The Tail of Mr. Bojangles

I was dragging my carry-on through the front door of the 3rd floor apartment I shared with my roommate, Steve. I fumbled with the keys, breathing heavily from the trek up the three flights of stairs that always seems to serve as a reminder that I needed to quite smoking. It was 9pm, and I had just completed my bi-weekly commute home from Washington Dulles Airport, where I am based as a flight attendant. I open the door and I am greeted by the sight of Steve, in his pajamas, holding a Rubbermaid wastebasket and signaling for me to be quiet. He looks down the hallway that connects the rooms of our tiny apartment, and I notice the intricate labyrinth of boxes that have been set up. He looks over to me and mouths the words I have been expecting to hear for the last three months since settling into our South Philly bachelor(ette) pad: “We have a mouse”.

I immediately abandon my luggage. I’m excited. I’m intrigued. I grew up in central Pennsylvania, that part of the state affectionately referred to as “Pennsyltucky”, and I am intimately acquainted with the struggle of rodents and people attempting to cohabitate. Growing up on a sprawling, rural area littered with small family farms, my mother would insist on keeping a barrage of family pets around, and the cats would serve as the chief rodent exterminators. Once or twice (ok, maybe a lot more often than that), there would be a mouse too cunning and too brazen for even the most agile of our feline family members, and I would get in on the action. I remember being seven, eight, nine years old, and stalking our unwelcome visitors, armed with a cereal bowl or cardboard box. Truth be told, I always preferred catching them myself, my family watching in horror and amazement as I grabbed them by their little tails, shrieking all the way out the front door and into the grassy fields outside. I found them playful and adorable, and my childhood self could never quite bear to watch them suffer at the paws of the family cat.
At once, we see a flash of grey fur scurry from the hall into the closet-sized living room. Steve jumps back and I start to laugh and plunge forward, excitedly. I can tell Steve is not pleased by the situation at hand, and so I try to mask my delight at the stand-off that is about to occur. I drop to the floor, still in my uniform and heels. I immediately begin to call out for him. “Mr. Bojangles, I’m sorry, but you’re not wanted here. Can you please come out? I’m not trying to hurt you, dude”. Silence. We move the reclining chair, and in an instant Mr. Bojangles runs for the nearest fortress, a box of board games under the coffee table against the wall. With all of the boldness of my previous childhood mouse-capades, I immediately grab the boxes, hoping the sudden interruption will jar Mr. Bojangles out of hiding into the waiting trashcan. I begin to have visions of victoriously pinching him by the tail and setting him free on the fire escape, telling him to run as fast as he can, and explore the delicious array of dumpsters and curbside trash that south Philly has to offer. We wait another five minutes, and Mr. Bojangles is no where to be seen or heard. A small hole in the bottom of the wall behind the television is his new, suspected hiding spot. “I’ll get some traps tomorrow”, Steve says.

He brings home five different traps. A little excessive maybe, given our tiny apartment, but I understand he wants to get the job done. The traps are glue traps, small black sticky pads of doom. Steve arms them with peanut butter and cheese, a kind of smorgasbord of entrapment. We scour the apartment for the most strategic places to set traps. We go back to emailing. We cook dinner. We go to bed. We wait.

In the morning, much to Steve’s delight and my (hidden) dismay, we see our traps have succeeded. There, on the black glue-trap pads of no return, is not only Mr. Bojangles, but another furry accomplice. Briefly, I imagine a sort of rodent Romeo and Juliet scene of a romantic double-suicide, before reminding myself that despite the fact that scientists use them in lab-testing studies and correlate their findings to the human brain, they are still mice. On one of the traps I can see Mr. Bojangles is still twitching slightly, he’s still alive. My heart breaks a little as Steve scoops up the traps, sandwiches them together, and tosses them into a plastic Wal-Mart bag. He ties it tight, double knotting it, quietly sealing their fate.