The Viking.

So, Jonny, AKA the kid, was back over Christmas. A delightful time where we both made ample use of our shared office. Then it happened on Dec. 18.

Strangely, I woke up before noon on this Thursday. When I did, I texted the kid regarding the rent being due. I had my half and was willing to meet down at the office. He responded with, “Sweet, I’m here showing my dad the place.”

This made me worry a slight bit because, when I left the night before, as a joke, I drew a snowman with a misplaced carrot on the whiteboard in the back room. Granted, this wasn’t the first joke like this I’d left in the back room. I wrote back, “Haha, you are? You get to the back room?” His reply did not ease my nerves as he said, “I saw, yes,” then, “Also, I just encountered a mouse.” And just like that, the day went to hell.

When I arrived at the office, no one was there, and I refused to get out of the car. The kid had run to get some poison. When he returned, we formed a united front and entered the building together. That being said, I made the kid go in first. The mouse had been spotted running towards the north wall. I made use of this information by staying by the south wall and the door. The kid puttered around, dropping bits of poison. I remained the sentry nearest the exit.

A blur of black fur went dashing along the floor near the north wall. I screamed at the top of my lungs. I ran out of the office, slamming the door behind me. I then continued to run down the sidewalk.

As I ran down the sidewalk, no air in my lungs, tears in my eyes, a cop car pulled to a stop on the street in front of me. The sun glared window rolled down, and there my oxygen-deprived eyes saw Matt, A.K.A. The Jolly Green Giant, a friend, and not a cop, nor under arrest. He was doing a ride-along with Tama Officer Tyler Ayala-Pagan, another person I know. The two of them looked at me with concern, the fact that I was actually running being the biggest sign of trouble. I told them about the mouse. They laughed.

Jolly Green, who is so tall his head is nearer the clouds than the pavement, stated that if it were a spider, that would be another issue.

Somewhere, along the line, the kid made it out of the office and found me talking to Jolly Green and Officer Ayala-Pagan. Frankly, I’d forgotten I’d left him for dead. Jolly and the officer offered a multitude of solutions between giggles, one being shoot the thing. I said, “Maybe, if I see it again, I’ll just call 911, and you can come down and shoot it.” Officer Ayala-Pagan said that if that happened, he’d release his body camera footage of me screaming. I said I was good with that as long as it was gone. They laughed and went on about their day.

Not wanting to return to the office, the kid and I decided to jaunt over to Hardon’s and pay the rent. Once they saw my face, they knew something was up. I retold the happenings to them. Marty then starts saying, “Ain’t it always the big guys with the beards that are afraid of the mice.” I said, “I’ll throw on another 20 to this month’s rent if you go down and kill that thing right now.” Marty said yeah yeah, but assured us he’d send someone down to put out some more poison. That’s when I remember the snowman and all the other jokes on the whiteboards in the back room. I figured if we did anything else that day, we had to get those off the whiteboards.

After a quick trip to get some sticky traps, we were back at the office. Marty’s guy had already been there and gone, so there was little use in changing the whiteboards. I figured the kid could take care of most of everything else, but I’d left a pile of paintings on the floor in the back room, and I didn’t want anything getting into them. So, I huffed, and I puffed, and I psyched myself up, and I ran into the backroom, threw the paintings on a table, ran back out, then took my inhaler once again.

The kid decided to do the same with the sticky traps. He took one, opened it up, ran into the office, dropped it and ran out of the office. We found this plan had one problem: the sticky traps were falling sticky side down. However, he ran back in, righted them, and ran back out again. After multiple traps were set up, the kid came out and said, “I can hear it.” I responded with, “bleh,” and cringed.

The thought was that it was already in a trap, or we needed to scare it into a trap. Either way, neither one of us was prepared to deal with those scenarios. That’s when the kid said, “What about the Viking?” It was brilliant. I called him. He was at home. I asked him if he was afraid of mice; the answer was an obvious no. I said we needed him at the office. He said he’d put his pants on. We were grateful.

The kid and I paced outside in the cold, awaiting the Viking’s arrival. Every once in a while, the kid would dash inside for a moment to see if he still heard anything. As we waited, I said, “He’s gonna laugh at us for calling him about this.” That’s when his truck pulled up.

Now, if I used every word I knew in the English language, I’d still come up wanting in my descriptions of my friend the Viking. When my friend, since second grade, parked his truck and came over to us that day, he pulled off an entrance straight out of a movie.

Once parked, the first glimpse we had of the Viking was his boots hitting the pavement. Walking around his truck, we saw him; he wore jeans with the cuffs folded and a red plaid lumberjack overshirt. Sitting atop his head was one of the biggest fur hats I’d ever seen, and dangling from his mouth was a cigarette.

It was at the sight of him that I realized we were just boys; we had to call in a man. The Viking sauntered up to us, flicked his cigarette away, and said, “I hear you boys have a mouse problem.” I laughed hard; it was awesome. If I live to be 100, that will still be one of the greatest entrances I’ve ever seen.

It took the Viking less than a minute to walk in, grab a trap with the mouse on it, and walk out again. He tossed it in a dumpster like a shrug. We all then went inside and hung out for a while. The Viking continued to consult and be on call for us two morons, especially in the following few days. We were lucky to have him.

So, I don’t know what you do when you see a mouse, but what do I do? I call a Viking.