Berck and I are now the proud “parents” of a new gerbil. It happened like this…

I was heading out the door to a job interview when I noticed a black and white cat crouched by the tire of the car parked next to the Miata. I recognized the cat; I often see him roaming the parking lots of our apartment complex. In fact, one evening when we had our door wide open to let the evening breeze in, I looked up to the see the cat all the way through the doorway, poking his nose around to see who was inside…though he dashed off when I stood up and greeted him with, “Hi, cat!”

But now as approached our car, the cat completely ignored me. He was intently staring at something emerging from behind the other side of the tire. A gerbil! I froze and thought to myself, I am about to witness a death. The thought of rescuing the gerbil occurred to me, but only briefly. Rodents are cheap and don’t live long, and this one’s owner had most likely already given it up for lost or dead. Still, I felt obligated to watch its death, not that I wanted to; it just seemed the proper respect to pay an animal I was declining to rescue.

But the cat didn’t pounce. And the gerbil didn’t try to run away. It simply walked to the other side of the tire, while the cat passed to the opposite side. I amused myself with the cartoonish idea that these two natural enemies were actually friends, out playing in the parking lot. I had to leave, and the two animals were continuing their protracted chase further under the car. So I came inside and informed Berck about my surreal encounter. He was standing, blinking, in the bathroom in his boxers, having just awoken.

When I returned from the job interview (for which I was hired on the spot, although it’s just a warehouse job that pays $8 an hour), I found Berck again in the bathroom, this time fully clothed. “Well, did you see your friend?” he asked. In a plastic storage tub by the front door was a little box and a towel with tell-tale rodent droppings on it. Out of the box poked a quivering, whisker covered, orange and white nose. “I glanced out the window and saw the cat playing with him,” Berck admitted. “The cat was poking, trying to make him run. I couldn’t let him toy with him until he killed him!”

I made somewhat of an effort to find the gerbil’s owner (he can’t have gone far…he certainly didn’t walk all the way from Mongolia, where gerbils originated). I went next door to the kleptomaniac kid’s house to ask first. Dad bought us some pepper plants at Wal-Mart when he was here helping us get settled the day after we arrived. We hadn’t gotten around to planting them yet, and they were still sitting in their little containers on the front porch. One afternoon there was a knock at the door, and I opened it to see a little kid with thick black hair and very crooked teeth standing there holding one of the peppers. Behind him, standing back on the sidewalk, a woman my age stood with her arms crossed and a very stern expression on her face.

The little boy took a deep breath, held out the pepper, stared at the ground, and said in a continuous stream, “I’m very sorry I saw this plant and I took it I don’t know why just for the heck of it I didn’t know it was just sitting out in the sun and I’m very sorry…” Here he offered the plant to me. I took it, trying not to laugh out loud, and thanked him. His mother’s expression melted into a smile, and they walked back to their apartment together.

The next day there was another knock, this time the boy’s mother asking to borrow a Phillip’s screwdriver to take her vacuum apart. I figured she meant it when she promised to bring it right back.

So she seemed the logical person to ask first about a missing gerbil. It’s a rather odd thing to knock on someone’s door and ask, “Have you lost a gerbil?” She hadn’t. I asked if she’d like a gerbil if I couldn’t find the owner. “Yes!” she said. I’m not sure which would be worse for the gerbil’s health: the black and white cat or her two boys. But gerbils are cheap and don’t live long anyway.

Next I asked a lady playing with her miniature daschunds in the grass across the street, but she didn’t have a gerbil either. I spotted a couple of Oriental kids playing in the parking lot, so I called to them, “Did you guys lose a gerbil!” They screeched to a halt and nodded. So I went inside and collected the gerbil’s box/nest. It’s a convenient way to pick him up, instead of chasing him around the tub with one’s hand. But when I went back outside, the kids were nowhere to be seen. I heard them, however, giggling and crouched behind an apartment’s porch fence. “Is this your gerbil?” I asked them. They giggled at me and peered into the box, jumping back in surprise to see a living creature inside. They giggled some more and moved closer to get a better look. I was getting the feeling they didn’t speak much English. “Is this your apartment?” Giggles. “What’s his name?” I asked, pointing to the gerbil.

“Minda!” said the little girl, poking herself in the chest. Oh, dear. About that time an Oriental man strolled around the corner. I asked him if the gerbil was his. He looked inside the box with much the same reaction as his kids had, except without the giggling.

“No,” he said. He ordered the kids to come with him in a guttural language. I wondered what he thought about the strange woman in the parking lot, pushing rodents to susceptible children. (“Wanna see my gerbil?”)

I asked a couple of other people in the parking lot, but by the time everyone began arriving home from work, I gave up. I didn’t expect many nine-to-fivers to keep gerbils as pets.

We fed the gerbil a crust of bread, which he held in his hands and chewed furiously for a few minutes. Berck held him and played with him for quite a while. “Do you want to keep him?” he asked. I don’t care. “Do you wanna keep him?” a few minutes later. No. “But you said you didn’t care!” I was getting the idea Berck wanted to keep him. He had found the gerbil FAQ and read it while I was away. “He needs gerbil food and wood shavings,” Berck informed me. “But I think he’s a she. Males are supposed to have two little bumps by their tails.”

So we took an evening trip to Petsmart. While we were there, we bought another betta. (It’s Berck’s gamma betta, my alpha betta.) So now we have two pets, though neither of them have names yet. I’m reluctant to name the gerbil; his…er, her owner could still turn up. But mom is mailing my late mouse Stalin’s cage to us. In the meantime, the gerbil seems quite happy to live in a plastic tub filled with wood shavings, though she tries from time to time to dig through the plastic, making a noise like a CD skipping.

I wonder if the black and white cat is out there searching for his friend…