Wild Child and Other Stories Page 23

  Inside, Pets & Company smelled of nature in the raw, every creature in every cage and glassed-in compartment having defecated simultaneously, just to greet him, or so he imagined. The place was superheated. He was the only customer. Bozeman was up on a footstool, cleaning one of the aquariums with a vacuum tube. “Hey, man,” he said, his voice a high sing-song, “Gerard, right? Don’t tell me.” He reached back in a practiced gesture to smooth down his ponytail as if he were petting a cat or a ferret. “You need a rat. Am I right?”

  Gerard found himself fumbling round the answer, perhaps because the question had been put so bluntly—or was it that Bozeman had become clairvoyant in the instant? “Well,” he heard himself say, and he might have made a joke, might have found something amusing or at least odd in the transaction, but he didn’t because Marietta was dead and he was depressed, or so he reminded himself, “I guess so.”

  The rat—he didn’t see it; Bozeman had gone into the back room to fetch it—came in a cardboard container with a molded carrying handle on top, the sort of thing you got if you asked for a doggie bag at a restaurant. The animal was heavier than he’d expected, shifting its weight mysteriously from one corner of the box to another as he carried it out into the snow and set the box on the seat beside him. He turned on the fan after he’d started up the engine, to give it some heat—but then it was a mammal, he figured, with fur, and it didn’t have as much of a need because it could warm itself. And in any case it was dinner, or soon to be. The roads were slick. Visibility was practically zero. He crawled behind the snowplow all the way back to Newhouse Gardens and when he came in the door he was pleased to see that the fire was still going strong.

  All right. He set down the box and then dragged the python’s terrarium across the floor from the bedroom to the living room and set it to one side of the fireplace. Then he lifted the snake—it was noticeably warm to the touch on the side that had been closest to the fire—and laid it gently in the terrarium. For a moment it came to life, the long run of muscles tensing, the great flat slab of the head gearing round to regard him out of its stony eyes, and then it was inert again, dead weight against the Plexiglas floor. Gerard bent cautiously to the rat’s box—would it spring out, bite him, scrabble away across the floor to live behind the baseboard forever as in some cartoon incarnation?—and, with his heart pounding, lowered the box into the terrarium and opened the lid.

  The rat—it was white, with pink eyes, like the lab rats he’d seen arrayed in their cages in the biology building when he was a student—slid from the box like a lump of gristle, then sat up on its haunches and began cleaning itself as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be transported in a doggie bag and dumped into a glass-walled cavern in the presence of a tongue-flicking reptile. Which might or might not be hungry.

  For a long while, nothing happened. Snow ticked at the windows, the fire sparked and settled. And then the snake moved ever so slightly, the faintest shifting of the bright tube of its scales, energy percolating from the deepest core of its musculature, and suddenly the rat stiffened. All at once it was aware of the danger it was in. It seemed to shrink into itself, as if by doing so it could somehow become invisible. Gerard watched, fascinated, wondering how the rat—reared in some drowsy pet warehouse, slick and pink and suckling at its mother’s teats in a warm gregarious pack of its pink siblings, generations removed from the wild and any knowledge of a thing like this snake and its shining elongate bulk—could recognize the threat. Very slowly, by almost imperceptible degrees, the snake lifted its head from the Plexiglas floor, leveling on the rat like a sculpture come to life. Then it struck, so quickly Gerard nearly missed it, but the rat, as if it had trained all its life for just this moment, was equal to it. It sprang over the snake’s head in a single frantic leap and shot to the farthest corner of the terrarium, where it began to emit a series of bird-like cries, all the while fastening its inflamed eyes on the white hovering face of Gerard. And what did he feel? He felt like a god, like a Roman emperor with the power of fatality in his thumb. The rat scrabbled at the Plexiglas. The snake shifted to close in on it.

  And then, because he was a god, Gerard reached into the terrarium and lifted the rat up out of the reach of his python. He was surprised by how warm the animal was and how quickly it accommodated itself to his hand. It didn’t struggle or try to escape but simply pressed itself against his wrist and the trailing sleeve of his sweater as if it understood, as if it were grateful. In the next moment he was cradling it against his chest, the pulse of its heart already slowing. He went to the couch and sank into it, uncertain what to do next. The rat gazed up at him, shivered the length of its body, and promptly fell asleep.

  The situation was novel, to say the least. Gerard had never touched a rat in his life, let alone allowed one to curl up and sleep in the weave of his sweater. He watched its miniature chest rise and fall, studied the intricacy of its naked feet that were like hands, saw the spray of etiolated whiskers and felt the suppleness of the tail as it lay between his fingers like the suede fringe of the jacket he’d worn as a boy. The fire faltered but he didn’t rise to feed it. When finally he got up to open a can of soup, the rat came with him, awake now and discovering its natural perch on his shoulder. He felt its fur like a caress on the side of his neck and then the touch of its whiskers and fevered nose. It stood on its hind legs and stretched from his lap to the edge of the table as he spooned up his soup by candlelight, and he couldn’t resist the experiment of extracting a cube of potato from the rich golden broth and feeding it into the eager mincing mouth. And then another. And another. When he went to bed, the rat came with him, and if he woke in the dark of the night—and he did, twice, three times—he felt its presence beside him, its spirit, its heart, its heat, and it was no reptile, no cold thankless thing with a flicking tongue and two dead eyes, but a creature radiant with life.

  The house was very cold when he woke to the seeping light of morning. He sat up in bed and looked round him. The face of the clock radio was blank, so the electricity must still have been down. He wondered about that, but when he pushed himself up and set his bare feet on the floor, it was the rat he was thinking of—and there it was, nestled in a fold of the blankets. It opened its eyes, stretched and then climbed into the palm he offered it, working its way up inside the sleeve of his pajamas until it was balanced on his shoulder. In the kitchen, he turned on all four gas burners and the oven too and shut off the room to trap the heat. It wasn’t until the kettle began to boil that he thought about the fireplace—and the snake stretched out in its terrarium—but by then it was too late.

  He returned to the pet store the following day, reasoning that he might as well convert the snake’s lair into a rat’s nest. Or no, that didn’t sound right—that was what his mother used to call his boyhood room; he’d call it a rat apartment. A rat hostel. A rat—Bozemen grinned when he saw him. “Not another rat,” he said, something quizzical in his eyes. “He can’t want another one already, can he? But then with Burms you’ve got to watch for obesity—they’ll eat anytime, whether they’re hungry or not.”

  Even under the best of conditions, Gerard was not the sort to confide in people he barely knew. “Yes,” was all he said, in answer to both questions. And then he added, “I may as well take a couple of them while I’m here.” He looked away. “To save me the trip.”

  Bozeman wiped his hands on the khaki apron he wore over his jeans and came out from behind the cash register. “Sure,” he said, “good idea. How many you want? They’re six ninety-nine each.”

  Gerard shrugged. He thought of the rat at home, the snugness of it, the way it sprang across the carpet in a series of little leaps or shot along the baseboard as if blown by a hurricane wind, how it would take a nut in its hands and sit up to gnaw at it, how it loved to play with anything he gave it, a paper clip, an eraser, the ridged aluminum top of a Perrier bottle. In a moment of inspiration he decided to call it Robbie, after his brother in Tulsa. Robbie. Robbie the Rat.
And Robbie needed company, needed playmates, just like any other creature. Before he could think, he said: “Ten?”

  “Ten? Whoa, man, that is going to be one fat snake.”

  “Is that too many?”

  Bozeman slicked back his ponytail and gave him a good long look. “Hell, no—I mean, I’ll sell you all I’ve got if that’s what you want, and everything else too. You want gerbils? Parakeets? Albino toads? I’m in business, you know—pets for sale. This is a pet shop, comprende? But I tell you, if that Burm doesn’t eat them PDQ, you’re going to see how fast these things breed . . . I mean, the females can go into heat or whatever you want to call it at five weeks old. Five weeks.” He shifted his weight and moved past Gerard, gesturing for him to follow. They stopped in front of a display of packaged food and brightly colored sacks of litter. “You’re going to want Rat Chow,” he said, handing him a ten-pound sack, “and a bag or two of these wood shavings.” Another look. “You got a place to keep them?”

  By the time he left the store, Gerard had two wire cages (with cedar plank flooring so the rats wouldn’t contract bumblefoot, whatever that was), twenty pounds of rat food, three bags of litter and two supersized doggie bags with five rats in each. Then he was home and shutting the door to keep out the cold even as Robbie, emerging from beneath the pillows of the couch, humped across the floor to greet him and all the lights flashed on simultaneously.

  It was mid-April by the time my wife and I returned from Switzerland. Tim and Tim II, who’d been cared for in our absence by our housekeeper, Florencia, were there at the door to greet us, acting out their joy on the doorstep and then carrying it into the living room with such an excess of animation it was all but impossible to get our bags in the door before giving them their treats, a thorough back-scratching and a cooed rehearsal of the little endearments they were used to. It was good to be home, back to a real community after all that time spent living in a sterile apartment in Basel, and what with making the rounds of the neighbors and settling back in both at home and at work, it wasn’t till some weeks later that I thought of Gerard. No one had seen him, save for Mary Martinson, who’d run into him in the parking lot at the mall, and he’d refused all invitations to dinner, casual get-togethers, ice-skating on the lake, even the annual Rites of Spring fund-raiser at the clubhouse. Mary said he’d seemed distracted and that she’d tried to engage him in conversation, thinking he was still locked in that first stage of grieving and just needed a little nudge to get him on track again, but he’d been abrupt with her. And she didn’t like to mention it, but he was unkempt—and he smelled worse than ever. It was startling, she said. Even outdoors, standing over the open trunk of his car, which was entirely filled, she couldn’t help noticing, with something called Rat Chow, even with a wind blowing and a lingering chill in the air, he gave off a powerful reek of sadness and body odor. Someone needed to look in on him, that was her opinion.

  I waited till the weekend, and then, as I’d done back in December, I took the dogs down the wide amicable streets, through the greening woods and over the rise to Gerard’s cottage. The day was glorious, the sun climbing toward its zenith, moths and butterflies spangling the flower gardens, the breeze sweetened with a scent of the south. My neighbors slowed their cars to wave as they passed and a few people stopped to chat, their engines rumbling idly. Carolyn Porterhouse thrust a bouquet of tulips at me and a mysterious wedge-shaped package wrapped in butcher’s paper, which proved to be an Emmentaler—“Welcome home,” she said, her grin anchored by a layer of magenta lipstick—and Ed Saperstein stopped right in the middle of the road to tell me about a trip to the Bahamas he and his wife had taken on a chartered yacht. It was past one by the time I got to Gerard’s.

  I noticed right off that not much had changed. The windows were streaked with dirt, and the yard, sprouting weeds along the margins of the unmowed lawn, looked as neglected as ever. The dogs bolted off after something in the deep grass and I shifted the bouquet under one arm, figuring I’d hand it to Gerard, to cheer him up a bit, and rang the bell. There was no answer. I tried a second time, then made my way along the side of the house, thinking to peer in the windows—for all anyone knew, he could be ill, or even, God forbid, dead.

  The windows were nearly opaque with a scrim of some sort of pale fluff or dander. I rapped at the glass and thought I saw movement within, a kaleidoscopic shifting of shadowy forms, but couldn’t be sure. It was then that I noticed the odor, saturate and bottom-heavy with ammonia, like the smell of a poorly run kennel. I mounted the back steps through a heavy accounting of discarded microwave dinner trays and a tidal drift of feed bags and knocked uselessly at the door. The wind stirred. I looked down at the refuse at my feet and saw the legend Rat Chow replicated over and over in neon-orange letters, and that should have been all the information I needed. Yet how was I to guess? How was anyone?

  Later, after I’d presented the bouquet and the cheese to my wife, I tried Gerard’s phone, and to my surprise he answered on the fourth or fifth ring. “Hello, Gerard,” I said, trying to work as much heartiness into my voice as I could, “it’s me, Roger, back from the embrace of the Swiss. I stopped by today to say hello, but—”

  He cut me off then, his voice husky and low, almost a whisper. “Yes, I know,” he said. “Robbie told me.”

  If I wondered who Robbie was—a roommate? a female?—I didn’t linger over it. “Well,” I said, “how’re things? Looking up?” He didn’t answer. I listened to the sound of his breathing for a moment, then added, “Would you like to get together? Maybe come over for dinner?”

  There was another long pause. Finally he said, “I can’t do that.”

  I wasn’t going to let him off so lightly. We were friends. I had a responsibility. We lived in a community where people cared about one another and where the loss of a single individual was a loss to us all. I tried to inject a little jocularity into my voice: “Well, why not? Too far to travel? I’ll grill you a nice steak and open a bottle of Côtes du Rhône.”

  “Too busy,” he said. And then he said something I couldn’t quite get hold of at the time. “It’s nature,” he said. “The force of nature.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m overwhelmed,” he said, so softly I could barely hear him, and then his breathing trailed off and the phone went dead.

  They found him a week later. The next-door neighbors, Paul and Peggy Bartlett, noticed the smell, which seemed to intensify as the days went on, and when there was no answer at the door they called the fire department. I’m told that when the firemen broke down the front door, a sea of rodents flooded out into the yard, fleeing in every direction. Inside, the floors were gummy with waste, and everything, from the furniture to the plaster-board walls and the oak beams of the living room ceiling, had been gnawed and whittled till the place was all but unrecognizable. In addition to the free-roaming animals, there were hundreds more rats stacked in cages, most of them starving and many cannibalized or displaying truncated limbs. A spokeswoman for the local ASPCA estimated that there were upwards of thirteen hundred rats in the house, most of which had to be euthanized at the shelter because they were in no condition to be sent out for adoption.

  As for Gerard, he’d apparently succumbed to pneumonia, though there were rumors of hantavirus, which really put a chill into the community, especially with so many of the rodents still at large. We all felt bad for him, of course, I more than anyone else. If only I’d been home through the winter, I kept thinking, if only I’d persisted when I’d stood outside his window and recognized the odor of decay, perhaps I could have saved him. But then I kept coming back to the idea that there must have been some deep character flaw in him none of us had recognized—he’d chosen a snake for a pet, for God’s sake, and that low animal had somehow morphed into this horde of creatures that could only be described as pests, as vermin, as enemies of mankind that should be exterminated, not nurtured. And that was another thing neither my wife nor I could understand—ho
w could he allow even a single one of them to come near him, to fall under the caress of his hand, to sleep with him, eat with him, breathe the same air?

  For the first two nights I could barely sleep, playing over that horrific scene in my mind—how could he have sunk so low? How could anyone?

  The ceremony was brief, the casket closed (and there wasn’t one of us who wanted to speculate on the reason, though it didn’t take an especially active imagination to picture Gerard’s final moments). I was very tender with my wife afterward. We went out to lunch with some of the others and when we got home I pressed her to me and held her for a long while. And though I was exhausted, I took the dogs out on the lawn to throw them their ball and watch the way the sun struck their rollicking fur as they streaked after the rumor of it, only to bring it back, again and again, and lay it in my palm, still warm from the embrace of their jaws.

  ANACAPA

  The boat left at eight a.m., and that wouldn’t have presented a problem, or not especially, if Damian hadn’t been in town. But then Damian was the whole reason for being here on this dock in the first place, the two of them hunkered over Styrofoam cups of coffee and shuffling in place with an assemblage of thirty or so males and two females (one of whom would turn out to be the deckhand), waiting in a kind of suppressed frenzy to board and lay claim to the prime spots along the rail. Hunter didn’t like boats. Didn’t especially like fish or fishing. But Damian did, and Damian—his roommate at college fourteen years ago and a deep well of inspiration and irritation ever since—always got his way. Which was in part why eight a.m. was such an impossible hour on this martyred morning with the sun dissolved in mist and the gulls keening and his head pounding and his stomach shrunk down to nothing. The other part of it, the complicating factor, was alcohol. Gin, to be specific.