La Rata No Es Bueno

La Rata No Es Bueno

Beyond the hanging Spanish moss a wobbly splintered dock ran out into the tidal flat rife with small crabs.  A methodical flock of white ibis combed slowly through the mud, probing with red decurved bills fanning along and other than a few stragglers eventually disappeared behind a stand of saw palmetto.  The morning sun was gathering its strength and radiated through the marshland and channels with a light haze around the distant islands as a ship moved soundlessly through the Intracoastal Waterway.  A few lean deer with twitching, delicate ears moved soundlessly as well as cautiously around the edge of the salt marsh.  As Maureen sipped her morning tea, she noticed a little tree frog sticking to the picture window behind her.  When it noticed her interest, it edged sideways along the glass and flattened itself against the door jamb. 

Maureen had been living here for more than a year and she still had trouble believing it was real.  She and her husband Albert had retired a few years prior and they decided to sell out their home in Long Island and purchase this home in Beaufort, South Carolina.  They bought their first home in 1979 for forty thousand dollars and thirty two years later sold it for nine times as much.  It was a tidy ranch house that was fit to raise their daughter who moved on her own twelve years ago to San Francisco.  Over the years they maintained and remodeled portions of the house as needed and in the end it was their greatest investment.  When Maureen’s father had finally passed away two years ago, they could finally ask themselves what they would want to do with the rest of their own lives.  They had visited their daughter in San Francisco several times and thought of moving out there because of its beauty and their grandchildren, but property was so expensive it would be a step backwards for them.  But Maureen had a friend from high school that lived in Charleston and they had a wonderful time visiting there.  The people were so friendly, the seafood so fresh, the weather so not freezing that they started to ask about real estate opportunities and when they compared the housing prices and the tax rates, they decided on moving.  All they had were a few adult cousins left on Long Island and both Maureen and Al realized they could live without barbeque birthday parties around an above ground pool.  So with Albert’s pension from Con Edison, and Maureen’s retirement from thirty years at the Department of Motor Vehicles, they sold their Long Island ranch home and bought this house on the water south of Charleston.  It was secluded but part of a gated golf club community.  They would joke to each other that their life had become a never ending vacation.

They spent mornings golfing, afternoons on the boat and evenings enjoying Al’s new love of healthy cooking.  After dinners of oysters, shrimp or fish and vegetables, they would relax on the back deck with a glass of white wine both content with a life deserved.  They both discovered joys and interests they hadn’t known before.  Aside from maintaining his boat and working on his short golf game, Al started to collect and repair old radios in his garage workshop.  Maureen discovered birds.

Al convinced her to let him put up a hummingbird feeder on their deck when she saw them buzzing around the large live oak on the corner of their property.

“But how much is nectar and where do you get it?”

“It’s just water and sugar,” he said.

“But won’t that attract bees and flies?”

“I doubt it.  Besides I think it attracts butterflies.  Remember that big black and yellow one on the seventh green?”

Within twenty minutes of putting up the feeder little ruby throats were zipping around their deck.  One hovered above her glass of iced tea on the table and another lighted on the deck rail before shooting up into the trees and she loved them instantly.  But she never loved birds before.

When she was young, like many women from her generation, she had seen the Hitchcock movie The Birds and developed a mild phobia of the fluttering and the beaks and the expressionless but knowing reptilian look in their eyes.  When she was ten, at a friend’s house for a birthday party, someone loosed the blue and yellow budgerigar from his cage and he flew around the living room until he became winded and entangled in Maureen’s hair.  Also, it didn’t help that her younger brother developed an unreasonable and inexplicable obsession with birds when he was ten and she was fifteen in 1970.  She loved Michael.  When he was born and brought home from the hospital she got her little pillow and blanket and slept underneath his crib for two weeks until her parents interceded, but there were many mornings she was caught sleeping underneath him again because after she crept into his room she drifted off looking up at the wire web of his crib.  He died young.

He began his obsession with birds after a blue jay swooped and clipped their father’s head requiring three stitches.  A young jay had fallen out of its nest in the bushy blue spruce that bordered their property and their dog was barking at it.  When Dad came out to investigate and grabbed the dog’s collar the jay dove and hit him.  When he returned from the doctor, he forbade anyone from leaving the house and put on his WWII helmet from his tour in Germany and France.  He also donned sunglasses lest he lose an eye.  He got out his wooden stepladder and a rake and ripped out the nest and crushed the remaining two nestlings.  Michael watched from the garage window as the jays, five adults, screamed and fretted in the trees.  They were so blue and animated, black and white and passionate.  He began to notice other birds and his obsession had begun.

She never knew another kid who had such a love of being outdoors.  He was always in trouble for riding his bicycle farther than he was allowed, riding to the brackish river and salt marsh a few miles from their home.  He would return after curfew in the summer, scratched, bleeding and reeking of sulfurous mud from stalking water birds or covered in boils from poison ivy for stalking woodland birds.  She still loved him those years when he became older and tolerated his silliness with a maternal constancy, but she was nearing the end of high school and had her own interests.  She would be married to Albert by 1975.  The only real problems arose when his boyish devil took hold and he left one of the expired birds he was always trying to rehabilitate under her pillow or in her dresser drawers.

He died at 23.  Through high school he worked in the restaurant at the country club on Bread and Cheese Hollow Road and became quite a cook.  He also became quite a drinker and used both those talents in Martha’s Vineyard, Cape May and Santa Fe working seasonally at country clubs and restaurants using his pay for partying and travelling and Maureen supposed still looking for birds.  He was with them the Christmas week of ’83, staying with her and Albert because their parents didn’t have the patience for him.  They would be civil on the holidays, but not beyond that point because he dismissed the idea of college and they thought he had so much promise.  At 5:35 am on December 27^th, he was killed in a drunk driving accident, but the irony was that he wasn’t drunk.  He woke up early to drive out to Shinnecock Inlet to look for eider when someone fell asleep at the wheel, went through a red light and destroyed Michael and his Jeep Cherokee.

One morning when Maureen was watering her rosemary and basil on the back deck she noticed a burst of color in the palmettos.  She descended the steps to her lawn and walked slowly towards a small bird of red, indigo and green.  She had never seen a bird of such exotic color in the wild, and it was so small and beautiful.  Much like the hummingbirds, this little creature enamored her.  Such a gorgeous and delicate little thing out here in the wild!  She went inside and grabbed from the book case A Guide to the Birds of South Carolina which someone had given her as a housewarming gift and found the bird almost immediately: Painted Bunting.  She was fascinated and flipped through the pages looking at all the other bird photographs in color plates.  Within a few days, she and Al put a bird feeder that was shaped like a small gazebo in the middle of the table on their bedroom deck.  Soon she recognized with ease chickadees and nuthatches, Carolina wrens and orioles.  It was a while before the painted buntings found the feeder, as well as others. 

They had been living in the new house for more than a year and were finally settled in and still joking about being on an eternal vacation, but a form of loneliness started to seep into Maureen’s being.  She had no friends around and really no interest in joining the social circles of the golf club as the women to her were older and foreign.  Her friend from Charleston and her husband would come visit every month or so because they loved Beaufort, but well-spaced weekends don’t consist of companionship.  She and Al would go to Charleston as well to see a Judy Collins concert or check out the Spoleto Festival.  Her grandchildren were on the other side of the country and her daughter had her own life, so they’d see them once a year and have to deal with her tedious and insufferable husband while doing so.  She and Al had each other and that was all.  She noticed sometimes his well-concealed exasperation at her clinginess since they were always together and sometimes felt jealous of his ability to get along with everyone.  He knew several of the neighbors, was cozy with the golf club manager and even began to run a bobcat and backhoe helping drainage on the course for free driving range balls.  So she found herself concentrating on improving her swing and really starting to enjoy the wildlife and birds around her. 

She loved the deer that crept along her property line, the bold and careless cottontail rabbit who grazed on her lawn, the white ibis in the marsh.  And she began to notice the birds beyond her feeder, the ones around the golf course.  She brought her guide book onto the course and identified brilliant red-headed woodpeckers and yellow-shafted flickers, snowy egrets and Louisiana herons, cormorants and the strange anhinga, or snake-bird, whose odd swimming habits had her captivated.  She saw two, necks twisting at strangle angles, almost form a heart shape before disappearing below the surface.  She only made the connection to her brother when she saw the spoonbills.

They were on the sixth hole and she looked back at Al who was in the middle of the fairway, but behind her.  On his right was the main pond of the course, on his left was a wide salt marsh with circuitous channels, and overhead were a couple jets from Parris Island performing their touch-and-go exercises with a deafening roar.  Even the few inconveniences of this life were beautiful in their own way.  As she watched him line up to swing, a group of long necked pink birds flew above him towards the salt marsh and they looked exactly like flamingoes.  According to her guide there were no flamingoes native to South Carolina, let alone any long necked pink birds.  She and Al reasoned that they were escapees from someone’s private estate.  When they were leaving Al had his usual lengthy conversation with the course manager and brought up the flamingoes.  The manager told him they were roseate spoonbills and they had been nesting on the property for two years and that they used to be only found in the Everglades in Florida.  When she got home to her computer, she found only references to the birds inhabiting Texas, Louisiana and Florida.  They were hunted almost to extinction in the 1800’s and there were 30-40 pairs left in existence until hunting them was banned. 

That evening after a salad and Al’s oyster bisque, they rode their bicycles with binoculars to the private road that ran through the course and edged the main pond where numbers of wading birds roosted, clamoring in the trees at night time.  As they scanned the trees amid the wood stork, the egrets, the ibis, the heron, there were the spoonbill, dozens of them unmistakable with a strange grey leathery bill that ended in a spoon shape.  Al said, “They must be moving up north now,” and she suddenly remembered her brother.  It would be difficult to remember all of his ramblings, especially about birds, but for some reason, she immediately connected Al’s statement to one night at the dinner table when her brother was fifteen and he was raving about bird species shifting north in their range.  He was eating the fat from the edge of his sirloin and pushing the lima beans to the side of his plate and talking like a madman about birds that were new to Long Island.  (He was talking about the red-bellied woodpecker.)  This time was long before people argued over global warming and thinking of the prescience and enthusiasm of her baby brother gave her a comfort she hadn’t known since his death.  From that point on, she looked at her birds as more than pretty things; she had more respect for them.  It also made her sad.

Albert was a kind and loving husband and he knew his wife well.  She never liked animals; they never had any pets because most of her life she was concerned with
“the mess they make.”  He was fine with whatever would make her happy and remembered with much pain the death of his own childhood dog when he was eighteen, two years before he and Maureen were married.  So when his wife took such an interest in birds especially he understood it was more than a distraction of retirement.  She was lonely and missed her friends from Long Island although she never really socialized much. She needed companionship more than he could offer but she refused to try to meet people from the course club.  He even encouraged her to get a part time job to get out of the house.  He knew her brother and was there for his death.  Birds of all things.  He didn’t need a degree in psychoanalysis to figure that one out.

Maureen had expressed concern that the squirrels might discover the bird feeder on their bedroom deck and make a mess of the seed.  They eventually did but before them they had another visitor.  Al was typically an earlier riser than his wife and one morning while he was out getting coffee and the newspaper from Adnan the owner of the nearest convenience store, Maureen woke and stretched.  She slipped out of bed and moved slowly to the glass doors of her bedroom that led to the deck eager to see if the buntings were back.  She had seen a wood thrush the previous morning.  She saw no birds but instead a squirrel at the feeder busy stuffing its cheeks with bird food.  Annoyed, she knocked hard three times on the glass hoping to send it leaping off the table without avail.  She opened the door briskly thinking it would send the critter forth but still it continued to eat as if she weren’t there.  She stepped out on the deck and realized that this squirrel did not have a bushy tail but rather a bald one.

Al was speaking with the clerk about the techniques of catching shrimp with a cast net when his phone rang.

“Al, there’s a rat at our bird feeder.  A rat!”

“A rat? Not a squirrel? Are you sure it’s not a squirrel?”

“It’s a rat!  Where are you?  It’s a rat!”

“I’ll be there in a minute.”

When he got home she described how she watched it as it left the table, crawled down the side of the chair and disappeared below the deck. 

            Al went out and inspected the deck, the area below the deck, the garbage cans, the garage and the edge of the property and all he found was the startled but bold rabbit that grazed on their lawn.  They both decided it would be wise to hang the feeder from a tree limb reachable from the deck to discourage the rat.  They didn’t climb trees did they?  This rat did not and the birds quickly adjusted and after a few days, they thought it was a freak occurrence, some lone rat which saw an opportunity.  But then the squirrels discovered the feeder and although they shook the feeder and wasted a lot of seed it was far better than a rat to them.

            Another morning Maureen awoke to find nuthatches and chickadees taking turns at the feeder and took her tea on her bedroom deck rather than the main back deck because now that the birds didn’t feed at her table, they weren’t afraid of her and she could watch them feed from the tree closely.  As she sat in her robe, a female bunting alighted nearby and then dropped below the feeder to take advantage of the dropped and scattered seeds from the squirrels.  Maureen leaned forward slowly so as not to disturb it and saw the rat foraging next to the bunting.  It was grazing methodically using its forepaws to fill its cheeks with spilled seed and didn’t seem to notice the bunting hopping back and forth near it.  Maureen tossed the tea from her cup at it scaring away the bunting.  The rat paused and then turned and walked to the edge of the house and hugged it until in turned the corner towards the driveway. 

Two mornings later it was back and Maureen watched it closely.  It almost seemed benign filling its cheeks, chipmunk like, uncaring as she took a few steps down the stairs towards it.  When she got to the fourth step it halted abruptly, paused and this time ran humpbacked and wobbly to the edge of the house and cornered towards the driveway.

“We need to do something about this rat,” they both agreed.

“Well, should I trap it?”

“Not with one of those snap traps.  Can’t you get one that doesn’t kill it?”

“I’m sure I can.”

Albert entered Grayco Hardware & Home relieved by the strength of its air conditioning and with a little help found the section for pest control.  Above the roach baits, the heavy-springed rat traps and poisons, he found several metal Havahart traps of varying sizes.  The smallest seemed much too small and the next largest seemed too large but he went with that one because there was no way the rat would get through the small squares of wire and it seemed likely the rat was large enough to trip the door.  He looked around before he took it off the shelf thinking that if he had moved here ten years earlier he could have had an extensive conversation with the store owner about the pros and cons of certain rat traps.

He and Maureen researched the best bait for rats and it turned out to be bacon, gummy bears and peanut butter.  Al joked he may end up in the trap if he sleepwalks and Maureen laughed.  Since they were eating healthier he had to go out and buy the ingredients and when he fried the bacon, he had three pieces himself and secreted the bacon grease in a small container in the back of the dairy drawer in their refrigerator for future use.  They tested the trap’s effectiveness with a stick, made an appealing pastry with a bacon crust and peanut butter filling with gummy bear garnish and set it out that night.

“You’ll let him go in a safe place?”

“Yes, sweetie.  Down at the boat launch.  Lots of space in the rocks, no gators and people leave dead fish down there all the time.  He’ll be fine.”

“Alright, I just feel bad because he’s not doing anything.  He’s actually kind of cute in a way.  But we can’t have rats.”

“I know, sweetie.”

“We can’t have rats.”

Al woke with the first light of the next day.  He put on a shirt, shorts and sandals and went out back to check the trap.  Sure enough, it had been sprung and there was the rat sitting peacefully in it.  “”Hey, little guy,” Al said as he cautiously approached.  The rat’s whiskers twitched as it seemed to regard Al, but when he reached down towards the cage to pick it up, the rat lunged savagely at him and made a deep growling noise.  Al jumped back, surprised at the sudden change in the rat’s demeanor.  The rat seemed to grow in size as it growled loudly striking periodically at the side of the cage.  The growling was growing louder and turning into a scream so Al needed to act quickly because he did not want Maureen to wake and see this situation.  He went to his boat in the driveway and pulled out a long gaff pole that came with the boat when he bought it.  He hooked the end of the gaff under the trap handle and lifted the cage of turmoil from the ground.  The handle slipped so the cage was hanging at a 45 degree angle with the rat screaming and clawing savagely as Al used all his energy to hold it out straight from him and walk it to the back of his pickup truck.  Bathed in sweat, he took a moment to get his breath and walked to the side of the house to see if Maureen had been awoken.  The house was quiet, but the rat was continuing its horrible growl, a combination of anger and anguish.

The air conditioning of his truck was welcome to cool him down as well as drown out the noise of the rat.  Leaving his neighborhood and passing the entrance to the golf course he worried that someone may hear the noise coming from the back of his truck.  Al, what was all that racket in your truck yesterday?  That sure would be a good story to tell later, he thought.  The road past the course passed through a salt marsh with winding channels and a pool where he had seen a man using a cast net to catch shrimp a few days prior.  He really wanted to give that a try.

He turned left onto the main road that led to the boat launch.  He looked in his rearview mirror at the rat, hot in the sun in the back of the pickup.  It was breathing heavily and Al could still hear the growling noise which persisted as if the thing was possessed.  The road was straight and narrowed as he moved along, the live oaks crowding in.  Except for an occasional bright plot of fresh construction the shade of the woods grew darker and Al was happy because that rat must’ve been overheating in the sun.  What would he tell Maureen?  Yes, the rat was angry.  It was sure aggressive, but he’s fine now and far from us.  It was needed for sure and we have the trap if there are others.

As the road closed in even more he began to pass some of the Gullah houses, descendants of freed slaves who had lived there for generations.  He wanted to try some of the Gullah restaurants around but Maureen was so health conscious these days and they heard the cooks used a lot of grease.  Finally, the road ended at an expansive channel, the Intracoastal Waterway.  The grass and dirt parking lot was empty as he had hoped and as he got out of the truck he heard the spouting exhale of a pod of passing dolphins.  The sun was beginning to heat the land and the cicadas began to buzz, and when the rat saw Al its growling intensified again.  When he hooked the cage with his gaff and lifted it out of the truck, the rat started to make that screaming noise again and savagely attack the cage as if it were animate itself.  When he placed the cage on the ground, unhooked the gaff and moved back he said out loud, “Jesus.  How the hell am I going to get him out of there?”

All he had to do was lift the sliding door and run if it came bolting out of the cage like a greyhound.  It shouldn’t be a problem, he reasoned, but when he approached the cage the rat’s anger became exponential.  He leaned down at a safe enough distance to regard the rat as it lunged, snarling and screeching that terrible noise.  It looked at him with such rage and hate in its eyes he was stunned.  He said, “Alright.  Enough is enough,” and forced himself to grab the top of the sliding door.  When he did the rat lunged at his hand and he jerked it back quickly.  Growling the rat latched on the cage bars and bit so hard he saw some of its teeth break off with a terrible cracking sound.  He backed away while the rat still chewed at the cage, it’s mouth bloody with foamy saliva, its eyes wild, its ribcage heaving and pathetic, a keening now in its growls. 

“If Maureen saw this,” he thought.  He remembered how she was when her brother died, four days in a dark bedroom and then the months afterward when he worried most about their little daughter. 

He wished he had gloves, but even then…

Albert Jorgenson hooked the handle of  of the cage with his gaff as the rat continued his assault.  He held the long pole in front of him with the shaking cage hanging at an angle and walked down the boat ramp without looking forward.  When the water was up to his knees he was glistening with sweat and still looking away as he lowered the cage into the water.  He heard brief splashing and a keening gurgle as the cage submerged.  He unhooked the gaff and went back to the air conditioning in his car and sat for fifteen minutes.

“Did you just let the rat go?  Did we catch him last night?” she asked eagerly.

“Oh yeah.  Yup,” he said removing his sandals before stepping into the house.

“Where did you let him go?  The boat launch?  Was he okay?”

“He’s far from here and won’t be back.  I didn’t think he’d ever leave he cage, but he did and then ran out and disappeared into the rocks.  I bet he was hoping for another bacon pastry,” he kidded.

“Well, maybe we can bring one down to him once in a while.  As long as you don’t eat it on the way there,” she kidded back and gave his arm a squeeze.

“Good idea,” he lied successfully for the first time that he could remember.

That night, after a delicious crab gumbo and green salad, they rode again with their binoculars to the roosting site of  so many beautiful birds, yellow crowned night herons, roseate spoonbills, snowy egrets while below in the duckweed, the tiniest flowering plant in the world, alligators waited silently for the clumsy young to fall.

Draft     August 2016