have some stuff. Promise."

I finally got her to sleep by rubbing her back.

"Shut up, Jack," I type. "You're trying too hard."

"I'm trying to be swift, like someone named Gulliver, in the first page of his story." Jack types.

"Oh, I think I see, but I'd rather not."

"Careful, you don't want to piss your old friend Jack off."

"Cut that out," I scream -- actually the typed version of a scream -- all caps with a star at either end.

"Let me get back to the third method I tried, the rat poison," I type.

"The poison disappeared quickly, so I knew they were eating it, knew many would die. At the time it was such a convenient, simple way. No mess, no fuss, especially compared with the earlier methods I tried, that I haven't gotten to yet. Since then I've rethought it all. In some ways poison is the nastiest way I can imagine. We only poison animals -- we don't even allow poison in warfare."

"OK," Jack types. "Poison is nasty. Give me another way."

"Well, the second method I tried was much worse, at least at the time -- a grotesque failure. I'll tell you."

Before the poison, I tried a different method, one that caught a rat, but in a way that also drove Kathy crazy. She was climbing the walls. She was licking the paint off the walls. The old man in the hardware store had been so enthusiastic: "Sticky traps. Open them up and lay them out where the rats run. The rats stick to the trap, and you just toss trap and rat out with the trash."

"Sounds a bit gross," I said. "I mean, the rat is stuck there, still alive."

"Nah," the man said. "They thrash around and suffocate. They'll be dead by the time you get to them. Then just toss them."

"It's worse than that," I type.

"What could be worse? That you torture them before they die?"

"Just listen to the story."

The rats lived in the attic, accessible by ladder through a hole in the hallway. It was a four-foot crawl space, but with not enough room to stand. From the mounds of droppings, their favorite spot was on top of the gas furnace. I suppose it was warm. I put the sticky traps up there, where later I would leave the poison with my third try.

Twice a day I checked the traps, and stupid, stupid move, at the third check Kathy was home reading -- and one of the traps had caught a rat. Listen, I just hadn't thought it through. I figured she'd be gone when I needed to dump a trap, if this silly method worked at all. Anyway, I pulled the attic steps down and clamored up, not expecting to see a rat. A large one was there, caught but not dead. The trap held him tightly, even his legs and head, but his eyes were open, and he quivered, letting out tiny cries. Even to someone with as little sentimentality as I have, the rat looked dreadful. I'd not told Kathy about these traps. I grabbed the end of the trap next to the tail, dangling it, to carry it out of the house.

"What in God's name is that?" Kathy said.

"It's one of the rats."

"What have you done to him?" Kathy went on, with her hand over her mouth, "It's alive. How are you holding it?"

"It's a sticky trap."

"What do you mean 'sticky trap?' Sticky?"

"It's sort of like fly paper. They stick to it," I finished ....

It was as if she finally put the parts together. "That's disgusting. That's the nastiest thing I've ever seen in my life." She was backing away, holding her book as if to fend me off with it, making little "Oh, Oh" cries, almost like the rat.

What could I have done to an animal to upset her more? The old bite-the-head-off-a-live-bat routine? Sex with a chicken? I don't know. I'd forgotten that she was a friend to animals -- well, most animals. She'd wanted us to get a cat, but the landlord wouldn't allow it.

"Oh, God, what are you going to do?" she said. She could barely speak. "It's still alive. Do something."

"I don't know, don't know. Got to kill it somehow." I wasn't exactly calm myself, even shaking so badly I was afraid I might drop the trap. What could I do? "I'll drown it in the bucket outside. That'll be quick." The cold water did kill the rat right away. When I came back, Kathy had locked herself in the bedroom. She didn't speak to me for two days.

"The first way is what I would recommend now. It's dull, but honest. If you're going to kill a rat, you ought to just do it."

"Go on. The old Pumpkinhead is waiting."

"Remember, Jack," I type, "I've been telling my rat stories backwards, so at this point I've just caught a glimpse of one rat. I'll go on with the first method."

The friendly man at the hardware store seemed really nice the first time. Later this guy would sell me the sticky traps and then poison, but this first time he rang up the wooden rat trap I'd picked out.

"Got some rats, eh?"

"Yep," I said, trying to sound like one of the boys. "I guess this'll do the trick." It was only later that I started asking for his advice.

The trap itself was wicked looking, about seven inches long, with a strong spring. I tried setting it carefully, then tripped it with a pencil. A big snap. This was no wimpy mousetrap -- it easily broke the pencil with a vicious crack.

I smeared cheese on the little trip platform and set it again. Now I had to decide where to place it. Near the doors where we actually saw the rat? No good -- Kathy, or even I, would step on it and break a toe. I couldn't get to the inner walls where we'd heard the rats. Then I thought of the attic. We were renting the house, and I'd only peeked up there once. Investigation revealed the mother lode of rat droppings, above and around the furnace, so I carefully set the trap and positioned it near the edge of the top of the furnace.

I didn't really expect to catch a rat. We all know that nothing is easy in this world -- extra problems always come along. So the next day I turned my flashlight toward what was surely an empty trap, except that the trap held an enormous rat. The metal wire had caught him diagonally across the head, cruelly smashing his head, but it hadn't killed him.

Fortunately, this first time, Kathy was at school. If only I would be as smart, or lucky, later with the sticky traps. Anyway, the rat was there, it was huge, it was alive, and I didn't know what I was going to do about it. The trap had just barely caught it across the tip of its head. I was squeamish about picking up rat and trap with my bare hands, and I also worried that the rat might slip off the trap -- to go scurrying or crawling off. I didn't want it to suffer more; I just wanted to kill it quickly and painlessly. But how, in the awkward space of the attic, without fetching the trap down?

"I promise. Stack of bibles, my first-born son."

"Really, no laughing. It's going to sound silly, but it was serious for me then."

"Come on, tell."

"I used a blowgun."

Jack types, "Sure, poison-tipped." Then he types: "Snicker, snicker, giggle, snort, giggle, giggle, snort, snort, titter, ha, ha, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, ...." Line after line of "HA, HA."

"You promised," I type.

"But a blowgun! Give me a break."

"You don't picture it. This was no toy. The Whamo Company made these -- five feet long with heavy six-inch stainless steel darts. It could penetrate half an inch into plywood."

"OK, OK, go on with the story."

I positioned the blowgun, gave a big puff, and womp, the dart slammed into the rat. He jerked just once and then stiffened, obviously dead. I was trembling, sweating. I carried the rat out to the side of the house, sprung him out of the trap, and looked at him under the harsh Texas sun. He was huge beyond anything I had expected. I fetched my tape measure. A nine-inch body plus a ten-inch tail. He dwarfed the pitiful little rat trap. Only by chance had this silly trap caught him right across the head.

I had a strange experience then. Memories from childhood came to me. How could I have forgotten? When I was five, we'd had lots of rats in my old house. Giant rats, but no bigger than the one here. We hadn't used little toy wooden traps like mine, but larger metal traps with jagged teeth like something to catch a beaver. And we fastened the trap down so the rats wouldn't drag it off, fastened with wire so they couldn't chew through. I hadn't done any of that -- just my dumb good luck, and my rat's bad luck.

I lifted my pants leg and looked at a white scar. A rat bite from long ago. How was it possible I hadn't remembered?

"Yeah, I guess so. This story sounds amusing now, maybe, I know. But it wasn't funny then. It still isn't."

"Hey, another point: I spent time on a farm, and I never saw metal traps for rats."

"Well, that's what I remember using."

"What about your friend Kathy?"

"She never got over it," I type. "She wouldn't talk about it -- just that she wanted to 'get off by herself.' You know, if all this were a story I was writing, making it up as I go, Kathy and I would have these discussions and even confrontations. We'd bring it all out in the open -- talk our problems over. But it was actually so dull, so miserable. We never talked at all, and the relationship just wilted, faded. She was -- special to me, so why did I let her go without a fight?"

"I don't know much about your Kathy, but maybe you're better off without her."

"I'm not kidding now, not joking," I type. "You're really starting to irritate me."

"Easy, easy," Jack answers. "I thought we were having some laughs, and your leg comes off in my hands. You tell me how things wound up, and I'll listen."

"Sorry. I need to calm down. But I was -- fond of her. I just let her leave; I didn't even try to keep her. I think of it now as one of those 'woman's' things. She insisted I get rid of the rats, but then couldn't stand to see one die. I've thought about it a lot. I could have tried live traps. Or used professionals. I should have pestered the landlord. The pros would have just put out poison."

"My friend, I really am sorry. I've been there myself, though I didn't fall as hard as you."

"I kept in touch with her. I think I secretly hoped to get back together. What a shock to get her wedding invitation a couple of years later. I sent them a crystal flower vase, but I didn't go to the wedding."

"You still haven't answered. Did you get rid of the rats in the end?"

"Oh, no, they were still there squeaking and scuttling until I left the house, months after Kathy moved out. I only managed to get rid of Kathy."