I used to raise rats around the time I entered high school, had several different cages in the shack in my backyard, and my parents let me raise them and train them. But in recent years, I bought a very used, run-down Jacuzzi for my patio and there was actually what my fiancée called a 'vole' that lived in it for awhile. Without that particular little vermin, this story would never be.
LOOKS LIKE A RAT TO ME
By Nicholas Grabowsky
I never liked rats much. They scare the bejesus out of me. It's a fact ... some folks are frightened by even the smallest, seemingly least imposing creatures on this planet. Mosquitoes, bugs, bees, spiders.
Themselves.
Sometimes, it's so senseless it must be hereditary, or perhaps the syndrome hails from some otherwise inconsiderable traumatic episode straight from childhood. Me, I can't figure it out.
All I know is I hate rats.
But I love dogs.
I love my dog.
At least, I did...?
My name is Jeremy Sytes. I used to be a middle-aged, run-of-the-mill average Joe Family Guy, so to speak. During the day, I was an assistant sales manager for the retail giant Kempco, and every night I returned to the suburban home life I shared with my wife Helen, toddler Terrance, and infant Jody. I had recently self-published a collection of my own anecdotes for weary travelers, Sytes for Sore Eyes. Might as well mention it whenever I can, and it's doing well at online bookstores.
Now, onto Viceroy...?
Viceroy was our Border terrier. He was a scruffy, spunky little canine with a face like Benji and a bluish, wiry double coat that thinned down to tan-colored 'socks' at his thighs and feet.
Viceroy hated rats, too.
We all did.
I'd stretched myself out over the blue fescue of the backyard lawn, around 11:30 pm, gazing up at the stars and wispy rogue clouds and the quintuplet of spotlights from the Lakefest Auto Mall's Midnight Madness sale dancing like a major Hollywood movie's premiere in the southern sky.
A half-empty bottle of Bud stood on a bald spot of the lawn and within comfortable reach of me. My kids were in their beds; Helen reading a paperback in the den; Viceroy likely lounging at her bunny-slippered feet with his snout buried into his paws.
I was alone.
I was loving every minute of it.
I was surrounded by a peaceful quiet but for the sickly hum of the weathered Jacuzzi at the corner of the patio. I was used to that hum, didn't mind it a bit. The Jacuzzi had cost me only a couple hundred bucks. It was previously owned by a succession of heavy partiers and building contractor acquaintances of mine, who'd convinced me the tub's appearance was only a result of moving it from points A to B, C, D, and E. But they were right, it operated with rarely a tick. Yeah, it wasn't supposed to hum the way it did, but Helen and I'd enjoyed a good few months of otherwise unaffordable recreational relaxation in spite of that. It was a four-person tub held upright by a weary wooden frame encased by cobwebs and redwood-stained plywood along its four sides. The patio had no shelter, and the sauna's thick foam/cloth cover was green with algae from the rain and riddled with splotches of brown stains from my using it as a tabletop when I barbecue. And I 'que quite often.
It didn't matter to us that it was such an eyesore. What mattered to us was that it worked.
We were nearly into the first week of enjoying the tub when the yellow jacket wasp population in our yard grew to nightmarish proportions and I discovered they'd made a sizeable nest of the Jacuzzi's wooden innards. I took care of that, but it was a pain in the ass.
The other week, I spotted a small rodent scurry across the patio's cement floor and squeeze itself into a hole in the wood of the hot tub's casing.
My God, it was attracting pests.
"That must've been a vole," Helen had told me. "An above-ground mole. I hear we have 'em up here."
"Looks like a rat to me," I'd told her. "So ... you're fine with it living inside our Jacuzzi?"
"We can phone the exterminators."
"We have exterminators? We can sick Viceroy on it..."
"Don't let our dog near that thing, it might have rabies," was Helen's final word, and the matter hadn't been brought up since, for we hadn't seen the damn rat in the stretch of time afterwards.
But lying there on the grass that night below the stars, I saw it again, the little prick.
I turned my gaze to one side, reaching for my beer bottle in my visual foreground and at my fingertips. The rat darted across the landscape no more than a few feet beyond. I could've sworn I heard children's laughter coming from the other side of the fence, the neighbor's kids, but I paid no mind to their business. I had my own.
"Godammit!"
I rolled onto my belly, alert with adrenaline. Damn vermin could've been right there with me the entire hour or so that I'd been, foraging in the grass inches away from my head, and me blissfully unaware. I watched it as it went up to the patio, sniffed the air, made a leisurely promenade across the cement until it crept into the same crack of plywood it had the last time I'd seen it, into the recesses of the Jacuzzi structure's dank interior.
The rat had been utterly oblivious to my presence, or downright just didn't care, and this discernment upset me further.
I thought to get up, get Viceroy after its ass, and I did just that. I crept carefully across the patio, slid open the glass door, called inside, with a voice soft but firm, my dog's name.
Viceroy came running. He leapt over the sofa, into the air, and in graceful avoidance of the living room's glass coffee table, ran out to me in the patio and humped my leg.
"Good dog," I told him, pulling him from me, patting him on the head and moving us both away from the door. "Now. Go get the rat!"
Viceroy spun around a few times in a chasing-his-tail kind of fashion, stood on his hind legs with paws in the air like a gallant steed, and bolted for the Jacuzzi. He knew exactly what I meant.
He went to sniffing around the parameter of red-stained plywood; thrust his black nose into the abysmal hole of the rodent's lair.
"That's it, Viceroy, go get it," I cheered, and while the dog was preoccupied, I crossed the yard to retrieve my beer.
I stopped cold for the brief distraction of rustling in the bushes at the fence to my left. Something the size of my dog disappeared into that fat bulk of foliage the second I'd laid eyes on it, and I looked over my shoulder at Viceroy. He was exactly where I'd left him, now barking into the rat's hole. I would have instantly hushed him for fear he'd awaken the kids or alert Helen to our antics, but what I'd seen steal away into the bush concerned me a bit more.
As I began to doubt I'd seen anything at all, my interests fell momentarily beer-ward. I looked, but I could not for the life of me locate my bottle of Bud.
It had been right there, on the bald spot in the middle of the grass...?
But no; another quick look behind me and there was my beer bottle, resting safely atop the Jacuzzi's foam covering. Like I'd put it there myself.
A bit disoriented from the apparent brain fart of not remembering placing it there, I went to it, downed the remainder of it in jealous abandon, craving another immediately. I withdrew inside and into the kitchen, then emerged onto the patio with fresh beer in hand to find no sign of Viceroy.
But I saw the rat scurry away from its Jacuzzi refuge, then out again onto the grass; this time, a family of more than a handful of the buggars in various sizes followed suit from out of the hole in one mass exodus. I was dumbfounded. Acting upon absolute frustration and in a bit of a panic, I threw my beer bottle at the last rodent to reach the grass. The bottle missed, the bursting of broken glass echoing into the late night, the foot-long tail of the last rat declining into the thickness of grass blades like a wiggle-worm toy pulled along by a string.
And that was my last beer.
I whistled, called out for my dog.
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