Adventures in the Crawl Space (Part II)

Previously on Adventures in the Crawl Space...

An officious odor in the house led me to a rotting mouse in the crawl space under the pantry trapdoor.

All I had to do was release the trap, dump the mouse into a plastic bag, and toss it in the trash. Easy, right? In theory. But in case I haven't made it clear, I am petrified of the crawl space. I will make things as difficult as they can possibly be if it means avoiding a trip to the seedy underbelly. For the next several minutes I brainstormed all the ways I could retrieve the mouse without actually setting foot under the house. What if, I thought, I fashioned a pair of oversized tongs out of the mop and the broom and scooped up the rodent and the trap? But then what? Would I carry it through the kitchen and risk dropping a maggot-infested rodent on the tiled floor? I'm ashamed to say that the tongs idea was the extent of my ingenuity--one of the many pitfalls of majoring in English. I would have to once again lower myself through the dark portal and into the tarp-lined bowels of my abode. "I am not having fun!" I announced on my way down, just so matters were perfectly clear.

My fear of dead rodents in traps is easy to explain: I'm terrified they're not actually dead and when I go to lift the spring the creature will hurl itself at my face. (Easy to explain, yes. Rational, absolutely not.) For some reason, the task of releasing the mouse from the trap in the confines of the crawl space was profoundly more unsettling to me than releasing the mouse from the trap in the freedom of the backyard. I lifted the whole contraption--mouse attached--into a plastic bag, hoisted myself up into the pantry, and marched outside with the bag as far in front of me as I could hold it.

I dumped the contents onto the grass and squatted next to it, my upper lip curled in disgust. I inspected the trap, searching for a way of lifting the metal lever without actually touching the mouse. Finding none, I slid my finger under the bar and into the fleshy stomach of the rotting rodent. When I pulled the lever up a patch of grey and white fur came up with it. Sick, I thought, and then said it aloud three times in quick succession. I held the trap open with one hand and dumped the mouse into the plastic bag I was holding with the other. Just to be safe I knotted the bag and dropped it into a bigger paper bag. Good riddance to bad rodents, I thought, and flung it into the trashcan. I went inside and took a long hot bath.

Oh how I wish I could say that was enough crawl space for one day, but apparently it was not. Several hours later my brother came over to do some work on the floor in the laundry room. Soon after I received a lesson on how to remove a toilet from the floor, I got a call on my cell from my brother. "Come to the crawl space," he said when I answered, his words garbled like he had something in his mouth. "The pipe burst."

I raced to the pantry and dropped into the seedy underbelly where my brother was on his side in a pool of rat pee and murky water with a flashlight in his mouth. "You have to turn the water off," he said. His flashlight was pointing to a knob behind me. The thickest, grimiest spider web I've ever encountered in my life hung between me and the valve, but with water spewing from the pipe above my brother's head I had no time to circumnavigate the arachnid death trap. I lowered my head and plowed right through it.

"Thanks," my brother said as soon as the water had stopped. I nodded and surveyed the dozens of miniature lakes that had formed across the tarp. "Well," I said, "good thing I already got that mouse." The faint smell of decaying rodent lingered in the air. I'm gonna need another bath, I thought.

It didn't dawn on me until five minutes later that I'd just turned off the water.