Pest Control

by Brett Biebel

Chris Ensminger

Saint Barb’s has a raccoon problem, and they’re trying to manage it with a bunch of coyote urine they buy off-book and in bulk from this guy Chad down at the Farm and Fleet because the thing about raccoon shit is it’s toxic. Students collect it. It has a way of showing up in certain high-level administrative offices on campus, and a few of the administrators are let’s just say a wee bit neurotic about various kinds of contaminants and hence the piss. Hence Chad. Nobody knows how he manages to find gallons of the stuff (and some people think it might actually be dog urine or Chad urine or else like two parts lemonade), but he does. He finds it. He gives Saint Barb’s a good deal. They fill old jars of weed killer and test the spray nozzles and viola. Maintenance does its thing. They laugh about it a lot, over beers down by the ballpark in Davenport, but they do it. They do it happily. There’s even this old-timer loves it so much he goes back to campus. At night. He hides in the hedges behind the biology building and waits for them ring-tailed fuckers to show up and maraud like rodents do, and he catches them. He catches them a lot. Raccoons, they sound like Geiger counters you get enough of them together, and sure, our maintenance man here takes some pride in the ones that scurry off. Slink off, more like. The ones that smell the piss and freeze and look like they’ve caught a glimpse of death. Of God. Of something they can sense but can’t quite imagine (and he doesn’t know if it’s rational, if they know it’s coyote urine and coyotes=scary, or if it’s just that kind of imagistic foreboding like a door creaking in the fall and at night), but he saves his deepest admiration for the ones who don’t run. The ones who squat. The ones who look right at him with their glowing fucking eyes and unleash hell and shit and trash right then and there, and coyotes be damned. It’s them he’s thinking of when he tells his wife he wants his ashes scattered on campus. Tells his daughter. Pictures that grandbaby Maddy born last August, and she’s the one holding the urn, and it’s got nothing to do with football. With school pride. It’s got nothing to do with the Bomberville Club or whatever they call it down there, and it’s them. Those overgrown panda rats. Them ugly masked assholes can’t help but shit on everything you do to try and stop them, and it’s simple when you really think about it. It’s how they remind him of all these things he once was. Maybe something he could still pretend to be.

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Brett Biebel is the author of 48 Blitz (Split/Lip Press, 2020), a collection of flash fiction set in Nebraska. He has two forthcoming collections in Winter Dance Party (Alternating Current, 2023) and Gridlock (Cornerstone, 2024). His reader’s companion to Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon will be released by University of Georgia Press in 2024.