The Old Man and the Slug

By Steve Sabatka

Bomb cyclone. That’s what the local paper called the deluge that came Zilla-roaring off the Pacific a few weeks ago, bouncing our recycling barrels down the street like tumbleweeds in a spaghetti western and causing the walls and ceiling of my attic bedroom to wail and moan with the phantom voices of keelhauled mutineers from another century.

Sometimes the gusts came so hard and rumbled so loudly that I thought maybe the inevitable, long overdue doom-quake that we try not to think about had finally arrived, to be followed by a towering tsunami that would drown any survivors like extras in an Irwin Allen disaster movie.

These were not what you’d call optimal sleep conditions so, after a few restless hours, I downed a palmful of melatonin and slapped on an extra-strength Breathe Right strip. (Those things help me sleep, but they make me look like a broken-nose boxer.)

When I finally drifted off, I dreamed, not of earthquakes and tsunami, but of a lone figure, dressed in a yellow rain slicker and looking kinda like one of those sea captain wood carvings but even more like the Gorton's Fisherman, standing at the end of a stone jetty, holding an old-timey lantern, and staring out to the black obsidian sea, watching, waiting for something or someone. Mrs. Paul, maybe.

In my dream, I joined the mysterious fisherman, feeling like I was in the weirdest fish stick commercial of all time. I could only think of one thing to say. “Ahoy!”

When the fisherman turned to me, I saw, cast in flickering lantern light, the snapping, snarling face of one of those deepwater horror-fish that explode when brought to the surface. And then, sure enough, BLAMMO! I felt warm fish entrails on my face, tasted something like spoiled cat food and tartar sauce, and snapped awake just like in the movies.

I gave up on sleep and went downstairs to write down the details of my filet-o-fish nightmare before it went off to the dream graveyard. But first, I had to deal with the shimmering awfulness that I knew would be waiting for me.

Don't get me wrong. I love my shack by the sea, my very own fortress of solitude. It's a modified garage, but I have the joint all decked out with cool stuff — like an autographed picture of Cap’n Shipwreck — and a red, hand-woven rug that, in the opinion of my friend, Walter, really brings the room together. All this for $750 a month.

But when I signed my lease, my landlord didn't mention the loathsome comings and goings — and leavings — of the uniquely Oregon wretchedness that always pays me a visit on rainy nights.

Now, if I came down to see muddy Sasquatch footprints on my scarlet rug, if I knew a crypto-hominid had come inside to dry off and rest for a while, and if the old boy had left me at least a half a roll of toilet paper, I wouldn't mind. Much.

But what I find after one of our A-bomb storms are shimmering lines, trails, left on my treasured rug by a repulsive life form, characterized by biologists as Ariolimax columbianus, but better known to Oregonians as the common slug, a big one, too, judging by the amount of the effluvia it leaves behind, and one who has since split the scene like the invertebrate, literally spineless coward that it is.

My red rug nightmare is right out of a horror story written by H.P. Lovecraft, the long-dead author of such creepy classics as “The Lurking Fear,” “The Terrible Old Man” and “The Rats in the Walls.” Far as I know, H.P. never wrote about snails or slugs, but he wrote a lot about revolting creatures, and he used the most ingenious adjectives to describe them, descriptors like “archeozoic,” “biophoid” and, my favorite, “xenofractic.”

This wasn’t my first Lovecraftian brush with nature gone mad.  Fort Bliss, El Paso. 1985. My then-wife and I lived and tried to murder each other in the cheapest off-post apartment we could find, a fake-adobe dive just off Dyer Street with a kidney-shaped pool that had been filled with sand after some drunken tank commander drowned in it. I don't know if Dyer Street is still as cutthroat as it was in those days, if you can still hear gunshots at night, or if the back alleys still trickle with blood and raw sewage, but that's what it was like back then. Sleazy. Sketchy. And, of course, roach-infested. 

Most of our kitchen roaches had the good sense and insectoid humility to scuttle for darkness when the lights came on. But one particular specimen, a biggun, possibly the mutant progeny of roaches that had survived nuke tests at nearby White Sands Missile Range, actually dared to rear up on his bristly back legs and hiss at me through clicking mouthparts. I was a soldier then and felt the urge to defend my home, shabby though it was. So I ended the invader's arthropodal reign with a Zippo lighter and a spat, aerosolized mouthful of 190 proof Everclear, which also set my wife's rice cooker on fire, kicking off another epic domestic disturbance.

Back to Oregon on a recent stormy night. Sure enough, my wormoid nemesis had laid down its usual spoor. But this time, probably because I was up early, the oozing fiend had not made its getaway. There it was, a brownish, five-inch slab of fulgurating undulation, right in the center of my rubescent rug!

I just happened to have a 26-oz. container of salt, otherwise known as slug napalm. As I used my fingernail to pry up the metal pouring spout, and as I chuckled to myself, this Lovecraft tale suddenly became Edgar Allen Poe-etic. Why will you say that I am mad? The villain’s hour had come! The invading mollusk was about to be nevermore!

But then I remembered the irradiated roach that I had drunkenly charred to West Texas bug-ash. Hadn’t I matured, mellowed, since my pistol-packing Everclear days? I had undoubtedly grown older. Wasn’t I wiser and kinder, too?

I kneeled next to my loitering foe, which, sensing my presence, had moved a full quarter-inch, probably headed for the dank safety of home. As I watched its eyestalks, swaying gently, almost hypnotically, from side to side, I realized that the lowly slug and I were both older and slower, that we both made emissions that we couldn’t control as well as we used to, and that more than anything else, we both wanted to live out our remaining days in peace.

Slug, you are my brother. Now I was channeling the title character in Mister Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” There is no one worthy of killing you.

OK, not so much with the brother thing. But I knew, brother or no, icky slime trail or no, I wouldn’t kill the brute.

I carefully plucked the mucilaginous creature from my blood-colored rug. It felt like a filet of raw chicken or a slice of overripe avocado, but pulsing and alive. I wanted to drive out to the country and release the beast, but it isn’t safe to drive in a squall — or steer with a clammy gastropod in one hand — so I settled for the front yard of the apartment complex next door.

As I stepped out into the slashing, Hokusai-print rain, I heard the jangle of a dozen overtaxed windchimes, an arrhythmic chorus of car alarms, distant police sirens, the thundering rotor-beat of a Coast Guard chopper. And what might’ve been a voice, small and as gentle as a church whisper:

“Where are you taking me?”

I whispered back. “Don’t worry. I’m taking you to a new home where you can slink and slither and play with the other slugs!”

Those eyestalks stared up at me with xenophractic hopefulness. “Will there be red rugs there?”

“Lots and lots of red rugs. Big ones, small ones, fluffy ones. Shag, loop-pile, Berber, all the rugs and carpets and runners you’d ever want!”

The slug’s eyes blinked and glistened with anticipation. And trust. I felt guilty about lying, but at the same time, I figured being rug-tricked was better than suffering the same kind of shrivel-shrieking death that took out the bad guys at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

I found a relatively dry place next to one of the apartment buildings and released the slug into the un-mowed grass. Maybe I heard “Born Free” in that murmuring slug voice. Maybe I didn’t.

Soaked to the skin, I went home, headed back upstairs, sacked out, and I didn’t have any more exploding fish stick dreams.

The sun came up a few hours later. The rain slacked to a mere drizzle. On the drive to work, I saw the results of the storm through sleep-deprived eyes and intermittent windshield wipers: Branches and tree limbs in the road. Seagulls huddled in a leeward corner of the Thriftway parking lot. Those recycling buckets and their wind-scattered contents. Utility trucks and linemen. And a bunch of dirty face masks.

By the time I got to school, I was convinced that I hadn’t heard a slug speak or sing and that the entire slimy saga was more a Gary Larson cartoon come to rain-drenched life than anything written by Lovecraft, Poe or Hemingway.

I felt good about sparing the poor, slime-secreting creature and I wondered, if aging humans and disgusting mollusks can get along so peacefully, can’t we all? 

As I pulled into my usual parking space, I was so exhilarated that I broke into song. I’m sure I sounded more like Homer Simpson than Andy Williams, and I altered the lyrics a little:

“Born free, as free as the wind blows

As free as the grass grows

Just stay off my rug!”

It wasn’t until fourth-period that I realized I still wore that Breathe Right strip from the night before — under my COVID mask. Nobody else had noticed.

Steve Sabatka’s young adult novel, “Mister Fishback’s Monster,” is available from Black Bed Sheet Books.