RAT: A WOMAN'S STORY

Miami Herald, The (FL)
August 28, 1983
Author: PATTY SHILLINGTON Herald Staff Writer

I was awakened by a tickle on my right ankle, a prickly sensation through the electric blanket that was keeping me warm on a rare cold night in Key West.

Growing heavy with movement, it raced toward me on top of the blanket -- along my right calf, past the knee, up my thigh, onto my stomach. It all happened in the gasp of an instant. I bolted upright, threw the blanket aside and clawed at the wall for the light switch.

I hadn't seen it, and it was gone, but I knew what it was. The prickle I'd felt through the blanket were its tiny, scrabbling claws. It was a rat.

The clock beside me said 4:08 a.m. I would sleep no more that night. For two hours I would lie awake, lights on, listening. I thought I heard it in the kitchen sink, scavenging among the unwashed pots and pans. I regretted my untidiness, and my imagination. Don't houses make noises at night?

In the morning I did not shower. I fumbled my way into my clothes and backed out the front door.

I am not a squeamish person. Cockroaches, palmetto bugs, a lizard or two have at times shared my home. I don't take elaborate precautions to keep these animals out and don't get inordinately distressed when I find one.

But there is something different about a rat, something primitive and sinister. It carried The Plague in the Middle Ages, typhus in the 1800s, rabies today. Despite centuries of efforts to eradicate it, it has fought us to a standoff. There are today as many rats in the world as there are people. They are still news, still the object of revulsion and terror. Wasn't the rat Winston Smith's ultimate nightmare in the nightmarish world of 1984?

Real life: Summer 1980 -- A New York secretary on her lunch hour is chased for a block by a pack of rats from a construction site. She is found an hour later, in her car, whimpering and incoherent. Summer 1982 -- A madman in Los Angeles is led from his house, his arms bitten raw, begging police to spare the lives of his "pets." Behind him, 50 rats swarm from his house as neighbors gape in horror. The stories go on.

I love animals and hate to see them hurt, but no, I would not live with a rat.

"I have a rat in my house."

"No problem." The exterminator on the phone was jaunty. "Doesn't everybody in Key West? Har har."

I wasn't laughing.

"Soonest we can come out is tomorrow, lady. We'll leave him a little packet, he'll eat the contents and go outside and leave you alone."

That's what I wanted to hear. But how could he be sure the rat would go outside?

"Because after they eat the packet they want water. So they go find some and drink and drink until they explode. Har har."

"Never mind," I said, hanging up.

No, I didn't want the animal to die like that, but that wasn't why I decided against the exterminator's "little packet." I am not that noble. I decided to do it myself because I didn't want any doubt about whether my rat was gone.

I wanted a body.

I consider myself a feminist. At 23, I live alone because I choose not to be reliant on anyone, economically or otherwise. I change my own flat tires. I build my own bookcases. I can be, at times, belligerently independent.

But on the night of Feb. 16 I shooed my friend Neil into the house ahead of me. I was carrying two rat traps. He grabbed my tennis racquet.

He banged around my living room for a while. Nothing. He shrugged.

"What was that?" I hissed.

"What was what?"

"Shh. Listen." I'd heard something. I swear it.

Neil began to look at me strangely. I was feeling a bit ridiculous: the hysterical housewife on a step stool, clutching her skirts about her.

Could I have imagined the rat attack? Neil seemed to think so. I was beginning to wonder myself. I had been half asleep.

Nonetheless, I set the two traps, baited with whole wheat bread. One I placed near the door to the bedroom, the other on the kitchen floor near the overflowing garbage pail that was beginning to stink. No rat could resist that garbage, I thought.

I left to spend the night with a friend and I slept well in her loft, where, her 4-year-old son gleefully informed me, there were plenty of rats.

The next morning I drove home and inspected the traps. Both were still baited. And empty.

That's it, I thought. There is no rat. I urged myself to go get the garbage -- which really stank now -- take it outside and forget the whole thing.

I made lots of noise all the way to the corner of my kitchen, where a large black plastic bag was filled to the rim inside a tall garbage can.

I peeled the plastic off the rim of the can, gathered it up tightly in a topknot, and spun it around to seal it. I was beginning to feel a bit at ease with this basic, familiar task. As I lifted the bag, it started to spin back in the other direction, and came to a stop in front of my face. I was staring at a hole, 6 inches around.

The bag had been gnawed open. It was unmistakable.

I stood frozen as garbage dribbled from the hole.

Suddenly, a head poked out. It was narrow, weasel-eyed, slick with grease from my garbage. I still held the bag. I could not move. I could not think. He leapt straight out at me, his body elongating impossibly, a black blur that thudded against my chest, then hit the floor running.

From somewhere --from me?-- I heard a deep, guttural scream. I dropped the bag and stumbled to the front door and out into the street. Then I wheeled around and stared back at the house, trembling.

I stood there for 15 minutes. Then I left for work.

Seeing the Rat painfully changed my perceptions.

It had looked like a squirrel with a skinny tail. Twice it had had an opportunity to bite me, and didn't. I had no reason to hate and fear it, but still I did.

And that was the problem. What terrified me, I think, was my own terror. My fear of the rat was irrational, something I could not intellectualize; the rat had peeled away my defenses. I was not an independent woman; I was helpless and vulnerable. I felt defeated.

I came home that night to find him thrashing in the trap near the garbage, pinned by the metal bar that had snapped shut just behind his ears.

Timidly, I approached. There was no blood, just a bit of yellowish liquid oozing from I-couldn't-tell-where.

Squatting there in the kitchen, I felt a strange guilt. He hadn't had to die. If I'd been more in control, less a captive of my own fear, I could have cornered this rat and chased him out of the house with a broom.

I phoned my landlord to come and remove the trap. No, I still wouldn't go near the rat. To this day, I step over the spot on my kitchen floor where he was caught.

I think I owe him a lot.

I now take the garbage out each night. I leave no food or its debris exposed in the kitchen. Only those who know me can truly appreciate the significance of this.

I am also finding myself more tolerant of illogical weaknesses in others. I used to have contempt for people I considered weak, people who were afraid to drive or who would fall to pieces after a personal setback. I believe I understand them better now.

Also, I keep two rat traps set in my house. Just in case.

A few months ago I was snapped awake by a bang in the kitchen. I sat up in bed, switched on the light, and glanced at the clock -- 4:12 a.m. So that's what the triggering of a rat trap sounds like.

For an hour I lay in my bed, listening, no less terrified than the first time. What if the trap was sprung but the rat got away? What if it had just made him angry?

It was nearly dawn when I cracked open my bedroom door and looked to the hallway closet. One trap was intact. I took a big enough step to flick on the kitchen light, and turned the corner. The other trap was still set. But my new broom, the one that now helps keep my kitchen spotless, had fallen to the floor.

I began to laugh, but caught myself. The rat was still with me, I realized. I think he always will be.

Section: TROPIC MAG
Copyright (c) 1983 The Miami Herald