Jimmy went outside to get the dog at bedtime and immediately rushed back in excitedly. “There is a possum in the garage!” He ran downstairs for his pellet gun and back out the front door. Yes, we are a farm, and it might be ok to shoot a varmint, but I do have my Prius parked in the garage, so I hollered on his way by,” You are not going to shoot that thing in the garage, right?” But he was Elmer Fudd on the hunt, on his hands and knees peering under the cars and behind the garbage cans. He even turned the lights out and stood in the dark quietly to try to convince the possum he had gone. No luck. The possum was gone.
But the next morning in the daylight there were telltale signs. Lex’s doggy bed had two turds perched in the middle, too small to be Lex’s and greenish in color. Possum scat. And when I went to the gardening shelf to get an empty flowerpot, there was another green turd on the shelf, 18″ off the ground. It was clear that Jimmy had scared the poop out of the possum and he had climbed up on the shelf to hide.
Joe began collecting possum stories. Barb and Bob caught a baby possum in their yard who reared up and snarled yellow fangs at them. A baby! Connie caught a possum and whacked it with a shovel. It was dead, so she scooped it up with the shovel and put it in the garbage can. The next morning it was gone. It had been playing possum!
The next day when we came home there was a shiny new wire catch-and-release cage on the counter. Jimmy had hunting fever, Jim vs. nature, and had bought a cage to catch the possum. He carefully baited it with dog food, and anxiously went to check it in the morning. No dice. No possum.
The next morning I had forgotten all about the cage when Jimmy came dancing into my bathroom singing a song with two syllables. “Pos-sum!” We all ran out to the garage; there was an angry adolescent possum hissing at Jimmy.
Ah, dat pesky possum. Jimmy got his pellet gun and took the cage out by the burn barrel (possible cremation in mind?). He shot the possum right in the eye. It plopped over dead, bleeding from the eye. Jimmy, full of adrenaline, began walking back to the house, already transitioning to go to work.
He heard the cage rattle and looked back, and WHAT?!? The possum had popped up and was standing there bleeding from the eye. Jimmy hurried back with the gun–going to be late for work–and shot into its ear. It flopped down, dead, bleeding from the ear and the eye. “That’s it, I got it. I am running late for work. I gotta go. Dad, will you bury it please?” He got his sleeping daughters from the house and put them in the car. Isabella asked,” Did you get the possum?” “Nope, no possum,” he said.
So Joe took the shovel out at about 8:00 and found the possum moving and bleeding and hissing. Bloody eye, bloody ear, standing up. Obviously not good timing for the burial. So who did he call? The kindergarten teacher, a widow, limping on a bad hip, looking for the .22 last seen in 1985 when her husband shot the peacocks. Joe tells her, “Avert your eyes.” (Then if she looks, it is her fault. )
Jimmy called Moe Man, the 6’4″ tough guy neighbor with an arsenal of guns and a gun safe. He gladly agreed to come shoot the varmint. However, he did not come till noon, so the kindergarten teacher walked down and saw the tortured possum dying a slow death by the burn barrel, slowly bleeding out from a GSW. She called her son all upset, and he called Jimmy all upset, and Joe said, ” She shouldn’t have looked!”
Joe has announced the sanitized story: Jimmy caught the possum but it escaped from the cage and ran away. In reality, it lies in a shallow grave covered with rocks, serving as a warning to all possums. Stay away!