This I'll Defend

While Hal was deployed to Iraq, roof rats infested his house, and he has to do something about it. 4700 words.

Hal thumbed back the hammer on the Crosman when he heard noise in the hallway. He wished he had night vision goggles, but the full moon’s light through the living room window over his shoulder and the night light in the kitchen let him see enough.

The luminescent paint on the sights made aiming easier in the dark: line up the dot on the front blade with the dots he had painted on each side of the rear vee. He centered the middle dot on the movement and waited until his target was visible.

The rat paused at the corner, where the kitchen nightlight illuminated its dark body. The rodent paused to lift its head and sample the air, whiskers twitching.

Hal squeezed the trigger and the pellet’s impact sent the rat tumbling sideways, its feet scrabbling for purchase on the terrazzo floor. Hal squeezed the trigger again, sending a second pellet into the rat, spinning it in a circle. Its back broken, the rat struggled to drag itself away by its front paws.

Hal sighted again and squeezed the trigger. The lead pellet struck the rat in the head, and the rodent’s movement stopped as if he had flipped a switch.

He relaxed his grip on the revolver and waited for any other noises in the dark house. Silence. Hal knew that the colony had several members, and he could hear them running behind the walls and across the attic. Not as many now as before. Tonight’s rat made number four. Killing rats felt a lot different from killing Hajjis in Iraq. Over there, Hal had lobbed 105mm shells, putting steel on a distant target he could not see. In his house, he saw what he aimed at and watched it die. Killing the first rat felt hard, as if had done something wrong, but killing the second went easier. The satisfaction of removing vermin soon overshadowed reservation.

Hal checked the time, 3:18, and tucked the Crosman into his belt. He walked to the kitchen and pulled out a quart ziplock bag. The rat hadn’t left too much blood on the terrazzo floor, and this one didn’t stink too bad, a hint of wet dog mixed with rat piss and blood. He dampened a paper towel in the kitchen sink, pushed the dead rat into the bag, then wiped up the blood, depositing the paper towel inside the ziplock with the dead rat. All the smell of blood and rat urine contained inside. He slid his fingers down the closure to seal the bag, then walked to the small chest freezer at the back of the kitchen to toss it in. Frozen rats don’t stink, and they could stay there until trash pickup.

He paused after closing the freezer, ears trained on the ceiling. Silence. Chances were that no more rats would venture into the house tonight. He had to be up at 6:30 for work.

The small, two bedroom bungalow was the first real house Hal had lived in, bought, not rented property, thanks to a VA mortgage. He appreciated its sturdy cinderblock construction, despite being fifty years old. This was a house, not another trailer or doublewide mobile home from his childhood. Something in a neighborhood, not a trailer park, not likely to be blown to pieces in the next storm with no landlord jacking up the lot rent.

The rats had freaked Jean out, and she refused to come over because of them. Hal didn’t want to lose his girlfriend, not after she waited for him during his deployment. He owed her.

The same National Guard that made it possible to buy this house held partial responsibility for the rat problem. Three months after moving in, Hal’s field artillery unit received orders for Iraq, a twelve-month tour and part of the 2007 surge.

Hal had worked his way up from gun bunny to the battery Fire Direction Center, plotting targeting information on maps and calculating the numbers they sent to the guns for elevation, deflection, and charge levels to send 105mm shells downrange.

The battery’s first sergeant, Top Gillespie heard of Hal’s talent in the FDC and took time to mentor the young buck sergeant.

“You hear all these tales about the goddamn infantry, and how some guy’s the big hero because he killed six enemy with a rifle.” Top shook his head. “One gun crew can kill twice as many in half the time from a mile away.” That same gun crew never saw the killing and death they caused.

Top had been a drill instructor, back when he was a staff sergeant turning recruits into soldiers at Ft Jackson, and the badge sewed to his shirt pocket earned him added respect. The emblem of the armored breastplate and the words, This We’ll Defend marked him as more than another senior NCO.

The alarm clock shrilled, and Hal dragged himself out of bed to make his way to the kitchen and start the coffeemaker. His eyes felt scratchy like they did after a long road march in Iraq with all the goddamned dust. He’d been home maybe a week after deployment. On his way to the shower, he looked at the rat traps set by the floorboards in the kitchen, still unsprung.

The technician from Truly Nolan, Edgar had left them. Hal had called the exterminator directly after coming home from deployment. The house smelled off when he entered, rat droppings and urine spoiling the air. That first night home offered a poor night’s sleep, interrupted by the sounds of rats running across the attic and inside walls.

Edgar the exterminator had confirmed the worst: roof rats established a colony in the house while Hal was away, and the school solution was traps. Catch, kill, and remove them.

That may look good on paper, but the rodents made noise running through the attic and inside the walls at night. Any food left in the open would become rat chow. This was his house, his first real house, and Hal refused to share it with vermin.

The rat droppings and urine had stunk enough, so Hal understood that the stench of poisoned decaying rat carcasses in the walls and attic would not be the answer he wanted. On the other hand, waiting for rats to commit suicide by trap seemed at least naive, if not stupid.

He and Jean began dating shortly before the deployment, and they resumed when he got back from Iraq. Jean waited for him while he was away in the Sandbox, impressive. On the night they stopped at Hal’s house ten days ago after a dinner date and dancing all night, she heard the rats running through the attic.

“What’s that?” Jean asked, rising from Hal’s arms.

“What?” Hal didn’t want to say.

“That.” She pointed at the ceiling and the sounds of another running rat.

Hal sighed. “There’s a couple of rats in the attic.”

Jean pushed her hair behind her ear and made the kind of face people do when they step in dogshit. “Rats.” She looked at him.

“In the attic.” Hal hoped they stayed out of sight.

Jean snapped her head to the left, toward the kitchen. Hal followed her gaze to catch movement at the baseboard. She shrieked and climbed on the couch. “That’s a rat I saw.” Her voice pitched high. “A goddamn rat.”

Hal craned his neck to look into the dim light from the hood over the stove. A rat crept along the baseboard, foraging.

Jean grabbed her purse and jacket. “I’m out of here. No way I can be around rats.”

Hal didn’t try changing her mind. She freaked out. Instead, he drove her home, promising that he would get rid of the invaders. The following day he visited Gander Sporting Goods and bought the Crosman pellet gun. The Vigilante was a CO₂ powered revolver fashioned to look like a Colt Python. Hal didn’t care what it was made to resemble. The pellet gun had what he wanted: a six-inch rifled barrel, adjustable sights, and a repeater to let him take second and third shots at fleeing rats. Hal selected a box of CO₂ cartridges and a tin of .177 pellets.

Hal poured himself a cup of coffee as soon as he arrived at work. Lots of black coffee had become part of his work routine with staying up most of the night to shoot rats. He set his steaming mug to the side of his keyboard, typed in his password, and fired up AutoCAD, his main tool at the firm. Hal worked as a draftsman, occasionally helping survey crews.

Ron Stuart, the firm’s elderly president and owner, walked past Hal’s workstation on his way to his corner office. He paused to smile at Hal’s coffee mug with the crossed cannons festooned on its side, 2/166 Field Artillery, Florida National Guard. The lines in his face deepened. “You’ve developed a real taste for lifer juice.” Ron had served in an engineer unit in Vietnam.

Hal hefted the mug and took a sip. His legs felt heavy with fatigue, and he wanted to stretch out for a long nap, but his workday had just begun. “Helps me through the day.” He returned the smile. Where the caffeine left off, a full bladder picked up at keeping him awake.

“I’m still glad to have you back in one piece.” His face sobered. “The first week home must be an adjustment.”

“Yessir, it is.” Hal sipped more coffee. “Good to be back.” Having an attic full of rats, not so much.

Ron nodded agreement. “I was so happy to see my boy come back healthy from the first Gulf War.”

Gus Franks walked by Hal’s cubicle on his way in to his office. In his mid forties, going gray, and carrying a growing gut of middle-age spread, he stopped to greet Ron. “Ready for another great day?”

“I guess so,” Ron replied and turned to Hal. “How about you?”

“Whatever it takes.” Hal sipped coffee and hoped that he could stay awake through the mid afternoon doldrums.
“I like that attitude.” Ron winked and walked to his office.

“You going to stick around?” Gus asked Hal, his voice not friendly.

Hal set his coffee down and met Gus’s eyes. He often asked this kind of question. “Where would I go?” He dared Gus with his eyes to say more.

“I don’t know. Wherever the National Guard wants to send you next.” Gus shrugged, his eyes still icy. When Hal received his deployment orders, Gus complained that Hal was free to go to Iraq with his unit instead of staying to do drafting work. He didn’t like the fact that the law allowed Hal to come back to his old job after a year’s deployment as if nothing had happened, and he had said so on more than one occasion.

“We had our turn in the Sandbox, and I don’t think we’re going back any time soon.” Hal sipped coffee. “Now, if a hurricane breaks out and the governor calls us up, there’s nothing I can do about that, unless you have some pull in Tallahassee.”

Gus stared at Hal.

“Meanwhile, I need to finish up the drawings for your bridge so we can stay on schedule.” He set his coffee mug down. “Excuse me, please.” Hal reached for the digitizer palette and his notes.

Gus moved on to enter his office and close the door, not speaking.

The bad blood between the two began when Gus insisted that Hal join in a surveying assignment that fell on a drill weekend. The firm already had a full crew, but Gus said he wanted to spread the misery of working weekends. Ron stepped in as owner to rein him in. “For crying out loud, he’s in the Guard and doing a drill weekend. It’s not like he’s hanging out in strip clubs. You got enough help to finish the job without him anyway.”

That hadn’t set well with Gus, who had never served. Ron’s experience in Vietnam and as the father of an Air Force pilot tempered his view of Hal’s drill weekends.

Hal looked at his notes and returned to work on the drawing for Gus’s bridge. He didn’t know how many more rats remained in the colony and figured that he may have killed half. Shooting the rest of the colony would get more difficult, the survivors more wary.

He squinted at his figures from survey work, then looked at the drawing. The drainage was off. Gus had made another mistake in estimating how rainwater would flow away from the base of the bridge. Hal corrected the calculations, then set to work with putting the correction into the drawing. He decided this time to just fix it and not say anything.

Just before the afternoon project meeting, Hal poured himself a fresh cup of black coffee, and he knocked out twenty pushups to make sure he was awake with his blood circulating before settling into a chair in the conference room.

Ron presided as Gus and Tom presented status reviews of the current projects. The firm had two bridges and a highway project under construction, along with another bridge and three roadway bids out, the county seeking bidders for a drainage project and a retention pond.

Hal’s eyes grew heavy as the presentations progressed, and after a while, a wadded lump of paper bounced off his forehead. His head snapped up.

“You still with us, Hal?” Gus asked, his voice louder than necessary. “Or are you off in the land of nod?”

“I’m here.” Hal bit his lip and reached for his coffee mug, the contents now only warm, not as warm as how his face felt. He wanted to tell Gus to kiss his ass, but now wasn’t the right time or place. A better idea might have been to speak up about correcting Gus’s drainage error.

“Good, I don’t want to lose you again.” Gus nodded and resumed his presentation.

Hal’s face tightened. Today wasn’t the first time in the past week he had nodded off in meetings, and he hated it. He knew he couldn’t keep this up forever.

That evening after dinner, Hal dialed Jean’s number. It went to voice mail, and he left a message: “Hal here, I want to get together this weekend and do something fun, away from my house, of course. Call me back.”

He and Jean had had three dates since the night she first saw the rats, but she wanted nothing to do with his house, their time spent together on neutral territory: restaurants, clubs, and parks around Lakeland.

Jean didn’t call back that night, and after the sun set, Hal heard the first rustlings in the attic. The Truly Nolan tech had left three traps up there, but Hal never heard any of them snap. He got out the Crosman, installed a fresh CO₂ cartridge, then loaded the cylinder with ten .177 pellets, an improvement over the typical six shots for a regular revolver.

Hal set the Crosman on his nightstand and sat up in bed, reading a Tom Clancy paperback while he waited. He didn’t know how long he’d be up tonight. Already he felt drowsy.

As he turned the page, he heard a scrabbling sound and looked up. A rat had exited the closet and followed the baseboard to the open bedroom door. His hand reached out to take the revolver from the nightstand. Hal moved slowly and swung his arm in a slow arc to line up the sights.

The rat turned its head toward Hal, freezing for a moment, ready to spring.

Hal squeezed the trigger, sending the first pellet into the trim. He continued squeezing, sending the next two pellets into the rat, knocking it over. He leaped from the bed and went to the door, slapping the hall light switch on.

The rat dragged itself along the baseboard, leaving a thin streak of a blood trail.

Hal stepped up to the rat to lay the muzzle at the back of the rat’s head and squeezed the trigger. At that range, the pellet exited the rat’s head and left a bloody smear on the floor. Cleaning up the gory mess took fifteen minutes, and he felt thankful that this bungalow had terrazzo floors.

The carcass went into a ziplock bag and into the freezer with the others. Before loading the freezer again with steaks, chops, and hamburger, he’d have to get rid of the dead rats.

While he was in the kitchen, he took a bottle of vanilla extract from the cupboard and found four cotton balls in the bathroom. He doused the cotton balls with vanilla and set them next to the baseboard in a spot he could watch from the couch. The exterminator technician had mentioned that vanilla was good rat bait because they navigated mostly by scent.

Hal left the light burning in the hood over the range, then darkened the rest of the house and settled into his customary spot on the couch he bought at the Salvation Army thrift store when he moved in.

The house lay quiet, no noise beyond the refrigerator. Hal waited, as he had every night in the past two weeks. His eyelids felt heavy, and he tightened his grip on the Crosman. White trash might be OK living with rats around, but Hal had risen above trash.

He had been dozing when he heard scrabbling on the terrazzo floor. Two rats had begun investigating and sniffing at the vanilla-soaked cotton balls.

He thumbed back the hammer on the pellet gun and raised it, lining up the sights and aiming at the larger rat. The pellet struck its hindquarters, rolling it across the floor. Hal squeezed the trigger again and again, following the moving rat and emptying the ten-round cylinder, ricocheting pellets off of the floor where he missed. The second rat scurried away into the darkness.

Hal walked to the rat he shot and saw it bleeding from three pellet wounds. It bared its teeth and tried to rear up as Hal approached. He raised his booted foot and brought it down on the animal, its skull making a popping noise. Hal smiled at the recognition that another rat was dead, then paused. Less than a week ago, he had felt queasy over killing the first rat from across the room. Now he felt satisfied about stomping this one dead.

This kind of killing felt very different from what Hal had done as an artilleryman. In the Sandbox killing felt abstract, reports from spotters or the units requesting fire, just words. Killing rats felt a lot more like the infantry stories he had heard, up close and personal. In the battery, they never saw what they hit.

Top was right in that a good gun crew could kill twice as many enemy in half the time as the infantry. What he had missed was the difference between lobbing shells from kilometers away and killing up close with your hands and feet.

After cleaning up the floor and bagging the dead rat for the freezer, Hal cleaned the blood off the sole of his shoe.

The following morning called for coffee brewed espresso strength. Hal had made his morning shower as cold as he could stand it. Even during the crazy-busiest times in Iraq, he had never been this sleep deprived. He cut himself shaving and felt thankful for how the sting of the styptic pencil kept him awake.

Mid morning at work, as he finished his fifth mug of coffee, he made a phone call to the armory and tracked down Ed, one of the fulltime guys who maintained the unit’s gear between drills. “Ed, I need a favor. I need smoke.”

“What kind of smoke? You’re not talking about dope?” His voice rose.

“No.” Hal shook his head and kneaded his eyebrows. “I’m looking for a smoke grenade, plain HC.” Hal’s eyelids felt like they had sand under them. He reached for his coffee mug. “Can you help me out?”

“Yeah, I can get you HC smoke. We got a shitload left over from the last field exercise.”

“I sure appreciate it, Ed.” Hal felt relief and wished he had though of using smoke from the start.

“What are you going to do?”

“I got a problem with rats in my house.” Hal gulped coffee. “And I want to flush the last of them the hell out.”

“Rats. That’s a bummer.” Ed’s voice commiserated with Hal’s situation.

“Yeah, at least Jody didn’t steal my girlfriend.” Hal smiled. “I can take care of the rats.”

“No problem, bro, I got your back. Come on down around lunchtime, and I’ll square you away.” The armory lay only a fifteen minute drive from the office.

That evening Hal pulled out a roasting pan and filled it with soil. He carried it to the attic and placed the smoke grenade in the middle. Laying on dirt, it couldn’t set anything afire. The sun was setting, and soon the rats would become active.

Hal inserted a fresh CO₂ cartridge into his pellet gun and loaded it. He waited until full dark, then went back to the attic.

He lifted the smoke grenade and pulled the pin, letting the spoon fly away into the rafters. Hal set the grenade into the pan, climbed down, and waited.

The grenade began spewing gray smoke into the attic. Hal moved to the middle of his house and watched. Whatever rats that remained in the attic would soon run to escape.

Hal heard something in his bedroom, a rat climbing down the wall. He swung the pellet pistol up, and like Dirty Harry, shot it dead.

He walked through his house, taking his time, looking and stalking.

Smoke from the attic drifted into the house, enough that Hal could smell it, and the attic must be socked in with gray HC smoke, enough to flush them all out. He wished he had thought of this idea earlier as another rat dashed down the hall. He raised the revolver and killed it with two shots.

Noise came from the wall, and Hal waited. Two more rats emerged from the linen closet, and he fired on the first one, taking three pellets to kill it. He shot at the second, missing, then discovered that he was out of pellets.

Hal hit the latch that broke open the revolver and ran to the kitchen table for the can of .177 lead pellets. His fingers moved slow and clumsy as he picked pellets from the can and loaded them into the cylinders. He had at least one more rat to kill. No time to waste. He snapped the revolver shut.

The rat had vanished from the hallway, no surprise, and Hal crept along the wall, looking and listening. He heard scratching noises and turned to the bathroom.

It had gotten into the bathtub and was trying to climb out, its paws finding no purchase on the porcelain surface. It must have jumped or climbed the shower curtain to fall in. He fired once and missed, the pellet ricocheting off the tub, chipping the enamel, and bouncing off the tile wall near Hal’s head. He took more time to line up the sights and fired again, hitting the rat and breaking its back. The rodent continued trying to climb out, and Hal stepped into the tub and stomped its head, leaving a bloody heel print.

Hal left the dead rat in the bathroom and continued patrolling his house. Another rat emerged in the kitchen, and Hal dispatched it to the next world with two pellets.

Around 11:30, Hal began gathering up the five rat carcasses and cleaning blood from the terrazzo floor and bathtub. He dropped the bagged dead rats into the chest freezer and waited for more noise. The house lay silent, not even the refrigerator running. After midnight, he ventured into the attic. The air lay thick with gray HC smoke and not a sound of any living creature.

At 12:30, with no more sounds coming from anywhere, Hal stretched out on the couch, revolver still in hand and dozed off.

He heard the alarm clock sounding from the bedroom and rubbed his eyes. The house had remained silent all night.

As his coffee perked, he peered into the chest freezer. An even dozen rat carcasses lay inside, packaged in ziplock bags, an impressive body count and something to show for all those nights of too-little sleep. Hal smiled, satisfied with his accomplishment. Vermin had invaded his home while he was in Iraq, chewing holes in the walls and stinking the place with droppings and urine. He defended his home, killing the last of the trespassers.

Hal had bought the freezer to store food, not dead vermin. The weekly trash pick-up day was yesterday, but he wanted the rats gone now.

After starting the bacon in the skillet, Hal took two Publix grocery bags and loaded them with the frozen rat carcasses. He’d drop them in the company dumpster at work, behind the main building, where nobody cared if it stank.

He put the bags in the trunk of his car after breakfast and made his regular commute to Stuart Associates Engineering. Last night’s work had taken a lot out of him, but the house had stayed silent all night. He dropped the bags in the company dumpster by the employee entrance behind the building.

His eyes felt like a he had a spoonful of sand in them, and he savored his morning office coffee as AutoCAD loaded in his desktop computer. He had to look twice at his notes from yesterday to see where he left off.

During the project meeting Hal fought sleep, pinching his thighs under the table to let the pain keep him awake. Nonetheless, he nodded off about halfway into the presentations.

“Jesus Christ, Hal,” Gus said, tossing his pencil onto the conference table. “Can’t you ever stay awake?”

Hal snapped his head up. Alert now and hating Gus, hating that superior look on his face, that he had never had to go to the Sandbox or deal with rats in his house. “I want to show you why. I’ll be right back.” He stepped out the back entry to the dumpster and returned with his two plastic grocery sacks.

“What do you want to show me?” Gus leaned on his elbows, eyebrow cocked as if he was ready to reprimand.

“Instead of sleeping nights for the past two weeks, I’ve been busy dealing with little trespassers.” He raised his hands with the grocery bags. “When I deployed, these guys moved into my house.” He hefted the two grocery sacks to spill dead frozen rats in ziplock bags onto the conference table.

He returned his gaze to Gus. “You’ll be happy to know that the problem is solved, and now I can focus 100% of my attention to your projects.”

Gus’s jaw dropped. The other two engineers stared at the bagged rats. Ron Stuart’s cheeks creased at the sight of the dead rodents, some more bloody than others, most still carrying tendrils of frost. Ron’s secretary, Laura, normally nonplussed and unflappable, covered her mouth and backed away from the table as if it were radioactive.

Hal gestured at the bagged rats. “I got the last of them yesterday.” He began stowing the carcasses in the grocery bags. “I’m sorry for not giving 100%, and I’ve been distracted, but I solved the problem.” He finished putting the last of the dead rats away.

That evening Hal called Jean to set a date. He offered her a home cooked meal of barbecue country style ribs.

“You got rats in your house,” she said.

“Not any more.” Hal smiled into the telephone.

“You sure?”

“Positive, and I’ll tell you how.”

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