Problems Come Out of the Woodwork

This column will self-destruct as soon as you have read it. Nothing explosive. It will simply disappear from the page. I have planned it that way because sooner or later I will want to sell my house, and the following column will not make the demand for this house as brisk as I might like.

The other day, my friend David Steinbacher was over, being a good fellow and washing the windows and woodwork. He called me from the sun room and said, “Hey, Zan, can you come and look at this?”

I did and he showed me the outside sill running across both of the windows. The sill looked crumbly. The woodwork was the consistency of feta cheese. Then David said the horrible “T” word and suggested that I call a company his parents had chosen.

These are people who specialize in getting rid of termites. I made an appointment for one of them to come out, survey the possible infestation and give me an estimate.

I haven’t any experience with termite people, but I have had a couple of professional encounters with rat people. I have never understood the lure of either kind of work.

This man arrived and was named Winfred (Wink) Cook. He looked at the windowsill and then made a circuit of the house, even up in the attic where a person could dehydrate and collapse in a matter of seconds.

After 45 minutes of prowling around and up and down, he came in the house and we settled at the kitchen table. He had drawn an outline of the house, indicating in red the locations where he had seen signs of infestation.

First he showed me full-color pictures of termites, a whole army of them and explained how they destroyed wood.

“Wink,” I said. “It’s all right. No more pictures, please. I don’t feel it necessary to recognize them by face.”

Wink Cook was known to his mother as Winker. This admirable man used to sell the Chattanooga News Free-Press on the street corner at the age of 7. The paper cost 7 cents on weekdays and Winker made 2 cents. The Sunday paper was 15 cents and he made 5 cents. I was becoming convinced that this industrious man was equal to my problem.

Then he told me that his son had just bought a bicycle with the money he made from recycling cans. This enterprise delighted me and I asked Wink if we might get back to the bugs at hand, or rather at wall.

We did and Wink explained that I might have the house tented, which would cost about as much as lunch in Paris by way of the Concorde. In addition, he said, even though this method instantly destroys the termites, there is no promise a new colony won’t invade in a few weeks. I asked Wink if he had an alternative.

He did, but not before he told me that he had two dogs and dozens of birds, including a cockateel that asks, “Where’s Wink?” when he is at work and welcomes him home by name at night.

The alternative to the tent is to have the buggy places injected with poison, and then Wink went on to tell me how that worked. He launched into a tale of sex and degradation about the carryings on of the termites that would send us all to the barricades.

The fellows on the outside of the wood carry the poison back into the center of the hive where the queen bug and her court are lolling about in decadent ease, the favorite courtiers romancing the queen bug and fertilizing the eggs. When the scout from outside the tunnel finally makes his way back into the royal apartments, he displays the luscious poisoned wood he has brought and they invite everybody in for an orgy and refreshments. They all loll around, high as Georgia pines on the controlled substances the outer guards have brought in. Some guards.

It takes several weeks before they are gone and during that time, one can only assume that the bugs in the court have suffered terrible withdrawals and have seen the error of their ways. Not a bit of it. They keep munching and partying until they are all quite dead.

Then Wink explained to me the yearly fee for coming back to check for new invasions, to be paid after the first whopper for poisoning this lot. By that time I was as numb as the termites in the inner chamber and when he told me where to sign, I did.

Now that Wink has gone home to his cockateel and I have thought it over, I can see there is only one way out for me. I’ll have to go to Chattanooga and sell the Chattanooga News Free-Press in order to pay for this. I may not be as endearing as the 7-year-old Wink, but it’s that or tell everyone the house is intended to look like Irish crochet.

The column will now disappear.