It's About Squirrels...

by Lynn Abbey

  It's About Squirrels...

  Lynn Abbey

  Lynn Abbey

  It's About Squirrels...

  "SQUIRRELS?" Nic repeated.

  "Yes, ma'am," the utility company spokeswoman replied, unaware of, or completely ignoring, Nic's sarcasm.

  Nic abandoned subtlety. "I lost power at nine a.m. this morning, at nine a.m. yesterday, at the same time the day before yesterday, and the day before that, too. After four days, my computer's dead as a doornail. I'm wondering if it's safe to replace my hardware, and you're telling me that my problem is squirrels?"

  "Yes, ma'am. From what you've said, your problem is squirrels."

  "Florida squirrels read clocks?"

  "No, ma'am," the utility representative replied, steadfastly polite.

  Like so many others, Nic was a transplant to the Sunshine State, and a recent one at that. Six months ago, Thursday mornings would have found her in an urban office, sipping coffee while she dreamed up new ways to seduce consumers onto the Internet. Now she was just another dot-bomb survivor with a stagnant resume and an endangered checking account. She'd sold most of her furniture, put the rest into storage, and retreated to a one-bedroom trailer at the end of an unpaved road somewhere between the middle of nowhere and the warmer levels of Dante's Hell. Worse than that, her parents—comfortably ensconced in a nearby retirement community—were footing her rent. But worst of all, Nic's computer—her lifeline to civilization—had fallen victim to squirrels.

  "All right, I don't understand. What makes you so certain I've got a squirrel problem?"

  "You've lost power four days in a row, each time at the same time, ma'am.

  That sounds like squirrels. Squirrels aren't loners. They do the same things—together—day after day. They take turns chasing and following, but if the squirrel that's leading makes a mistake and falls in a pole transformer—"

  "It gets fried and I lose power?" Nic cut to the chase.

  "Yes, ma'am, except you didn't really lose power; your voltage fell. I'd be surprised if the drop even affected your microwave clock—"

  The spokeswoman was right: Nic's microwave clock, the canary among household appliances, hadn't faltered.

  "When it happens, there's a little hiccup as the transformer drops off the grid just long enough to reset itself," she continued. "The whole process takes a lot less than a second. You wouldn't have noticed at all, if you weren't close to the transformer."

  "And then the follower-squirrels come back the next day to make the same mistake?"

  "Yes, ma'am—that's exactly what happens. They keep doing what the dead squirrel did until another squirrel takes over ... or until the whole group's dead. It's like their needle's stuck. Our engineers even have a name for them: pallbearer squirrels. It's a real problem here in Florida."

  Only in Florida, Nic thought before asking: "How serious a problem? My computer's already lost its hard drive to these hiccups. How long will squirrelsbe committing serial suicide in my vicinity?"

  "Usually it stops after three or four days, ma'am, but they had one up near Tallahassee that went on for nineteen days. If you've got one of those fancy batteries, you shouldn't have any problems. Those stick surge protectors they sell in Wal*mart won't help you against squirrels and ospreys—"

  Without knowing the cause of her problem, Nic had anticipated its solution.

  Along with a replacement hard drive, UPS had just delivered fifteen pounds of continuously recharged, uninterruptible battery power. She could safely resurrect her computer—assuming there wasn't something Floridian that went after batteries the way squirrels went after hard drives. Determined not to be caught blind again, Nic asked—

  "Ospreys?"

  "Birds, ma'am. Some call them fish-eagles. They're endangered because people've cut down all the snag trees around the lakes. Sushine Power built nesting platforms on top of our poles near the lakes. The ospreys think our poles are as good as pine trees. Around this time of year, they bring fish back to the nests for their babies. They carry the fish in their claws and have to drop them in the nest before they can land. But sometimes they miss and the fish fall into the pole transformers. They don't usually miss twice, though, so when a transformer hiccups two days running, and at the same time, we think squirrels."

  Nic wondered why Sunshine Power didn't put lids on their transformers but didn't ask the question, and the conversation died a natural death. She had her day's work cut out for her. Even with the best backups—which Nic didn't have—resurrecting a computer took hours. It was well past midnight before she left the kitchen table that had replaced her ergonomic desk. Since her hard drive's manufacturer replaced its warrantied products, no questions asked, in exchange for the defunct hardware, Nic's last acts of a long day were wrapping the hard drive in antistatic plastic and boxing it for the post office.

  Her eyes were closed before her head hit the pillow. For a few moments, she cursed the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that had her sleeping in a secondhand bed, but the wounds were too familiar to keep her awake.

  Florida wasn't called the Sunshine State by accident. The dawning sky brightened quickly and even if it hadn't, there was a Chevrolet dealership at the other end of the dirt road which opened, noisily, at seven. Nic made coffee and stuck close to her resurrected computer, waiting for the witching—squirreling—

  hour. At 9:08 the battery's LEDs flickered from green to red and back again while somewhere in its heavy depths a switch clicked twice.

  Another squirrel was transformer bouillabaisse, but Nic's computer had survived. She collected the sealed box, headed for her car and the post office.

  Her neighbor—one RJ Walker, according to the letters shakily painted across his mailbox—had done a worse-than-usual job of parking his pickup truck last night. Nic couldn't get her Honda around its bright-red rear end without running through mud. Though the Honda could probably handle the risk, Nic couldn't. She considered tucking a nasty note under RJ's wipers, but his truck was plastered with Deep-South decals in praise of guns, NASCAR, and the University of Florida Gators; prudent Yankee that she was, Nic knewbetter than to roil those waters.

  Other than the Chevy dealership, there weren't many buildings within walking distance of Nic's trailer, but one of them, barely, was a post office.

  There were no sidewalks, of course, and traffic was surprisingly thick for a road in the middle of nowhere. Nic treated it with respect, paying more attention to what was hurtling along the asphalt than what else might be walking beside it.

  She didn't realize she wasn't alone until a man warned:

  "Don't do it!"

  The dead center of Florida wasn't the state's most prosperous region. As near as Nic could tell, it rated near the wrong end of just about every county standard, but full-blown derelicts weren't common, even along a road once known as the Hobo's Highway.

  The man wasn't criminally scary. He didn't look strong or steady enough to wield a weapon. Nic didn't doubt she could outrun him—and she wasn't a runner. His clothes were long, loose, layered, and literally ragged. Whatever their original colors, they'd faded in the sun and seemed covered by grayish dust. His hair matched his clothes: faded, dusted with gray, limp, and shoulder-length. Nic lowered her eyes as the distance between them shrank.

  "Don't send it away. Don't! Take it home. Get him out of the box!"

  Nic stretched her eyes and wished she hadn't. The man's stare was dark, wild, and riveted to the box she carried. She clutched it tight and held her breath as they passed.

  "Keep it! Keep it. He belongs here!"

  He—the derelict had definitely muttered the word he.

  She dared a backward glance: grass, sand, the usual roadside debris, and the Chevrolet d
ealership in the background, but no derelict, not even a shadow of one. No screeching brakes or battered bodies in the road, either, or footprints in the sand. The faded man had simply vanished.

  Heaven knew the Florida sun got brutal enough to fry human brains, but not in the season the natives called winter, so Nic called the derelict a waking dream, a brain-cramp—the sort of mistake anyone could make and no reason not to finish her trek to the post office. But she returned to the trailer instead.

  RJ Walker had removed his pickup; Nic could have driven her Honda. There was a squirrel sitting on the hood, twitching its tail, the way squirrels did.

  Another squirrel perched above the trailer's door while a third raced along an overhead wire, headed for a transformer pole. Her heart skipped when the squirrel leaped safely for thicker wires where it paused, twitching and scolding.

  Nic climbed the aluminum steps to her front door. The drive's manufacturer gave her a whole month to return the hard drive before it debited her hemorrhaging credit card. She poured cold coffee into a rinsed cup and sent an e-mail to a close, yet distant, friend who lived not far from her stored furniture—

  Hi, Sara. Sorry I've been out of touch. This places gets weirder all the time.

  Monday I lost a hard drive to suicidal squirrels— pallbearer squirrels, according to Sunshine Power, and they should know, I guess. Today I thought a saw a hobo's ghost out on the highway. I'm still sending out resumes by the score and hearing nothing back. Unless it's my folks, I'm lucky if I say two words to another human being in a day—I wound up complaining to Sunshine Power just to havesomeone to talk to. It's them or the squirrels. I keep telling myself this is only temporary, that I'll be out of here in a month, so there's no need to get my stuff out of storage up north—as if I could afford to bring it down here.

  Miss you. Miss winter. Miss everything I ever complained about.

  All for now ... Nic.

  Nic was catching a nap in the bedroom between rounds of boredom and e-mailing resumes when someone banged loudly on the door. There was no good reason for anyone to come knocking on her door, but a bunch of bad ones. The first bad reason to form fully in Nic's imagination was her parents, who were in good health but retired now and getting old.

  Never mind that bad news usually traveled by phone; once the idea had occurred to Nic, it filled her entire imagination. She had hospitals on the brain before opening the door.

  Nic heard the twangy drawl of the natives: "Afternoon, ma'am. Bobby Walker, ma'am—"

  He was too old to be a Bobby. No one over the age of eighteen should be a Bobby, unless he was a professional athlete and Bobby Walker, though not grossly out of shape, was long past eighteen. His face was more weathered than tan beneath unruly hair that had started to recede. He squinted as though he needed glasses—which might account for his parking habits.

  But Bobby Walker—RJ Walker, in all probability—had all his teeth, at least all the ones that showed when he talked. Nic hadn't gotten used to seeing people her own age with missing teeth. Snaggle-tooth grins were a constant reminder of how fundamentally different life was in dead-center Florida.

  Bobby Walker stuck out his hand. She clasped it barely long enough to say—

  "Nicole Larsens."

  "I don't mean to bother you, ma'am, but you've got to quit feeding the squirrels."

  "I'm not feeding them," Nic replied, feeling very un-ma'am-like in her jeans and nap-wrinkled T-shirt.

  "Maybe you don't think you're feeding them, ma'am, but they wouldn't be here like this, if they weren't finding food."

  Nic blinked and realized that between Bobby and his red pickup, there'd been a squirrel explosion. The animals were agitated. She couldn't count more than a few without losing track. There were at least a dozen and more when she looked right or left.

  "I'm not feeding them. I'm not doing anything to attract them."

  "Well, ma'am, then maybe they've got a colony under your trailer. In winter they like to find someplace warm—"

  A colony of squirrels under the sagging bedroom floor? The image conjured up countless bad movies, and Nic's thoughts must have shown on her face because Bobby Walker quickly said—

  "I could check underneath, ma'am. Set a few traps—?"

  Spring-loaded rings of rusty, serrated metal added themselves to Nic's imagination without improving her sense of security.

  "Live traps, ma'am," Bobby Walker added, accurately guessing the reasonfor Nic's silence. "I'll empty 'em down the road. I'll look for holes, too. You don't want to go under there, ma'am."

  Southern hospitality. Southern charm. And every bit as effective as Northern sarcasm. Whatever Nic saw when she looked at Bobby Walker, what he saw was another damn Yankee without the sense God gave ants. On the other hand, he was absolutely right: Nic didn't want to crawl around under the trailer. She could waste time begging the park owner or accept Bobby Walker's offer.

  The choice was clear, but before Bobby Walker went off to get his traps, Nic asked, "Have you heard of pallbearer squirrels?"

  He gave her a doubting glance. "No, ma'am, can't say that I have."

  So she told him, in quick sentences, about the power problems, her call to the utility company, and the explanation she'd received.

  "Huh," Bobby Walker concluded. "They do get into habits, but so do people.

  Never heard anything about them following leaders—" He caught himself, changed his mind. "My momma used to say that when squirrels got crazy, it was because they were chasing brownies. My momma said things like that; she was Scottish."

  Nic took note of the past tense and said nothing about Mrs. Walker's opinions of ancestry.

  For the next hour, Mrs. Walker's son thumped and cursed beneath her rented trailer on his way to deciding that the crawlspace wasn't squirrel-infested.

  "There's a hole or two they might fit through, but there's no scat, no nothing to say they've set up housekeeping. Looks like they've just got a fascination for your front door—"

  They both took a moment to study the squirrels. Nic couldn't say that there were more now than when Bobby first knocked on her door, but certainly there were no less.

  "If you're not feeding them, I can't imagine why they're doing that, but once a few of them get trapped, the rest will get the idea that there's nothing here for them." Bobby had set his traps beneath the steps and beneath a holly bush midway between the steps and Nic's car. "You might hear something as they're sprung," he warned Nic.

  Nic forced a smile and thanked Bobby Walker for his help. He lingered at the foot of the aluminum stairs as if he expected an invitation. She gave him a question instead.

  "What happens next, if the traps work?"

  "Oh, they'll work, ma'am," Bobby Walker replied, lapsing into Southern formality. "I've got 'em baited with more peanuts and corn than any squirrel can resist. Might not trap them all, but there'll be a mess of squirrels in those traps when I check them tomorrow morning."

  "So, you'll be checking them? I don't have to?"

  "No, ma'am. I'll take care of everything on my way to work."

  "Good," Nic said. "I really appreciate that."

  She closed the door and closed the curtains, too. Twice during the long evening, Nic thought she heard the sounds of squirrels succumbing to corn and peanuts. She stifled her curiosity and stayed away from the curtains. The localnews had finished and there was no reason not to go to bed.

  Darkness did wonders for Nic's imagination. Never mind that she was reasonably certain that squirrels weren't active at night, she could hear their little claws scratching the roof. Nic tensed, expecting to hear the traps clanging, and stayed that way. A green-glowing midnight became one a.m., then one-thirty.

  Finally, noise happened: not the expected clang, but a duller thud; and not outside the trailer, but inside.

  Nic kept a broom handle between the mattress and the box spring—a souvenir from an urban survival class. With it grasped in her fist, she slid silently out of bed. Aside from glow
ing clocks, the trailer was dark—or it should have been. There was a steady, soft light at the end of the corridor connecting the bedroom. By that light Nic saw that both the curtains and the front door were still closed, exactly as she remembered leaving them.

  Fear and curiosity battled for Nic's mind. Curiosity won— because, with the door and curtains undisturbed, she expected an annoying explanation for the light. Striding to the living room, Nic's only concession to caution came when she sidestepped along the kitchen counter rather than walk straight into the light.

  Nic was fortunate that the counter was behind her when she beheld a gray-clad, self-luminous woman kneeling in front of the door: it kept her upright when she reeled and knocked unwashed silverware to the floor. The clatter—the loudest noise Nic had ever heard—surprised the kneeling woman who flung herself at the closed door.

  The whole trailer should have rocked on its wheeled foundations, Nic thought with the slow clarity of panic; it hadn't. There should have been noise as the gray-clad woman pounded her fists against the door; there wasn't. The woman should have known that beating the door wouldn't help, that she needed to release the bolt and turn the doorknob.

  Any full-grown woman knew that.

  Then again, any full-grown woman didn't glow with her own silvery light, and most people had rounder, fleshier faces than that turned toward Nic.

  "Wha—?" Nic croaked. She inhaled and tried again. "Who are you? What are you doing in my living room?"

  The woman heard Nic's questions; that much showed in her reactions, but she didn't answer, just pushed herself away from the door and toward the curtains which didn't move when she touched them.

  Nic wondered if she might be dreaming and willed herself to wake up.

  Nothing changed, then the retreating woman's gown-like clothes withdrew across a box—the box Nic hadn't gotten to the post office. It was upside down and on the floor; Nic guessed what had awakened her.

  The other woman raised her hands to her face when she saw the box. Nic imagined a horrified gasp, but heard nothing.