The Only Great Dictator

Our septic tank backed up during COVID. It was even shittier than you might imagine. Our bedroom has doors that open onto our deck, and we left them open to air out the house. Some opportunistic rat bastard got in and made himself at home in our walls. Our mouser, Sister Lightning Jenkins, and I went to war.

These are the kinds of rats we deal with in the canyon.

At one point, we cornered the nuisance in a cabinet we used to store dog food, where this rat was testing the boundaries of rodent obesity. I opened the cabinet. The rat scampered up the wall onto a shelf, but I blocked his route with the bristles of a broom.

Temporary victory.

The little plague pouch scurried up the broomstick and went all kamikaze, leaping at me. Thankfully, I’m pretty spry and limber for my middle age, so I sidestepped and Sister Lightning Jenkins read him his last rites.

Not long after this, I woke in the middle of the night because I heard our chickens clucking bloody murder. The last time that happened, a bobcat had gotten into the coop, so I was duty-bound to make sure our cackleberry producers were not being executed. I pulled the coop door open, and 13 chickens looked at me as if to say, “There’s some creepy shit going on here, Norm!”

I shined my flashlight in every corner of the coop the way the SWAT team does in the movie Se7en. Then I said “Clear!” to put their little chicken hearts at ease. My mistake was only thinking in two dimensions—length and width. Had I thought about height, I may not have been a victim to the fleshy thump I felt on the side of my neck. A rat, the size and texture of a wet Nerf football, jumped from the corner of the coop where the walls met the ceiling and used my neck as a parkour obstacle on its way to the ground.

Grace and plyometric skills are not what you expect from a rat.

Over the next few weeks, the rats became bolder. They scurried under our deck and along our fence. They snatched eggs from the coop. They even got into my head—I had nightmares of a rat holding me at gunpoint, saying, “You’re in our world now, bitch!”

Biographical note: I was traumatized by Chuck E. Cheese when I was four years old. My mom threatened to kick the ass of whichever teenager or middle-aged alcoholic was inside the costume. We may or may not have been 86’d from the restaurant. It’s a sore subject.

We tried a variety of traps and holistic solutions, none of which worked. These rats were clearly genetic descendants of Mighty Mouse or the gopher from Caddyshack.

At last, we decided to get a cat, a cutthroat feline murderer for hire, or at least a murderer for canned cat food. Our first three cats were duds, which bummed me out because I came up with names that conjured evil and ruthlessness, names that embodied the dictatorial savage we were looking for in a barn cat.

In retrospect, the names—Pussolini, Adolf Hissler, and Kitty Jong Un—were poor choices. I should’ve known. Dictators are historically ineffective. They’re also world-class assholes. All three of these cats fucked off after only a couple of days, true to asshole form, and the rats still ran rampant.

This is the energy our first barn cats brought to the fore.

So my wife got a line on two cats picked up by a shelter in Long Beach, a mother and her daughter. My wife named them Alexis and Moira after her two favorite characters from Schitt’s Creek. Alexis and Moira proved to be Hall of Fame caliber barn cats. Rats, mice, gophers—Alexis and Moira put them on notice.

We were sitting on our deck on a beautiful spring day when we came to understand that they were real ones, fully committed to their calling. They had caught a mouse, but they didn’t immediately kill it. Like those videos that came out so long ago that disabused us of the notion that it’s not normal for orcas to swim with wet-suited 20-somethings and perform jumps in giant aquariums. What is normal is they hunt adorable seals and then use their tails to fling these sea puppies violently into the air with all the force of a medieval trebuchet.

Alexis and Moira sat on either side of the mouse and swatted it again and again as it tried to escape. It was like a demented grisly version of Pong. The mouse got past Alexis at one point and started escaping up a live oak tree. Alexis let it get about a third of the way up the trunk before she ran up and swatted it off, launching it into an airborne, spectacular, unintentional gymnastics display of flips and twists, not unlike the seal prey of a killer whale.

The mouse landed with a squishy thud right in front of Moira, who looked at it as if to say, “Go ahead. Run. I want you to run. I dare you to run. Try me, motherfucker.” If the mouse had a white flag, it would’ve waved it. It reminded me of a time on the subway in New York with my wife when a drunk kept asking us if we had a gun. “Do you have a gun? Please shoot me. I don’t have a gun.” This mouse was in the same headspace as the drunk.

After another hour of this carnage, my wife said, “I think I’m starting to root for the mouse.” Alexis seemed not only to hear but to understand the statement because she picked up the mouse in her mouth by its head and looked at us, her eyes filled with seven kinds of crazy.

Alexis, when she’s on the clock.

“Root for the mouse?” I said to my wife. “Do you want to be a canyon girl or don’t you?” And then, as if to punctuate my rhetorical question, Alexis bit into the mouse’s head, and there was an audible crunch.

“Not if I have to hear the crunch!” my wife said.

Alexis dropped the dead mouse in the dirt. The subtext was clear. “Well, lady, it’s either the crunch of skulls or the scurry of rodents in the place you live, laugh, and love. Make your choice, sister.”

Of course, my wife chose Alexis. For the next few years, Alexis racked up a rodent body count to compete with Attila the Hun. We felt nothing but pride.

Unfortunately, this past week, just a few days before my wife’s birthday, when we were traveling for a volleyball tournament, we got a call from my mom that our sweet Alexis had been hit and killed by a car. It devastated us, my wife the most.

She cried and heaved for hours, feeling guilty for not being there when the poor thing passed. But you can’t predict these things.

To ease the grief and the guilt, my wife called our vet to see what cremation options they offered. Such a shitty way to kick off her birthday.

Preach.

She got off the phone, still sobbing. “For $75, they’ll cremate her, and for $300, they’ll cremate her and return the ashes along with a plaster-of-Paris cast of her paw as a keepsake.”

“Okay,” I said.

“What should we do?”

“What would make you feel better?”

“I’m not sure.”

“If you want her ashes, you should have them. Do you want the ashes?”

“Yeah…” She started heaving and crying again. “I do want them.”

“Okay… well, then…” And with all the sincerity I could muster, I said, “Happy birthday.”

The ugly-girl crying turned to laughter immediately. After she caught her breath, she said, “That’s the darkest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

She might be right. And as soon as I thought I should probably book a therapy session, I comforted myself by remembering Alexis and her crazy eyes as she made that mouse’s skull crunch, and I believe with my whole heart that she would approve.

Happiest of birthdays to my beautiful wife this week! And rest in peace, sweet Alexis “Lexi Lou” Leonard. Your watch has ended.

The face of a feline dictator.

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story about death, maybe consider some of these doozies!

Bunny Rabbits, Kindergarteners, Epiphanies & Other Depressing Things: a memoir-slash-dark-comedy.

Claw and Disorder: the restaurant industry introduces crustaceans to absolute carnage.

Memories of Hand-Drawn Eyebrows: a naughty dog’s obituary.

Conversation Pieces, Keepsakes, and Death Wishes: a meditation on death, the fun way.

And if you haven’t read my dark crime comedy Dig, it’s a fictional take on how death should never be handled. You can get it on Amazon for less than a buck.