Part TwoÐ
The Day After Yesterday
by Christopher Mattison
Mice Wearing Ski Masks
Monday, August 11Ð
I want a dog. I've given notice where I currently live, which won't allow pets, and signed up for another place--not on the lake, but whose landlord will allow a dog. Having had a golden retriever previously, from 5-week old puppy to white-faced 11-year old lady, I went against instinct and answered a classified ad soliciting someone to adopt their pre-owned male Siberian Husky. On the morning I went to pick it up the dog wasn't there, only a note telling me to go ahead and take Ootok (or something like that) from the chain skewered into the ground. But there was only a recently clawed hole and a fresh pile of shit.
That was this morning. So I drove to the animal shelter in town to see if any dogs were available to go, right now, a la carte. There were, but not the one I wanted: a cringing grinning golden retriever with bare skin patches along her sides and hysteria vibrating inside. She had just been arrested by the warden and was unavailable for adoption until ten days had passed, unless the owner showed up and made claim against her. The shelter lady knew the dog and its owner and indicated a high legal probability that she'd be mine.
I was put first on a list to adopt the frenzied five-year old.
Driving to The Woods I stopped at a roadside tangle of debris spread out front of a junkyard garage. I needed a used lawn mower and saw four exemplary models chained together in semi-circle. Unsure if they were junk or for sale I parked on the shoulder and went over to browse. An old guy in patchwork mechanic's overalls shuffled out of the dark behind a door and said, "What!"
"Are these mowers for sale?"
"Maybe."
"How much?"
"I put a new coil in that one there." He cupped his crotch and raised on tip-toe.
I dropped my eyes to hide abashment, then asked about the others.
"Forty-five each."
"Do they run?"
The man made no move to direct me.
"You a tourist?" He held up a disposable camera and took my snapshot beside his mowers.
All three machines were at least thirty years old, manufactured in the days before inventions like discharge chute guards or stone flaps. Only one had a recoil starter. None had remote throttle controls. Simple designs. A motor, a blade, a handle to push it all. No amenities like self-propulsion, kick starters, mufflers, or beer bottle holder.
I nudged one with my toe, the one with a Led Zeppelin sticker on its front deck and racing slicks at the rear. "Can you start this one?"
"You start it," the man sneered.
I wound the rope and jerked. The mower tipped on its side and leaked oil. The man stood and watched it and me, I guess to see how it was all going to turn out. I righted the machine, rewound the rope, placed my foot on the deck and pulled. The rope broke. I requested another and the man pointed to a dangling pink jump rope. I took it and wound it back onto the first machine, then yanked. Nothing moved except my foot, across the oily deck, and my shin slammed the spark plug.
A tattered cat with a scarf on its head and a crooked tail padded over and sat beside the man.
"This one seems seized."
"T'aint, I tell ya."
"Then you start it."
"Don't want to. You." He disappeared into the dark garage and walked back out dragging a yellow vinyl-covered kitchen chair, put it down beside the cat and sat.
I went to the middle mower and got on my knees, searching for a throttle switch or leverage shim, something to choke.
A car tooted twice as it went by. I looked quick. A lady pushed a wringer washer off a tailgate. It bounced into the ditch.
I stood up and started winding the starter cord on the second mower.
"That one's got two new square keys on the shaft and a rebuilt crinoline crimp," the man reported.
I pulled. But it did not start. I pulled again. Nothing. Not even a snort.
"Maybe it has a short?"
Distracted re-tying his tie, the man didn't respond. A squirrel jumped on his knee, and gnawed a votive candle.
Across the yard under some trees I saw a whiskery face peering through rear window sun shimmers in the backseat of a hundred-dollar Oldsmobile on blocks.
I tried to start the mower three more times then moved on to the third, a Montgomery Ward Trusty Grassmaster!" outfitted with bicycle handlebars.
"That's my best. Forty-nine ninety-five."
"You said forty-five."
"Liar."
"I'm not one. You bid forty-five."
"You pickin' a fight?"
I did not answer but coiled the starter with a length of rubber hose. I jerked and jerked and jerked. Then suggested to the man that it wouldn't start. He shrugged, mocked a puckered pout and contorted his face, silently mimicking a baby crying.
I ignored him and took off the air cleaner. Didn't look too awful, but the bees nest buzzed unreasonably. Unscrewed the gas cap and peered inside. Empty.
"There's no gas inside."
"You wanna' buy gas?"
"You mean I have to buy my own crummy gas to see if your junk mower works?"
The man murmured. The cat strolled to my foot, hissed in my face, then pissed on my shoe. Then leaped in the air and landed on my hat, which I tried to shake off, but the cat "rowled" and dug in its claws. (It was Siamese.)
I looked up at the man. He looked impressed.
"You come on my property and throw my stuff around and soil my groundwater with a machinery oil spill and you call me a liar and you stand there pompously with my cat on your head and now say I am a smarty-pants seller of junk?"
The man picked up the squirrel and stuck it in his overall pocket, stood, turned his head toward the hunkering Oldsmobile and pointed at me. "Lyle! Get over here and teach manners to that there fool."
The dim whiskery person in the rear of the Oldsmobile emerges wearing a fresh tuxedo, dragging a big chrome bumper. He extends it overhead like a weight lifter doing presses and roller-skates toward me barking, "scram scram scram," in an east-Polish accent. I back toward the highway. A little girl, strapped under a donkey's tummy and swinging a kitchen drainpipe in a sling, gallops out of a school bus in the overgrown weeds to the west, flinging her plumbing whistling past my left knee.
"Would you take forty?" I shout, diving into my car and backing over the chrome bumper which bounced off the rear of my truck.
This is my first trip to The Woods for several years. Decided to avoid treacherous social interaction and bought a brand new mower at Ace Hardware in Sandstone. $124.99. Complete with all current safety features. A courteous young man loaded it into my truck. But I had to buy my own gas.
Andersons beeped a greeting as they drove past this morning.
While in town today I noticed Bob's Barber Shop is gone, replaced by a large senior apartment building. Sandstone is a self-contained community, one that, for the most part a person could be born in and die in and never need to leave town, unless frivolous cravings crept in.
Eaglehead fire tower, between the cabin and town, has been removed. It's where Hattie climbed the steel ladder high into flowing wind to watch for fires during flammable seasons.
Showing myself at the Store to buy ice for the cooler (they still sell it in empty milk-cartons for 50-cents), I heard Meg say, "there's someone I want a hug from." We embraced and caught up on news. I asked about the kids. Both girls are doing fine with families and jobs and meaningful life. Her youngest son is a helicopter powerline worker in California. When asked about Leon she said, "He likes to drink."
I did not immediately appreciate the seriousness of the mouse takeover when first entering the cabin. Found a mouse with fresh babies in the clothespin hamper hanging from a nail on the wall. Carried it out and laid it in the grass by the road. The mouse scat littering most horizontal surfaces had, through the years, become a customary formality. Not alarmed, I unpacked and opened the cabin to august aromas, set up a camp mattress I'd bought (the cabin bed-frame had been dismantled and the mattress discarded a year or two earlier by Mere and Chuck due to mouse damage and leak-water decay). Darkness moved in. I shut off the gas light and retired. All was quiet but for summer night sounds moving through the screens: an owl hooting in the west, mosquitoes humming, cows mooing in the southeast. I felt secure, glad to be there again after a long absence.
I awoke with a start, holding my breath. Unsure why, but with an uneasy sense that tiny paws had just galloped across my chest and that small bodies were arcing through the interior of the kitchen, issuing faint shrieks of nocturnal hilarity. As my eyes focused out of sleep I glimpsed a blur soar over the kitchen table and heard a furry "thuck" near a base cabinet along the north wall. A sound like "whee" accompanied this whimsical sight. I laid motionless, exhaled, took another huff and held it, giving full attention toward the kitchen. I heard wisps of sound, minor shufflings, then a faint sound like a rusty door hinge easing open. I heard a "thwap" and saw another bat-sized object arc through the kitchen heading south, then a muffled "tink" against a window. I seized the flashlight and fumbled it on.
What met my view was like something from an early Disney cartoon: all was in motion. Jiggling, undulating action. Mice scampered across flat surfaces and up and down vertical studs. A clutch of six mice wearing ski masks were hunched giggling inside a candy dish, scooping M&M's into black loot socks. Mice were lined up single file on a ledge three feet high, diving into four-inch deep water inside the dishpan. I heard another "thwap" and saw a mousy body soar high. At its apex a ten-inch scrap of dishtowel, tethered with what appeared to be braided paper towel, unfurled from a pack on its back and it, legs jerked forward by sudden wind resistance, noiselessly descended to the cabin floor.
I shone the light at the floor. Two dozen mice were clustered near a mouse trap. Two mice held it while another three--with huge necks and shoulders--muscled back the "snapper," as though to set it. They were setting it. A mouse wearing an orange jumpsuit ducked in, prodded the stay lever into the tripper, then paused while those holding the snap wire eased off and checked the angle. Jumpsuit scurried back and picked up a plastic spoon, then waited on hind paws as a mouse stepped onto the snap wire and nodded. Jumpsuit lowered his spoon onto the trigger and, "snap." Up flew the mouse, "pop" opened a chute, and down onto a countertop it settled.
I saw a sooty brown haze flowing from behind the fridge. Straining out from my cot I aimed the light beam back there. A congregation of six or eight younger mice, with fur-less heads and dayglo hair were sucking, then passing a joint, guffawing and collapsing in heaps of hilarity.
I panned the light. Two mice were brawling atop the dining table, surrounded by a cloud of dust and a mob of jeering turd-throwing spectators. Two mice were kissing--a cartoon cloud pair of interlocked hearts hovering above them--on a shelf under the propane stove. Another was scampering across the floor dragging an unfurling roll of my film, two others were unraveling one of my socks. Hey! On a shelf above the stove, a couple was uniting sexually while a line of onlookers sifted bits of paper towel confetti down around them from the shelf above.
On the floor near the wastebasket I saw another pair of mouse traps and a crowd of activity. One mouse, on its back under the snap wire, extending his hind legs upward, was doing leg pumps. The other trap was used for upper body-building: a mouse with wide shoulders was raising the snap wire in a modified bench press. He then rolled over, placed his muzzle on the tripper, as two muscular mice pulled the snap wire up 'till it touched an adjustable toothpick spanning between two supports, then snapped it down onto the neck of the mouse below.
On the wash basin shelf a solo mouse pulled its lips wide and stuck out her tongue.
I shut off the light, hollered "quiet!," thumped my foot and clapped my hands. Then put my pillow over my ears and fainted.
The desk drawers have each hosted nests. The kitchen armoire has housed mice; mouse droppings are routinely found scattered across eating surfaces and have become a tolerated idiosyncrasy.
It has become my obsession to heartily and conclusively rid mice from the interior of the cabin. They've had their way here for years, fabricating nests from thieved insulation and bedding and woolen shirts and paper towel.
Red's Shed was in a dismal condition: 2 cracked windows, spiderwebs drooped all around, a serious gap gnawed into the undersides of the floor along the west end. I discovered it while scrubbing the linoleum floor. Patched it with pieces of unmatched plywood. After plugging the old propane gas line hole, the sleeper is again tightly sealed against mice and mosquitoes.
The Fiberglas screening on the cabin's west panel needed replacing. Moth-eaten holes, some two inches round. Installed aluminum screen which should last longer.
The crickets this time of year are great. Was sitting in the Store this afternoon having wild blueberry pie ala-mode when I became aware of cricketing just a few feet away, somewhere under the candy rack. Don't think anybody else noticed. But nobody else was there except Meg.