Chapter Six
Six
On the first of October, they awoke to the sound of scurrying in the walls.
For several nights, this had been happening.
Now, putting two and two together, Miles understood the origin of the black sesame seeds that he dutifully wiped off the counter each morning.
Like most other academics in the humanities, Miles had taught a “Literature of Plague” seminar during the pandemic, so he knew that action couldn’t wait.
He began an email to Professor Rumphius, then deleted it.
It seemed ungrateful to bother their host with such a minor, common problem, especially when they were staying there for free.
On Facebook, he found the names of two local exterminators, one of whom was accused of “making the matter worse” and the other, “the Rat Man of Vermont,” who, in this age of viperous partisanship, seemed to be one of the few people in the world to be universally beloved, praised for his promptness and his honesty.
And prompt he was! An hour later, he rang their doorbell.
Miles had met exterminators twice before, both rodentlike men, long-nosed, whiskery, with thin rodent fingers, whose appearance raised the age-old question of whether people chose pets that looked like them, or came to look like their pets.
One had seemed oblivious to the similarity, but the other had embraced it.
He’d had a photo of himself in a mouse’s nose printed on his van, and when he came out to the house Miles was renting after college, he’d had a pink pool noodle attached to the back of his overalls, carefully studded with brown pipe cleaners, which Miles understood as bristles.
Miles complimented him on the costume, and he beamed.
Kids love it, he said, which was a little odd, because it was a weekday and there were no kids in sight.
He wore the tail while he worked, and it wasn’t clear if he’d forgotten or if it was part of his strategy.
In contrast, the Rat Man of Vermont didn’t look like a rat at all.
He had a flat nose and wide eyes and a ginger beard and ginger mustache, which he combed outward in two smooth waves.
His hands were covered in ginger freckles and soft ginger hair, and his fingers were short and fat, with long, sharp nails.
His ginger-colored T-shirt covered his big belly, just.
“Like a cat, right?” said the Rat Man.
“Sorry?”
“You were thinking that I look like a cat.”
Was it rude to answer?
“Come on,” said the Rat Man. “Everyone says it. I’m fuckin’ Garfield.” He lifted a hand, palm forward, fingers bent to show his nails, like a beckoning statue in a Japanese restaurant.
“Now I see it,” said Miles.
“Thing is, I was born like this,” said the Rat Man. “My dad, too. It was like God wanted us to be exterminators. Like that girl with webbed fingers.”
Miles must have looked perplexed, because the Rat Man said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of her.”
“Was she a swimmer?” asked Miles.
“Flycatcher,” said the Rat Man.
Miles said that he didn’t know that was a job.
“Well, it’s not,” said the Rat Man. “More like a performance. But I am surprised you don’t know about her, because she was all over TV.
Leno had a jar filled with flies and opened them and she would catch them, just like that, one, two, three.
Pop. Pop. Pop. With you or me, they would just slip through our fingers, see. But we’re not webbed.”
“No,” said Miles.
“But it wasn’t all roses and lilies,” said the Rat Man. “Like she had trouble holding a fork and using keys and that sort of thing—what is it, small-motor?”
“Fine-motor?” asked Miles.
“Couldn’t type, couldn’t hold a pencil. And Leno asks can’t the doctors do something about it, but then she wouldn’t be able to catch flies.”
“I can see the trade-off,” said Miles.
The Rat Man tapped his temple as if to say that Miles was a bright one. “Gonna finish the tour?” he asked.
Kate joined, and for the next half-hour they walked through the house. The Rat Man of Vermont put his ears to the walls, lay on the floor and closed his eyes, sniffed at the chimney, and then began to shake his head.
And he explained that the world consisted of what he called Rat-Lines, invisible pathways through field and forest along which the world’s rodents migrated, funneling together in great rushing channels, a transnational interchange of murine highways that converged in rare, legendary routes called Super-Rat-Lines, used for millennia, their numbers ebbing and flowing in fabled cycles.
The Rumphius house sat in the middle of such a corridor, the age in such a cycle.
The good news, he said, was that Rumphius had mostly mice, even if, emotionally, these mice were rats.
“Emotionally for us, or them?” asked Kate.
Giuseppe sauntered past.
“The dog doesn’t seem to care,” said Miles, hopefully.
“Ever try to sniff down a loaf of bread inside a bakery?” asked the Rat Man.
There was silence as the parties admired the analogy.
Kate had her hand on Miles’s shoulder, to steady herself. “Is there anything that we can do?” she asked.
The Rat Man shook his head. “No. I’m sorry.” Then he must have seen their distress, because he added, “Think of it like cancer. We could take it out, but what good would that do anyone?”
“It could get rid of the cancer,” said Kate.
“Not that kind of cancer,” said the Rat Man. “The kind that always comes back.”
Kate acknowledged that that was a different situation. But wasn’t there a chance that they had the other kind, which could be cured?
“Not a line like this,” said Garfield. “You could bomb a line like this and they’d be back. You could nuke the shit out of it and they’d be scurrying over all our corpses, over the scarred and melted earth.”
By the far wall, Giuseppe stopped and was sniffing at the molding. Miles looked to the Rat Man. For some reason, this seemed a cause for optimism.
“Hot spot,” said the Rat Man. He shook his head pityingly.
“Can’t we at least try trapping them?” asked Miles.
“It’s America, big guy,” the Rat Man said. “You can do anything you want.”
The hardware store in town sold twelve kinds of traps, in various grades of cruelty.
The packages showed happy little mice sitting on, dancing with, and hugging the objects of their execution.
Miles recalled Olive’s great pile of stuffed animals, the plush little rodents that she kissed each night before she slept.
There was a single brand of “humane” trap.
Chekhov, recalled Miles, when he first moved to his country home, could not bring himself to kill his mice, but carried them one by one into the forest.
“Good luck,” the cashier said, after he had swiped his credit card.
“I’m guessing it doesn’t work,” said Miles, forlornly.
“A typical mouse-bitch produces five to ten litters per year,” said the cashier.
“Five to eight pups a litter, though, on the upside, she’ll eat some of the young, so you’re probably down to four or five a litter on average.
But then the girl babies can get impregnated by their brothers and their fathers when they are six weeks old.
So it depends what you mean by ‘work.’ ”
The trap consisted of a swinging plank on top of a bucket. They put peanut butter on the swinging plank. The mice would tip the plank and tumble into the bucket.
The cashier was wrong. The humane trap worked wonders.
In the morning, before the kids awoke, Miles found four mice, three of which had been killed and partially eaten by the fourth, a terrified little creature who was trembling beneath some leaves that Olive had thoughtfully inserted to break its fall.
“I think I am going to be sick,” said Kate. “I don’t think this is humane at all.”
According to the Internet, this was a known problem if you didn’t put food in the bucket.
Of course! Well, that was easily fixed. And, lo!
, the next morning they found eight little mice so engorged on peanuts that they just stared up in sated wonder at the faces peering down at them.
The Internet also said the mice would find their way back unless you took them at least two miles away.
This seemed like an exaggeration; it would be like transporting a human to New Jersey.
But they had no authority to question the Internet.
And Miles recalled, at other dawns, on other evenings, seeing people with similar buckets, crouched suspiciously by the roadside, so he joined the good, kind country people who redistributed each other’s mice.
—
In addition to teaching two classes, Kate was asked to attend a weekly seminar for visiting scholars.
It was not technically a requirement, but it was followed by a dinner hosted by a farm-to-table restaurant, and often the group would adjourn to a pub off campus.
Spouses were invited, but Miles wasn’t eager for another evening being reminded of his failings.
And Kate, for her part, did not insist. Was she embarrassed by him?
Miles wondered. But the nights ran late, long after the children’s bedtime, and they’d been warned about the quality and pricing practices of the local babysitters, a cartel.