Driving Minnie's Piano

by Lesley Choyce

  Terry noticed it before I did. I was recovering from a cold and my nose was stuffed up. I couldn't smell very well and therein was some luck. For me at least. I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. I was supposed to leave for the airport in one hour for a flight to Toronto and I wanted to be well-rested for a long day ahead.

  But my attempt to drift towards dreamland was interrupted by an elbow in my ribs. “You can't go back to sleep,” Terry said. “The smell is horrible.”

  “But there's nothing I can do. Whatever happened, happened under the house. I'm not going down there.”

  “Oh great. And you're going to fly off to Toronto and leave me with the problem.”

  “I'll take care of it when I get back,” I said. Which was four days away.

  My wife pinched her nose and stared at the ceiling.

  Sunyata had stayed at a friend's house that night and was spared the morning skunk attack. But not Pamela.

  By 6:30, the smell had reached her room. I was reawakened by her shouting, “Oh yuck! What is that smell?” She opened the door to our bedroom and I tried to calmly explain that there was a skunk under the house.

  “This is disgusting!” she said.

  “The smell will go away after a while,” I said confidently, trying to prevent family panic. “Get ready for school.”

  “I'm getting out of this house now,” she replied and raced off to her room to get dressed.

  I gave up on sleep, got up and had a bowl of granola and a cup of tea with my unhappy wife.

  “I'll look under the house before I go. Maybe I can do something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don't know. I'll tell the skunk to go somewhere else.”

  “Great.”

  Just then, Pamela ran past us out the door. She was holding her nose. “I can't stand it,” she screamed and ran off down the driveway, looking for fresh air and heading for the bus to school.

  “The entire house smells like skunk,” my wife said. She was taking this very personally.

  “It's not that bad,” I said. Despite the cold, the skunk odour had become overpowering. “Call someone later. Maybe there's some kind of machine that gets rid of the smell.”

  I did poke around outside in the dim early morning light just to make it seem like I was doing something about the problem. But there was nothing to be seen by peering into the crawl space. Near the north end of my house - from under the living room and bedroom - the aroma of skunk was powerful enough to render a person unconscious. The skunk and cat war had happened under there, and I wasn't about to get down on my hands and knees and poke my head between the lose stones in the old foundation only to come face to face with the creature with the smelliest weapon on earth. I backed away slowly.

  On the away to the airport I felt guilty that I had left my wife with a problem: a skunk under the house that might decide to cut loose again and a house that smelled like skunk in every room. Nonetheless, I breathed a little easier. I would deal with the problem when I came back home. I would do the honourable thing: catch the darn skunk in a live trap and have someone with a truck help me take him somewhere far away. I was pretty sure I didn't want the skunk actually in my car even for a short drive.

  At the airport, I checked in and waited for my plane, sitting alone by the windows, looking out on the bleak winter runway, thinking unkind thoughts about wild creatures who took up residence under my old farmhouse. It seemed unfair. Me, the guy who was always kind to animals. Why would nature try to do such a nasty thing to me and my family?

  My flight was called. I stood in line, entered the plane and proceeded down the aisle towards my seat, 21F. The plane was already three-quarters filled. I was one of the last passengers on. As I walked down the narrow aisle, my early-morning, fuzzy brain registered the fact that people were looking up at me, heads were turning my way as I shuffled forward. Some passengers were scrunching up their faces.

  I stuffed my coat into the upper compartment and sat down. There was a kind of low churn of muffled voices in the quiet plane. And then I heard someone say outright to someone else, “Do you smell something that smells like . . . skunk?”

  It seemed impossible. But within seconds everyone on the plane was sniffing the air and uttering sounds of dissatisfaction. The door to the plane was closed just then and that must have made things worse, because the passengers sniffed some more and then began to talk about it. The entire inside of the plane smelled like skunk and everyone knew it.

  A man across the aisle leaned over towards me and said, “What do you think this smell is all about?”

  “I don't know,” I lied. I hadn't noticed that I had carried the skunk smell with me - on my clothes, on me - out of my house, all the way to the airport and now, here in the closed cylinder of the plane, the smell was ominously pervasive.

  I realized I had two choices. I could stand up and announce that the skunk smell was me. Or keep my mouth shut and not say a thing.

  Now in most situations, I am an honest, forthright person. If I've done something wrong, I own up to it. If it's my fault, I am the first to confess. This trait has caused me more harm than good in life but it is part of my personality and I'm proud of it. I envisioned myself standing up and, in a jovial manner, telling everyone on the plane the skunk smell was me. I would tell them about the morning crisis of the skunk under the house. They would laugh and feel sorry for me, and everyone would feel okay about flying to Toronto with skunky air.

  But it was still early in the morning. I don't confess well early in the morning. I felt my face going red. This was very embarrassing. I put on my glasses, opened up a book to read. It was Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and I pretended I had done nothing wrong.

  Glasses and books are good to hide behind if you smell like a skunk on an airplane. I pretended I was invisible too. People were still sniffing and talking as the airline attendant handed out the newspapers. Another attendant was going up and down the aisle trying to pinpoint the smell, opening and closing luggage compartments, looking under the seats. Maybe she actually expected to discover one of the furry long-tailed black and white striped creatures. In my book, I travelled farther with Jules Verne towards the centre of the earth as she neared me. Miraculously, I was not discovered. My skunk smell had so thoroughly distributed itself around the cabin that the vortex of the evil stench seemingly could not be detected.

  Failing to find the source, the attendant knocked on the pilot cabin's door and the co-pilot came striding down the aisle to see if his more highly trained co-pilot nose could detect the source of the stinkiness. In a very professional manner, he sniffed east and west on the plane, north and south, looking for a clue.

  Just then, the pilot came on the intercom to announce that the flight would be a little delayed. “As you all probably know, there's a very unusual smell on the plane and we don't want to take off until we've discovered what it is.”

  Oh boy, I thought. This is not looking good. The co-pilot was getting closer and closer to me. I was sure he had a good, precise nose and could tell that I was the culprit. Now they would put me off the plane, for sure. I would get into deep trouble. I could see the headlines in tomorrow's paper: “Man Smelling Like Skunk Tries to Fly to Toronto.”

  I pretended I was not there at all but crawling through the caves toward the centre of the earth with Jules Verne.

  That's when a woman three seats in front of me handed over the newspapers to the co-pilot. “Smell it,” she said.

  The co-pilot, with the professional nose, smelled. I began to think that maybe he had even been trained for this as part of his schooling. What to do if your plane smells like skunk. In a hushed voice, the woman was explaining something about the newspapers that had been handed out by the airline attendant.

  The co-pilot was nodding his head up and down. Other people were nodding their heads in agreement. They all thought the newspapers smelled like skunk. Why, I don't know. But the belief swept through the plane quickly
and pretty soon everyone was handing their papers back to the attendants. The co-pilot, a smirk of satisfaction on his face, was returning to the cockpit.

  I listened to the buzz of the other passengers, talking about how funny it all was. The guy across the aisle leaned over and said, “The newspapers had been sitting outside. They think a skunk came and did whatever it is skunks do - on the papers.”

  Even though we were out on the runway, the door opened and a gust of frigid air swept into the plane. An airport worker ran out to the plane. The airline attendant leaned over and handed him the stack of supposedly stinky morning news-papers.

  I'm sure the plane still smelled of skunk. After all, I was still on board. But everyone was satisfied that the mystery was over. We taxied and flew off to Toronto. I'm certain that along the way, more than one person with a keen nose figured out that I was the source of the skunk smell. But no one said a word, even the guy across the aisle from me who wanted to talk. He told me he was a lawyer and I bet lawyers have a way of figuring things like this out.

  When the plane's door opened again in Toronto and we walked into the terminal, I watched the faces of the airport workers we passed. Some frowned, some squinched up their noses. I think that we all smelled a little bit like skunk by then and everywhere my fellow passengers went that day, the smell would be noticed. It's amazing how an early morning smell of skunk in Nova Scotia would turn up at lunches and business meetings and sporting events in Toronto, twelve hundred miles away that same day.

  Back home in Nova Scotia, my family was having a worse time than me. I felt a certain pride in my success at flying all the way to Toronto without anyone pointing me out as the man who smelled like skunk. Fortunately, there is a piano in the airport in Toronto and I sat down and played Pachelbel's Canon and a couple of other songs to celebrate my achievement.

  At that very moment, however, my daughter Pamela was crying in the principal's office at Ross Road School. Kids on school busses are never fooled about where skunk smells come from. Pamela got on the bus and immediately everyone knew. They made fun of her all the way to school and into school and she toughed it out until ten o'clock when she couldn't take it any more.

  She called home and her mother came to rescue her from the cruel insults of her classmates. For weeks and months afterwards, unmerciful kids would remind everyone about the time Pamela came to school smelling like, well, you know what.

  While Terry was picking up Pamela, Sunyata arrived home on this cold winter day to see all the doors and windows to the house were open and clothing strewn all over the entire lawn. She let out a scream and ran towards the house, assuming that some insane burglar had invaded her home, stealing things and leaving piles of unwanted clothes on the lawn. But as soon as she got inside, she realized it was worse than that. The house wreaked badly and Terry had distributed clothes outside to rid them of the smell.

  An expensive machine was rented to supposedly kill the skunk aroma but it barely made a dent. The skunk, after all, was living under the house and even if he wasn't in full defense mode, he continued to let his presence be known. At night you could hear him scratching around in the dirt below. And his perfume pervaded everything and everywhere. It would hang around for a long time. Nearly two months later, I could open my old leather briefcase in the university classroom where I taught, and out would pour the olfactory signature of skunk.

  I returned from Toronto a few days later to confront a family in rebellion. Because I had escaped skunk city for a few brief days, I felt the full wrath of two daughters and a wife who had been coping with the physical and psychological impact of a house under skunk siege. My wife walked around with tissue paper stuffed up her nose. Sunyata used a swimmer's nose plug. Pamela, whose bedroom was farthest from the skunk problem, kept the door to her room shut tightly and, when necessary, ran through the rest of the house holding her breath until she could get outside.

  It seems that everyone had advice about how to get rid of skunks. Many advised killing them with poison, but I couldn't bring myself to do that. The skunks really meant us no harm. My favourite advice by someone who claimed success in skunk eviction was this. You wire up a bright light and a radio to play somewhere near where the skunk den is. It will scare them away.

  I liked this non-violent method immensely. It meant that I had to go into the deeper part of the basement, however, and get as close to the crawl space as possible. I put on heavy protective clothes and safety glasses, climbed down the basement hatchway, ducked under and around the giant spiders that help protect my old house from unwanted insects. Then I found my way to the northeast corner. I shone a flashlight into the crawl space and could actually see branches, leaves and scraps of cloth all bunched up into something like a nest.

  I didn't poke it or prod it or make too much in the way of loud noises. Instead, I ran an extension cord, plugged in the light and the radio, set the dial to the heavy rock station. The sounds of Metallica echoed around the cold frosty cellar. That would do it. The skunks would be annoyed by light, afraid of the heavy metal music and go somewhere else.

  Two days passed and there was still the sound of scratching beneath the floor. The darned music was keeping us awake at night as well. It wasn't working at all. Instead of driving the skunks away, maybe they were thinking we liked them so much we decided to give them some creature comforts like a glowing light bulb and non-stop, around-the-clock entertainment in the form of loud guitars and smashing drums. The next day I pulled the plug on the frills for the skunk family.

  The expensive odour-killing machinery was returned and the familiar smell continued on. I bought a handmade live skunk trap from a farm supply store but it didn't work. I baited it with mackerel and the skunk got away with the fish every time. So I bought a bigger trap. It turned out my skunk was a really big skunk that required a large wire cage called a Havaheart trap. On my third night back home, I set the big trap on the lawn, placed a fresh piece of haddock inside and slept fitfully. I had not really planned what to do if I caught a live skunk inside the cage.

  It snowed that night and in the morning I awoke to a world of white. Everything was white, that is, except for the black parts of the skunk that were in my cage. He looked harmless enough, cute even. I had finally caught my skunk. Pretty soon our troubles would be over.

  I wouldn't even approach the skunk until I found someone with a truck willing to help carry it away. I was turned down three times. One person said he'd be happy to help do just about anything but deal with a skunk. He'd heard stories of people dealing with skunks who never, ever got rid of the smell. Eventually, I called a young surfer friend named Glenn, who had a truck. He thought dealing with a skunk would be funny and interesting.

  When Glenn arrived he saw me standing in my driveway in heavy rubber boots, zip-up white overalls, orange toque, heavy work gloves and safety glasses. I looked like someone about to deal with a melt-down at a nuclear reactor.

  The first thing I did was throw an old blanket over the skunk cage. The skunk did not like this at all and took revenge by polluting the front yard with a toxic cloud. Glenn and I both ran for the bushes in retreat until the worst of the attack was over. Then there was nothing else to do but pick up the cage, skunk and all, hidden beneath the old blanket, and we set it in the back of the pickup.

  We drove the skunk fifteen kilometres away because I had done some research and learned that skunks will return great distances to favoured “dens.” It was a remote location by a lake, just off a big highway. Nearby, a local artist had painted a giant green frog on a rock outcropping. There were no houses for at least two kilometres in any direction. It was a great, natural, safe place for a skunk to live out the rest of his days.

  Far back from the road, Glenn and I looked at each other, wondering how to open the cage to free the skunk. It would be a dangerous deed. But it was my problem, my skunk. I pulled down on the toque, positioned the safety glasses in place, pulled on some rubber gloves and proceeded with great cautio
n.

  I gently raised the metal door and asked the skunk to leave. He refused. I begged and pleaded but he would have none of it. He wanted to go home, back to my house.

  In desperation, I asked Glenn to tilt the back of the cage while I kept the door open. He tilted and still no skunk. The blanket still surrounded the trap. Maybe the skunk had somehow gotten out while we were driving. Like a fool, I put my head down to the open end of the cage and peered inside.

  For a split second I was nose to nose with the skunk. Then he started to turn around - which meant disaster. I screamed something loud and horrible and Glenn dropped the cage. We both ran for the highway. But nothing happened. Five minutes later we returned to the cage and tried again. Door open, a gentle shake of the cage and, this time, he fled for the safety of the woods, black and white tail bobbing in the air like a flag.

  We both smelled awful at that point but congratulated ourselves on the success. I thought the story was over.

  My family slept blissfully that night, assured that the skunk problem was behind us. The night after that was also calm and quiet. But on the third night, I heard scratching beneath the floorboards and thought that the air smelled slightly stronger than the usual skunk odour that still hugged the walls of our home.

  Had the visitor returned? Had he travelled across those many kilometres of frozen winter terrain? It seemed unlikely, but such is the intensity of a wild creature trying to find its way back “home.”

  The next day I reset the trap and the following morning, sure enough, a skunk - or the skunk - was in the trap. I phoned Glenn, who thought it was a joke but he came right over. We performed the ritual again. I convinced myself the skunk was smaller than the other one. And this one didn't let fly with the deadly scent. We drove him to the same spot and let him go. The theory was this.