Hauntings: Rats and Traps

BY ANNA BAKER SMITH

“Only the lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw.”

Jim is canning tomatoes again. He’s in a hurry because in a couple of hours he’s leaving to go to Canada for the week. I’m at my morning perch, drinking tea next to the laptop that doubles as a radio. The window AC is pumping cool air at my back, doing what it can to combat steam from vats of boiling tomatoes and the August humidity in the Connecticut River Valley.

On weekday mornings, I drink tea while listening to the public radio station out of Albany. Today a panel is talking about the Russia investigation and whether bots, fake news, and ads on social media could have actually swayed the 2016 election. For most of the panel, the answer is a careful, “We just can’t tell,” but they’re worried about the 2018 midterms.

I may be checking email, or staring into space, which means I’m doing at least three things: listening to the radio, skimming email, and thinking about work I should be doing—updating my fall course on the relationship between technology and humans. I tell myself that listening to the radio is research.

What I’m not doing is looking straight ahead, toward the butcher block where Jim is cutting tomatoes, when he sees something I don’t.

“Whoa! That was a rat!”

“What?”

“A rat just ran by.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, it was a rat. It was this big.” He holds up his hands, indicating a rat-sized space.

For the next hour, we scramble around, him apologizing for leaving me with “a” rat. (We still called it “the” rat then.) He tries to dial back his earlier assessment, “It could have been a really large mouse,” as if that would be way better.

I look at him.

“Okay, it was a rat.”

He’d seen rats in the garage a couple of weeks earlier where they were chatting up the garbage. We’d watched Sunny the Dog scratch the floor and bark at the laundry room door over the last month. We assumed he’d lost a few marbles but now realize he was onto something. A rat had found the birdseed in the laundry room, and Sunny was trying to warn us of the insurgency.

We guess it had gone under a gaping, wedge-shaped space beneath the basement door, where our slanting floors leave plenty of room for a rat to squish through. We stack boards, hand-weights, and something like an anvil in front of the gap.

I resolve to remain optimistic. That’s my job. Jim has a lot to think about: a twenty-four-year-old daughter, the farm where we live, a company that makes instruments that measure all sorts of climate-related mayhem, a close family member with chronic illness. It’s just a rat. I’ll handle it.

Jim leaves, and I go out back to talk to the farm manager, Dan. He owned the farm before Jim did; he raised his kids there. “I’m sorry you have to deal with this,” he says. We trade rumors about the growing rat population being linked to climate change.

We find the Have-a-Heart trap in the white barn, and he shows me how to work it. I load her up with peanut butter crackers, assuring him I’m fine, telling myself things could be worse.

I wonder if Dan is worried I’m rat phobic. I’m not (if I were I’d have been gone), so I add, “Rats aren’t one of my things”—meaning one of the things I’m afraid of. I have a list—rats aren’t on it.

*

The next morning I’m sitting in my usual spot by the laptop, drinking tea, again listening to the panel on the radio talk about the Russia investigation.

And I see a rat run across the floor.

Holy crap—that was no mouse. After grabbing a bucket and beach towel, I follow him. He must have skittered into the dining room, beyond my field of vision.

I search the obvious places, then see a tiny space beneath the door into the basement. It’s at the end of the gap where just yesterday we’d piled all the boards and weights. It looks too small for a rat to pass through, but then I see sawdust. I eye the old upright piano against the wall. It’s got to be here somewhere so I bang the keys, hoping to hear rat music from the strings inside. Nothing.

I spend the day trying to be optimistic, talking to Sunny the Dog. I call my friend, Nancy, who’s written about roaches, bats, and squirrels invading her home. I figure she’s an expert of sorts.

“Oh wow, I’m sorry. I never had rats.” For a moment I mishear—like she’s pondering this as a missed literary opportunity—then realize what she meant.

I go into reassurance mode: “Well, it wasn’t huge, not like a subway rat.” I should wonder why my knee-jerk reaction is to reassure the person I’m talking to that I’m fine, really—things could be worse.

We talk Have-a-Heart traps, sticky paper, and exterminators (including the one she dated back in Arkansas). We’ve entered sketchy territory for me, as I try not to kill things. On the other hand, I can’t just let the rats move in. It was probably time I had to deal with this particular problem. I grew up in North Carolina with copperheads, black widows, and wolf spiders. As a child, I would casually shake the mouse poop off the thinning chenille bedspread in our farmhouse in the mountains. I lived in Arkansas with cockroaches and even bigger spiders, Boston with huge rats between the rails of the T, and California with brown recluses, rattlesnakes, bears, and mountain lions. (I once saw two rattlers copulating beneath my cabin. My dog kept barking; I wondered why…) But I’ve never had rats in my home. To every thing, there is a season.

*

The basement door has been barricaded since the first sighting, but that night, before heading off to the second floor bedroom, I add more boards, more five-pound weights, and a cookie sheet in an attempt to block the wedge-shaped gap.

I try to sleep.

Visions of rats, robots, and Russians dance in my head, the words “Cozy Bear” and “Fancy Bear” on a repeating loop. I’ve been reading about social media algorithms and the election hacking. My fall class is called “Experiential Reflections of Our Technological World,” which before the 2016 election I playfully referred to as “Phones, Drones, and Sexbots.” I wish I could “clear history” on my mind.

Sunny the Dog is as unable to sleep as I am, scratching the floor, trying to burrow his way down to the basement where all the action is.

I can’t resist getting up to investigate. The laundry room and pantry doors are closed, but I stand outside the door to the basement stairs and hear the undeniable sound of munching. The little bastard is trying to eat through the door, eat his way into the main house again. I try to sound top-of-the-food-chain, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I go over to the dishwasher. This is the place the rats appeared to come from, both times they were seen. Again, I hear a “munch, munch” from what seems like the floor below it, and bang on the dishwasher door, ordering, “Cut it out!”

The dog has followed me downstairs and is giving me the eye, saying, “Why the harsh tone? Is this about me?” I stick a metal scrubby into a big crack on the side of the dishwasher and go back to the basement door. The muncher is still there so I re-check the cookie sheet, boards, and weights. I try to guess whether a rat can push over the five-pound hand weights. How strong is a rat?  

Again I try to sleep. The house is alive with sound. From outside, I hear frogs, crickets, cicadas, the occasional owl. From inside, I hear Sunny pacing the wood floor—click, click, click, which makes me think of “Up on the Housetop,” and then a favorite Little Golden Book from my childhood, Christmas in the Country. The book takes you through a farmhouse, barn, and pasture; sheep, chickens, and a cat help decorate a Christmas tree. One picture includes a tiny mouse in a blue pullover—but no rats and no anxious dog using his vastly superior olfactory nerves to nark on upstart rodents. None of these stories or songs involve August humidity or use the refrain, “munch, munch, munch.” Rats just aren’t that cozy.

*

It’s 3:00 AM, and I’m wide awake.

I go to the top of the stairs with the dog and listen, even though it should be impossible to hear munching from the second floor, through two closed doors.

What I hear is appalling. That bugger is crunching somewhere below the top steps—seemingly right below my feet. How is this possible? I wonder if I’ve lost it, like the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

I go downstairs and again hear the munching on the other side of the basement door.

At this point, I call Jim in Canada. He doesn’t answer.

I text him a single emoji: the rat. No reply.

I go back upstairs and contemplate the structural relationship between the stairs to the basement and the stairs going up to the second floor. The ceiling above the basement stairs is attached to the joists holding up the stairs to the second floor. I figure that means Rat Man is possibly still below the first floor, but the sound of his munching is being conducted through the ceiling to the stairs above—which is why it sounds like he’s eaten the first floor and is working on the second.

I go back downstairs and again hear munching from the dishwasher. I make a video of this for some reason.

*

The next day Jim calls and suggests an exterminator he found online. They’re in Northampton, just over the river. I look them up and approve of their non-phobia-triggering website: no photos except of three kind-looking men, one a UMass grad with a major in the much-touted field of “Integrative Pest Management.”

After dialing their number, I carefully clear history, cache, and cookies on the browser. I don’t want to be known to the Google algorithm (and the known universe) as “middle-aged woman with a rat problem.” I really don’t want to start seeing ads for exterminators.

But as psychologists say, “What you resist, persists.” Turns out the fancy liberal exterminators in Northampton are booked far into next week. No way will I wait that long, and Jim isn’t due back till Saturday.

I man up and Google “exterminators.”

The second one on the page (after the guys in Northampton) is nearby, in a town I remember had a lot of Trump/Pence yard signs in 2016. Their website has all manner of phobia-triggering photos that I won’t go into. Okay, maybe just one: a bunch of baby mice nestled into a loaf of bread—the side view. The photo’s composition was almost too perfect, as if it had been staged, though I can hardly see how that was possible.

But they can come the next day.

After I make the appointment with the second most popular exterminators in the Pioneer Valley, I try to work. I go to the café down the street, partly for lunch and partly to partake of their superior air conditioning.

I watch the usual summer crowd, in their shorts and flip flops, happily drinking iced tea and eating hamburgers with sides of micro-greens. After a day and a half of rat-induced anxiety, how pleasant it is to enter a rat-free zone. The young staff whirls past, delivering luscious plates of farm to table fare.

But again, I’m reading about the uses of social media—how a post could be used to increase voter turnout or not, how people devour the posts that are most disturbing to them (increasing what is cheerfully called “engagement”). Social media engineers exploit this hole in our psychology.

So basically, when we think we’re just looking at Facebook, we’re more like addicts who stay too long at the slot machine—except instead of losing money, we’re losing years of our lives and the ability to know when we’ve been lied to. We’re Skinner’s rats, pressing the bar, hoping for a pellet. (One kind of pellet are dopamine hits from “likes”—a technology that Justin Rosenstein, creator of the “like” button, now describes as delivering “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure.”) Meanwhile, our every trackable thought, word, and deed are offered up at the invisible altar of surveillance capitalism.

I leave the lights on in the kitchen and dining room that night again, but I sleep better, knowing the exterminator is coming the next day. I know the rats won’t be discouraged by the lights, since the only times we’ve seen them has been in the kitchen in broad daylight, but I remember my old apartment in Arkansas—how I would leave the lights on to avoid the shock of flipping the switch and seeing cockroaches scurry into hiding.

*

Finally the exterminator comes. He has a shaved head, bushy black beard, and is wearing a tee-shirt with a giant ant or spider on the back—I don’t know—I try not to look. The “treatment” will take place over three visits. He listens to me talk a mile a minute about our rat visitations, nodding calmly, having heard it all before.

We talk about the increasing rat population and climate change. He tells me he’s worked in Boston and Springfield. What they say is true.  

In the coming months, I’ll read articles on a coming climate change-related “Ratpocalypse.” Cities but also suburbs are seeing a rise in rat populations, and not the shy kind, either. They’ve become bolder, unafraid of humans, their oldest nemesis.

We find a hole in a screen in a basement window, at least one point of entry we can block. He leaves a few traps there and some evil-looking plastic boxes around the foundation outside.

The next day is Friday. Jim calls to tell me that he and the offspring will be home that night, a day early. When they finally arrive, we sit in the kitchen drinking bubble water and beer. They’ve never looked more beautiful—so happy and relaxed. I keep saying, “I’m so glad you’re here”—grateful not to face the Ratpocalypse alone.

                                                  *

Two years pass, and it’s now late September, 2020, one week after an early frost, five weeks before the presidential election. Pumpkins are scattered over the fields of Western Massachusetts, bright spots of orange in the mist.

The country has plenty to be anxious about—the election, the aftermath of the election, the pandemic, endless brutality.  

In the last two weeks, as the nights have been cooler, I’ve heard scuttling beneath the floorboards, but when I call Jim to listen, we hear nothing. Finally, he found a dead rat in the basement. I suppose if something’s gnawing away at the foundation, I want to know, especially if it’s invisible.

———-

Anna Baker Smith grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and now lives in Western Massachusetts. Her writing has appeared in The Massachusetts Review blog, After the Art, The Daily Hampshire Gazette, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches for UMass Amherst. Twitter: @innergothic.