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The True Story of the Southland Southland Recipes The Secret of Southland Mac and Cheese How to Make a Southland Club Sandwich Southland Stories Always be Nice to Your Waitress Daddy Roy vs. The Rats |
These days, we don't have rat infestations in town and around restaurants. This is a story about how we used to handle rats. DADDY ROY vs. THE RATS Decades ago it wasn’t uncommon for my dad to take an afternoon nap in the backseat of his Pontiac parked out back of the Southland, a café he operated along with my mom's sister Sarah and her husband, we called him JO. My dad we called Daddy Roy. He would sleep out back, not because he was lazy, he was one of the least lazy men you could ever meet. It was because after a decade or two in the restaurant business you learn to get your rest when and where you can. Being a light sleeper, it was also a good way to keep an eye on the place. Just hanging out, half dozing in his car he would notice things that most other people would overlook or just ignore. Things like rats. Garbage disposal in those days was a lot more casual than it is now. Even the most environmentally retarded states now use metal or plastic containers with attached tops and the trash is taken to lined and graded landfills out in the county and added to budding mountain ranges made of refuse. Back in the 1950s and 1960s though we took the garbage out to big galvanized cans kept in a low cinderblock structure Daddy Roy and JO had built out back near the edge of our property. The little compound they had put up was open at one end so you could slide the battered cans in and out. The whole setup worked pretty well to hide the sight if not the smell of the garbage. Once or twice a week a nasty looking city dump truck would stop by and a couple of guys would somehow heave the trash into the bed of the truck and take it to a remote part of town down by the river where it was dumped and was left open to the elements and scavengers. Though this disposal strategy was a big improvement over just tossing your trash into the street it did have its drawbacks. Roaming dogs would knock the cans over to get at the goodies, raccoons grew royally fat and every stray cat in town could have its own catfish carcass. The thing you really had to watch out for and aggressively repress though was the local rat. The rat in one variety or another has lived on the margins of human society for thousands of years and Sheffield was no exception. We had a variety that haunted our little dump that my folks called gopher rats, I don’t actually know if that’s their proper name but they were big, ugly, vicious and sometimes showed a shocking boldness chasing dogs and cats out of their digs. And what digs they had. They weren't called gopher rats for nothing for they tunneled under the cinderblocks and concrete pad with the skill and tenacity of West Virginia coal miners. Someone faced with a problem like this now would probably call in professional exterminators but my folks were mostly doing it yourselfers and they had refined the flushing and killing the rodents to a fine art. Here is how it went. First thing we did was arm volunteers from our mostly black kitchen crew with weapons like hoe handles and stout clubs from the pile of hickory we kept to bar-be-cue with. Some employees brought their own arms, usually an old tool handle with a sharpened spike attached to one end. Sometimes Daddy Roy and JO would join in but mostly they just would direct the action like a couple of deranged white hunters. We had an old 1949 Studebaker pickup truck that would be backed up to the burrows and we would then block off all the tunnel entrances we could find except two. Then a rubber hose was attached to the trucks tailpipe and pre-catalytic exhaust was then pumped into the warren under our feet. If you tried this with a modern vehicle, it would probably only make the burrows warm and damp, but the leaded breath of an old Detroit straight six is as toxic as the atmosphere of an alien planet and with it you get results in hurry. It was only a few seconds before rodents began to surface gasping for air but the sight of a crowd of heavily armed locals waiting for them sent them diving back underground, you could feel a vibration under your feet as they milled around like they were trying to decide what to do. They had only two choices, stay down in the burrows and be murdered by the ancient Studebaker or make a break for it out the sole remaining exit. Of course, there was only one real choice to make, run the gauntlet, first a lone rat or two would come tearing out to try their luck, which wasn’t very good. The rats would be almost instantly pinned and pounded into the ground by the hired help, who seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. Finally the whole pack would pile out half blinded and staggering from carbon monoxide poisoning and try to rush the mob that was waiting for them. Things really got lively. We would fall upon them like we were reenacting the French revolution and the massacre would be over in less than a minute. It was a system that was effective, almost free and more fun than a trainload of monkeys. Almost every massacre has survivors though and this was no exception. No matter how much we poisoned, gassed, whacked and impaled the rats there were always a few that managed to somehow escape and reoccupy their fortress within a short time. We would put out lethal unregulated poisons, but some of the rodents actually seemed to enjoy eating the stuff and acted like it didn’t even give them a headache. The boys put out some of those huge rattraps so big they look like a slab of 1x10 shelving with bedsprings attached but these only killed the stupid clumsy or inattentive ones. Charles Darwin would have been fascinated. The tougher we got, the tougher the rats got. The more we drenched them in poisons, the more immune they became. The smartest ones would rob the bait from the traps and the dimmer or slower ones would get only a crushed skull. We became locked in a struggle between the human predatory instinct and the immutable laws of natural selection. After a while it was obvious we were just making them smarter bigger and meaner. What Daddy Roy really wanted to use was a .22 rim fire but even in a place like Sheffield this wasn’t that kind of town. Back during the war when he worked for Union Carbide, he would astonish his coworkers by throwing ball bearings at scrap yard rats with almost unerring accuracy. These bearings were not the variety you can find in a kids roller skates but were steel balls 1 or 2 inches in diameter that on a rats sense of scale were more like cannonballs. He had been so good at it, the managers would take sucker bets from visiting company bigwigs and the home team almost always won. That had been a long time ago though. Besides this was more about safety and sanitation than entertainment. It was our neighbor Mr. Bittner who finally provided the solution. Ernest Bittner was the son of a German couple who had immigrated early in the century and Ernest had grown up to become an engineer during the glory days of the TVA and he and his family were wonderful neighbors. The Bittner home would have blended seamlessly into even the most picturesque Bavarian landscape. The property was practically manicured with verdant gardens, fruit orchards, pecan trees and even beehives. He had a basement workshop that looked like it belonged to Werner Von Braun; it was full of lathes, drill presses and had an enormous old coal-burning furnace big enough to power a small riverboat. This was the man who held the solution to Daddy Roy's rat problem. For years he had protected his little farm from squirrels and other pests with a pellet rifle. It was definitely not a kid's toy. Ernest Bittner could knock raiding pests out of a 60-foot tall tree and when they hit the ground they were as lifeless as a doorknob. I don’t know if he had customized or modified the air rifle in any way, but it had to have been as nearly powerful as a .22 short. It had a rifled steel barrel and a walnut stock and was topped off with a 4x scope. A one-stroke lever compressed a powerful spring that propelled the tiny pointed lead pellets in near absolute silence. And in the hands of Daddy Roy it was nothing less than a deadly weapon. Sometimes when we would go frog gigging he would take a tiny little browning rifle and shoot bullfrogs with such precision that when I would retrieve them I could feel the frogs heart still throbbing calmly while waiting for the next fly to come along and when we got home that evening the frogs heart would still be beating. There wasn’t a freshman biology lab in the world that could as neatly lobotomize an amphibian as cleanly and humanely as Daddy Roy. The next afternoon around sundown, when the surviving rats surfaced to do a little foraging, Daddy Roy was waiting for them patiently in the backseat of his Pontiac, with Ernest Bittner's loaned Teutonic air rifle. There were a couple or three of the hulking rodents. When they had relaxed and began to feed, Daddy Roy eased the barrel of the rifle out the window and lined up his first target. He put the scope's crosshairs slightly behind the rat's ear, pushed the safety to "off" and gently squeezed the trigger. The rifle gave a barely audible puff and the shot zipped downrange drilling through the targets noggin like it was made of cardboard. It slumped to the ground without any kicking, screaming or any other visible sign of distress. The other two giant rats continued their grazing placidly as bison while Daddy Roy quietly reloaded, cocked his piece and sat back to await developments. He didn’t have to wait long. The two remaining rats eventually nosed up to their dead pal, probably catching a whiff of blood and thinking it might mean something tasty had turned up. Daddy Roy nailed another one right through the head and reloaded. The lone rodent began to become dimly alarmed like a crack smoker who has just caught on fire. Just as the third shot was fired, it had turned to bolt for the nearest burrow entrance but that was as far as it got. Daddy Roy's reign of terror had begun. With him out there shooting at them, the rats might as well have been trapped in the ruins of Stalingrad. Every now and then a rat would try to move in but only a few were wary or intelligent enough to avoid being killed but one was way too many so Daddy Roy stuck with it. Unavoidably the same thing happened that had earlier, despite their poor eyesight some rats began to instinctively use any available cover to move around, getting a little smarter in the process. It went on for month after terrifying month in fair weather and foul. Sometimes they would be shot from the woodpile, sometimes while sitting just inside the door on the back porch. He finally wound up shooting from a broad expanse of flat roof on top of the restaurant. We actually went up there on occasions, we would sometimes catch largemouth bass or prehistoric looking gar, salt down their heads and dry them on the gravel rooftop in the searing Alabama sun to keep as trophies. Most often the shrunken heads would be nailed up on the back door of somebody's workshop. That was and is one of the great things about my family. Doing things like mummifying scary looking fish heads or sniping from rooftops to control pests didn’t seem eccentric or unusual. The men folk just did things like that sometimes. Sadly, not everyone is lucky enough to have been spawned by families this open-minded. One day someone called in a compliant about a suspicious man running around with a gun. If such a call is made today, there is almost always an overwhelming paramilitary response but back then the authorities sometimes tended to handle problems like this more informally. The responding police officer was another neighbor who knew as soon as the call came in who it was and what is was about. It was officer Morgan's sad duty to inform Daddy Roy that the fun was over and he had to call a cease-fire. Well, Daddy Roy was the kind of guy who respected a polite request by the police and the lethal little air rifle was returned to the capable hands of Ernest Bittner. There was a little anxiety at first on our ability to keep the pests knocked down but as it sometimes happens the problem was overtaken by unforeseen events. The U-shaped block structure was pulled down and scraped clean right down to the concrete pads and the old battered cans were taken away and replaced by a big green steel box with a hinged top like you see everywhere today. After that the towns infestation dropped off dramatically and it's rare to see big gopher rats anymore, in town anyway. When I do see them its usually late at night down at one of the railroad crossings scurrying across the road and when they run in front of me, I step on the gas. |
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