The Importance Of Rats In The Gables

So we found out our house had rats. This surprised me. I always thought rats mainly hung out in gritty urban neighborhoods, and we live in Coral Gables, a grit-free community that keeps property values up by making pretty much everything illegal. You get fined for painting your house a non-approved color; if you left a tire in your yard, you’d get the death penalty. That’s how serious they are about property values in the Gables. So I just assumed it wasn’t zoned for rats.
But they’re there. The way we found out is that one of them — let’s call him Stu — died in the bowels of our house. My wife smelled Stu immediately. Like many women, she has supernatural powers of smell; she can detect a single molecule of rancid milk at a range of 1,000 yards. I, on the other hand, never smell anything. I routinely eat foods that expired during the Civil War. And even I could smell Stu. It was disgusting. It reminded me of college, when I shared a dorm room with Bob Stern, and we did our laundry basically every other Christmas.

Fortunately I’ve been a homeowner for a long time, and without tooting my own horn of masculinity, I will say that I have developed a fair amount of expertise. So I knew exactly what to do about Stu, which is the same thing I do about all other household problems; namely, call a man with a truck.
Specifically I called a guy named Robert, who came over in his truck and confirmed, after approximately five seconds of nasal investigation, that there was indeed a dead rat somewhere. This was followed by two days of pounding by men armed with tools, at the end of which Stu was (a) still dead, and (b) still somewhere in the bowels of our house. Robert told us, regretfully, that Stu had chosen to kick the bucket in a particularly inaccessible and structurally critical bowel. He said our options