Our attached garage is off the kitchen, through a firedoor and down a couple of steps. One of the tasks still remaining in the kitchen remodel is replacing the firedoor. The kitchen is open to the garage, a hole of frame and plaster between the two.
I was getting ready tonight to fix the the feet on the god damned wobbly washing machine — again — when I looked at the spot on the floor where I was about to lie down with the wrench. A mouse lay there, dead on its side.
It’s been a few years since we’ve had a mouse in the house. We set out snap traps and warfarin — I think the person who invented sticky traps for mice should be tossed onto a ping-pong table thickly spread with that horrible adhesive — and I sealed the entrances to our crawl space with galvanized mesh. That solved the problem for a few years, and the mice were restricted to the compost pile.
In our last place, there were dozens of mice. Hundreds. An elderly man a couple houses down moved to a convalescent home, and his granddaughter called the contractors in to renovate the house. I’d always heard that mice and rats refused to live in the same house at the same time: Mr. Connor’s house disproved that rumor. All those rodents were displaced. They had to go somewhere.
When Zeke first came to live with us we had pet rats, whom he loved as pals. It was surprising to me, therefore, to see the ruthlessness with which he set to killing Mr. Connor’s rats. Within three or four days he had killed half a dozen, jumping on them and snapping their necks then bringing me to the scene of the kill. The rest of the rats made themselves scarce.
But the mice were more persistent. Over the next few months Zeke spent a lot of time in our old garage, hunting. One day early on Becky came home and found the garage torn apart, stacked cardboard and paper recycling strewn all over. She punished Zeke. The next day she saw Zeke near the recycling, delivering a stiff-legged pounce to a suddenly dead mouse. He killed probably twenty mice in the next month, as many as we did wiith traps. For several years I could not turn the compost without Zeke jumping between the pile and the fork, excited at what game I might turn up.
Of course that was years ago, when Zeke was still agile and energetic. Tonight, I looked the mouse over. It seemed intact, as if it had died in its sleep. In the kitchen, Becky and I wondered what had done it in: a stash of warfarin left over? One of the neighborhood cats, sneaking in while I had the garage door open? A mystery. I heard footsteps come through the living room. Zeke wandered into the kitchen still yawning from his nap.
“Hey Zekie,” I said, “where’s the mousie?”
Zeke finished yawning, then looked at the garage door.
