by Thom Jones
“That’s it! I’ve heard enough—you’ve got fifteen minutes before I call the police!” Dr. White said, standing up. “Puh-puh-puh-pack your stuff and get out.”
“Fine,” Hammermeister said. “Fifteen minutes. That’s just fine. ‘The custodians are a little trouble spot,’ remember? ‘They seem to defy our coping skills,’ remember? Shit, why did I have to be born white! It’s a curse!”
The principal walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him.
Hammermeister began slamming his personal supplies into a box. There wasn’t much. He picked up Blackboard Jungle 1999 and began to read. There was the truth. The American public would be shocked if they came to these schools and observed. Something very dangerous was going on inside. Well, the public did come. They were invited to come with open arms, but only to well-orchestrated events with canned speeches, lies, bullshit inspiration. If America really knew what was going on, it would be shocked. If they could see the school, day in and day out. The quality of education was an abomination!
Harold began to dictate into his personal recorder. “The school-board system: you’ve got a superintendent. What is his job? Why, he goes to a meeting now and then. He gets a haircut. Plays golf. Around levy time he sweet-talks some newspaper people. The taxpayers would be better off if they let the district secretary run things! When I came into this field I thought that by hard work and determination I could make a difference, but I have been swallowed up in chaos and futility. The American public has been greatly deceived! It is not only your hard-earned tax dollars that I am concerned about, it is our youth and the future of this once great nation! We need parental involvement. You can’t send them to us for seven hours and expect us to undo. They’re going loco. We need more metal detectors in the school. We need drug testing. We need a crime-prevention program. There should even be AIDS testing and quarantine like they’ve got over in Cuba. Are we going to let the rotten apples spoil the whole barrel? Goddammit, democracy just isn’t cutting it anymore. Someone has to step in and get the fucking trains running on time again or it’s closing time in the gardens of the West!”
Two uniformed police officers in squeaky leather jackets stepped warily into Hammermeister’s office. Harold looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes? “It hasn’t been fifteen minutes.”
“It’s time to go,” one of the police officers said.
Hammermeister looked at the box. He threw his thesis in it. He attempted to place Lulu’s glass cage in the box but it was too large. He set it back on the desk. He would have to carry the cage under one arm, and the box with the thesis, the Dixon pencils, coffee mug, Pepto-Bismol, aspirin, Tylenol #4s, Advil, his spare sports coat and neckties, etc., under the other arm. Except that now he was so spaced from the codeine and round-the-clock vodka drinking that he knew he would never manage it.
“Let’s go,” the officer said.
Hammermeister stuffed his pockets with the codeine #4s, then on impulse flipped the thesis into the wastebasket, dumping the remainder of the box in after it—the pencils, coffee cup, neckties, spare sports jacket, everything. He was dizzy with rage. He had a crazy impulse to dash over to the office safe and grab the nine-millimeter they recently pulled off a drug peddler and fire off a few rounds. If Sean Duffy and Centrick Cline were not there, he’d just shoot…whomever. Get Rider and White first. Instead, he flung the cardboard box aside and placed Lulu’s empty cage on top of his wastebasket. He raised a pebble-leather, oxblood brogue over the cage and then stepped down several times, crunching the glass.
The police officers braced for action, but then Hammermeister sagged. The only picture that came to his mind now were those of the flattened tires of his Ford. Gone was the movie, the new and better wife, the Lincoln, polo, and country clubbing. His shoulders slumped and he turned to them defeated. “I’m ready,” Harold said with a melodramatic flourish, presenting his hands for cuffing. “Read me my Miranda and let’s clear out of this place.”
The police officers, one short, one tall, exchanged a significant look. The short one said, “No need for the handcuffs, sir. They just want you off the grounds. It’s a routine eighty-six, that’s all. They just want you to leave.”
Hammermeister seemed disappointed that he was not under arrest. He felt cheated but let the police officers lead him through the party of “concerned” but not entirely unsympathetic office secretaries. They led him out into the throng of students who had heard the sound of smashed glass and had gathered to witness what they intuitively knew was a very strange and very bad scene. Several of the students wondered out loud as to what was going on. One of these, a student who had once been mesmerized by Hammermeister’s power of positive thinking spiel, and who had a certain affection for the former junior vice-principal, asked, “Wha’chew got, man?”
Hammermeister looked over his shoulder and cried, “Murder one.”
And with that he was led out to the parking lot to a squad car, driven to the bus stop, and dumped off. He had never taken a bus in America, didn’t know how, didn’t know when one was coming, and when he could no longer stand the cold, he gulped down a couple more codeine tablets with a slug of vodka and surveyed the landscape before him. Hammermeister realized he was the only Caucasian in the neighborhood, and he began to feel conspicuous. A couple of thugs, also brown bagging, joined him at the bus shelter. One carried a ghetto blaster. Clarence “Frogman” Henry was singing, “I’m a lonely frog, I ain’t got no home.” Hammermeister watched as the man inserted a rock in a crack pipe and took a hit off of it before passing it to his companion.
Moving from the shelter of the Plexiglas bus stop, Hammermeister dropped his head down against yet another Nanook of the North sleet storm. A mere pedestrian in the heart of the Motor City, new citizen John Harold Hammermeister caught the shoe-leather express back to his apartment.
Mouses
RODENTS INFILTRATED MY place at the first hard frost of the fall. I had a minor premonition that this would happen, and then, lo, it happened. For a couple of days it was in the back of my mind, in the twilight area where minor worries flourish—no big alarm bell rang, because most of the stuff you worry about never comes to pass. But then came the evidence, the irrefutable fact that not only did said perpetrators (previously unknown to me) claw and chew through a box of Wheat Thins, they defecated at the scene of the crime, leaving sizable pellets behind. Apparently “Don’t shit where you eat” isn’t in the rodent codebook. Hygiene is not a big concern with them. At first, I was in a state of denial. My place is sealed as tight as a drum. How could they get in? Also, I was thinking, I don’t need this now. I really do not need this. I was facing problems at work. There were rumors of a cutback at the plant. In spite of my seniority—I’ve been an engineer for ten years—I knew I was high on the shit list. I’m a convenient target. Why? Because I’m very short in stature. Five feet nothing. And I have a slight spinal deformity—a hump. No matter what goes wrong at that hellhole, I get blamed. “Anson, the midget, did it.” A computer goes down, blueprints get lost, milk sours in the lunchroom refrigerator: “The midget did it!”
So at first I buried my head in the sand. I had woken up late that day, no morning coffee, and my feet had barely hit the floor when I saw the chewed-to-shit Wheat Thins box. What a sight! It looked as if a wolverine had gone through it. There I was, standing in my pajamas in a state of complete disbelief. This was no time to conduct a full-scale pest investigation. I was late for work.
That night in bed, when fears are greatly magnified, not only was I worried about my suck-ass job, I began to think that the intruder might be a big black rat with an appetite for human flesh. Jurassic. The Wheat Thins box looked like it had been blasted by a shotgun and, as I said, the waste pellets were mighty big. For all I knew there could be a whole pack of vermin running around my place bearing disease and pestilence. Off a ship from Africa or something. Can you get rabies from proximity? That’s what I was thinking. About 3 A.M. a miasma of moldy rodential air ca
me wafting into my bedroom. I hadn’t noticed that before. Somewhere, unseen, these vermin were stirring about, revved up into a state of high activity, giving off odoriferous secretions.
The next morning I was up early to see what dirty work had occurred during the night. I entered the kitchen with a heavy brogan shoe in my hand, and it was just as I thought: they had been at it again. Bolder than ever! I had thrown out the contaminated food, and closed the cupboard tight, but—hey!—no problem: the culprits had gone to the breadbox! Its lid was ajar, a good inch and a half. Had I closed it? You’d think you’d remember a pertinent detail like that, especially if you’re in a batten-down-the-hatches frame of mind. And what if I had closed the breadbox? This rodent must be very strong. This rodent might very well be a rat—a rat that bench-pressed No. 3 vegetable cans and probably played tackle for the local ratball team. Black Bart, the Norway power rat. Fangola from Borneo.
On no sleep, work that morning was an ongoing hell. I had to sneak out to my car at lunch and catch a nap, but I woke up three hours later not in the least refreshed: it wasn’t a nap, it was a damn coma. The boss called me in: “Yeah yeah, ying ying, ya ya, where in the hell have you been?” Put the fear of God in me. I stayed late working on the annual report, which made no sense to me anymore. I was just sitting there, “pretending,” which is a lot harder than actually working. You could chop logs all day, stack thirty cords of wood, and not get as tired. When the boss bagged out, I waited five minutes and then left. My back was killing me. The hump veers toward my left shoulder. It was all hot and knotted up like an angry fist. Just complete agony.
I stopped at the supermarket for some Advil and asked a stocker where the mousetraps were. Evidently, there’d been a run on rodent traps. “Cold weather,” he said.
I said, “You haven’t been selling rat traps?”
“Rat traps, yeah, sold a few,” he said, pointing them out. They were huge rectangular slabs of pinewood with monstrous springs and rectangular clap bars made of heavy-gauge metal. Big enough to snag a Shetland pony.
“Whoa, man!” I said. “I hope I don’t need one of those.”
“Where do you live?” he asked me, and I told him the neighborhood and he said no doubt my problem was mice. Rats don’t frequent upscale places, he said. They go for the shitholes where people leave garbage around. He couldn’t guarantee it but he was ninety percent sure. Then he left me alone in the aisle to inspect the merchandise. I chided myself for being melodramatic. No rats, just some mice. And others were having the same problem. I was reassured. I was fortunate to be able to get any traps at all. There were only five left and I bought all five.
I thought of using poison, going for complete and certain eradication, but I wanted to see the corpses. Your mouse poisoner is like a bomber pilot flying miles above a war zone—the bloodless battle. That’s cool, but sometimes you hear of poisoned mice dying in parts of the house that are inaccessible to the homeowner and giving off a horrible smell. People start yanking off drywall panels to get to the smelly things, knocking down chimneys, tearing up the foundation.
Vacor, for instance, a rodenticide that looks like cornmeal, destroys the beta cells of the pancreas, causing instant diabetes, followed by chest pain, impaired intellect, coma, and finally death. A diabetic mouse with severe hyperglycemia will develop an incredible thirst and head outside to look for water—you don’t have to tear your house apart tracking down odors. Strychnine is another possibility. An overdose of strychnine destroys the nerves and causes convulsions. The sick rodent cannot bear noise or bright light. It dies a prolonged, agonizing death of utter torment. That kind of mouse wouldn’t opt for the hustle and bustle of the outdoors. That’s a hide-in-the-drywall mouse.
All in all, the trap is more humane. But I was so angry at the inconvenience I had been through—disturbed sleep, fright, the loss of snack foods—that the thought of a mouse writhing in pain out in a field somewhere did not bother my conscience in the slightest. The opposite was the case. It gave me satisfaction. Die, suckah!
I set three of the traps in the kitchen using peanut butter as bait. I put another in the bedroom and one behind the living-room couch. That night, moments after I turned off the lights, I heard one of the kitchen traps go off. Wap! Man, I almost hit the ceiling. I wasn’t sure if I heard a shriek or not. It all happened so fast. In the blink of an eye, an execution.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I was a little afraid to confront the consequences. But what could I do? I picked up my heavy shoe and went out. The victim was a gray mouse with broad, powerful shoulders, prickly chin whiskers, red beady eyes, and a short stumpy tail. Its mouth was open, exposing a crimson tongue and sharp yellow teeth. Ahggh! The trap had snapped its neck. I picked up the trap and quickly tossed it in the garbage. How that mouse had so totally destroyed the Wheat Thins was beyond me, but such are the mysteries of life. There, I’m thinking. Done! Half an hour later I was sawing logs.
In the morning I got up and went to the kitchen to make coffee and I saw another mouse, this one still alive, with one paw caught in a trap. It was trying to drag-ass out of there. I got my work gloves out of the garage and picked up the trap, the mouse hanging down from it, wriggling. I put the mouse in a coffee can, and then—I don’t know what made me do it, maybe because Christmas was coming—I punched some holes in it for air. The mouse’s foot was smashed, but otherwise it was okay. I set the can in the garage and went off to work.
I was tired again, with moderate-to-severe hunch pains. Except for short-lived bursts of activity when my boss passed by with a scowl on his repugnant face, all I could do was sit at my desk and “pretend” all day. Even though I’d got some sleep, I was thrashed, body and soul.
When I got home I threw some wood shavings into an old aquarium and put the mouse in there. If it was in pain, I couldn’t tell. I gave it a little dish of water and some cornflakes. The thing was this: I couldn’t stand having an invisible invader prowling around in my house at will, but with the animal caged and me in full control, I could tolerate it. I mean the mouse was just trying to get by like the rest of us. I named him Al.
After a few days, Al’s foot turned black and fell off. He wouldn’t eat for a while. I think he had a fever. A close call with death. I put out some whole-wheat bread with peanut butter on it. He loved that. He was going to weather the crisis. He started to gain weight. I found a hamster wheel at a garage sale and the guy just gave it to me to get rid of it.
That’s when Al began his rehab therapy. Without his foot, he got by hobbling, but his whole left shoulder was weak. On the wheel, he struggled and became disoriented. To encourage him, I put his favorite treat, a Hershey’s chocolate square, in a little box in front of the wheel. Stick and carrot. Pretty soon Al was running his ass and lost all the weight from his peanut-butter days of convalescence. With treats to motivate him, he’d put in five hours a night on the wheel. One night, just as I was getting him his Hershey’s square, he hopped into my palm and let me hand-feed him. It was a momentous transition. Suddenly this little wild animal was on the road to domestication. He trusted me. I felt like I was in tune with the universe. But not for long.
The next day at work, the boss stuck his ugly face inches from my own. “You’re terminated, Anson. Clean out your desk! You have one hour.”
The heartless bastard. I’d known it was coming, but I was devastated just the same. He couldn’t wait until after Christmas. I immediately drove to the unemployment office. Filled out the forms. Stood around and waited. Geez, what a seedy stink-ass joint.
If you’re an engineer, a job in these times is the hardest thing in the world to find. There are thousands of engineers.
I put together a résumé and scanned the want ads. There was nothing. One of the no-jobs at the unemployment office told me that nobody hires during the Christmas season, so just chill out.
At night I watched TV. It was me and Al, with him crawling up my arm and on top of my head and whatnot. Once in a while out slipped
a mouse pellet but what are you going to do? Al is my friend, so it was no biggie. I wondered if he missed his life in the wild. I wondered if he was bored. If I let him go in the spring, with no foot, what would happen?
One night after a futile and discouraging day of handing out résumés, I popped over to the pet shop and bought a companion for Al. A pet mouse cost a dollar and eighty-nine cents. I got a female and named her Angela. I put her in with Al and they sniffed each other out for a bit, but when I turned my back they started fighting. Angela was kicking ass. She bit the piss out of Al and he was left bleeding all over, especially from his stub. I broke up the fight, stuck her in the coffee can, and put her in the dark garage for punishment. Then I put hydrogen peroxide on Al’s wounds. If it wasn’t for the incredible cardiovascular reserve he’d built up running the wheel, I think she would have killed him.
I took to hand-feeding Al again—I had to—and he eventually came around. He seemed to like the mouse chow I got him. I figure that animals have body wisdom and will eat the right thing if you provide it for them. Pretty soon Al was on the wheel again, and we were watching TV together at night, and everything was just hunky. He padded around on my scalp with his three little paws, up and down my arm, with no fear at all. It was like we’d been pals in some previous lifetime. Bosom buddies.
I fashioned a divider panel for the aquarium and took Angela out of the punishment can. But I was still hating her. I gave her nothing but peanut butter. I denied her access to the exercise wheel. And in a couple of weeks she was a disgusting tub of lard. Meanwhile, Al, on his good diet, exercise regime, and nightly entertainment, was the very picture of health. Angela was practically eating her body weight in peanut butter every day. She ballooned up. I started weighing her on a postal scale, and one time she bit me. She didn’t break the skin, but after the infraction it was three more days in the punishment can.