The $64 Tomato

by William Alexander

  The cracking didn’t bother Superchuck, who preferred the Brandywines to the cherry and French tomatoes. A few days later, there he was again, in the garden. I was starting to develop a kind of respect for this fat, ugly, Brandywine-loving groundhog who was rewriting the book on pest control. I should have captured him for science, but I was in a war, and losing. In order to maximize the voltage, I went out and bought some four-foot-long galvanized steel grounding rods and pounded them deep into the earth to get a better earth contact for the ground wires. I ran more wire between the other strands. I smeared the whole thing with peanut butter. Still he continued to raid the tomatoes. Then one day, in what seemed like a rare moment of lucidity, I put the trap, baited with cut-up apples, outside the fence, hoping that he would tire of the shock and go for the easy meal in the Havahart. I set the trap up in the morning, before going to work. That evening, there was nothing but browned apples in the trap. Now, you really shouldn’t leave the trap loaded overnight, because you might catch a skunk or some other nocturnal animal, but Superchuck was an early riser—much earlier than I—so I left it loaded with the browned apples and went to bed.

  The next morning, as I made coffee, a movement outside the window caught my eye. The trap! Victory! I wanted to release him as soon as possible before Houdini could work an escape.

  “Zach, would you put the cage in the back of the wagon, please?”

  Zach grumbled, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and shuffled out the kitchen door. A moment later he reappeared, panting and white as a sheet, slamming the door behind him as if being hotly pursued. I was alarmed.

  “Zach, what’s the matter? Are you all right?”

  His eyes were as big as apples.

  “Dad, that’s no groundhog,” he panted.

  “Then what is it?”

  He mutely shook his head from side to side.

  I decided I’d better go out and have a look. Clearly I wasn’t going to get any useful information out of my squeamish son. “Really,” I muttered, “I’ve got to do a better job of introducing these kids to nature.”

  A moment later I was back in the kitchen, panting and white as a sheet.

  As I had approached the trap, before I was within six feet, a snarling, tooth-baring, drooling opossum had started leaping for my jugular. I had never been close to an opossum, but I had trapped squirrels and groundhogs, and I had never been afraid of an animal in the trap. Until that moment. An opossum is one nasty animal, with a long, tapered tail, sharp, pointy teeth, and really, really unpleasant eyes. And this one was clearly not happy with me.

  If you’ve never had the pleasure of using a Havahart, the way you release the animal is by approaching the door end of the trap. The animal generally retreats to the opposite end, and you release the latch, open the door, and poke a stick through to keep it open. Not until you walk away will the frightened animal venture out. At least, that’s the way it had always worked with groundhogs, squirrels, and birds. But it didn’t look like the possum understood the rules, and this time I was the frightened animal.

  I explained the situation to Anne.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “It hasn’t been doing us any harm. I guess we really should just release it.” I considered the unwelcome prospect of returning to the trap. “How much do you love me?” I ventured.

  “Oh, no. I’m not going anywhere near that thing. He’s your pet.”

  So I swallowed my fear, grabbed a stick, and approached the trap. The snarling, tooth-baring, drooling opossum from hell, instead of retreating to the other end, started snapping at me, the cage rattling violently and inching closer with each leap. Frankly I was terrified and returned to the kitchen.

  “What if he’s rabid?” I asked Anne. “I mean, he’s acting really weirdly. I’m getting freaked out.”

  “Foaming at the mouth?”

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

  “Not you, him. Is the possum foaming at the mouth?”

  “I think he’s drooling. Maybe I’ll just let him sit for a while and calm down.”

  “You both need to calm down,” Anne said, patting me on the back as she left the room.

  Midday, I approached again, with the same result. Neither of us was showing signs of calming down anytime soon. I returned to the kitchen, where the family had gathered for lunch.

  “Dad, what are you going to do with the possum?” Katie asked.

  There was a long, silent moment during which I felt the collective stare. I had already decided what I was going to do; I was just stuck figuring out how to explain it. For during my walk back to the kitchen, I had examined my conscience, weighed my options, and decided simply to leave him in the trap for a few more hours, leaving him to die of dehydration. This may sound heartless, but on a hot day, which this was, an animal in the trap will usually die fairly quickly, within a couple of hours. In fact I’ve accidentally lost a couple of groundhogs that way, and I always feel a little bad when it happens, but it seemed preferable to getting attacked by a possibly rabid opossum.

  “I think he’s going to”—I searched for a word that I could slip past a child without upsetting her—“expire in a few hours.”

  “Dad, that’s horrible! You can’t murder him!”

  Zach countered, “Katie, he tried to kill me! He’s evil!”

  “You can’t just let him die.”

  This wasn’t going well. I had an idea. “Katie, why don’t you go take a look at him. See how he’s doing.”

  Katie went outside, we heard a rattle from the cage, and she came back a minute later and went straight up to her room without a word, her eyes wide. I now had unanimous, if silent, consent.

  Except that at sundown, ole possum was still alive and kicking.

  The next morning, though, it was motionless, thank goodness. Until I approached the trap. Then the snarling, tooth-baring, drooling opossum from hell starting snapping at me again. I left it for another day and night. The following morning, I approached the trap again. The snarling, tooth-baring, drooling opossum from hell took another shot at me, but by this time its heart clearly wasn’t in it. Then again, neither was mine. We were now into day three. I can tolerate killing an animal, especially one presenting a danger to me, but I am not into torture, and this was starting to feel like torture. Not to mention bad karma. That phrase kept popping into my head like a mantra: Bad karma. Bad karma. I was still afraid, though, and opening the trap did not seem like a good idea. Yet I had to put this creature out of its misery. I had created this cruel situation, and now a quick, merciful death seemed the best of my bad options. I had once read the most humane way to kill a small animal in a trap is to attach a rope to the trap and fling the whole thing into a pond. In lieu of a pond, I filled the largest garbage can I had with water and dumped the trap in.

  The opossum, instead of drowning, climbed to the top of the cage, which was just sticking out of the water, and starting eagerly lapping up the water. Instead of drowning it, I was reviving it! This was no opossum, this was Rasputin. All right, enough! My courage inspired by the snarling, tooth-baring, drooling opossum from hell who refused to die, I threw the cage into the car, drove to the state lands, said a quick prayer, and opened the trap door. Ole possum, wet, exhausted, half-drowned, and half-dead, scampered out and ran—more like stumbled—into the woods, to what fate I knew not.

  And the bad karma? The very next day, the temperature set a record high. We don’t have air-conditioning in our house but instead depend on a house fan set into the attic floor. It sucks air in the windows and sends it out the attic vents. I arrived home from work and switched on the house fan. Nothing. I couldn’t believe it: hottest day of the year, and the house fan decided to break. So up into the attic I went. God, it was hot in there; it must have been at least 140. Hot, dry heat that stung my lungs when I inhaled. As I worked on the fan, once again lamenting my mechanical ineptitude, sweat dripped off my face like a steady rain. I started feeling a little ligh
t headed, the attic started feeling like a dream, and gradually it dawned on me that I was becoming dehydrated. For two days that poor possum sweltered in the heat. So this is what it’s like, I thought. And that instant I knew with absolute certainty that possum was dead, that it had stumbled into the woods to die, the victim of my torture.

  Now, if this were a Stephen King novel, the attic door would accidentally shut and lock, the family would be out, and I would expire in the attic.

  This is not a Stephen King novel. I got out of the attic, downed a few glasses of ice water, and, miraculously, a new fan belt from an automotive-parts store solved the problem. But I was spooked for days.

  In the meantime, I still had a masochistic woodchuck absorbing his daily near electrocution and eating his way through my harvest. Understandably the experience with the opossum had damped my enthusiasm for the Havahart (which I renamed the Havahartattack), so I refocused my attentions on making the garden impenetrable. I added wires, I moved wires, I changed connectors, I redid my ground rods, I tried to squeeze every last volt out of the charger. Still it wasn’t enough. Superchuck, undaunted by my efforts, and now with that pesky possum out of the way, continued to visit the garden and raid the lettuce and tomatoes.

  “I think we need more volts,” I ventured to Anne.

  She muttered something semiunintelligible, which may have been along the lines of “You need more brain cells.”

  I didn’t pursue it. More voltage wouldn’t have helped, as I was about to learn. For one day as I watched through the window, I saw a remarkable thing: after chowing down in the garden, Superchuck, ready to hit the lair under the barn for a good nap, slowly approached the fence, then paused just in front of it, crouched as if waiting for just the right moment, and timed a leap through the wires, easily passing through in the second between pulses. He had learned how to avoid the shock! Now, this was remarkable. This truly was no ordinary groundhog.

  But I was no ordinary gardener. And now it was getting personal. I was not about to be outsmarted by a ground-hog. This guy had to go. I broached the idea of buying a rifle with Anne. No dice.

  “What about a BB gun?” she suggested.

  Just the kind of response you’d expect from a woman. “What the hell am I going to do with a BB gun?”

  “Shoot the groundhog,” she said in a tone that suggested she meant, “Shoot the groundhog, dummy.”

  “You can’t kill a groundhog with a BB gun. You might scare it, but a groundhog that isn’t afraid of ten thousand volts isn’t going to be deterred by a Red Ryder.”

  “Well, no rifles in this house,” she said, ending the conversation. I would remind her of this exchange with delight in a few years, when the deer had become such a nuisance that sweet Anne would advocate annihilation by rifle, arrow, or plastique. But for now, no guns in the house.

  It seemed as if the thing to do was to evict the tenant. Convert his tunnel into a living tomb. Seal him off. I read on the Internet (so it must be true) that if you fill the main exit, plus the two or three escape routes they typically have, with a sixty-pound bag of cement, groundhogs will asphyxiate before they can dig a new exit. I had located two escape routes Superchuck had dug outside the barn; the problem was that the main opening was somewhere in the crawl space under the barn. There was not enough room for a human to squeeze through, so the only way to seal off all escapes would be to first seal off the barn with a two-foot-deep underground fence around its perimeter, then seal off the other escape exits with cement before he knew what was happening. This looked like three to five back-breaking days of work, and there were two ways it could turn out, neither one particularly attractive: First, it might not work (I could miss an escape route, or the Internet author may be full of beans). The second possibility, that it might indeed work, would leave at least one groundhog (and maybe a whole family) dead and stinking directly under the floor of my woodshop. I abandoned the idea.

  Frankly, I was out of creative ideas, so once again I hauled out the Havahartattack, determined not to leave it baited at night, and this time I placed it not in or near the garden but right outside the barn, where it would be the first thing Superchuck saw when he came out for a snack. And instead of apples, I threw in a couple of nice, ripe Brandywines.

  And miracle of miracles, the day I set the trap, another blistering August day, I came home from work to find Superchuck’s huge frame crammed into the trap. Dead. I was almost sad. He was a worthy opponent, crafty, innovative, and determined. And I, I was just … lucky. There was no thrill of victory, only a sense of relief. I dug a grave in the woods on my property. As I was throwing shovelfuls of dirt on Superchuck, I had a momentary scare—I thought he twitched, and I panicked: Oh, no, now what do I do? I’m burying an animal alive! Do I have to bludgeon him with the shovel? My life is becoming one endless Edgar Allan Poe tale! But I guess it was just rigor mortis setting in, or his body shifting in the grave. He never moved again.

  Predictably, a new groundhog showed up under the barn within a couple of weeks. I’ve been letting him be.

  THE ONLY ANIMAL I have seen that is more persistent than a groundhog is a squirrel. One summer day, we had some guests over for lunch. As we were sitting on our porch overlooking the orchard and admiring the serenity of a perfect summer afternoon, we saw a squirrel hop into the orchard, scamper up a tree, bite off a golfball-size apple, and scamper away. Cute. Our suburban guests were very amused by this quaint display of country life. Five minutes later they were amused again. And five minutes later, again. And so on, like clockwork. They were hysterical. I was beside myself. I did a little math in my head: 12 apples an hour times, say, five hours a day equals 60 apples a day, equals 420 apples a week. If this kept up at even half the pace we were witnessing, the orchard would be cleaned out in a week.

  I’d had my trees for several years at this point and had never seen squirrels stealing the crop before. But the past spring and summer had been devastatingly dry. Farmers without irrigation had no crops. Towns had instituted water restrictions. I surmised that the squirrel was using the apples as a source of water.

  But what to do? He might have been ready to pick the apples, but I sure wasn’t; they were still a good few weeks from maturity. I needed to get to the Agway, and fast. We were on dessert. Surely our visitors would be leaving soon.

  Anne offered seconds of peach pie.

  “No thanks!” I practically yelled before anyone else could answer. “Too rich!”

  Anne glared at me.

  “I could sit here all afternoon,” said one guest, sighing, as Anne brought more pie. I almost choked. “And this pie is fantastic. But we’ll have to get going soon.” That was more like it. They had stopped by on their way upstate and still had a two-hour trip ahead of them.

  “How much of a drive do you figure we have from here?”

  Anne started to answer, “No more than two—”

  “Four hours,” I interrupted.

  Our guests exchanged a look.

  “At least,” I added as I watched the squirrel out of the corner of my eye. “Traffic, you know.” From behind the visitors, Anne grimaced and made a slashing motion across her throat, which I took to mean either “Cut it out,” or “I’m going to kill you when this is over.”

  Our guests were still waving from their car as I hopped in mine and sped down to the Agway. I told my tale to the pest expert there.

  “You don’t say!” he declared. “I’ve never heard of that. Hey, Rich!” He called over another salesman. “You got to hear this.” I had to repeat the story to Rich, which cost me at least two more apples. He asked where I lived. I started to describe the place.

  “Not the Big Brown House!” he exclaimed. “You still have sheep?”

  “Sheep?”

  “Yeah, Kreske kept sheep so he could classify it as a farm. Cut his property taxes in half. And he didn’t have to cut the grass.”

  Or fertilize, I imagine. This was a story I’d have to come back for, but minutes were pa
ssing and apples disappearing. I got Rich back to the problem at hand, and we mulled over the options. There was pepper spray. (“But I’ve got to eat the apples, too,” I reminded them. They assured me it came off with soap and water.) We considered bird netting, but a net large enough to drape over an entire tree with enough left to secure at the base cost fifty dollars, and I had four trees to cover. Two hundred dollars would buy a lot of apples at the farm stand. I couldn’t bring myself to spend two hundred dollars to try (and possibly fail) to protect trees with no more than fifty dollars’ worth of apples on them, so I left with the pepper spray for ten bucks. This stuff was supposed to be hot: “Keep from face and eyes,” the bottle cautioned. I drenched the apples in pepper spray.

  Apparently the squirrel had watched me from afar, for the moment I left the orchard, he bounded in, grabbed a Mexicali apple in his mouth, and bounded off to eat it, or bury it, or whatever the hell he was doing with them. And five minutes later, he was back. And so on. Maybe he was making salsa.

  THE EXPERIENCE BROUGHT BACK bad memories of my first battle with squirrels, years ago in our first house in Yonkers. We had purchased the house through an estate sale. The owner had passed away over a year earlier (we seem to have a habit of buying abandoned homes), and we were the first suckers to offer anything near the asking price over the course of a year. Our offer was accepted so quickly that we wanted to rescind it. (“Oh, did I say a hundred and ninety thousand? I meant a hundred and nineteen thousand. I always get those two mixed up.”) But as I’ve mentioned, it was a fine house, and we loved it, cracked plaster and all.

  So did a pair of squirrels we came to call Chip and Dale. On our very first morning—very early morning—we learned two things without leaving our bed: (1) the New York State Thruway was a lot closer than we realized: we could hear the trucks shifting gears in the predawn; and (2) we were not alone. The pitter-patter of little feet directly overhead was our first clue that Chip and Dale were well established in the attic and, for all I knew (assuming that unlike their Disney namesakes, Dale was a female), planning on starting a family. Time to evict.