The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder (16 page)

“Hamster Heaven!” Larry said to himself as July rolled around. It was vacation time. Two litters had just been born in the warren. And maybe more were being born underground? Larry believed so. He imagined the burrows according to the encyclopedia’s description: six feet deep and winding. How fascinating to know that the very ground he stood on was being used by families and their offspring as shelter and storage place, safe bedrooms—
home!
And no one could tell it from looking at the ground. What a good thing his father had stopped jogging, Larry thought, because even Larry sank in now and then if he stepped on a burrow entrance unawares. His father, being heavier, would sink in more, and might set about getting rid of the hamsters—even if his father still thought they were moles. Larry congratulated himself that his rather furtive feeding of the garden hamsters was paying off.

However, this same fact caused Larry to tell a lie, which weighed a bit on his conscience. It happened thus:

His mother remarked in the kitchen one afternoon, “There aren’t so many as I thought there’d be by this time. To tell you the truth, I’m glad, Larry. So much easier—”

“I’ve given a few away to kids at school,” Larry said, interrupting in his haste, and feeling awful at once.

“Oh,
I
see. I thought something was a little out of the ordinary about them.” Betty laughed. “I was reading about them, and it seems they fight moles—destroy them. It might be a good idea if we put a couple in the garden. What do you think, Larry? Can you bear to part with a pair or two?”

Larry’s slightly freckled face almost split with his smile. “I think the hamsters would like that.”

After that, in a matter of ten days, things happened with lightning speed, or so it seemed to Larry. For a while, he was lying on his bed in his room, reading books propped on a pillow in lovely sunlight. His hamsters in the warren were plump and happy. Larry’s father was looking forward to the last week in July and the first two weeks in August for his vacation, and Larry had learned that they were going to stay home this summer, because there was a river to fish in not far away, and a little gardening would be good exercise for Julian, his doctor had said. All was bliss, until the swimming pool men arrived in the last week in July.

They came early, around 7 a.m. Larry awakened at the noise of their two big trucks, and watched everything from his window. They were driving a bulldozer on to the lawn! Larry heard his father and mother talking in the hall, then Julian went downstairs and trotted on to the lawn. Larry saw it happen: his father’s left foot sank suddenly, and he fell in a twisted way.

Then Julian gave a moan of pain.

One of the workmen took Julian gently by the shoulders. Julian was seated on the grass. Betty ran out. Julian was not getting up. Betty ran back to the house.

Then a doctor arrived. Julian was lying on the downstairs sofa, grimacing with pain, pale in the face.

“Do you think it’s broken?” Betty asked the doctor.

“I don’t think so, but we’d better take an X-ray. I’ve got some crutches in the car. I’ll get them, and if your husband can just manage to get to my car . . .”

The bulldozer was already humming, groaning, stabbing at the lawn. Larry was more worried about his hamster burrows than about his father.

Julian was back in less than two hours, on crutches, his left foot thickly bandaged and with a metal bar underneath it to walk on when his ankle became better. And he was in a furious temper.

“That lawn is honeycombed!” Julian said to Betty and also Larry, who was in the kitchen having a second breakfast of milk and doughnuts. “The workmen say they’re hamsters, not moles!”

“Well, the digging, darling—the excavation will at least scare some of them off,” Betty said soothingly.

Julian focused his glare on his son. “It’s quite plain, Larry, you’ve been putting your hamsters right in the garden. You didn’t tell us. Therefore you
lied
. You didn’t—”

“But I didn’t
lie
,” Larry interrupted in panic, because “lie” was his father’s most awful word. “No one asked me about the—the—” Larry was on his feet, trembling.

“You led your mother to think, which is the same as lying, that the two you released in the garden recently were the only two. This is patently untrue, since the lawn is full of holes and tunnels and God knows
what
!”

“Darling, don’t get excited,” Betty said, fearing another heart attack. “There are ways—even if there are a lot of holes and things. Exterminators.”

“You’re damned right!” said Julian. “And I’m going to call them up now!” He went off on his crutches in the direction of the telephone.

“Julian,
I’ll
call them,” Betty said. “Have a rest. You’re probably still in pain.”

Julian wouldn’t be dissuaded. Larry watched, breathing shallowly. He’d never seen his father quite so angry.
Exterminators
. That meant deadly poison, probably. Maybe men stood out there with clubs and hit the hamsters as they ran from their burrows. Larry wet his lips. Should he try to scare a few out now, and catch them, put them back in the warrens where it was safe? How many burrows with little ones were the pool men killing this very minute?

Larry looked out of the kitchen window. The bulldozer had already made a beginning on one wing of the boomerang shape, and was working now on the second wing, as if marking the land out. But not a hamster was in sight. Larry looked everywhere, even at the edges of the garden. He imagined his hamsters cringing far below in the earth, wondering what was causing all the reverberations. But they’d be only six feet below, and the pool would definitely be twelve feet deep in some places.

“
Goddamn the whole batch of ’em!
” Julian said in a voice like thunder, and crashed the telephone down.

Larry held his breath and listened.

“Darling, one said he could come possibly tomorrow. Call that one back,” said Betty.

Larry escaped out of the kitchen door, intending to watch the workmen, and to try to save some hamsters if he could. For this reason, he detoured and went to the toolhouse for an empty carton. When Larry reached the excavation, he was just in time to see the big toothed scoop rise with a load of earth, swing and dump it exactly on a spot where Larry knew there was a hamster exit. Larry seethed with helpless fury. He wanted to cry out and stop them. Fortunately the hamsters always had a second exit, Larry reminded himself.

His sense of reassurance was brief. When he looked into the hole the bulldozer was digging, he saw part of a burrow exposed as cleanly as if someone had taken a knife and cut downward, as in the encyclopedia diagram. And there at the bottom were three or four little ones—visible, barely four feet under, wriggling! Where were the hamster parents?

“Stop!” Larry yelled in a shrill voice, waving his arms at the man up in the orange bulldozer. “There’re animals
alive
there!”

The bulldozer man might not have heard him. The great jaw swung again and struck at a point lower than the baby hamsters’ chamber.

“What’s the matter, sonny?” asked the workman who had walked up beside Larry. “There’re plenty more of those, I can tell you!”

“But these are pets!” Larry said.

The man shook his head. “Your father’s plenty fed up with ’em, you know. Lawn’s full of ’em! Just look. Now don’t cry, kid! If we kill a few, you’ve got a hundred more around here!” He turned away before Larry could straighten up and assure the man he was not crying.

The rest of the day was a shambles. Julian was again on the telephone during the time the workmen stopped for lunch. Larry went out with his empty cardboard box to try to rescue a few hamsters, adults or babies, and didn’t find a single one. Betty made a simple lunch, and Julian was still too upset to eat more than a bite. He was talking about getting at the hamsters himself, sticking burning brands down their holes, the way the farmers used to do with mole holes in Massachusetts where he’d been brought up.

“But Julian, the exterminators—” Betty glanced at her son. “They’ll probably be able to come in a few days. Friday, they said. You mustn’t get excited over nothing. It’s bad for you.”

“I’m damned well going to have a cigarette!” Julian said, and got up, dropped a crutch, picked it up, and made his way to the telephone table, where there were always cigarettes in a box.

Betty had cut her smoking down to five a day, which she smoked when Julian wasn’t with her. Now she sighed, and glanced at Larry, who looked down at his plate.

His father, Larry thought, was mainly furious because he hadn’t been able to smoke for the last several months, because the doctor had made him work shorter hours—little things like that. How could anyone get so angry just over hamsters? It was absurd. Larry said, “Excuse me,” and left the table.

He went upstairs and wept on his bed. He knew it wouldn’t last long, and it felt good to weep and get it over with. He was feeling a bit sleepy, when the sound of the bulldozer jolted him alert. They were at it again. His hamsters! Larry ran downstairs, with an idea of again trying, with his cardboard box, to save any refugee hamsters. He almost bumped into Julian who was coming in the kitchen door.

“Betty, you wouldn’t believe it!” said Julian to his wife who was at the sink. “There’s not a square foot of that damned lawn that isn’t undermined! Larry—Larry, you take the cake for destroying property! Your
own
property!”

“Julian, please!” Betty said.

“I can’t understand why you hadn’t noticed it!” Julian said to her. “I can poke one of these crutches—
any
place and it sinks!”

“Well, I don’t go around poking crutches!” Betty came back, but she was really wondering if she could get one of her tranquilizers (ancient pills, she hadn’t taken one in at least two years) down Julian, or should she simply ring the doctor, their family doctor? Suppose he had another heart attack? “Darling, would you take one of my Libriums?”

“No!” said Julian. “I haven’t time!” He turned on his crutches and went out again.

Larry went timidly out, drifted towards his hamster warrens, and felt a warm, happy relief at seeing Pirate and Gloria munching away at their bowl of wheat grain, and seven or eight young hamsters asleep in the hay.

“Hey there, Larry!” called his father. “Gather some firewood, would you? Twigs! From anywhere!”

Larry took a deep breath, hating it, hating his father. His father was going to try to smoke the hamsters out. Larry obeyed with leaden feet, picking up twigs from under hedges and rose bushes, until after five minutes or so Julian yelled at him to move a little faster. Larry’s mother had come out, and Larry heard her vaguely protesting, and then she too was recruited for his father’s awful work. Betty took stakes from the toolhouse, stakes that had been destined for tomato plants, Larry knew.

As Larry advanced towards the barbecue grill on the terrace, he caught sight of something that made him freeze, then smile. A pair of hamsters stood on their hind legs in the laurel, chattering as if talking to each other, and in an anxious way.

“Larry, take that stuff to the grill!” Julian called, and Larry moved.

When Larry looked again, the hamsters were not there. Had he imagined them? No. He had
seen
them.

Kar-
rumph!
The bulldozer bit out another hunk.

Betty joined Larry at the grill, poured a bit of paraffin on the charcoal, and struck a match. Larry dutifully added his twigs.

“Hand me the stakes, dear,” Betty said.

Larry did so. “He’s not going to stab them with the stakes, is he?” asked Larry, suddenly near tears. He wanted to fight his father with his fists. If he’d only been able to tackle his father man to man in a fight, he wouldn’t be about to cry now, like a coward.

“Oh no, dear,” said his mother in her artificially soft voice, which always meant some crisis was at hand. “He’s just going to smoke them out. Then you can catch them and put them back in the warren.”

Larry didn’t believe a word of it. “And what about the little ones? All underneath? Without their parents?”

Betty only sighed.

Grimly, Larry watched his father poking with the tip of one of his crutches at the ground. He knew his father had found a hamster hole, and was trying to make it bigger, so a burning brand would go down there.

“Take these to your father, dear,” said Betty, handing Larry two burning sticks at least three feet long. “Never mind if they go out. Hold them away from you.”

Larry trudged across the lawn with them.

“Ha!” laughed one of the workmen. “You’ll need more than that!”

Larry pretended not to hear. He handed Julian the stakes without looking into his face.

“Thanks, my boy,” Julian said, and stuck a smoking stick at once into a hole four inches in diameter. The stake all but disappeared and showed just a few inches above the ground. “Ah, there we are!” Julian said in a tone of satisfaction. “Take this. Follow me.”

Larry took back one stake, whose flame had gone out, but whose smoke made Larry close his eyes for an instant. His father had found two holes, the next just a yard or so away. The second stake went into this one.

“Splendid! More sticks, Larry!”

Larry walked back towards the terrace. The boomerang hole was now pretty deep, already looking like a boomerang shape, and Larry kept clear of it. He could not bring himself to glance at it, lest he see more destroyed hamster homes. But the two hamsters he had seen above ground cheered him greatly: maybe they’d all have time to escape before they were overcome by asphyxiation. Larry carried more stakes to his father, six, eight, maybe twelve. The sun was sinking. The bulldozer pulled back and dropped its toothy scoop as if intending to rest for the night.

“Hamsters, come out!” Larry said aloud. “It’ll be dark soon!
Night!
” There must be some escape holes left, he thought.

The big rectangular lawn smoked from a dozen spots, but Larry was delighted to see that two or three stakes showed no smoke at ground level. He had relit several for his father. The puppy, Mr. Johnson, had retreated to the house, not liking the smoke.