Inside, Where the Wild Things Are

I wandered back to our utility room the other night to feed the cats and was confronted by an animal scratching at a wastebasket in a far corner.

I couldn’t see what it was, but instinct told me it wasn’t one of ours. When Cat One and Cat Two enter the room, they do so with intense caution and hesitancy and are rarely waiting for me when I arrive. They are more shadow than substance.

We live in wild L.A., and animal intrusions are not uncommon. The utility room is left open to the outside until the cats come in, at which time the door is closed to protect the little dears from night-hunting predators.

Anything could come waltzing in, from raccoons to unregenerated hippies still existing on beer and cat food.

When I heard the scratching at the wastebasket, I instantly shut the door that leads from the room into the main house to protect myself from the unknown, the way screaming women hid from werewolves in those old Lon Chaney Jr. movies.

I yelled at my wife, “There’s an animal in the utility room!”

It’s on Page 361, Section 42, of the Funk & Wagnalls Manual for Husbands, to wit: “When danger threatens, holler for your woman, then push her in front of you.”

“That’s what cats are,” she said, “animals. Feed them.”

“This isn’t a cat animal.”

“Well, you were a Marine. Flush it out!”

Flushing out was never a part of my training. A drill instructor simplified our goals in perilous situations by saying, “If it moves, shoot it.”

I don’t have a gun, but I do have a ceremonial sword given to me by a friend from Kuwait. The same D.I. pointed out in his own primitive way that sticking an enemy with a bayonet was almost as much fun as shooting it.

While I saw little amusement using a sword to do in a small animal, I was not about to turn my house over to it.

I felt like a character out of an Alexandre Dumas epic as, cutlass in hand, I opened the door to the utility room and turned on the light. Staring at me from inside a wooden recycling box was an animal with a long, pointed nose.

For a moment, I thought it was an oversized rat, but then I realized it was a possum.

In the few seconds that we stared at each other, the question arose in my mind: Do I have the raw Marine devotion to duty that would allow me to stick a possum? I pictured the D.I., a sergeant with the attitude of a serial killer, and knew he’d track me down if I didn’t stick the possum.

I wavered.

“What’s going on back there?”

I could hear Cinelli coming down the hall. I closed the door.

“It’s a possum,” I said.

“Hey, that’s cute. Oops, shouldn’t have said that. I know how much you hate cute.”

She opened the door to peek in. “There’s nothing there.”

“It’s in the recycling box.”

She went in. “There’s nothing in the box.”

A closer look revealed that items had been knocked down from shelves below a makeshift attic. It’s where we store stuff we don’t want but can’t bear to throw away. A sort of halfway house for junk.

It didn’t take Charlie Chan to figure out that the possum had gone into the attic for safety and was tucked among those things.

Cinelli looked upward and shook her head. “You got a big problem there, Mac,” she said, and left me standing with a sword in hand and a cute thing in the attic.

I put the dog Barkley into the room for about 20 minutes, assuming that as a springer spaniel, he was probably an instinctive flusher. But when I opened the door, I found he’d eaten the cats’ food and gone to sleep on their blanket. So much for man’s best friend as a possum hunter.

After leaving messages for people I thought might know possums, I received a return call from David Diliberto, director of field operations for the city’s Department of Animal Services. He said not to worry, possums might hiss and drool as a warning, but most of the time they’ll either run away or, well, play possum.

He did warn, however, that they have more teeth than any other North American mammal and they’re needle sharp. Grabbing at them, he said, might not be a good idea, adding, “Sprinkle a little flour by the door and you can tell by the footprints if your possum has left.” If ever.

An Internet Web site suggested that I could locate the beast by its scent and then trap it. I asked Cinelli how she thought a possum might smell, and she mentioned the odor of a drinking friend of mine in Oakland named Freddie, who was known not to bathe frequently. I ignored her comparison. The guy may have been a little gamy, but I don’t think he smelled like a possum.

I found nothing of value online regarding possum nuisances until I hit upon a Web page called “The Possum Cookbook.” Here were recipes for possum kabob, possum pot pie, possum stew and so on. Possum creole appealed to me the most, but in order to obtain the possum chunks required, one had to have the possum first, which I didn’t have.

“You harm that animal,” Cinelli warned, “and I turn you in for the reward.”

In the end, I didn’t do anything but sprinkle flour by the door. The possum, sensing my hostility, wandered off on his own, leaving his little rat prints behind. I was glad to be rid of him, but I couldn’t help wondering how a possum tasted.

If he smelled anything like Freddie, I probably wouldn’t have eaten him anyhow.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He is at al.martinez@latimes.com.