Flihad

         I don’t remember anything bad happening to our pets when I was growing up. Occasionally, one would get run over and we’d have to get a replacement pet but none of the many cats and dogs we’d had over the years ever really did anything more inconvenient than poop on the rug. And even that, if it was around Christmas, could be fun. All you need is a can of shellac, a few paperclips, and two parents with a sense of humor and you’ve got yourself a new angel.
         That’s why it came as such a shock to me that my current pet had fleas. It seemed so improbable. My dainty little kitten has fleas? It was like finding out the Queen has crabs. How could this happen?
         I know we’re not the cleanest family in the world. I’ve been known to keep a stack of paper plates in the cupboard for those special times when every dish in the house is dirty and I don’t feel like climbing Mount Sponge to waste an entire evening scrubbing burnt rice out of aluminum pots.
         But still, fleas? I always thought the people who got fleas were the ones who drive around town with rottweilers chained to the bed of their pickups. The kind of people who keep engine parts in their living room and know what NASCAR stands for.
         People like us don’t get fleas. I read hardcover nonfiction. I watch foreign films and shop at a co-op. I drink green tea in the mornings and laugh smugly to myself when I hear someone confuse the word etymology with entomology. People like us don’t get fleas.
         When I say ‘us’ I mean my son and I. My son is 11 years old and is completely covered in fleabites. They haven’t bothered me but my son looks like he has chicken pox, hives, acne and malaria all at the same time. When we go swimming at the Y, mothers shield their children. I hear them talking about the thoughtless parent that would bring such a contagious child to a swimming pool. So far it’s easier to sit quietly at the back of the bleachers than try to explain that I’m raising my son in a house filled with tiny blood-sucking vermin.
         We tried giving the cat flea baths but it didn’t help. I’m not sure which is worse fleabites or cat scratches. The instructions on the bottle said to wrap the cat in a towel afterward to dry her off, but I almost put the hissy little thing in the microwave. I would have too if there had been a button that read CAT next to the one that read POPCORN.
         When my kid’s teacher called me the following Wednesday to tell me that she was concerned the class ferret had caught something from him I knew it was time for drastic measures. I declared a holy war on the fleas – a flihad. I asked everyone I knew what poison worked best. A surprising number of them were shocked I would even consider bringing toxic chemicals into the house. Everyone gave me their own special recipe for dealing with fleas.
         “Wash everything you own in lemon juice.”
         “Dry your laundry over a beehive.”
         “Put on all your clothes and sit in the garage with the engine running for two hours.” (that was my ex-girlfriend’s idea)
         One family who owns an organic farm told me to eat five cloves of garlic a day and put an onion in my pants.
         None of these people, I have to admit, have any fleas. Of course none of them have neighbors either. A lot of my friends live in old school buses on the outskirts of town and can identify 25 kinds of mushrooms. Some of which are legal to possess.
         One person gave me a bag of diatomaceous earth. Diatomaceous earth is made from the spiky skeletons of microscopic animals. I wasn’t real sure how it was supposed to work. The fleas either ate the skeletons or sat on them. Either way it was supposed to kill them. It seemed like a pretty horrible way to go. I wouldn’t want to die from eating a porcupine or sitting on a pineapple.
         Even worse, the stuff is also dangerous for humans. Big red letters on the back of the bag warned me against taking a single breath while spreading this stuff. I don’t know what you do if your house is so big it takes more than one breath to walk through it. Hire a pearl diver I guess. After I locked the cat out on the balcony, I put on my 65-cent dust mask, a yellow raincoat, old sweats, rubber boots, a pair of Playtex Living gloves and went to work. I covered the whole apartment in fine white dust. I looked like a deranged beekeeper painting the 50-yard-line at the Superbowl. I didn’t care. If it would keep the kid in school and out of the smallpox ward I would have done it naked in a windstorm. I am not homeschooling my kid.
         A week later the cat and the kid were still scratching. In fact, they looked worse than before. Maybe the fleas were snorting the powder and working overtime.
         More friends chimed in with advice.
         “You gotta get the eggs. If you don’t get the eggs buried in the carpet you’ll never get rid of those fleas.”
         Eggs? What eggs? These things have eggs? Nobody told me about eggs. Is this some kind of horrible Easter trick played on Jews?
         It was time to take the final step in my war on the fleas. They had survived the carpet bombing, now it was time for biological weapons. I didn’t care if I had to strap the fogger to the cat’s back. I was going to show these fleas who was the higher life form if I had to kill every other life form to do it.
         I went to Home Depot, the place where they let stock boys chase customers with forklifts. If anyone sold cans of black death it’d be these guys. I found three different cans of aerosol doom and checked the list of active ingredients. I was looking for words like napalm, Agent Orange, mustard gas. Instead I saw tetramethrin and permethrin. Was that good? I imagined the methrin brothers as a chemical Earp family ridding the last frontier of renegade fleas. On the front of the can there was a picture of a bug lying on its back with its legs in the air and its tongue sticking out. That seemed good. I didn’t want to just kill these fleas, I wanted them to suffer.
         For I am a horseman of the apocalypse now. I ride a black steed and swing my credit card like a scythe. I want my name to go down in flea history as Paul the Impaler, the mighty Khan with a ten thousand Mongols behind me, thundering out of the mountains, each armed with a can of Sure-Shot D-Con.
         I want fleas 50 years from now to hear about the Great Exodus from the Currington apartment.
         “You larvae think you have it tough? I was in apartment eight, October 5th, 2002 when the great white gas clouds rolled down off the drapes.” A tear would form along the edge of his multifaceted eye. He’d wipe it away with a hairy foreleg, unable to go on.
         I didn’t think of these bugs as the friendly little creatures from Charlotte’s Web or James and the Giant Peach. These were Starship Trooper bugs. Sigourney Weaver bugs. I imagined them in tiny jackboots herding happy caterpillars and crippled ladybugs into concentration camps the size of matchbooks.
         There would be no military tribunal for these fleas. No jury of their peers to judge the seriousness of their crimes and the extent of their involvement. These fleas must be destroyed, for I am The Redeemer of Souls, Protector of the Meek, Bringer of Justice to a Land Forsaken. Vengeance shall be mine. As a child of the tribes of Abraham I will scratch no more forever.
         I bought all three kinds of foggers. I went across town to a hardware store and bought two more. I went to the vet and picked up a can so big it looked like it should have had fins and a nosecone.
         I met a Vietnam vet in a dark alley who handed me a small box of white powder and whispered, “This stuff will knock your eyes out, Man.” I didn’t know if I should snort it or pour it on my carpet.
         Saturday morning I used everything I had all at once. I put three foggers in each room, lit the fuses and ran out. We ran down the stairs and across the street. I wasn’t sure what how much pressure the windows could take so we walked ten blocks to a park downtown just to be sure. I didn’t want to be there in case the building blew up in a shower of dead bugs and Dean Martin albums.
         Six hours later we came back. With handkerchiefs covering our mouths, we walked from room to room surveying the carnage. It looked like a scene from All Quiet on the Western Front. A dozen different species of insects lay dead in the bathtub. On the kitchen counter lay half a dozen flies, dead in the butter. How strange, I thought, that in their final moments they chose to wallow knee-deep in a pool of Land O’ Lakes unsalted. I wondered, if I had the choice, would I choose to die with my head stuck in a bucket of rainbow sherbet in a Basket-Robbins?
         My son started to feel bad about all the destruction. I explained to him that the nurse wasn’t going to let him back in school if we didn’t get rid of the bugs. And if he didn’t go back to school he would never learn long division or where Hawaii is on a map, and the fleas would have won. For our children’s sake, and our children’s children’s sake, we did what we had to do. God bless apartment eight.
         It’s been almost a month now and the fleas haven’t returned. Biotechnology and good old-fashioned American Know-how has triumphed again. My kid is back in school, our chemical burns are starting to fade, and the doctor says my respiratory problems will probably go away by the end of summer.