Rats

It’s difficult, impossible really, to live on acreage in a rural place and draw a firm line. This side: orderly, civilized, tidy, clean. That side: the wilderness. Some days, you mow the patch of lawn in front of the woods, admire its smoothness, its edge of sweet clover left for the bees. Other days, the sick possum under the trees hisses and staggers away or the hawk snatches a sparrow and eats it at your picture window, feathers like a flurry of petals and the sparrow not dead yet. Fattened with rats, the king snakes grow longer than the broomstick you use to push them back into the tangles of privet and muscadine vines. You’ve seen these rats, their babies anyway, in a nest in the back of the yard under the trees, a nest dug out in the warm center of a pile of leaves. They are like larvae, wet and pink and naked, so that you cover them up again in hopes that the world is tenderer than you know it is. You can’t kill anything that vulnerable, that like an unboned thumb. Later, when you check on the nest, they’re gone; the hollow where they lay lined in the fur you’d combed from your dogs earlier in the spring.

One summer day, a hump in the flower box catches my eye, the fiber liner in disarray, the dirt and moss rose bellied up. I had planted the flowers in the spring, and in the heat they had just begun to put out their throat-pink blooms. I can’t imagine what has lifted the plants this way, almost free of the dirt, the roots exposed, pale silk threads barely thicker than spiderwebs. The pearlized bits in the potting soil suddenly look like pellets of bone. The dirt spills out of the flower box into a cone-shaped pile on the ground underneath as if it has been running through an hourglass, keeping time. I don’t know what that hump in the flower box is besides wrong, bad for the flowers. I’ll get the hose, I think, water them in good and it’ll be fine. But as I step forward, the flowers shift slightly, then the whole box rattles hard, once. I can’t register fast enough why this should be before the box comes alive with rats, rats boiling over the edge of the box, rats running across my shoes past me out the open screen door into the yard, through the lattice holes in the pen wall, leaping the stone wall into the flowerbeds, climbing up the lattice, dashing behind the coop. It’s as if the world is composed solely of rats who only need a push to reveal themselves.

I think: Scream! But I just stand there, silent, rooted in surprise, the rats running everywhere squeaking their horror-show squeaks.

~

When this happens, I am clutching a pail of dirt full of worms to spread in the pen for the chickens. Minutes later, I stand in the house in my dirty shoes with this pail and a look on my face.

“Chuck,” I say. I am still very calm. “We have rats.”

“I know, I know. You mean out back?”

“No, I mean: We have rats. In the coop. Everywhere.”

“Everywhere? In the house you mean?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. They’re everywhere.” My head feels like an empty plastic bag, like the tide is out but it is coming in fast. “They just poured out of the flower box on the coop. Poured. Out of the flower box. On me. On me.”

“Show me. It’ll be okay.”

We walk to the coop at the corner of the house. I am imagining rats everywhere, in everything, rat faces in the grass, rat tails in the trees, rat droppings on the pavement, everything blinking and skittering. I set the pail of dirt down in the chicken pen while Chuck looks at the flower box, its contents now fully upended on the ground, the liner like it had been roiled in an accident. The uprooted moss roses are starting to wilt, and I see how the stems look just like the slender, hairless tails of rats.

“Look here,” Chuck says. He’s crouched where the coop meets the house. Beside the coop, pieces of hay from the chickens’ nests fringe a hole in the dirt.

“Oh god. They’re under there now?”

“Can’t be. Wire’s okay”—he pulls some near the hole to make sure it isn’t loose or broken. “Small ones maybe, though, until they’re too big to get back in.”

To keep out vermin, like rats, he’d built the coop over a foundation wrapped in wire a foot down in the dirt. But the wire-holes are big enough for lizards, snakes—small rats.

“Look,” I say, pointing at a tiny pink nose, a spray of gray whiskers poking out of the wire. I have to remind myself: rats are bad, bubonic plague, hanta fever, disease disease disease. I call up images of plague buboes the size of oranges and black as burnt flesh, babies eaten in their cribs, people with leprosy waking up a little less themselves for rats gnawing off numb fingers in the night. What rats can do to chickens—eat them alive, piece by piece. The rat under the coop sniffs at us, his bead-dark eyes unblinking.

“He’s so small,” Chuck says. “A baby.”

The baby basilisked me motionless. It takes the sudden sound of my dogs barking in the house to bring me back.

~

A few hours later we stand in our local feed and seed, looking at all the ways one can move rats on, say, to the rat afterlife, if there is one. Or, say, to the wilderness beyond the creek a couple of football fields behind our house. We decide against every device that seems cruel, against insides-melting poisons, against horrifying glue-traps that force the rat’s head down and slowly suffocate it. We’re not those people, the anything-but-rats people. We’re the people trying to negotiate a healthy relationship with the wild, trying to find that line between our space, safety, order, cleanliness, and health, and the space in which rats figure. We wanted to be civilized about it, to be civil to the rats, but to move them on.

We buy a nine-inch catch cage, a wire rectangle with a bait latch that, when tripped, locks the rat in the cage for transport elsewhere. The first night we set it out, we catch an adult right outside the coop, six or so inches long, tail like a thick, pale taproot. Chuck drives it miles from home and releases it into a field. We set the trap out again the next night and many nights afterward, but we never catch another one. We decide that this means they’ve crossed over, gone back to the woods in the way back, to the leaf piles, the predictable hazards of snakes and hawks and feral cats.

So when, a few days later, Chuck opens the door to the walk-in space under the house and hears rustling coming from under the plastic grill-cover, he expects lizards, a trapped bird, something benign.

Now, this is the part of the film where you know what you shouldn’t do, the part where, as the audience, you know what comes next, but the characters never seem to. You know the serial killer is in the darkened basement. That the sound you’re hearing is the demon-possessed doll spooling up. That the house is going to collapse. That the ticking noise is a timer on a bomb. You know you should run, that the worst decision you can make is not to run, fast, far, whatever else—away.

But Chuck is not you. He’s Dead Teenager Seven, Zombie Bait Five, Unsuspecting Space Soldier Twelve. He does not run away. Instead, he ambles over and puts his hand on the grill and triggers an explosion.

Inside the house, I hear bald, naked, panicked screaming. In the seconds it takes me to get to the door, I imagine severed arteries spurting great gushes of blood, a bashed-in, blood-spattered head, fingers caught in a saw, ripped ragged but still twitching. It’s that kind of screaming. I run to the door. The dogs are there first, barking and whining and scratching. I push them with my legs, Chuck could be bleeding out right then, but I can’t get the door open and then I do and we’re launched into the sunlight on the deck. The dogs are like missiles, straight-arrowing low to the ground, tails flat out like lances, hurtling toward the grass. Chuck stands, unbloodied, not screaming anymore but pacing, muttering, brushing at his pants, his arms, his hair. The dogs zigzag in the grass, Blue, the furry red Akita mix, doing figure eights, the gray Catahoula leopard dog, Ollie, making endless parentheses cupped in parentheses. The rats are boiling up the grass, but I see only that Chuck is not dead, that he has all his fingers, that there is no blood.

“What happened? What happened? Are you okay?”

“Rats,” Chuck says. “So many rats. In the grill. God, the rats. No, no bites. I’m okay. Really I’m—”

Before Chuck can finish his sentence, we’re both watching the dogs in the yard making figures in a small, moving patch of grass and sun, Blue with his head down, lifting and coming down hard on his front legs, while Ollie concentrates on packing in the edges, keeping the center tight around Blue. Inside the edges Ollie is making, the grass is teeming, bubbling with gray bodies that pop into the air like the ground is on fire.

At that moment, Blue understands his job, understands it with a kind of passion reserved for vocation, for the perfect moment when the purpose of being becomes clear. Ollie always knew, was always doing his job, but Blue has just discovered his. He puts his head into the squirming grass, rats popping onto his face. His ears flattened, his lips drawn back, he snatches a rat delicately as though testing a bit of lace with his front teeth. The rat is nearly as big as his snout. The other rats racing under him, he bounces straight legged to keep them down, the rat still in his mouth, struggling. Even from this far, you can see it lash its tail, its paws scrabbling at the dog’s jaw.

Blue goes absolutely still, the rat in his mouth squealing, trying to get free. He tenses up, then unleashes the kinetic energy in his neck in one short snap. The rat hangs limp. Tossing it aside, Blue reaches down, picks up another, whip-breaks its neck, tosses it, picks up and does the same to another, and another. When the pack begins to loosen, four or five rats left maybe, Ollie begins to cut single rats from the herd and push them toward Blue. The survivors streak for the trees, Ollie fast behind them, dodging left, right, no time for his sheep stare but plenty for his best side-to-sides. Blue keeps right where Ollie can see him, takes up each rat, kills it so quickly you nearly miss that sideways snap of his head, the graceful arcing of the dead body into the tidy, motionless pile a few feet from his work.

In less than a minute, the rats are gone, one or two back in the woods where they belong, the rest quiet, lying on their sides like they’re asleep. We get the dogs into the house, pet them elaborately, praise them, inspect Blue’s face for bites or scratches. I call the vet to see if he needs to be vaccinated. “No,” she says, “but congratulations. You could rent him to some folks we know.” I laugh. I remember his puppyhood, his sweet handsome face with its emphatic eyeliner. I’m not sure how to reconcile that with the death-machine he’s clearly meant to be. Once the dogs are settled in, Chuck and I go inspect the corpses in the yard.

“Dozen,” he says.

“More,” I say. “What do we do with them?”

“Other things can eat them, right?”

I was not thinking of them as food. I say nothing. Chuck walks outside the gate to a small hillock where a pine tree stump sticks up from the moss like a table. The tree had been eaten through with pine beetles, all one hundred feet of it, so we’d had it removed when we moved in several years ago. “Here,” he says. “We can set them out here.” He puts on waterproof garden gloves and lifts the rats by their tails, still flexible and cooling, into the wheelbarrow, then sets them in a pattern on the stump, like a flower, their tails all curled toward the center, their perfect bodies like petals. None looks a bit disheveled. “Are they even dead?” I say. “They don’t look dead.” Chuck lifts one and shakes it a little. It’s clearly not living.

There are more than twenty, so he layers them. “Zinnia,” I say. There is no blood anywhere, no color—the rats are shades of gray and brown, their button eyes dimmed and open, even their noses without pink. They make a zinnia of meat in black and white on the old stump. Above us, a family of crows gathers, parents and two generations of grown children. They are almost perfectly quiet except for the sound of their wings. We had watched them hatch and fledge; they knew us and alerted us to threats to the chickens in the yard or called out when we were gardening and they were ready to descend on the grubs we’d dug up.

I wave at them, one startling briefly in a half caw. “Hi,” I say. “Hi, crow-babies. Dinner’s served.” Chuck laughs, lifts the last corpse by its tail. It’s a young male, each foot perfect, each toe perfectly defined, the nails flecks of white. Chuck curves him into the shape the dogs make sleeping, and sets him in the middle of the flower like a heart. “Sleep well,” he says, giving him a pat. In the morning, not one of the bodies remains.