Fight Apathy, or Don't

Tom Sawyer

I’m afraid of 2 things. Heights scare the ever-living shit out of me. It’s a rational fear. If I’m up too high, and I fall, I’m going to die. It’s like being afraid of bears. If a bear is coming toward you, I completely understand the rational fear of wanting to head for the fucking hills.

The other thing I’m terrified of is mice.

Now, I’m 6 feet, 2 inches tall. On a good day I weigh about 240 lbs, so I’m a pretty big guy. I realize this isn’t a rational fear, the little fuckers are about 3 inches long, but they creep me out more than anything in the world. As a kid, we had a little mouse problem at my parent’s house. My dad showed me these new “glue traps” that supposedly were more successful than the traditional snap traps.

So one day, in his infinite wisdom of what I can only suppose was to make me more of a man, he placed some lint from the dryer on the glue trap, and placed it in a drawer in the basement. He subsequently asked me to go get something out of the drawer, and when I opened it, he successfully turned me into a complete pussy. I screamed, leapt back, and smashed my skull on the stairs. I guess his plan backfired, and I was scarred for life.

Once I got married, my wife and I bought a house in Warren, RI. Fancying myself something of a homeowner, I installed a walkway in the front yard. It was perfectly straight, only because I used pieces of cedar shingles and string to setup a nice straight line in which to install the walk. At the end of the day, it was starting to rain, and I took all the pieces of shingle, and put them into the barrel next to the side door of my house. I went inside, looked out the front window at the beginning rain, admiring my handiwork of the walkway.

It poured buckets all night. In the interest of space, I’m not going to go into the specifics of the piece of shit dog we had at the time, she gets her own essay, but at around 11:00 she needed to go out. I stood there at the side door trying to get that she-devil outside so I could go back to watching X-files, but she REFUSED to go out. She was making all kinds of weird noises, and I was hoping that she was bleeding internally, but I finally discovered what she was whining about.

At this point the barrel was about ½ full of rain, with pieces of cedar shingles floating on the surface. Included in this delicious soup was also an enormous rat struggling to breathe. I’m not exaggerating when I say this bastard was 5 feet long. He was slowly drowning, so I wasn’t worried about him.

I was worried about his friend.

Splashing around frantically was this little grey mouse. Watching from inside the house I saw him climb onto a floating shingle, and attempt to jump out of the barrel. Because the level of the water was too low, he never reached the top, and would subsequently fall back in the water, and climb onto another shingle. Every once in a while, he’d just sit and wait, floating on that little raft like Tom Sawyer floating down the Mississippi. He’d float by the dying rat, check him out, and make another attempt to leap to freedom.

Now I’m in a panic. If I knock it over now, I’m basically releasing these two right near my house, which means I’ll never sleep again. If I leave it alone, I know that the über-rat will drown, but eventually the rain level will reach high enough that Tom Sawyer will jump out and crawl on me in my sleep.

I decided to chance it.

I left the two to their fates and prayed to god that something would smite them. I woke up the next morning to a barrel full of rain, shingles and a giant, bloated dead rat. “Hah!” I thought, “If only the dog would have fit in the barrel, I’d be down two problems.” Staring into the delicious broth, I noticed that Tom Sawyer was nowhere to be found. Did he survive? Did he make it out of the barrel?

There was only one way to find out.

I called my dad to come get rid of it. Hey, listen, I’m just as terrified of dead rodents as live ones, I can’t even look at the things without getting the shakes. My dad showed up, and dumped the barrel over. My father then took a shovel and disposed the dead carcass. Don’t feel bad, it’s his fault for scaring the shit out of me in the first place. In any event, I asked him about Tom Sawyer, and he looked at me like I was crazy.

“Tom Sawyer? What are you talking about?” Right, I hadn’t explained to him my naming convention. When I explained that there was a second mouse in there, he told me that there wasn’t anything other than shingles and a big dead rat in there.

Shit.

He escaped. I’d never sleep again. Tom Sawyer was out there, and because he had seen me, he knew I hadn’t helped him. Because of that, he was gonna torment me forever. I just knew he was going to get me. I was terrified of that guy climbing into my mouth when I was sleeping. I was fucked. If that little bastard could survive riding a raft and jumping to safety, he was definitely coming back for revenge.

Over the next 3 months we eventually sold that house, and moved to Swansea. It was an older house, owned by some crazy bastard who was unbelievably organized. He had to have had some kind of OCD because once we purchased the house, he told me to make sure I polished the knocker. I wanted to tell him that I polish the knocker at least twice a day, but he was talking about the bald eagle doorknocker on the front door. One Friday night I was teaching, when I got a phone call from my wife who was at home with the kids.

“Listen, I don’t want you to panic, but I saw a mouse in the kitchen, and I just wanted to give you the heads up.”

In my mind, there’s only one response to statement like that. It’s time to sell the house. Unfortunately my wife wasn’t going to allow that, and, quite frankly, I had promised to polish the knocker. That’s when the eerie truth rang in my head, and I started to sweat.

It’s him. It’s fucking Tom Sawyer.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. I didn’t even go into the kitchen. I knew he was in there, and there was no way I was going in there. I spent the whole night sending the kids into the kitchen to get crap for me.

The next day I ran to the hardware store for something to get him with. I saw every kind of trap known to man, but I went with Dad’s old standby of the glue traps. I figured this would do the job perfectly, so I bought 16 of them. When I got home, I put them all on the floor of the kitchen. It looked like a minefield in there. I then went outside to distract myself with a little light yard work. After about 15 minutes, I was exhausted, so I came back in and decided to check on the traps. Peeking around the corner, I saw the first of two of the most terrifying fucking things I had ever seen.

He was trapped. I caught him. The only problem was that only 1 back leg was trapped in the glue trap, and he was dragging the entire trap around the floor. I screamed for help, and my wife came in to see if I was dying. Once she assessed that I wasn’t injured, she told me to pick up the trap and throw it out. It was at that point I realized that I probably married the wrong person, because there was no fucking way I was going near that thing. While I stood there figuring out who to contact about drawing up divorce papers, my wife told me to just leave him, and eventually he’ll get the rest of his body stuck, and THEN I’ll have to pick it up, and throw it out. I went back outside, and I started to panic again, knowing that I’m going to have to get up close to that agent of Satan.

I went out side and started pacing back and forth. I was totally freaking out at the thought of going near it, when I realized the only good thing about the situation.

I had finally caught Tom Sawyer.

That little bastard, who had tormented me for all this time, and who traveled across state lines to get me was finally gonna be locked in a glue trap, and thrown in the trash where he belonged. Once I realized that this would be the end of my torment, I headed back into the kitchen, with a little more of my manhood back. I peeked around the corner again, just wanting to see him stuck in all that glue.

Except he wasn’t there.

He had chewed his leg off, in order to escape the trap. All that I had was a bloody stump of a leg. If I was in a panic before, now I’m absolutely freaking the fuck out. I’m coming to the realization that he’s out there now, pissed off, with one leg, planning on getting me when I sleep. Terrified, I look down and see that there’s a mouse in another of the 15 glue traps I laid out. I screamed, started to run out of the kitchen, and ended up with 3 glue traps stuck to my leg. My wife ran back in again, and saw me lying on the floor, and didn’t even really have to ask what happened.

“He chewed his leg off”, I said, “but he got stuck in another trap, and we got him, WE GOT HIM!”

My wife then slowly walked into the kitchen to view his little body in the glue. She turned around, and started to walk back towards me on the floor. Standing before me, she said the words that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

“Four legs.”

“What?”

“Four legs, he has four legs, the other one got away.”

He’s out there somewhere. He’s waiting. We eventually got some of the snap traps, but I insisted on the covered ones. There’s nothing more awful then sitting in the next room, and hearing one of those traps go off. In order to pick and dispose of those things, I had to use an oven mitt, and a shovel. They’re equipped with a release on them so that you can just drop the beast into the trash, and reuse the trap, but fuck it, I just throw the whole damn thing away. The one good thing about those covered snap traps is that the mouse’s back end is always sticking out, so I can always check to see if he’s missing a back leg. Every mouse we caught after that had 2 back legs.

He’s eventually going to show up at my front door.

In crutches.

Pissed off.