Tribb's Trouble (2 page)

“You've been telling that joke for fifteen years and it still isn't funny,” Peter would reply. “But keep trying.”

Tribb always said that Peter was partly responsible for the life Tribb knew. About a year after they began working at Donner Metal Works, Peter had married a woman named Allison. Tribb was the best man at their wedding. At the wedding
reception, Tribb had met Linda, who was a friend of Allison's. Linda was pretty, with long reddish-blond hair. “I liked your best man speech,” she told Tribb at the reception. Then she rolled her eyes and grinned. “You tell terrible jokes.”

Their life together had started that night. They dated for a while, and then they got married. Three years later, Suzy was born.

Whenever Peter had a problem in his life, he told Tribb about it, and they tried to work it out. The same was true for Tribb; if he had a problem, Peter was the first to know. They worked well together on problems because they had different ways of going at them. Tribb liked to look at things from all sides and think a lot before he acted. Peter would rather try right away to solve a problem with action.

Peter felt happiest when he could solve a problem by building something. He made stuff all the time in his garage workshop. Special holders for sharp knives and kitchen gadgets. Odd lamps to light a shelf or a cupboard. Bookcases with secret compartments. Once, Allison complained about having to lift the lid of the compost bin under the sink when her hands were full of kitchen scraps. So Peter made a lever that would lift the lid every time Allison opened the cupboard door.

Peter's skill sometimes caused Tribb a bit of embarrassment. Tribb didn't feel very smart when it came to fixing things around the house. His father hadn't been much good at it, and so Tribb had never really learned. He could change a light bulb, of course. One time he'd changed a washer on a bathroom tap by looking at the pictures on the package. But that was about it.

So Tribb always dreaded going over to Allison and Peter's place for dinner. Every time, Allison had to show Linda the latest cool gadget Peter had made. When Allison pointed out how opening the cupboard door lifted the lid of the compost bin, Linda had been amazed.

“Why don't you make something like that for our house?” she asked Tribb.

Every time Linda wanted him to be more like Peter, Tribb could only shrug. “Peter's a builder,” he'd say. “I'm a thinker.”

Linda never seemed fully satisfied with this answer. In fact, lately, Tribb felt that Linda wasn't much satisfied with
him.
He knew husbands and wives sometimes went through stages when they
weren't exactly thrilled with each other. He hoped they were just going through one of those times.

Anyway, when the two men were getting their beers in the pub, Tribb told Peter about his problem.

“We've got mice in our house.”

And, of course, the first thing Peter said in reply was, “Great! I'll build you a mousetrap!”

Tribb waved him off. “I'm gonna handle this.” He stared at his beer. “Mice,” he muttered. “What is it they call mice? Vermin?” Tribb shuddered. Vermin was a word for pests that carried disease. Like the rats that caused the Plague in Europe hundreds of years ago, the disease that killed millions of people. In Tribb's mind, mice meant big, big trouble.

When Linda had shown him the bread bag with the hole in it that morning, she had been horrified. And then she had spent an extra long time cleaning the kitchen counters. He remembered her saying to him, “Mouse droppings are toxic. They make you sick. If they got into Suzy's food, I'd never forgive myself.”

The look she gave him had made him feel pretty bad. Tribb thought it said,
And I'd never forgive
you, either.
It was as if having mice in the house was
his
fault.

Now Tribb took a gulp of his beer. “I guess I have to buy some mousetraps,” he said.

“What kind?” said Peter.

“I don't know,” said Tribb. “I'll have to go to the store and see what they've got. Maybe just some of those regular wood traps. They work.”

Peter shook his head. “That's old technology,” he said. “They've got plenty of new ones now.” He took a sip of his beer. “Why don't you just let me build one for you?”

Tribb sighed. “I'll think about it.”

Peter looked at him and lifted his glass. “Buddy,” he said, “you think too much.”

On his way home from the pub, Tribb stopped at Home Depot. He had no idea where to find the mousetraps, and he felt too embarrassed to ask a clerk. Telling Peter about his mouse problem was one thing. Telling a stranger was different. The more Tribb thought about the problem, the more embarrassed he felt. Having mice in his home, he thought, said something bad about him.

Linda had asked him to hire a pest company to deal with the mice. But Tribb had refused. He didn't want a pest control truck parked in front of their house for all the neighbours to see. Whenever he saw one of those trucks in front of someone's house, he couldn't help himself. He thought that the people in that house must not keep it very clean. He always felt a little smug, a little better than those people. What kind of people let their house become infested?

Infested:
such an ugly word. Words like that always seemed to have a bad story behind them.
(Divorce
was another one.) Tribb had lived his life without thinking
infested
would ever have anything to do with him. And now it did.

Tribb wandered through Home Depot looking for mousetraps. He figured the section would be small. It would be hidden away, like something shameful, next to the products for killing cockroaches. He wandered through the back part of the store, past the plumbing and lumber supplies, but had no luck. He finally worked up the courage to ask a sales person if she could direct him to the mousetraps. He had to force himself not to look at the floor when he asked her.

“Right up near the front,” she said. “Aisle number two.” Tribb noticed that the woman smiled as she said it. And the smile didn't seem sly or nasty. The woman didn't seem disgusted. In fact, she seemed quite cheerful, as if she pointed the way to the mousetraps every day. As if people came up to her all the time asking for directions to the mousetraps. As if it was no big deal.

The sales person's attitude made him feel a tiny bit better.

When he found the right section, Tribb was amazed. It was huge! He could see more than a dozen different ways to trap or kill mice. There were the regular snap traps made of wood, of course. There were also different kinds of plastic traps. Some looked like big plastic clothespins, others like plastic monster jaws. One gadget looked like some kind of mouse launching pad that would bounce the mouse off the ceiling. But Tribb knew that probably wasn't how it really worked.

Tribb also saw new “humane” traps that kept the mice alive. Why would you want to do that? Tribb wondered. The shelves of traps also had three or four kinds of mouse “repellers.” They used sound to scare the mice out of the house. To Tribb,
they looked like little stereo speakers. There were also pads the size of thin books, which promised to catch the mice with something sticky. And there was poison. Poison blocks. Poison pellets. Plenty of poison.

Tribb stared at all of these choices for a few minutes. He thought, Boy, a lot of people out there must have mouse trouble. An old saying came to mind: “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” At last he understood it. So many people had mice to get rid of that anyone who built the perfect mousetrap could get rich.

Clearly, a lot of companies were trying to do just that.

Tribb thought about Linda. How she had asked him to hire a company to solve the mouse problem. She must have decided he wouldn't be able to do the job properly himself. He badly wanted to prove her wrong. He badly wanted to show that he was clever, handy around the house, a reliable husband. Just like Peter.

Which trap should he get? The more Tribb looked at all the different kinds, the more confused he got. The more he thought about making a choice, the more he worried about making the
wrong
choice. The only ones that looked familiar were the old-style wooden snap traps. They were simple. They were tried and true. But Peter was right, they were old technology. Next to all the shiny new ideas, they seemed lame.

Tribb took a breath. Tried to relax. He looked around and saw the sticky pads. Something in him said
yes
. He thought back to that moment he saw something in the hall. That must have been a mouse scurrying along the floor. He'd lay some of these pads down, and the next time, that mouse would run right into trouble.

The pads were a lot more expensive than the old traps. That was another reason Tribb figured they had to be good. He bought three packages. Six pads in all.

“What are those?” Linda asked.

It was the next morning, and Tribb had laid out six sticky mouse-catching pads. They were like plastic trays filled with glue. He had put three of the trays along the hall where he'd seen the mouse. After that, he'd set down three in the kitchen, near the stove, the fridge, and the sink. The glue was a soft, sweet-smelling gel, and very sticky to the touch. Tribb knew how sticky because he had touched the tip of one finger to it, just to test it. He'd had to pull very hard to get his finger loose. Actually, he felt a little frightened by how hard he'd had to pull.

“They're mousetraps,” said Tribb proudly. “I got them last night.”

“They don't look like mousetraps,” said Linda. The way his wife was looking at the trays, Tribb could tell she wasn't sure they'd work. She picked one of them up to study it more closely. Tribb secretly wished she would touch a fingertip to the gel.

“They're the latest thing,” said Tribb. “The mouse runs along the floor and sticks in the glue.”

Linda lifted an eyebrow. “The mice have all this floor space to get where they're going. Why would they step into a tray like this?” She shook her head. “The mice will just run around it.”

Tribb was starting to doubt the whole plan himself. But he couldn't let Linda see his doubt. “Maybe I'll put some cheese in the middle,” he said. “They'll work. You'll see.”

Linda just looked at him.

“If you want to see how sticky that gel is,” said Tribb, “you could touch it with your finger.”

“I think that would be a dumb thing to do,” said Linda. “It's probably toxic.”

Tribb looked at his own fingertip as Linda put the tray back down on the floor. She put her hands on her hips and looked around at the other trays Tribb had set out. “They don't look very nice,”
she said. She was right. They were ugly and black. “How long do they have to be here?”

Tribb shrugged. “Not long,” he said. He heard Linda sigh.

“I've invited some people over for lunch on Thursday,” she said. “All six of the moms in the school fund-raising group.”

“This Thursday?” asked Tribb.

“Next Thursday,” said Linda. “It's the only day that week I don't have to work at the hospital.” She looked again at the sticky pads. “I want these to be gone by then.”

That gave Tribb eight days. He didn't know how long it would take to get rid of the mice. But he did know he couldn't admit that to Linda. “I understand,” he said. “No problem.”

Linda took a deep breath, as if things were settled for now. “I still think you should have hired an expert to deal with this,” she said.

A few minutes later, Suzy came down for breakfast. When she entered the kitchen she stopped dead in her tracks and pointed. “What are those, mouse swimming pools?” she asked. And Tribb had to go through the whole explanation again. At work that day, Tribb told Peter about the sticky pads he'd bought to catch the mice. Peter just stared at Tribb.

“Sticky pads?” he said. “I could build you a custom, sure-fire mousetrap, but you thought it'd be better to buy sticky pads.” Then Peter shook his head, as if Tribb had made a terrible mistake.

Everyone doubted him, thought Tribb. His best friend, his wife. Nobody believed he'd made the right choice. Well, never mind.
Somebody
had to feel good about things, so
he
would.

As the day went on, Tribb began to feel better. Even excited. Nobody had helped him find the pads, he'd found them on his own. He thought about them doing their job all day while he was at work. He couldn't stop imagining mice running along the floor and onto the sticky pads and getting stuck. The whole thing ran in his mind like a cartoon. As Tribb daydreamed about the mice getting stuck, he almost heard music. Fast music that suddenly stopped with a
sproing!
when the mice hit the gel. Sure, the idea was silly, but whenever he heard that
sproing!
in his head, he smiled. How satisfied he would feel, he thought, when he solved this mouse problem on his own. He didn't need help from any expert. Or Peter. On the way home from work, Tribb's heart started to race. He had put a small chunk of cheddar cheese in the middle of each of the pads. That was sure to make them more effective. He figured there was a good chance he'd find a mouse on each one of his pads. Six pads, six mice. That would have to be all of them. Wouldn't it? He couldn't imagine that more than six mice were hiding in his house.