The Man Who Smells Like Death
The creature in the crawl space under my house sounds as if it’s doing a gymnastics routine, vaulting about with dull thuds that reverberate up through the floorboards. When you can’t see an animal it becomes larger and more fearsome in your mind. Not knowing what kind it is, it’s all kinds. An amalgam of skunk and raccoon, perhaps rabid. I’m at my house in Vermont—the corner in the upper right called the Northeast Kingdom—where humans of every gender and race are a minority compared to the profusion of creatures that call the place home. So it’s no surprise a furry intruder is pole-vaulting down below.
I put down my book and stealthily walk to the place where I can hear the critter, and it keeps moving as I walk, like we are mirrors of each other separated by the floor. To the bathroom I follow it, and there the sound stops. A door at the edge of the bathroom leads out to a utility room that intersects with the crawl space, and this door I open ever so slowly, a small crack, then a few inches, extending my hand into the darkness to pull the light switch cord, and instantly the brightness illuminates a woodchuck looking up at me with a deeply human expression that says, “What are you doing in my house?”
I close the door in a hurry without answering. I wish I had a gun, but in truth I don’t like guns, and to be even more honest if I had a gun I’m not sure I’d shoot the woodchuck as it stands defiantly next to my water heater like an elderly British lady affronted by my American manners. I suppose I could shoot it, but doing so seems like a recipe for one of those funny deaths you read about: ricochet bullet kills man trying to rid basement of woodchuck. People would just chuckle and shake their heads at my demise. An idiot getting his comeuppance from a damn woodchuck of all things. The bumper sticker would read: GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE. WOODCHUCKS DO.
Letting the woodchuck stay, however, is not an option. They are known for digging under foundations and chewing on electrical wiring like it’s liquorish. So I call up the Pick & Shovel hardware store in Newport and explain the situation.
The Pick & Shovel’s tagline is, “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.” They say I should get a “Have a Heart” trap and bait it with cantaloupe. The idea is to capture critters painlessly, throw the trap in the back of your truck and drive many miles away to set them free.
By nightfall the trap is set and the next morning I head to Boston on business. A day later, my neighbor Jim calls me up.
“You’ve got a new friend,” Jim says.
“A woodchuck?”
“A big fat skunk. Stinks pretty bad.”
I ask Jim if he knows of anyone who could come take the skunk away.
“Well,” Jim replies, “I don’t know his name but there’s a guy who does that sort of thing. All I knows is he smells like death.”
In the little town of Westmore there’s no Wi-Fi, no Googling “animal trapper,” and Yelp! is just a sound your dog makes. To get stuff done it’s all about who you know and who they know.
So I call up the Willoughby Store and ask Sandy, “Hey, I heard there’s a man who smells like death who could take the skunk out of my Have a Heart trap.”
“Yup” Sandy says, “There is a man who smells like death but I couldn’t tell you where to find him. Have you asked Carol? She knows everybody.” Apparently in Pick & Shovel terms if Carol doesn’t know somebody you don’t need to know them.
When I get Carol on the phone she doesn’t miss a beat. “Hold on,” she says, “Yes, I think the man who smells like death is Steve Lapier, and his company is Green Mountain Animal Restraint.”
“Steve,” I says when he returns my call a day later, “I’ve got a skunk in my Have a Heart trap and everybody says you’re the guy who knows how to deal with it.”
“Well,” says Steve, and here he pauses to sigh and I could swear a smell like death wafts from the phone, “I live in Southern Vermont so it’s a good three hour drive up to Westmore and I charge by the hour. But I can take away that skunk for five hundred dollars.”
“Steve,” I says after I’ve taken in the thought of spending my children’s inheritance all at once, “I’d like to think I have a heart. But I don’t think I have five hundred dollars worth of heart. I’ll ask around some more.”
When I hang up I feel very badly. And that night I lay awake thinking of the skunk as it strains against the cage in the cold Northern Vermont air, the milky way spread overhead glittering like a cruel nightlight, and as my guilt grows so does the skunk; I picture its body swelling, it’s black and white fur poking out all over through the steel mesh. I hear it cry. That poor skunk’s only crime was loving cantaloupe, and by that measure we are all felons. The thought occurs to me that this is some kind of test of who I really am as a person, a cosmic scorecard of my kindness tallied by a God-like Unitarian with a “coexist” bumper sticker on his Toyota Prius. I feel like I’m in the cage, too, trapped by my conscience.
The next day I call Steve back up. “Steve,” I says, “You know, whether we’re full-time Vermonters or just here for the summer, all of us are just visiting. But these animals, this truly is their home. Help me do the right thing for this critter.”
“Well,” Steve says, “Since you put it that way. I’ll take away that skunk for two-hundred-fifty dollars.”
“Steve, for two-hundred-fifty dollars I have a heart.”
The deal done, I’m thinking that’s the end of it. But late the next night my cell phone rings. Steve is on his way to the house but lost somewhere around Barton. The GPS says my zip code is in Orleans, but I’m in Westmore. I’ve had a glass of Scotch or two and I think Steve might have done the same because he can’t get it through his head that a zip code could belong to one town but a GPS would say it was another town, and no amount of explaining from me is getting through to him. Then he starts saying things that are so strange, even coming from the Man Who Smells Like Death, that I keep shaking my head and holding the receiver away from my face as I mouth the word, “What?”
“You know,” Steve says, “I don’t know if you’re a good looking guy or not, but if you’re ever in St. Johnsbury the women there are very aggressive.
“Steve,” I says, “I’ve been married thirty-five years, “but I’ll bear that in mind.”
Never missing a chance to indulge in non-sequiturs, Steve then says, “You know, up here in Vermont you can’t have a Nazi flag.”
“You’re right about that, Steve. Well, I really should be going but it sounds like you’re on the right road and….”
“People get offended,” he kept on.
I manage to make a fast exit somehow, and go to bed scratching my bald head.
Three days later I’m back at the house, and sure enough the skunk is gone. Now, maybe that St. Johnsbury girl-chasing, Nazi-loving man who smells like death did take away the skunk. Or maybe, just maybe, that skunk—like some holy being—rose up through the steel wires, body and soul it rose up as a mist would rise from Lake Willoughby on a cool spring morning, and it kept right on going. And someday when I die and approach the gates of heaven, it won’t be Saint Peter standing there—a tall white man with a beard—but a big furry critter with stripes down her back, and she’ll turn to look at me with a small smile of recognition, and without a word she’ll wave me in.
And only then will I know for sure that I passed the test.
