Squirrels And Up Are Safe

So my new house on Austin's East Side is awesome--Awesome!--and you should all come visit. It does, however, have a few maintenance issues. Our management company was kind enough to send out Bear to take care of them. Bear, who looks like a mildly reformed Hell's Angel, usually comes by in the morning while I'm still working from home, sitting at my computer in a bathrobe with a cup of coffee. I don't think it bothers him, though. When I opened the door the first time, I stood out on the lawn with Bear with said coffee in said bathrobe and had a 15 minute conversation about how my motorcycle was or was not safely parked on the street.

Bear cleared out a bunch of trash left by the previous tenants, filled in a bunch of holes left from sheet rock screws, fixed some ceiling tiles in my room, etc., etc., etc. He also killed a family of rats.

We knew we had rats. We knew we needed to get rid of them. I was mostly okay with that. I don't eat meat, but I'm also not keen on getting the bubonic plague. So the little bastards can die to save me. Bear, however, takes a gleefully exuberant approach to his job that's mingled with a mix of terror every time he actually sees a rat.

The first one was killed when he lifted up a tile in the hallway to place a trap. It fell down and hit him on his face before he swatted it across the hall to the bathroom floor with his 2-foot Maglight while screaming bloody murder. "Get me the shovel, Joe," he kept saying to his assistant. "I'm gonna get it." By the time Joe got there with the shovel, Bear had massacred the little plague carrier with his flashlight and calmly scooped him into a garbage bag.

The second one got killed by a trap. It took ten minutes for Bear and Joe to coordinate the elaborate process of pulling it down from the ceiling into a bag without actually touching the rat. He explained to me this morning, while repeating the process for a third rat, that the first two were probably the parents.

"That's kind of sad," I said.

"No, no, it's cool," said Bear. "We only kill rats. Sometimes mice. Squirrels and up are safe."

That, my friends, is the exterminator's taxonomy.

Bear killed five more rats today. All with his bare hands. The man is a hulking angel of death. I'm kind of honored to have him in our home.