Nothing's worse than rats in your belfry
As the days grow shorter and the leaves blush crimson, my thoughts turn to rats.
The weak of stomach should read no further. The true personal account to follow includes a sewer rat foraging up into our toilet and splashing out onto our bathroom floor, and another rat dead and rotting in the innards of our washing machine, making each successive load of laundry smell more corpse-like.
Also, mysterious legions of itchy red bites on the milky-white torso of a 2-year-old boy and all over his long-suffering nanny. Rats scrabbling in walls and jangling nerves so that normally calm family types struggle with jolts of raging adrenaline more typical to tweakers hooked on methamphetamine.
And all this in a gracious Victorian in Brookline's Coolidge Corner, the moral of the story being: They can get you, too, wherever you are. And now is about the time they might start looking for a cold-weather home, and settle on yours.
It has long been known, of course, that no one is immune: The toniest sections of the Back Bay have reported extra rat sightings in recent years, and the Big Dig helped spread rat refugees across the city. But rats are so viscerally repulsive that they tend to be surrounded by an aura of urban myth. Who really believed the legends about rats coming up toilet pipes and biting people's bottoms?
So herewith, one true rat story, all as accurate as year-old memory permits.
It began late at night. Sprax, my night-owl husband, was reading in the kitchen when he heard the scritch-scritch-scritch.
In the following days, our 2-year-old, Tully, started scratching furiously under his arms and around his stomach. Little red dots appeared, concentrated there but on his legs and neck as well. Not hives, the doctor said, not sure what. Try anti-itching cream.
Then Leeza, our heroic nanny, started to sprout the same kinds of spots. We thought it might be a contagious childhood disease. But she had already had them all, and why were the rest of us not affected? She got so bad she was too embarrassed to swim at her health club. I worried she would quit. Sprax and I found ourselves scratching our belly buttons like monkeys, but nowhere else. Liliana, our 4-year-old, did, too.
A nice enough exterminator from a national chain came and checked for bed bugs. Nope, he said. No clue what else it might be. He also laid a half-dozen rat traps, and pointed out the many chinks in our foundation where rats could get in. They could squeeze through a hole the size of a quarter, he said.
The traps caught a couple of rats, but the itchy bites and wall-scrabbling continued. Our home started to turn from a refuge into a biological battleground. We washed and washed the bed linens, all of Tully's clothes, the floors and walls. We hired masons to plug up every chink in the foundation and boarded up the leaky basement windows.
And still, the bites and the night noises. Tully's bites got so bad I brought him back to the pediatrician with my theory that the rats were bringing in mites. Maybe, my pediatrician said. Try Permethrin lotion, a bug-killer, and lots more laundering and vacuuming.
We did, the whole family and Leeza spending a night coated in slimy lotion. The biting seemed to diminish a bit. Then one evening, I got home from work and Leeza said she had just seen a rat slip behind the couch in the living room, where the children often played.
I felt a surge of feral aggression. If I'd had a gun, I'd have gone rat-hunting right then. It was one thing for them to leave their little night droppings on our kitchen floor; it was another for them to slither near the kids. I called the national exterminator chain: It was late Friday and they couldn't send anyone until Monday.
We packed bags and moved to my father's in Cambridge for a couple of days. But we couldn't abandon the house forever.
Enter the hero: Steve Buono of Buono Pest Control, which was recommended by a Harvard University insect expert. Buono never advertises, never needs to. Compact and dark-haired, he met my obvious panic with low-key confidence that acted as an anti-anxiety drug. Twenty-six years of experience in rat extermination led him to their likely haunts. He laid new traps and set poison. He found a 20-year-old box of rat poison behind some pantry drawers; clearly, our house had been rat Party Central for a long time.
As for the bites, he politely discounted my mite theory, but laid dozens of insect traps to catch whatever might be crawling about.
For our anniversary, Sprax and I planned a fancy dinner out. That morning, I was once again washing extra loads of laundry when I noticed a nasty, fruity smell in the washing machine. I ran the same load again with more detergent - it only got worse. I left the house to do errands, and when I got home, Sprax met me in the kitchen with a face pale as death. He had investigated the smell, and found a rat corpse in the innards of the washing machine, so stiff with rigor mortis he had to dismember it to get it out.
I told him he couldn't have given me a lovelier anniversary present.
In the next few days, Buono methodically attacked the rats, uncovering a family nest in the basement and snaring a few more. We were doing everything right, he said. Yet the scrabbling and bites continued. It just takes time, he said. And maybe - maybe - he was starting to think: It was possible they were coming in through the toilet. It is rare, but it does happen.
The man knows his business. The very next morning, at 5 a.m., I heard a splashing glub-glub from our downstairs bathroom. As I came down the stairs, half awake, something skittered like a shot from the bathroom across the hallway into the living room. Its lightning-fast movement reminded me of the little creature that breaks out of the astronaut's chest in "Alien" and zooms away. I sat down on the stairs, shaking.
Later, when I called Buono, he said we could have a valve put on our sewer line that would keep rats out. Our kind plumber, George Lucey, came as quickly as if our pipes had been spouting water, and put the thing on.
The end. The rats went away. With the rats, the bites went away, even though the insect monitors had never turned up any mites. Leeza, bless her, didn't quit.
And this fall, we seem to be rat-free. So far.
