by David Hirst
25
The coming of spring coincided with the collective realisation that some work had to be done soon, as summer’s hounds were on its traces, and labour would be as hard to find in the heat as it was only a few weeks before in the freeze. Work — the bane of the drinking classes — of all kinds was available. Trees needed to be trimmed. Serious repairs to roofs that had been patched throughout the rains cried out for attention. Winter winds had ushered forth a half-inch of dust that would soon turn to mud and then algae on the pool’s bottom. The poolroom was in a sorry state, with water having cascaded through the roof and ruined what should have been a pretty one-bedroom apartment. Instead it was a sodden, mildewed threat to the safety of all but the fast-growing rodent population.
All creatures great and small and just plain fat suddenly materialised with the new season. Quail in great numbers appeared from the brush they had retreated to for the winter to get on with the warm-weather business of making more quail. They arrived in a great rush, racing back and forth in pairs with their red headdresses bobbing nervously, like two gossip columnists, horrified to find themselves in the same hat, chasing the same scandal. They nested in the bushes and up amongst the rocks, blasé in the knowledge that they were not likely to get shot by these strange new people in the big nest on their land. At first they all fled squawking when Sailor made a nosedive at their bushes. But they needn’t have bothered themselves, for this is one bird dog who wouldn’t thank you for a bird. Not when the whole place was suddenly, magically, crawling with something far more interesting — lizards. Sailor will happily spend all day trying to dry-gulch a lizard, and entire afternoons were now given to Mexican standoffs in the baking sun.
The quail, like its namesake, the former vice-president, is not the smartest of all God’s creations. If you’re short on dinner, we were informed by our neighbours, you need only put honey in the bottom of a plastic cup and wait for a quail to stick his head in. With the cup covering his eyes he will think it’s night and go to sleep, and you can bag him. This task has not been successfully completed by the author.
Spring is referred to as ‘the season’ by those few locals who are engaged in activity related to tourism — the only industry that keeps the town afloat. The prospect of the heat to come made the winter more bearable, but spring, when it finally arrived, was unmercifully short. Someone upstairs turned a knob, and the world and the creatures that inhabit it changed almost overnight.
Our first spring in the desert was heralded by a tiny cheeping noise that appeared to come from under the big four-poster bed. Being hard of hearing, my first thought was that Boo had mislaid the last of her marbles as she maintained she could hear what she thought were birds — birds under the bed. But after a few days, even I could detect some small voices, and they did appear to be coming from under the bed. The bed is so big that even if it wasn’t bolted to the wall it would still be too heavy to move, so there was no way to determine what might be happening. And so it was that after the fifth day of chirping, a rodent the size of a baby’s thumb emerged and made its way drunkenly over the tecate tiles. It was hairless and had only a few of the characteristics of the kangaroo rat it might have grown up to be. Boo mothered it in a box filled with cotton wool and, as we wondered what to do with a creature that was more foetus than animal, another little pink object squirrelled its way through a tiny crack between the bed’s support and the tiles. Then came another and another, until Boo had five babies wriggling through her cotton wool.
‘Yep. Looks like you got yourself some baby pack rats,’ the lady at the High Desert Museum assured Boo. ‘But they probably won’t make it without their mother if they’re that young.’
Undeterred, Boo hurried home with a can of baby formula and a miniature feeding bottle, and for the next week fed the little creatures in the shoebox. They thrived and grew. In two weeks they were recognisably rats.
Sean was amazed that anyone would go to such lengths to save vermin. He had once seen a pack rat pushing a potato up a hill, as he sat fulfilling his ablutions. As he was carrying a .45 at the time — Sean liked to take small arms to his outdoor toilet, usually to deal with snakes — he shot it stone-cold dead.
But the woman at the feedlot on Old Woman Springs Road wasn’t at all surprised, and assured us that she was capable of taking over and raising our small shoebox family to an age where they could be released into their natural location — the desert.
Meanwhile, their relatives — the pack rats and the mice — continued in their merry vein. Though we were hardly being plagued, there was every indication that we would soon be facing something out of Camus — albeit with hantavirus. Having once made a documentary on health care, Boo had become amazingly aware of that blight in northern Arizona, not much further away than LA. It is a disease that is often fatal, and involves a horrible death. And it could be in our house. I was constantly working around the house and thereby disturbing rats’ nests with attendant droppings — the agent that spreads the virus. It was a clear and apparent danger.
Sailor watched the rodents’ frolics with interest and then adopted an almost fatherly attitude to them — even allowing them to eat his food. Little bits of dog kibble were found squirrelled all around the house. Even in Boo’s lingerie drawer.
Upstairs, things were even grimmer. There, a very large rat, a rat the size of a small kangaroo, had moved in and had taken to roaming freely while obviously preparing a nest.
The subject of the eradication of these pests is one of considerable debate. John Edwards is a great believer, as are others, in the cement solution. This solution is, in fact, a solution of cement and water. For reasons only the rodents can explain, they are fond of cement. But the salt in the cement makes them thirsty. Put out a bowl of cement and a bowl of water, and our little friends will lick the cement, head for the water, and concrete their innards to their other innards and die. No poison. No danger to the dogs.
Boo wouldn’t hear of such cruelty. There would be no slow, agonising deaths around here. But after much screaming and arguing, she was prepared to compromise.
I was permitted to place traps on the ridge of rock in the den where the rats would perch while watching The Money Hour. Within days, I had dubbed that small piece of planet the ‘Highway to Hell’.
On the first night, I trapped two, and thinking that all my problems would soon be over, I gave the beasts a funeral. That is, I buried them at a decent depth so they wouldn’t be cannibalised by other rodents. As I repaired the shovel to the garage, I wondered about the burial policy. The land is hard, and there are only a few places where one can stick a shovel more than a few inches into the ground. Most of those spots are near the house. There are some soft spots down in the Hidden Valley, but that’s a long place to walk to bury a rat.
Nevertheless, I returned to the house with some sense of achievement. Perhaps I had wiped out a good percentage of them. Perhaps they would move somewhere else. The next morning, I had three in my traps. The policy of repatriation in the desert, then burial in same, degenerated into a quick trip to the toilet and from there to the septic. How easily we are brutalised.
I was getting pretty skilled at dealing with these pests, but they — we were soon to learn — were getting the hang of mouse traps. The kill rate dropped off. The rats were back, more brazen than ever. The big upstairs rat, though dubbed ‘King Rat’, was, we suspected, a queen. These suspicions grew with the sound of tiny mousey cries amidst his complex. King Rat, in the meantime, had taken to visiting guests that might be slumbering in the den. There were reports of him/her standing a foot high with another foot for his tail, watching Fox Sports.
All through this, Boo had been advocating the deployment of a cat. I had fought this escalation on the grounds of collateral damage. Cats eat birds, and I felt that allowing a cat would be a betrayal of my love of birds.
We fought about it on a daily basis. Boo dragged everyone who
came into the house into the argument. Lil Debbie agreed that I was being stupid, and strongly supported the cat solution. So did Ed Gibson, who took a cavalier approach to his own black cat’s bird-catching. Ed also liked to point out that the rats would not only eat their way through the electrical cable and the phone lines, but had been known to consume the very foundations of houses, which eventually collapsed. Finally, Crinkly Jim, Lil Debbie’s new boyfriend, pointed out that American birds are smarter than Australian birds. They have evolved with natural predators, while their Australian cousins have not. Until the introduction of domestic cats, the Australian birds were predator-free and thus utterly clueless about the murderous future in store. Today, feral Australian cats have grown to be twice the size of the lovable household kitty, and are capable of killing thirteen birds a day — or, more often, a night.
At that time, Carole had rescued an animal known as Inky on the very good grounds that it was as black as the future. Even its white bits were black. Boo took him, sight unseen, and I personally undertook the formal duty of releasing Inky from his cat box in the children’s room at the top of the stairs. As we have no children and the cat was small, this seemed to be the appropriate place. It was well away from the path of the dogs, and the bed was the only one made up.
Inky — who soon adopted other titles, including Black Death — inspected the small room and found it wanting. He disappeared and was not seen for days. But his handiwork was soon in evidence.
The rains seemed to have stopped, and I deemed it wise to patch up some spots in the rock bedroom where water had made its way through the skylight. The job was a small one, so I did it standing on the bed with the trowel above my head. I wiped the mud off in the last crack and started to exit the bedroom through a small stairway. There below me lay King Rat — or at least some of him. His head was missing entirely, as was much of his torso, some of which I found in a pile of vomit not far away. But this was a dead rat. His kidney had been torn, intact, from his body and thrown a few feet away. The rest of him lay, rather formally, on a mat where he had been deposited. Inky was nowhere to be seen. The rat was so big that at first I thought it was an eagle. Programmed to assume that cats kill birds, it took me a second to remember they also kill rats. I was about to scream to Boo ‘This mother has killed the golden eagle!’ when it became apparent that this was the remains of a rodent. If nothing else, the tail was a giveaway. Few birds have long bald tails, in my experience, and this creature had one like a big red kangaroo.
He was too big to flush down any toilet, so at least he had the honour of burial amongst his peers.
Inky — now also known as The Black Flash and Zorro — was, in absentia (since leaving the children’s room he had not been sighted), a household hero. Days passed. The killer showed signs of his presence, but not of himself. He was eating and drinking and using his little cat tray as a bathroom. Like the Viet Cong, he wore black and controlled the night. Five days and nights passed without a sighting, but on the sixth, Boo found two decent-sized rodents (nothing like King Rat, but enough to give most a scare) laid out on the same mat. Again, their bodies ran in line with the weave of the rug. When I inspected them, I ruminated that Killer might start doing them up in body bags.
It was almost a week before he made another public appearance. Green eyes could be seen staring from high in the rock room, a place where the room ceases to be a room and becomes a maze of small caves. There he was — above us in his lair — inspecting us. Soon he was down and about, attacking Sailor and walking over the computer keyboard in mid-sentence. Arrogant as the rat he had brought down.
The rats had gone into retreat and borderline capitulation. Victory, as the old rat-traps were branded before the Taiwanese took over the mousing game, was ours.
Everything was mating, and Lil Debbie was no exception. The first time we met Crinkly Jim, Boo was very taken with his intelligent disposition and wry humour. I was impressed by the fact he held a construction licence and knew more about building than I would if I had tried.
Jim’s late wife had been one of Ken Kesey’s original Merry Pranksters, and Jim was keeping the tradition alive. For years, he drove around with a stuffed killer Doberman in his car. Like so many locals, he was always laughing at life’s quirks. His face was a mass of lines etched deep. He might have been called Wrinkly Jim, but Crinkly stuck. He didn’t mind the title; he didn’t mind much at all. His laugh was a series of coughing sounds that were actually chuckles which the years of cigarettes had distorted.
Jim had moved in with Lil Debbie, and I called in to visit them on my way home from town. The two had been drinking since they woke — about 11.00 (a.m.). I sat studying the sun’s pale path. Lil Debbie had a clock that emphatically stated that we had reached five in the afternoon. But the clock, a nice one, had been telling that same story whenever I had bothered to look at it. Lil Debbie liked the clock — but not because it told the time. It was an old thing, and she could have wound it, but Debbie didn’t keep clocks that keep time. The sun suggested four-ish. Soon the clock would be right. The sunlight washed the room in its thin afternoon colours as the sun inched towards the peak of Mount Gorgonio. Mostly, the room, indeed the entire house, was covered in pictures and images of John Lennon. They were cleverly arranged. Pictures that Lil Debbie’s hero would admire. She’d spent much of her life trying to do John Lennon right, and she hadn’t done a bad job. Lennon stared out from every point like Mary in a Catholic church. Debbie fixed another screwdriver. One wall was a collection of blue bottles. They shone, and Debbie shone. She had recently showered, and the blue light spun into her curly damp hair as she stood smiling, always smiling, above me. A pixie, I thought.
Jim was drinking a huge bottle of cheap Magnum beer — the type often criticised for being heavily promoted in black communities. It is laced with raw alcohol, and he was taking it as a chaser to gin. He offered me some, and I asked Lil Debbie for a glass.
‘Shit, she’ll have to wash it,’ Jim remonstrated.
Lil Debbie brought me a glass as Jim explained why Magnum was the best beer, and how I should get acquainted with it. I took a sip.
‘Sorry,’ I said, putting down perhaps the only beer I have rejected in my life. ‘That stuff will kill you.’
Jim then announced that although his liver, spleen, kidneys, et cetera had been pronounced DOA at every hospital he had visited in years, ‘That was all shit.’
‘I’ll live for years,’ he added confidently as the phone rang.
Lil Debbie answered, and it was Loma Linda Hospital asking that he come in for some tests.
Dates for the tests were discussed. The first was out of the question because of a party on the preceding twenty-eighth.
Jim insisted that tests were a waste of time for at least a week after the party, and then remembered that he had another party coming up about then.
‘Let’s make it the seventh,’ he suggested.
The hospital secretary seemed to think that all this was a good idea, and agreed on the date. Jim hung up the phone and winced. His elbow had hit the tabletop right where a benign tumour had been removed a few days before. Jim rolled up his sleeve and displayed a large bandaged elbow. He thrust it at me from a few feet across the table, and wondered if it was bleeding.
There was blood, but it wasn’t dripping.
‘No, looks all right. What happened?’ I asked.
‘They took this tumour out. It was bigger than a golf ball. I was going to bring it back and dice it for the chilli.’
‘Pity to waste it,’ Debbie added. ‘We could at least have fed it to the dogs.’
‘And it was benign.’ I added, hoping I was entering into the spirit of things.
‘Of course it was benign,’ said Jim pouring himself a half-glass of gin.
The doctors had told Jim he had about one hundred days to live, which was good news for him as it assured him continued access to soci
al security. The government didn’t mind handing out a few hundred bucks a month to people who were soon to relieve themselves from the welfare rolls, and they were happy to also provide free pharmaceuticals.
‘There’s good money in dying,’ Jim rejoined. ‘Thousand bucks a month.’
But while the doctors had told him his liver had virtually ceased to function, and Jim had assumed a yellow countenance, he was confident that he could build Debbie a house and live with her for many a year. Debbie seemed to agree that there was life in Crinkly Jim yet — but whether it would be with her was another matter.
Lil Debbie was simultaneously being wooed by George, a retired bar-owner from Long Beach whose financial prospects were better than Jim’s, though his prognosis was similar. George was due at the hospital to have half a lung removed the next week, the same day his estranged wife would enter another hospital for some complicated surgery. If the wife died, George had the house, and prices in Long Beach were looking decidedly sunny. George was as tough as Jim, but perhaps more determined. Determined, that is, to outlive his hated wife, take possession of her house, sell it, and buy Lil Debbie her house.
A few weeks later, I was standing outside the bowling alley on Mane Street when George drove by puffing on a cigarette. He was looking pretty happy with himself.
‘I thought you were in hospital,’ I inquired.
‘I was,’ George replied with a remarkably impish look for a man in his late sixties who was supposed to be at death’s door.