cockroaches, mice

One night I woke up hot. I was a little drunk when I went to bed, and still was. I didn’t have a bed yet and was sleeping on an air mattress in the living room. I heard a scratching sound that sounded as though something was trying to dig into the house from the other side. At first I just thought it was the alley cat I’d seen on the dumpsters, but the noise was too deliberate for a cat.

Earlier in the day someone had told me a story about their house being taken over by cockroaches. This nightmarish kind of narrative seemed to be more common than I would have expected, and I'd now heard a version of it a few times. Where I've lived in New York City and Utah, there are cockroaches, but they are very adept at hiding when the light comes on. Sometimes you don't even know they exist until you look for them. Always something sinister about that, but brazen cockroaches that take over an entire house are worse.



After a while it occurred to me that the sound I was hearing was too close to be outside. I thought immediately of cockroaches, and this jolted me to my feet, but I was afraid to turn on the light because of what I might see.

The sound had stopped while I contemplated my move. That gave me the courage to turn on the light. I did not see my carpet swarming with cockroaches, as I had feared. I went for a closer look. As I veered in, something dark skittered toward the kitchen. It was fast and I didn’t get a good look at it. It was heavy enough to make an audible sound as it moved and I assumed it was a giant, queen cockroach, about to call for a million reinforcements. When it turned the corner, though, I saw that it had a tail, and was not a cockroach but a small mouse.

I have lived in apartment buildings all of my adult life and never dealt with mice. They were around my parents’ house when I was a kid, but I rarely saw them directly. Once, though, when I was helping some neighbors load firewood from their garage into their trailer and I saw a mouse in the open sunlight. It was stuck on one of those traps that make their feet stick so they can’t get away, until someone sees it and kills it, or they eventually just die. This mouse was still alive, and it was all nerves and instinct as it tried to jerk itself free, but it couldn’t. After a while Mr. Childs saw it and smashed it with a shovel. That had always made me sympathetic for mice, but that sympathy was easier when I didn’t have to encounter them.

I couldn’t find where the mouse went and eventually tried to go back to sleep in the bedroom with the door closed. I kept seeing this image of the mouse sneaking into my room and biting me on my toe or my earlobe. If I heard a click, I assumed it was the mouse; but I never caught it in the act when I went out there, even though I tried to surprise it. I eventually had to open up the window and listen to the crickets to get back to sleep.