Gabrielle was an infant the night we were attacked by a flying squirrel.
Now, listen. I'm not afraid of snakes, spiders, moths or bees. But rodents wig me out. I can't tell you why. There's just something not to trust about small, four-legged fury things that can out-run a car and have beady little evil eyes.
This story will live in infamy in the Turner house. It's one of the few told repeatedly, and the details of which increase in color, length, and disproportion to the truth at each new telling. That's because Corrine is the storyteller, because Corrine is not afraid of rodents. Well, not as much as me anyway.
As do all great stories starting with "Corrine and I", this one begins with us in bed.
It was the last waning moments of the evening, after dinner, when the older kids were downstairs arguing over what to watch on television, and Corrine and I had just climbed into bed. Gabrielle, who was 9 months old, was asleep in her crib across the room from us.
Outside our door came a curious sound. Something akin to a doll being thrown down a flight of stairs, followed by a growl. Not a fierce growl, as if from a dog, but a muted growl, as if from a cat that had something in its mouth.
At the time we had two cats, and both were great mousers, so this was not an uncommon sound in our home, a three-story house built in 1850. Our house, when we moved in, was a mouse's version of the Continental Hyatt House, that infamous Hollywood hotel where rock stars flocked in the 1970s and ran riot, throwing televisions off balconies and driving motorcycles down hallways.
Like the great bouncers that they were, our cats disposed of our unruly, drunken mice without impunity. For the first months there, we regularly found the decapitated carcasses of the little hell raisers in the middle of our living room floor or hallways.
"Francesca's got another one," I grumbled to Corrine, who was already sound asleep.
But then came a different noise. The rapid whap-thud-whap of two small bodies wrestling outside our door, and then a hair-raising chit-chit-chit-chittering. I'd heard this sound before, in a science fiction horror movie.
"What is that," I said, loud enough for Corrine to hear me. I may have also elbowed her face.
"Whaaaa? Stop. I was asleep." she growled.
"Did you hear that?"
"No."
"Do cats wrestle with mice?"
"Seriously?" she said, and sat up in a huff.
The wrestling recommenced. Francesca mewed and hissed and her opponent chittered. Goosebumps popped up onto my skin. I was now convinced our cat had cornered the Predator and we were all about to be disemboweled. I turned sharply to her, the covers pulled to my chin.
"What the fuck IS that?!" I asked. I may have stuttered.
"I don't know, Andy," she said, with the same tone she uses when the kids ask the same question for the ninth time.
So like all great horror movies when the main character inexplicably becomes illogical and runs toward axe-wielding mask-wearers, I got out of bed, turned the light on and opened the door. I would love to say it's because I face my fears or that I'm brave. Folks, I don't ever face my fears and I am not brave. I am Priscilla Queen of the Desert who will not allow his wife to tear a Band-Aid off his big toe.
Nevertheless. Here I was, Barney Fife in boxer briefs, opening our bedroom door to let in The Thing.
I may have peed a little when it raced into our room, chased by Francesca. I do remember leaping. From the door into the bed next to Corrine. Corrine yelped.
"WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!?!" she shouted.
"I DON'T KNOW, CORRINE!"
"YOU OPENED THE DOOR, AN-DY!"
"I REALIZE THAT, CORR-INE!!"
We watched and listened. Francesca whined and screamed, digging at our bureau, beneath which she had cornered something vile and angry. Probably someone's dismembered hand now animated by radiation experiments. Ok maybe that was my adrenaline-infused writer's imagination. But still, the whatever was chittering and now stuck beneath our bureau and -
"NEXT TO THE BABY!" Corrine yelled, bruising my arm with her fist. What? She punches like a middleweight.
"I know," I said, bug-eyed and spying the darkness beneath the bureau.
"Andy. GET THE BABY!"
"Me?"
I hoped, in that moment, that Andy Warhol, or Andy Griffith, or maybe Raggedy Andy was standing in our doorway. Certainly they had bigger balls than me. I'm not too proud. Let one of those bastards risk losing their larynx, I reasoned.
"Andy!"
"Ok! Jesus!"
I slid the covers from around my neck, flexed my fingers to get the blood flowing again, and then slowly moved my right leg over the edge of the bed with the same deliberation that Neil Armstrong used in dismounting the ladder to reach the surface of the moon.
My eyes remained affixed to the bureau. Francesca sat and watched me with contempt.
I brought the left leg around and both feet were planted together on the floor. I reached down and groped for something I could defend myself with. I found nothing. Because for the first time in my life I slept in a bed that didn't have shoes or books or pizza crust beneath it. Of course.
"Shit."
I looked at the crib, then the bureau, then the crib.
Crib-bureau-crib-bureau-crib-bureau-crib-bureau-
I leaped toward the crib, snatched my sleeping daughter, turned and leaped back into the bed. (This was a night of leaping. Lots of it). Gabrielle's body warbled limply around my arm, her head lolling like a bobble-head toy. I chucked her at her mother and pulled the covers up to my neck again all with the fluidity of a perfectly executed double play.
"Did you get a look at it?" she asked, placing Gabrielle beneath the covers beside her.
"It's small and wicked fast," I said.
"Ya think?"
"I don't know Corrine, it's bigger than a mouse. Like a squirrel but..."
"But what?"
"But different. Something is different about it," I said. I felt like I was being interviewed by the FBI and trying to describe the guy on the grassy knoll.
"It's a chinchilla," she said with sudden expertise.
"It is NOT a chinchilla," I argued.
"How would you know?"
"Because. A chinchilla...chinchillas are....they're warm-blooded nocturnal animals that only live in tropical locales," I said, like I knew what I was talking about.
"It's night time," she reasoned. "It could be someone's pet."
"Pshaw." I dismissed her.
Because I was now Andy the South American Rodent Expert and no longer Andy, The World's Skinniest, Leaping Pussy.
"Well, anyway. We have to get it," she said.
"Get it?"
"Yeah. We can't let that thing run around our house with the baby."
Because for some reason, when there's a baby in the house, everything matters more. Exposed electrical outlets, exploding toilets, Satan, rabid chinchillas.
"Francesca will get it."
"Yeah. Clearly that's working."
"Well, how am I supposed to get it?"
"I don't know. Get a net."
"We have a net?"
"I don't know."
"Mmmhmmm. Yup. Bingo."
It was at this moment that Francesca, clearly rested now, took a swipe beneath the bureau and dislodged the creature. Corrine screamed. I screamed higher and louder.
Francesca pounced at it and missed. It bolted across the floor, up the nearest curtain and to the top of the window sill where it sat peering over us all.
"WHAT. THE FUCK. IS. THAT?!?!" I shouted.
Francesca rustled the curtain. The thing. The IT. The whatever leaped (told you) into the air and flew...FLEW...down to the bureau where it came to rest.
"IT'S A FLYING. FUCKING. SQUIRREL!" I shouted.
"What?!?!"
"It's a flying squirrel."
"Squirrel's fly?"
"Did you not just see that? A squirrel? With wings? Flying?"
Francesca leaped (right??) onto the bureau and the chase was back on. The squirrel landed on the floor and sprinted out the door, Francesca whining and sprinting in hot pursuit.
"Now!" Corrine shouted and shoved me.
"Now what?!?!?"
"We have to get it."
"Jesus H. Ok. Gimme a second."
I got out of bed and began to do the dance of the helplessly inept. Spinning in circles, searching for weapons. Corrine joined me.
"Wait," I said. "Find a box or something. I'll get something to hit it with."
Corrine vanished out the door. I bounded into Fallon's bedroom and found a tennis racket. We met up again in the hallway at the foot of the stairs leading to the third floor, where we could hear Francesca and the squirrel dodging and parrying, mewing and chittering. Corrine held a cardboard box.
"A tennis racket?" she asked, in the same tone you would ask someone coming to a fishing expedition with a shotgun.
"Come on," I said, leading the way up to the top stair, where I stopped and peered into Ty's bedroom. The one time when leaving his light on was a blessing. I spied Francesca staring up at the top of a window sill and knew the squirrel had found another lofty perch.
"Come on," I whispered to Corrine.
We slunk into Ty's room. We kept our eyes on the squirrel. The squirrel kept one bulgy eye on us and one on Francesca.
"Ok. I'm gonna knock it down, you catch it in the box," I whispered.
"Huh?"
Corrine had started laughing at about the time she noticed me holding a tennis racket downstairs.
Just then, the squirrel (anyone? anyone?) - leaped from the window, flew down to the floor at my feet and I screamed the scream of a 16-year-old girl at an N'Sync concert. I hopped up onto the bed. Corrine, meanwhile, still laughing, began chasing the squirrel around the room, with Francesca as her wing-man.
From my perch on the bed I watched, waving the tennis racket back and fourth like I was preparing to return a back-handed lob.
Corrine - laughing even harder now - flushed the not-a-chinchilla flying squirrel from a corner, and the little bastard leaped up onto the bed with me.
"Jesus fucking christ motherfucker!" I screamed, dancing, pumping my knees high into my chest, the racket flailing over my head, as the squirrel bounced off the bed and into a far corner. Corrine was right there with the box, flipping it onto the squirrel and trapping it. She remained bent over the box. I got down and approached, racket raised in case of a break out.
Corrine, still bent over, turned to me, her face red, laughing the kind of silent laugh of the truly insane.
"I pissed my pants!" she finally shouted, tears flowing.
Francesca sat on the bed, looking down on the spectacle with amusement and disgust.
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