The Right Thing To Do
by Steve Cave

In the fleeting instant known as college, what man perceives as the right thing to do is quite often the wrong thing to do. Getting liquored up, streaking bare-ass naked through the quad, and scaling a chain link fence to evade campus police may seem like the right thing at the time: the resulting accolades from friends and colleagues can provide a permanent gold star on one's social resume.

(Descending the fence's other side and leaving a sizeable chunk of scrotum attached to the fence top may mitigate the "rightness" of the effort, but probably only slightly.)

As years pass and social mores shift, the normal man draws on past experiences (such as shredding his ballsack) and becomes more adept at choosing the right thing to do. But in life, right is seldom an epic battle or a dramatic naked chase sequence; in fact, right can be rather mundane - perhaps even distasteful. Right is rarely sexy; right is rarely fun. But essential to becoming a real man is ensuring that right be done.



Charlie, my 16-month-old son, gets up most mornings at around 6:00. Though not an early-riser, I enjoy getting up and spending time with the little guy. I change his diaper, give him a bottle, and from there we gravitate toward one of three activities, two of which don't suck.

Option One: He says "hockey" in a dialect only I understand, prompting me to fetch our two mini plastic hockey sticks. We smack a tennis ball around the living room for a while, at some point he slashes me, and we fall to the floor and brawl. It's the type of thing men imagine they will do with their sons even before they have kids. It's macho.

Option Two: He says "Elmo" over and over until I put on his "Elmo in Grouchland" DVD. Watching a squeaky-voiced puppet prance around like a sissy is not at all macho and sucks on the surface, but it allows me to relax on the couch, read the sports page and drink a cup of coffee while my boy drifts off into a TV-trance. Sports page + coffee + quiet kid = enjoyable activity for Daddy.

Option Three: He grabs my hand and leads me to our enclosed porch room where he sits on the floor, insisting I do the same, and presses his face against the window. We then stare outside at the band of squirrels that inhabit our backyard as they engage in typical rodent tomfoolery. If I try to get up, Charlie throws a fit, so I don't bother. Spying on squirrels may be good times for a one-year-old, but for a grown man with a cranky back, who can't get comfortable sitting on the floor, it flat-out sucks. (By the way, I am suspicious of any 30-year-old male who can sit comfortably Indian-style, or "criss-cross-applesauce" as my daughter's overly PC pre-school teachers call it.) But, alas, I do it anyway; it's the right thing to do.

A byproduct of watching the squirrels for half an hour, twice a week, is that I have "gotten to know" the cast of characters for whom my yard serves as stage for their shenanigans. There is a core group of four we see every time that I've given names to. There's "Bushy" (bushy tail), "Whitey" (more white than normal on chest), "Blacky" (an unusually dark coat, quite lovely actually), and "Chubby" (a portly fellow as far as squirrels go). I'm also pretty sure the squirrels have gotten used to seeing Charlie and me perched in the window: he wide-eyed with a goofy, drooly grin, me bored out of my skull with a surly "I-can't-wait-until-it's-time-to-go-to-work" expression on my face. If they've come up with a nickname for me, I'm certain it's "dickhead", however that translates in squirrelese.

One Friday morning in January, one of those freakishly cold sub-zero days we endured in Boston this winter, I labored through a particularly awful episode of squirrel gawking. The little guys were lethargic from the arctic air - sluggishly rummaging for sticks and leaves to reinforce their nests against the elements, with very little of the chasing, wrestling and mirth making that get my kid juiced up. Charlie looked bored. We cut the session a bit shorter than usual and I left for work - unaware that my squirrel dealings for the day were far from over.

I returned home, happy that it was Friday and looking forward to an evening of relaxation - a few beers, a Bruins game, staying warm by the fire, maybe some romance if the lady was lucky. I walked through the door and cued the kids with "Big Poppa's in the houuuuuuse!" in my best gangsta-rap voice. (The wife hates it, and I'm pretty sure it actually frightens the children, but it amuses the hell out of me.) The kids ran into the kitchen and gave me a hero's welcome as usual - my absolute favorite part of the day - and my wife soon followed wearing a look of concern.

"We have a situation," she said to me. A "situation?" WTF? I avoid "situations" at all costs. Big Poppa is The King of Situation Avoidance. If I'd known there was a "situation" at home, I'd have worked late or stopped at the local for a couple of cold ones. "Situations" always cut into leisure time and often involve activities that suck.

My wife explained that Mary our animal-loving neighbor knocked on the door a few minutes before with news that a quivering squirrel with a head wound was flailing about by the side of our house. Frantic, she explained that her husband Tony would normally take care of it, but he is out of town, and the police won't do anything about it, and animal control is not answering the phone, and she just can't stand to watch it suffer, so "please ask Steve to put the mortally wounded critter out of its misery!"

Besides gutting a striped bass here and there, I'd never intentionally killed anything larger than an insect. How exactly does one carry out such a thing? I was unnerved. I sat down at the computer and did a quick Google search: "humane squirrel execution." Nothing but porn came up in the results. After book-marking a few of the more interesting looking sites, I opened a beer and told my wife I'd take care of the "situation"… later. I knew it would suck, but I had to do anyway; it was the right thing to do.

I drink fast when I'm nervous. Whether I'm watching the Sox blow a three-run lead late in the seventh game of the ALCS because the half-wit manager was saving the bullpen for Game 8 (I'm still bitter; fuck you, Grady), or whether I'm fretting over the looming task of snuffing out a crippled squirrel, they go down easier. So after two hours and seven or eight beers, the kids were asleep, and I joined my wife on the couch to watch a TiVo'd episode of 24.

Since the initial "Welcome home; there's a 'situation'" conversation, the "situation" had gone unmentioned, and by this time I had begun tricking myself into thinking that I could avoid it altogether… maybe just let nature take its course. Just as I started to put the whole thing out of my mind, my wife asked, "Aren't you going to take care of that squirrel?"

"Of course I am, I just thought maybe you wanted me to wait until you went to bed. I thought it might, um, upset you," I said.

"No, do it now," she said firmly, "I just saw Mary peek out the window to see if it was still there." So off I went, half in the wrapper and without a plan, but determined to do the right thing.

After bundling up to combat the bitter cold, armed with flashlight and liquid courage, I went out to the garage to find equipment appropriate for exterminating a maimed squirrel:

• A hoe? No, I'd prefer to avoid decapitation.
• Spade? No, see hoe.
• Two-by-four? Nah, not confident I'd get the job done with one strike. (I didn't want this thing to turn into one of those piñata-type cluster-fucks where little kids flail away at a dangling donkey for half an hour until an adult becomes so annoyed that he grabs the bat and whacks the shit out of the piñata himself. I wanted this to be an efficient, single-blow operation.)

At this point I hadn't even seen the squirrel (maybe it wasn't there anymore), so I decided to scout out the "situation" and then figure out how to deal with it. I walked around to the side of the house and shined the flashlight up and down the grassy area. It was nowhere to be found. Maybe it miraculously recovered and took off on its own power, or perhaps some opportunistic predator happened upon the scene and did the job for me. Relieved, and freezing my ass off, I turned to head inside.

Then I heard something, a faint squeak and some rustling leaves. I followed the sound around the corner to the back patio. There it was. The little critter had convulsed itself all the way down the slope on the side of the house and around the corner to the back yard. I shined the light on its frightened, bloodied face.

"Sweet Jesus," I muttered, and my heart sank… "Blacky?" There was no mistaking him; he was the most recognizable of his four-varmint posse. I hadn't thought of the possibility that the squirrel I was commissioned to kill would be one of the four on this planet that I actually knew. The suck rating of this "situation" was now off the charts.

I composed myself, remembering that I was still without an implement for putting this animal down. Then I realized that the helpful little fellow had answered the question of "how should I kill you?" for me: he had come to rest up against a small stack of loose cinder blocks that formed a knee-high wall between the patio and the side yard.

I owed it to Blacky to make this swift. I lifted a block above my head and paused for a final look. At that moment I swear the twitching ceased, his crippled body relaxed, and (this part might have been the beer talking) he nodded his approval. This gave me great comfort.

"Farewell Blacky," I said. I then spiked the block of cement with all my might down upon his tiny, tortured body, covering my ears as soon as it left my hands to block the sound of the bone-shattering collision. I removed the cinder block, confirmed he was no longer with us, and scooped up Blacky's broken, pancaked remains with a snow shovel. I carried him to the compost pile along the tree line of my rear yard, covered him with some debris, and went inside.

"I took care of it," I told my wife. That's all I said.

The next morning I got up with Charlie as usual. He rarely chooses the same post-bottle activity two days in a row, but again he grabbed my hand and led me to the porch room. We sat and watched what was now a trio of squirrels bustle about the yard. The cold had moderated, and the critters played with more vigor - amusing Charlie more than they had the morning before. It still sucked for me, but somehow less so than usual.

And it was the right thing to do.