The
Groundhog
A Short Story by Jonathan Brett
Published by Jonathan Brett at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Jonathan Brett
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I am not mad, I tell you. In fact, I was once a perfectly sane and respectable person. Married, happy, and, sure I had some troubles after I lost my job, but insane? Never!
Perhaps I should back up. Apologies to H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe, but introducing myself as a madman is a little off base, really. I’m just trying to let you know how stressed out I am. You see, I’m an unemployed American male with a singular problem. That problem is Legion. It is an insidious monster that threatens to dig up everything I hold dear. But, wait, I’m straying back into Lovecraft territory. I need to get back to the point.
My wife told me that I should enjoy myself in my unemployment – but not too much since I do have to find another job. Being a kept man is fun, but it starts to do things to your self-esteem. Somewhere around doing housework, cooking meals, and being rejected for another job because they were going to hire internally anyway, you start to think that maybe you’re the punchline in God’s newest and funniest joke.
I decided that yardwork would be my salvation. What could be manlier than tending to the yard, fixing up the house, and making sure the planters in the back yard look immaculate? Then I realized that I hated mowing the lawn and decided that it would be manlier to kill the grass. That’s when this manly man found himself challenging Nature, and Nature fought back. You see, everything was going fine until he came.
It was a normal summer day. I was lucky to be unemployed during a warm and sunny summer. The weather was nice and I rather enjoyed my freedom when the sun was high and the air was clear. My next-door neighbor just took a job working from home in some sort of IT thing I don’t understand. He was there that day. He saw it, too.
I had just finished plowing my lawnmower over the grass, allowing the machine to spit out as much dirt as it did greenery, when I saw my neighbor over the fence.
“Hey, Bob!” I said.
He waved, but I noticed that he was holding something peculiar. I walked over to the fence to get a closer look.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a katana,” he said. “A samurai sword.”
He held out the sword, which was as long as my arm, in a two-handed grip. I backed up a little, wondering if that was a hint of madness I saw in the blue eyes behind his glasses.
“Is something wrong at home?” I asked.
“It’s these weeds,” he said, pointing the sword at a tall patch of weeds between his lawn and the woods beside our houses. “The wife wants to be able to see the woods, but these weeds get in the way. They’re too thick for anything cheap to cut through them, so I bought this. See? You can swipe it up and then come back down, clearing things out without wasting a stroke!”
He waded into the weeds and brought the katana up in a flat U and then back down. Weeds flew briefly into the air and landed gracelessly like chickens that have had their wings cut.
I shrugged. “Looks like fun.”
“What’s that in your planter?” he asked.
I turned and looked. A brown lump had formed in one of my planters. As I got closer, the lump sat up and looked at me, calmly stuffing one of my wife’s flowers into its mouth. Two eyes as black as oil glinted in the sunlight.
“A groundhog!” I said.
“Better get rid of him,” Bob said.
I didn’t need any more prompting. I ran across the lawn and approached the groundhog, waving my arms like a madman and screaming until my voice cracked.
The groundhog blinked, wrinkled its nose, and then started munching on some hosta. I stomped on the ground and he didn’t move. Finally I kicked him.
That got the furball off his rather rotund bottom. He waddled across my lawn and under my deck.
He crawled through a hole in the lattice under my deck!
Upon investigation, I discovered that he had gnawed a front door and a back door for himself. When stomping and jumping on the deck didn’t work, I decided to go inside and discuss the situation with my wife.
“He’s under the deck right now?” she asked as we surveyed the damage in my once immaculate planting box.
“Yes, Rita, he’s under the deck right now,” I said.
She crouched beside me, looking under the deck. The sun was at an odd angle with the trees around the house so most of the underside of the deck was hidden in shadow.
“I don’t see him,” she said.
“Trust me, he’s there,” I said. The steady sound of my neighbor beheading weeds continued through our long silence.
Finally, Rita said, “What do we do?”
“I guess we need to
find ways to get rid of him,” I said.
“Well, make it cheap,” she said. “We can’t pay a lot of money until you get another job.”
“I know,” I said. And I did. I knew that paying lots of money to rid myself of vermin wasn’t in our budget. Little did I know that I was about to engage in a war.
* * *
The Internet is a very helpful tool. I found several methods to getting rid of groundhogs. The first and the easiest was to get mothballs. The local department store had a big box on clearance, so I bought it. Since the mothball box didn’t have instructions on how to get rid of a groundhog, I decided that I needed to use everything. I dumped it out around and underneath the deck.
“What is that smell?” Rita asked when she got home from work.
“Mothballs,” I said. “The Internet says it’ll get rid of our groundhog.”
“The whole house reeks of them!” she gave me a hug and then flew backwards. I swear her feet never touched the floor. “You smell like my great-grandmother’s attic!”
“They were cheap,” I said. “And I’ve already taken two showers.”
“Take a third one,” Rita said. “We’re meeting Bob and Bella tonight and I don’t want you smelling like mothballs.”
I still did when we went to Bob and Bella’s. Bob didn’t say anything, but Bella had to.
“The cat just passed out,” she said. “I think it’s the new cologne you’re wearing.”
“It’s not a cologne, it’s mothballs,” I said. “I’m trying to get rid of a groundhog.”
“I hear that human hair works,” Bella said. “But, man! That has to be better than mothballs.”
“Is that why your house smelled funny when I was trimming the weeds?” Bob asked.
“Probably,” I said.
“I hope it works,” Bella said. She opened all the doors in the house and put the unconscious cat on the back porch. She wrinkled her nose and brought the cat back inside. After a brief moment of indecision, she put the cat on the front step.
“I’ve never seen a cat pass out like that,” Bob said. “And I’ve seen them do a lot of things.”
“I hope that smell is gone before your job interview tomorrow,” Rita said.
* * *
Well, it wasn’t. When I mixed my cologne with the mothballs I created a smell so singular that I gave the receptionist an asthma attack when I signed in. Otherwise, the interview went well, except for the interviewer talking to me through his handkerchief.
After the interview, I decided to see how my little scheme had worked.
All of my mothballs were piled up beside the porch and the groundhog was munching on the hosta.
“You…you…MONSTER!” I screamed. “I probably lost a job because of you!”
Rita came outside. “What’s wrong, honey? Oh! Is that…?”
The question remained unfinished as the groundhog moved from the hosta to my wife’s four o’clocks.
I’ve never seen Rita in such a rage. She seized one of the deck chairs and ran at the animal, screaming like a banshee. The groundhog didn’t know what to do at first. I think it was stunned. Anyway, as she swung the chair, the animal sidestepped the attack and the chair smacked the wooden side of the planting box and Rita dropped the chair.
The groundhog, seeing that he might be in mortal danger, scurried past her, through my legs, and under the deck by his front door.
“You get him, Dan!” Rita said as she rubbed her aching arms. “I don’t care what it takes, but you get him!”
Now, granted, the four o’clocks were a gift from her grandmother, but I thought that response to be a little extreme. So did she when, two days later, she came out of the house screaming at me because I was removing her freshly-cut hair from a gallon freezer bag.
“What?” I asked, almost dropping the ponytail.
“That’s for Locks of Love!” Rita screamed. She snatched the bag and the ponytail from me.
“You just left it on the table all day!” I said. “I thought you were helping me get rid of the groundhog.”
“Not my hair,” she said. “This is important. Your hair isn’t.”
“My hair?” I asked. I tugged at the short hair on my head. “I don’t have that much. What do you expect me to do? Cut it?”
* * *
“So, neighbor, going bald for the next interview?” Bob asked. He rested his katana on his shoulder.
“Aren’t you supposed to be working?” I asked as I shook a bag that contained my hair.
“System’s compiling,” he said. He pointed the silvery blade across my lawn. “Doesn’t look like your groundhog cares too much.”
“That’s because he hasn’t noticed me yet,” I said. The groundhog was munching on the rhododendron beside the deck. He was only about three or four feet away from me.
I shook out the rest of the hair and tossed a tuft at the groundhog. He shook his head, sneezed, and kept eating.
“It isn’t working,” Bob observed. “Can I draw an eight on the back of your head?”
“Maybe I’ll get hired because they think I just recovered from cancer,” I said as I balled up the bag.
Bob swung the katana. “I wonder if you’re missing something here. There has to be an easy, obvious way to get rid of a groundhog.”
I watched him trim another line of weeds. I wondered how many days he’d be cutting those things.
I looked along the side of my house to where the borough was fixing a plugged storm drain. Then it hit me! I could call the borough.
“What do you mean I can’t discharge a firearm inside borough limits?” I asked through the telephone twenty minutes later.
“Only in self defense or at a shooting range. Otherwise, it’s illegal,” said the borough employee through her pinched nose. I think her nose was pinched because it sounded like it was. Maybe that’s just the way she talked.
“This is self defense,” I said. “That groundhog is destroying my lawn.”
“Where do you live again?”
I gave her my address.
“Is that the house with the dead lawn? Sorry, sir, I don’t buy it,” she said.
I looked out my window and saw some discarded newspapers roll like tumbleweeds across my brown lawn.
‘Tell you what, sir,” the woman said through her nose. “I’ll send Gus. He’s our pest control man. Will you be there in two hours?”
“Sure,” I said. I really didn’t have anything better to do than to wait for Gus.
Gus was late, but that was okay. The groundhog had discovered my porch chair and had curled up on it like a cat.
“Can’t you just bludgeon him to death now?” I asked quietly as Gus and I watched the groundhog sleep.
“Wha’ happen to yer hair?” Gus asked. His jowls shook when he talked and sprigs of coarse-looking hair stuck out of his chin and cheeks. The rest of his hair looked like a mossy growth on a reddish rock.
“I tried to scare him away by putting my hair around the house,” I said.
“Don’ work fer them,” Gus said, waving a dirty hand. “Ya gotter use mothballs.”
“I did,” I said. “He piled them up over there.” I pointed to the pile of mothballs.
“Heh,” Gus said. “Well, I gotter set up me traps, so gimme a minute.”
“He’s sleeping right there!” I said. I jabbed my finger at the sleeping critter. “Don’t you have something to collar him? A net, maybe?”
“That ain’t how we does it,” Gus said. “It ain’t sportin’. Ya gotter give ’em a chance.”
Gus bent over and mooned half the neighborhood. I saw Bella look out the window and faint. Bob put his katana up in a defensive position. When Gus straightened up, his red face was split in a yellow-toothed grin. I noticed that his nose was very small for the immensity of his face.
“This here trap, she’s a beaut!” Gus said. “Traps ’em live, every time.”
He held up a rusted cage with a flat trigger in the middle. I had never seen a trap like it. I wondered how old it was.
“Fer thirty bucks, Ol’ Gus’ll take care of the groundhog fer ya,” Gus said.
“Before or after delivery?” I asked.
“Before,” Gus said. “I gots a family to feed.”
I shuddered. “How do I know you’ll deliver?”
“It’s jus’ thirty bucks!” Gus said. He put the trap down on the deck.
“I don’t like paying for a nonexistent product,” I said. “That groundhog is a demon.”
The groundhog stretched and yawned. He went back to sleep on my chair.
“I work fer the gov’ment,” Gus said. “When ya pays the gov’ment, yer always payin’ for a nonexistent product.”
The man was a genius. I knew I couldn’t argue with that, so I fished out my wallet and handed him my last thirty bucks.
“If you don’t catch it, I expect a refund,” I said.
“Don’t do refunds,” Gus said as he set up the trap beside my house. He angled his behind so he mooned the other half of the neighborhood. Somehow, his backside was as sunburned as his face.
“What about a friendly wager, then?” I suggested. “I bet you thirty bucks that you can’t catch that groundhog in a week.”
Gus stood up and I saw that two joggers had turn around and fled the other direction. Gus wiped his small nose and then held out his hand. “Issa deal.”
I shook his hand and then wiped my hand on my shirt. While Gus worked, I ran my hand under scalding-hot water. As he left, I waved to him.
I went around back to inspect the trap. The bait was set, the trap was ready, and the groundhog slept in my chair.
“Your day’s coming,” I said. “Sleep peacefully.”
* * *
I didn’t sleep peacefully that night. The groundhog had figured out that the lights at the back of our house were motion sensitive and jumped up on the table to activate them and then back down when they went out. This went on for hours.
“I told you we should get better blinds,” Rita said. She put a pillow over her head.
I sat on the edge of the bed, watching the window light up, go dark, and light up again. I think I felt my cheek twitch.
“It isn’t natural,” I said. “It’s…it’s too smart!”
“It’s just a groundhog,” Rita said. “Try to sleep. If you can’t, let me sleep. I still have to work tomorrow.”
I felt my shoulders slump. I grabbed a pillow and left the room quietly. I know Rita didn’t mean anything by it, but it still hurt. I finally managed to fall asleep on the couch downstairs, but I woke up several hours later to the most incredible racket.
Something was in the trap!
Rita was getting ready for work when I threw open the door with a cry of triumph. I went over to the trap and looked in.
It was my neighbor’s cat.
It didn’t take much to open the trap, release the cat, and reset it. However, cats aren’t as intelligent as, apparently, groundhogs because I had to let the cat out three more times that day. When I heard a noise again later, I figured that it was the stupid cat and decided that I might feed it rat poison to get it out of my hair. I had important video gaming to do.
Yet, when I opened the door, it wasn’t the cat at all.
It was a squirrel. And, boy, was he angry.
“That’s one mad squirrel,” Bob said.
I looked up and saw that he was using the katana to trim the vines off a tree.
“They make things to do that, you know,” I said.
“Not as much
fun,” Bob said. “What are you going to do about the squirrel?”
I
looked down and saw that the groundhog was gorging himself on the
rhododendron.
“I’ll let him out like I did your cat, I guess.”
I bent down and went to open the latch. When I did, the squirrel attacked my fingers. I barely pulled my hand back in time. Its little paws swiped frantically through the bars. It hissed at me like an alien in a movie. Its furry gray tail darted up and down like it was alive and trying to get away from the main body.
“On second thought,” I said, “I’m calling Gus.”
“Oh, God!” Bob said. “It took me twenty minutes to revive Bella after the last time he mooned her.”
“Just tell her not to look out the windows, okay?” I said.
Gus got there just as Rita got home from work. I had to listen to the crying of the squirrel all day long. I had considered getting something to shoot it with, but remembered that I couldn’t discharge a firearm within borough limits.
Gus pulled on a pair of dirty gloves and reached down to unlock the cage.
“Be careful,” Rita warned. She and I had decided to stand behind the cage where we couldn’t see the shining moon.
Gus laughed. “This here squirrel’s jus’ mad, issal. I do this stuff all t’time.”
The squirrel gnawed at Gus’ gloved fingers as the trapper unlocked the cage and pulled the door open.
“Kay, little feller, time to…”
Poor Gus never finished his sentence. The squirrel backed up to the rear of the cage, gathered up all its strength, and launched itself at Gus’ red, round face. It was a blur of screeching gray, moving too fast for me or Rita to even cry out a warning.
Later, I made sure my thirty bucks weren’t too smelly.
“I guess we’re back to square one,” I said. “I feel bad about Gus. I hope he has good health insurance.”
“Well,” Rita said as she washed her hands to eat, “it’s not like his face looked any better with a nose.”
“I did get my money back,” I said. I ran it through some soapy water and clipped it to a string above the sink so it could dry.
“Wash your hands again,” Rita said as she sat down. “Dinner looks good.”
“Thanks,” I said. I washed my hands one more time before sitting down. “By the way, I have an idea. I looked up the law and saw that as long as I don’t discharge a firearm, I can discharge anything else I want to.”
“Like?” Rita nibbled on some salad while I settled in to eat.
“Like that old bow and arrow set I have in the garage. I think it’ll still fire,” I said.
“You’re going to shoot yourself,” Rita said.
“Nonsense,” I said. “I used to shoot it all the time as a kid. What could possibly go wrong?”
Interestingly enough, I saw Gus in the emergency room the next day. His stitches got infected, apparently. I don’t know if he understood my story of how I got an arrow in my foot. In fact, I don’t know if I understand it, either.
After I got home, Rita made me sit outside while she grumbled about having to take a day off work to take her unemployed husband to the emergency room. I understood, of course. It was the groundhog. Rita never complained about my inability to get a job until he came into the picture. He was wrecking my marriage.
I sat on the back steps with my right foot bandaged up (I had miraculously missed anything bony). Sitting beside me was the groundhog. He was up on his haunches nibbling on a flower.
“Hey, Dan,” Bob said. “How’s the foot?”
“It’ll heal,” I said.
“I see you’ve made peace with the groundhog,” Bob said.
I looked over at the creature beside me. I put my hand against his smooth fur and pushed him off the step. He crashed into the rhododendron beside the stairs with a squawk. When he recovered, he glared at me and ate the rhododendron. There really wasn’t much left of that plant.
“I can’t find any way to kill him,” I said. “He’s a plague! A curse! If God wanted to punish me for something, isn’t losing my job enough? Why me? Why? Why?”
I started to cry. I sat on the porch sobbing uncontrollably.
Bob, being as sensitive as any guy could be, awkwardly found his way back into his house.
I stood to my aching feet and pointed at the groundhog. I cursed him like I was a Shakespearian actor. Finally, I hobbled back into my house. I accidently closed the door on my foot.
Hopping up and down and swearing, I lost my balance and smacked my head on the edge of the table.
Rita was in a panic as I came to. I couldn’t really see her face.
“Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?” I asked, sleepily.
“It’s okay,” Rita said. “I’m calling 911.”
“No, no,” I said. “I’m fine. Really.”
In actuality, I think God spoke to me through Shakespeare. I had the answer I was seeking. It was right in front of me all along.
When the headache cleared I knocked on Bob’s door. He answered, looking at me cautiously as if I would burst into tears again.
“Bob, I need a favor,” I said.
“Sure,” he said.
“I need to borrow your katana,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll go get it.”
Bob let me hobble into his house. As he hurried up his stairs to get the weapon, he called down: “Can I ask why?”
“Well, you see, I have this groundhog that’s not afraid of people…”