The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 41. One Mouse Screams and All Others Vanish

I lived 3.1 miles from school, and on most days I walked.  That is because I officially lived out of my high school's zone, but in an area that still accepted students.  They just didn't provide busing.  The walk was long, but on most days I rather enjoyed it, especially in the afternoons when it was warmer.  After I got home, I'd change my clothes and walk another .9 miles to work.  Some mornings Lloyd gave me a ride to school, and on some days, I took the car, so it wasn't always like this, but frequently I walked a total of 8 miles during the day not counting the normal amount of steps one takes living.

My walks were my reprieve from the world, a time when I could just vanish in daydreams and notice shade and sunlight.  On the way home, I always passed one particular small apartment complex that had an enormous tree out front--so large, and so full that grass refused to grow underneath.  In the fall, the leaves fell and covered the moist dirt with layers of gold.  The low, winter sun left the place in blue shadow.  I thought to myself, If one has to live in an apartment, this is the place.  The complex was on a backstreet in an older part of town.  With some imagination, one could pretend one was in a small town, and by then, I was feeling nostalgia towards my former rural life.  One day, I saw a For Rent sign and told Lloyd about it.  Our complex had been purchased by a developer who bought up old rentals, painted the outside, planted a few flowers, and then raised the rent without making any improvements inside.  This was our chance to move out of the mold hole we inhabited, and we took it.

We moved into a second story apartment that had a sliding glass door that opened up onto a balcony that looked into that wonderful tree.  The place also had an open living room and dining room, and lots of light, even in the two bedrooms.  However, it also had mice, mice droppings, and that oh so strong smell that comes with lots of mice.  Had we been different people, we probably would have complained and made our landlord shampoo the carpets.  We weren't.  We didn't.  We were just happy to get out of the mold hole, and so we vacuumed up piles of poop out of the gold shag carpeting, set up traps, and moved in.

The mice didn't instantly move out.  We'd hear them in the walls, find little trails of poop now and then along the baseboards, and occasionally catch one in a trap.  But the smell was gone, life was good, and it seemed like as long as we could keep the mice under control, we could coexist with them.

Then, early one morning we woke up to the most horrible cry imaginable.  It was loud; it was shrill; but worst of all, it was filled with human-like agony.  We rushed to the living room, plugged our ears, looked towards the trap in shame.  We wanted to go rescue the animal, but neither one of us had the guts.  After what seemed like eternal damnation as punishment for our cruelty, the sound finally stopped.  We walked over the the trap.  That was one big mouse.  Not a rat, but almost.  The Goliath of its kind.

We were so disgusted with ourselves that we threw away the whole trap and buried it with other garbage to hide the evidence before the sun came up, at which time, we'd get rid of that bag as fast as possible.

We never set another trap.  We collected the other two and threw them in the garbage as well.  I'm not sure what we thought we'd do.  I guess we'd resigned to coexistence with them even if they started to slowly devour us.  We seldom spoke of it, for it was too real.

In the end, we were okay.  After about a week, we realized all of the mice moved out.  Where they went, I don't know.  I assume into the apartments around us, but from that long, blood-curdling screech forward, we were mouse free.