My Husband's Stalker

My husband had a stalker. The stalking went on for about two weeks last year, and it got really scary after a while. At first it was kind of funny, I mean - my husband is a good looking guy and I had a great time giving him grief about it, but then, not so much. It got pretty freaky, really. We started fearing that she would attack us when we left the house. She had beady brown eyes and reddish-brown bushy hair and a general air of unpredictableness about her. She was small, but surprisingly aggressive for her size - like some sort of a cross-gender Napoleon complex or something. She also had a bushy tail and an affinity for nuts - she was (and is, I suppose) a squirrel. And she was pissed.

When we bought our house two years ago I realized that the facade was missing its very topmost brick to the far left (if you're facing it from the street). It's kind of obscured by the crepe myrtle that the previous idiot, I mean owner, planted entirely too close to the house. The upshot of this is that it's not very noticeable and I kept forgetting to mention it to Walker, who is not normally known for his keen powers of observation. When I did mention it to him, he didn't exactly run to the garage to get the ladder, if you catch my drift. We'd be out working in the yard that spring and neither of us would remember it. It was kind of like breaking your measuring cup. While you're sweeping up the pieces, you think to yourself, "Oh, well, no big deal. I'll pick up another one next time I go to WalMart." 347 thousand trips to WalMart later (yeah, I won't tell your husband but I do know how often you really go), you're still pissed off every time you have to use your dry measuring cups to measure out the milk for the kids' pancakes. Some things, you just don't think about.

So, one day we're sitting up in the front living room (also known as The Red Room - no relation to "The Shining", though, the room just happens to be red) when we hear this tiny tap dancing going on above our heads. But it's not the kids cause we don't happen to have a second story. Walker and I looked at each other and I said, "I told you if we didn't fix that brick, we'd end up with squirrels in the attic." I'm the wife and it's in my job description to say, "I told you so." He just fixed me with a somewhat baleful stare and told me he'd get to it. I dropped it because really, I don't begrudge a squirrel a nice place to play, and we don't have anything stored in that part of the attic. But I do have this otherwise completely normal aunt who had such an ordeal with squirrels in her attic that, to this day, she hates them with a passion and will actually swerve to hit one with her car if one happens to be foolish enough to cross the street in front of her. And if she sees a squirrel who's already been sent to meet its maker, she laughs this weird, gleeful laugh and says something to the effect of there being one less squirrel to get in her attic, chew up the wiring, and permeate the air ducts with the stench of decomposition. Everybody has one crazy aunt, right? Okay, I've got a couple but that's not the point.

The point is: a squirrel was in our attic.

I told myself that as long as the squirrel stayed in that part of the attic, I wasn't going to make a big fuss. A couple of weeks later, I heard it above our room...which is in the total opposite end of the house. That was it, the squirrel had to go - she had overstayed her welcome. The next weekend when we were out working in the yard, I noticed her come out of the hole where the missing brick had been and scamper across the roof in search of whatever type of little squirrel-y things that squirrels do. I told Walker and he went over and fixed the brick so she couldn't get back in. I knew that the squirrel I saw come out was the same one that had been coming and going because this particular squirrel was distinctive. Something, a cat or a trap or an electric wire or something, had gotten ahold of her tail and almost all the fur was gone. She had a few little tufts here and there, but for the most part she was a squirrel with a funny naked rat tail. And she could't get back in my attic, tee hee hee. Walker did go up and check to make sure that there wasn't a nest with babies already in the attic, but he didn't find anything so I didn't worry about it anymore. We didn't see her for the rest of the day and I figured she had moved on and found new digs. HA.

The next day when Walker left for work, he noticed a squirrel sitting on the roof of the house. We have a ton of squirrels in our neighborhood so he didn't think much of it, even when he came home that night and noticed that the squirrel still seemed to be almost watching him from the roof of the house. The next morning when he went to work, he heard this chittering sound and realized that the squirrel was still on the roof. In the ensuing days, it got to the point where any time Walker went outside the squirrel followed him, chittering and chirping and practically shaking her little fists at him. Not the rest of us, just him. How she knew that he was the one to put the brick back, we'll never know. But she knew and she was prepared to let him know that she did NOT appreciate it. She would race from one end of the roof to the other, over the roof, down around the fence, and up the trees in our yard to follow him, just cussing him up one side and down the other in that high-pitched squirrel speak. After a week, she started looming over all of us from the roof line and I started to wonder if she hadn't gone totally bonkers and wasn't going to jump of the roof and onto our heads in some sort of a kamikaze squirrel attack. I asked Walker to go in the attic and double check that we hadn't inadvertently separated her from her babies, but he reported once again that nothing was there. We felt so sorry for her that the next weekend we tried our hands at making a squirrel house out of scrap lumber. I looked it up on the internet and found the floor plan preferred by nesting squirrels, 2 to 1, and the kids helped up put it together. We hung it in the crape myrtle, under the eaves of the house, near her now sealed-up portal into our attic. The low point in this Greek tragedy came the day that I walked out of our front door, and instead of being confronted by an angry, fire-breathing squirrel, found her lying completely prone on the roof of the 'squirrel house' moaning softly, with her little arms and legs stretched out in a crucifix pattern. I resigned myself to the guilt that comes from knowing that I killed an innocent squirrel by somehow breaking her heart.

Later that day, I'm in the house by myself (though I really don't know how that happened) watching TV in the living room when I hear a strange noise coming from the garage. There should be no noises coming from our garage, and besides, the noise sounded suspiciously like someone dropped an aluminum can on the concrete floor. Creepy, right? So I got up and opened the garage door to investigate, and was confronted with a squirrel - eye level and about two feet from my face. I screamed, the squirrel screamed, and we both started hopping around. The squirrel started trying to scramble back up the aluminum ladder that goes to the attic, but its toe nails couldn't get purchase on the slick metal so it didn't go anywhere very fast. I hit the button for the garage door opener and grabbed a broom, thinking that if I could swat the unwelcome houseguest down, it might run out the open garage door and begone. Meanwhile, we're both still shrieking in terror. Eventually, Secret Squirrel made it back up the ladder, and I wasn't about to go chasing after it into the attic.

I put out a dish of water out of sympathy (it was already pretty hot outside) and left the garage door cracked open at the bottom for the rest of the day. After another confrontation a day or two later with Secret Squirrel, I guess he finally took the hint and moved out of our attic. Rat-tail Squirrel vacated her post on top of the squirrel house, and I saw her joyfully chasing and being chased through our yard by a generic-looking squirrel that could easily have been Secret Squirrel. They lived out the winter in the Sycamore tree at the front of our house, and I noticed this spring that the fur has started coming back in on her tail. By next spring, I probably won't be able to distinguish her from the other thousand squirrels that live in the neighborhood. But what I want to know is, what did Secret Squirrel drink for the two weeks he was stuck in the attic? He couldn't get out, so did he drink the dregs of the beer from the cans that Walker threw away in the garage? And if so, did he go into withdrawls when he moved out? Some questions, I now realize, will never be satisfactorily answered. Who cares where Hoffa's buried, anyway.