The Exterminator

 

The dusk was warm and still. After the intense heat of the day, a blanket of soft air surrounded me as I marched down Clinton Street. I loved the evenings after a hot day. No cold wind. No suffocating jackets. Only the stillness of the heat.

            It was magical.

            Turning the corner from Clinton onto 32^nd, I spied a line of cats on Evelyn’s lawn. She and I have chatted over the years about cats, the weather, holidays. You know, the important stuff. Tonight, as I stopped in front of her house, I noted four cats lined up: Ozzie, the big established irascible orange tabby; Kitty, the sweet fluffy black cat; Sammy, the shy brother of Ozzie and Kitty; and an unfamiliar fuzzy orange and white cat next to Sammy.

            “Evelyn!” I called out to her as she emerged from the house. “There’re a lot of cats on your lawn tonight.”

            She laughed, welcoming. Wiping a stringy dark bang out of her eye, she came toward me and then stopped to survey the cat line.  Clucking her tongue, she hollered: “SAMMY SAMMY! Get away from there!”

            Turning to me, she rolled her eyes. Her thick mascara dripping. “He has a rat!”

            “Oh no!” I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the rat. I hadn’t noticed this before she pointed it out, but now that I looked more closely, I did see a motionless, rumpled grey carcass at Sammy’s feet.

            Now, Sammy eyed Evelyn distrustfully. I could hear him saying, “You are NOT taking away my treasure! I worked hard for this and I’m proud of my accomplishment. Let me finish him off in peace!”

            But Evelyn was having none of it, stomping over the lawn toward him, shooing and yelling. “Git away! Sammy! NOW!”

            Sammy backed off slightly; the other orange fluffy cat fled over the fence. “Oh, Spooky! I’m sorry! Oh, dear,” she shrugged, looking back at me, “I hope I didn’t scare Spooky.”

            With a name like that, I thought, it should have been the other way around. But maybe Spooky had been instrumental in the hunt, capture, and murder of the rat.

            Now Sammy was back at the rat’s spot. He was not gonna give in easily. Evelyn came back and stood next to me. “He’s the Exterminator. That Sammy. He kills rats.” She sighed, heavily. Then pointed at the black cat, Kitty, “And that one, my sweet Baby, she kills birds.” I tried not to gasp, thinking of how awful this was, but hell, cats will be cats. Killing is in their nature. They are beasts of prey. “And that one, Ozzie!” She laughed softly, shaking her head, “He kills bugs!”

            We both burst out laughing. Perfect, I thought, the biggest cat kills the smallest prey.

            Sammy moved a paw tentatively toward his lifeless conquest. Batting it slightly. “SAMMMY!” Evelyn hollered again. “Git away from that!”

            I was secretly hoping that if she could get Sammy away from the rat, that it was just playing dead. I will never forget the time that my Big White Cat, Pablo, came into the house one rainy night, and deposited a lifeless mouse on the floor in front of me and my friends, deep into watching Lady and the Tramp. “Meow” he had announced. Two of us had shrieked, scooching up on the sofa, that archetypal woman v. mouse fear rising up and overwhelming. Then the mouse had lifted its tiny head and ran under the piano. It wasn’t dead after all, evidently. Julianne, the brave one of us, coaxed it out from the piano somehow and captured it with an elaborate contraption built from a flattened granola bar box and a cheese grater, which she positioned over the mouse, trapping it. Then she’d carried it out the front door, releasing it into the stormy night.

            Pablo sat there, unfazed, before turning and sauntering away.

            So, tonight, I was hoping that the same fate would befall this rat, but sadly, it did look quite dead.

            I needed to walk on. The night was falling and Evelyn had work to do.

            “Well, good luck with the Rat Retrieval,” I said, waving good bye.

            “Thanks,” she shook her head, “I’ll need it.”

            She stalked back into the back yard, presumably to find some sort of apparatus to remove the dead rat.

            As I continued down the street, the warm night now tinged with the hilarity of cat jobs, I smiled to myself.

            Cats: wild beasts, ferocious felines, and eradicators of vermin.

            A car passed by, its headlights illuminating the asphalt. The crunch of its tires breaking the quiet of the night. A small screech from a night bird sang out.

            I quickened my pace as the darkness approached, the silhouette of a large cat up ahead, sitting plumply in the middle of the sidewalk. Who knows what vermin lurk in the night?

            Good thing the cats are on the job!