Rodney

On a Saturday night a creature crept amongst the ripe tomatoes, speckled bananas and waxy jalapeños in a basket on our kitchen counter. It was dark and chilly in our house when I muted Law and Order and padded silently into the kitchen with bare feet to scrounge hopelessly for a snack of sorts. Little did I know but the creature was there. In our kitchen. Tail hanging over the edge of the fruit basket, about to be caught red-handed stealing mouthfuls of hot pepper. Light cast down upon the creature as I carelessly flipped the switch, my pupils dilated then focused. The little bastard stared me straight in the eye, sniffed twice (rather haughtily) and then made his break for the back of the stove. Well of course I screamed. I’m rather ashamed to admit that I also leapt upon a chair in fright and was looking about frantically when my roommate dashed to my rescue. Following my sputtered explanation, quite the ruckus ensued in our house, this was a big deal to say the least. We were experiencing our very first mouse in our very first house.

“You know . . . Mice don’t have bladders,” my sister would later tell me over the phone. “They track footprints of urine everywhere they go.” So there we stood, in our urine covered kitchen, a broom clutched threateningly in my hand and the dust pan (to sweep the carcass into after I bashed it?) raised protectively in my roommate, Autumn’s hand. Where was the little intruder? Our ears strained to hear minute mouse movements. Where had he been? Had we been eating food tracked with tiny footprints of mouse urine? Amid our crisis we decided there was but one thing to do. I picked up my phone and I speed-dialed Rodney.

Now Rodney is an interesting character to say the least. We were first introduced to him in September when we moved into the house we are currently renting. I remember him knocking on the door one afternoon. It was a little jingle he tapped with his knuckles and I found it odd as I opened the door and took in the sight of him. He wore an old and faded Hawaiian shirt with the sleeves cutoff. His bright green running shorts blew gently in the wind and flaunted more than a bit of tanned thigh. He was old. A Vietnam vet I would come to learn. His hair was white and always combed down with water when he came to visit us. His nose was very large and lumpy looking. He held his hand out to me, stuck it in through the edge of the door and announced, “Hi, I’m Rodney. I live upstairs, I’m your neighbor.” It was the beginning of a short but lovely friendship between Rodney, Autumn and I.

Rodney had been a big help to us in the first few months that we lived in the house below his apartment. We would see him wander by our windows in the late afternoon, picking up pieces of trash from our front yard and he would always hoot out a hello and raise his old hand high for a little wave. He once asked me to help him become acquainted with his new cell phone. “I hate these damn things,” Rodney said. “I ain’t never had one but you know, I guess it’s time I get one.” After that, I frequently saw him wandering outside the house in the late evenings in his green shorts, yackin’ on his phone to someone or another. He would see me and give me a wave and a hoot, I think he came to appreciate his new phone.

It was late in the evening when I called him on his phone to come downstairs fast and help us with our mouse. He didn’t answer and I listened to his voicemail that I had helped him program as I clutched the broom in apprehension. We were still standing in the kitchen when he called me back. I answered breathlessly.
“Hello?” I said.
“What!” he barked menacingly.
“Rodney! I just saw a mouse! We have a mouse in our house!”
“What?! I can’t hear ya!”
Rodney was drunk.
“Rodney, there is a mouse in our house. We don’t know what to do.”
“You got a mouse?”
“Yes Rodney.”
“Well I got a gun.”
“No Rodney, no gun. I don’t think that’s the answer for just a little mouse.”
“I’m comin’ down!”

Much to our relief Rodney came down twenty-five minutes later holding a flashlight instead of a gun. He reeked of booze but his hair had been wetted and combed down carefully. Rodney spent a five minutes poking around in our cupboards. No mouse. Autumn and I stood by tensely, she with the dust pan clutched to her chest, me with the broom handle clutched to mine.

“Well girls, I just don’t see nothing’,” Rodney said. “It’s just a little mouse, it won’t do you no harm.”
The three of us sat down in the living room and Rodney began to explain to us that the solution to removing the mouse was to get a cat. We patiently explained back that we couldn’t adopt a cat due to allergies and perhaps a nice mouse trap would suffice? “No mousetraps!” He bellowed. “No, no mousetraps! You get yourselves a cat you hear? Don’t go using no mousetraps.”

Eventually we ushered him out of our house and sent him back upstairs to bed. Soon after we leapt into our Autumns car and drove to Wal-mart to buy a four-pack of mousetraps. The following day, Rodney came meandering past our window, shaded his eyes with his hand to see inside and gave us a little wave. We met him at the door and welcomed him in, explained that there had been no sign of the mouse since last night. Meanwhile, little did he know but there was two mousetraps set and waiting in a dark corner of our cupboard, one with peanut butter and one with feta (incase it had a more refined palate). “Man, I tell you what, if only I was younger when I met you two girls,” Rodney said. “I tell you what, you two girls are something else. Real nice girls.” We loved Rodney. Suddenly, I sat up abruptly. Fully alert. Had she heard it? She had, Autumn was staring back at me with wide eyes. The sound of the mousetrap snapping was unmistakable. Rodney rambled on about his old Vietnam days while we stared at each other and exchanged silent communication. Could we tell him what had just happened? No, we couldn’t tell him, he had been so adamant about not buying mousetraps.

“You have to go Rodney,” I said. He looked slightly bewildered as we rushed him out of our house.
Peeking into the cupboard, there he was. The little mouse who had eaten our jalapeños. It was almost sad, seeing his crippled little body. After all, he had been our mouse, almost a guest in our home. These thoughts were still lingering in our minds when we walked back to the living room and were just sitting down when a second mousetrap snapped. Could we possibly have more than one mouse?

This story goes on to encompass many, many more mice, a full on infestation you could say. Our cupboard became a battle zone, mouse droppings, bits of fur, it was a regular bloodbath. We caught mouse after mouse, set trap after trap. One horrific night a mouse scampered across my roommates body in bed. We became professionals at bating and killing the rodents that mysteriously intruded our home. Rodney never found out about our slaying technique but he did occasionally call me late at night, offering to role me a blunt to “help me relax and not worry about that darn mouse.” One day, when the mice stopped coming, Rodney no longer lived upstairs. He had left. Just like that. It was awhile before we noticed that we hadn’t seen him chatting away on his cell phone, or giving us a wave through the front window. We learned that Rodney had cancer. When it was discovered, Rodney’s brother bought him a condo and without a word, Rodney moved away. The mice don’t come around anymore, not after we snuffed out their little souls in our kitchen cabinet. We had gotten used to checking and setting the traps morning and night, the mice had become part of our daily routine, as had Rodney. He made us feel at home living in the new house, checked up on us, visited and laughed with us in his Hawaiin cutoff. When he was gone new people moved in to replace him. We don’t know who they are, we have never talked to them. Someone told us they were dealing drugs from the upstairs apartment. As for Autumn and I, well sometimes we just wish the mice would come back. And Rodney too.