Mike Nelson's Death Rat!

by Michael J. Nelson

  “Wow, so Bromstad beat you like a drum and then jumped ship, huh? You pretty bitter?” asked Beater, not even looking at Ponty.

  “No, actually. I always loved what I did. Bromstad didn’t have anything to do with me. I may not like him personally, but—”

  “What’s that you were talking about, the trades?” asked Phil, who was currently sporting a particularly undignified milk mustache.

  “Oh, right. Well, like Variety for the entertainment industry, the trades just keep everyone in a specific business up-to-date with the latest news, technology, business trends, that kind of thing,” said Ponty, warming to his topic.

  “What did you work on?” asked Scotty politely.

  “Well, I worked on the Journal of Plasma Beam Annealing, which was pretty cool. And there was the journal of the barcode-scanning industry, Bar Code Solutions. I did a lot with that particular mag,” said Ponty, and then he waited for more questions.

  “But they fired you, huh?” asked Beater.

  Ponty shifted his weight in his chair. “Well, they . . . it’s more that they eliminated their entire book-publishing division, which was, as I said, really just me.”

  “Is that why you went berserker on that cop?” asked Scotty.

  “That was an accident, man,” said Phil. “His hand got pinned in his car, okay?”

  “No, it’s all right,” Ponty said, looking down.

  Ponty carried his shame with him into the evening like a knapsack. As he sat in the cramped room he shared with Sags, he thought about calling his younger brother in Tucson, but he knew he couldn’t face any questions about the accident, his job, his new living situation. Scotty, Phil, and Sags, were playing hockey in the hallway, too, and it would be difficult for him to hear anyway. In adulthood their relationship had not been one of big brother/little brother. It was Thaddeus, the successful one, who had been watching over Ponty, and since Ponty had hit his mid-fifties, Thad had been, consciously or not, trying to prematurely age him, blaming any problem he might have on his advancing years. These latest events would only further Ponty’s growing belief that he was eighty-five and feeble of mind and body, so he decided to send his brother a change-of-address card tomorrow and deal with the questions later.

  Weaving his way through the hockey game in the hall, Ponty made his way to the street, wandered about the neighborhood in distracted thought for a time, and presently found himself at Prospero’s Bookstore. He pushed open the door, heard the tinkling of the bell, and was greeted with the traditional smells of a college bookstore: the dusty, dry-moldy scent of the books themselves, an undertone of coffee, a dirty whiff of patchouli oil, and a hint of body odor. His attention was arrested almost immediately by a large cardboard cutout of a man with books in his chest. It was a corrugated likeness of Bunt Casey, dressed in a flight suit, arms akimbo, dispensing copies of his latest military thriller, Shall Not Perish, from his midsection. Ponty, almost to make himself feel worse, fished a copy from an area near Bunt’s heart and turned it over to read the jacket copy. “Trent Corby has discovered a shocking secret: The president of the United States of America is a spy.” Ponty snorted derisively, then realized he was compelled to keep reading. “If he follows his training and eliminates the president, the secret—and Trent himself—could die; if he doesn’t, the most powerful country in the world could fall victim to an insidious plot involving corrupt coffee-plantation owners, the Russian mafia, and a secret organization known only as the Silent Arm.”

  Ponty opened the book to read the bio on the dust jacket. “Bunt Casey is the bestselling author of Red Debt; Go Skyward, Missile; and the book that Colin Powell called ‘a quick read’: He Lived to Die. He lives in Virginia with his Jack Russell terrier, Sun-tzu, his collection of antique muzzle-loaders, and one fully restored Patton tank. He owns a controlling share of the Washington Redskins.”

  “Oh, for the . . .” Ponty said out loud. He knew, as anyone who bothered to check could, that Bunt Casey was a former finance manager for a medium-size GMC dealership in Topeka, Kansas, who just happened to have an interest in military hardware. In 1984 his first novel, The Hammer of Nippon, featured his picture on the dust jacket wearing his signature flight suit and baseball cap with the scrambled eggs on the brim. Though he had never served, people just assumed he was in the military, and he did nothing to dispel that belief. He made the news in 1990 when he blew off his left index finger while reloading his German-made Göerck 470, the model he used to shoot steel targets at the range behind his home in Virginia.

  Critics were none too fond of his work, coming down especially hard on his propensity to write extended and agonizingly detailed descriptions of antitank missiles. Still, Ponty noted with some self-pity, even Casey’s least successful book, O’er the Ramparts, sold close to 5 million copies, some twenty-three thousand times more than his own Better than Great: A Maritime History of Lake Superior.

  He pushed the book back into its grim-faced author’s abdomen and headed off to find the history section, pausing at a display table situated on the end of an aisle. LIVE THE ADVENTURE, read a hand-lettered sign. Ponty, though in no mood to live any adventures, examined a few books and discovered that three of the ones featured—Man One, Mountain Zero; White Pyramid of Doom; and On Belay—were about the same ill-fated expedition up Nanga Parbat. Two more were about shipwrecks in which men ate each other, and another was about a man who got lost in the Canadian wilderness, killed a moose, and lived inside its body until he was found several weeks later. Grim, thought Ponty, though he admired the cover art, which featured a helicopter shot of a man on a frozen lake surrounded by thick woods. Knowing that he ended up in a moose somehow made it very effective.

  He searched the history section. If he could see only one of his books sitting on a shelf in its natural habitat, he thought, he might mute the failure of the day and place himself, however insignificantly, in the world. But after about five minutes of unsuccessful hunting, he gave up and timidly approached the young woman at the information counter. Despite his inherently charitable nature, he had to suppress the thought that she was the filthiest-looking creature he had ever seen. She had on an array of tank tops, all of slightly varying shapes and sizes, most of them—and he guessed there might be six in total—bleached and frayed; a pair of shockingly dirty jeans cut off at the knees, replete with penned words of an indeterminate, though probably Germanic, language; and studs gracing numerous piercings, most noticeably in her tongue, each nostril, and her bottom lip. Most of her head was shaved to Curly Howard length, though from the right lower half a shock of chartreuse hair hung greasily down.

  “Hi! Can I help you?” she said in a bright, enthusiastic manner that for some reason made Ponty feel ashamed.

  “Um. Yes. Do you have Without an Ore: The Decline of Minnesota’s Mining Industry?” he asked. “I didn’t see it on the shelves,” he added in a tone that let her know that it was probably his fault.

  “Do you know the author?” she asked kindly.

  “No, never met him,” he said guiltily before realizing he had misinterpreted her meaning. “Oh, wait. Um, yeah. Pontius Feeb.”

  “Feeb, F-E-E-B?” she asked, already tapping it into the computer.

  “Yes.”

  She entered a surprising amount of additional keystrokes, staring at the screen with concern.

  She hit a few sharp backspaces and then an emphatic enter. “Hm. Okay, I’m not showing anything. And you didn’t see it on the shelves?”

  “No, that’s okay. Could you maybe look for Better than Great: A Maritime History of Lake Superior?”

  She looked at him blankly for a moment, then began entering keystrokes. “Okay. I’m not seeing it.”

  “How about Old von Steuben Had a Farm? Same author,” he said, leaning over the counter slightly to look at the computer’s monitor, as if doing that might somehow help.

  “Had a Farm?” she asked.

  “Had a Farm, correct.”

  “The Old Man and the Sea,
” she offered weakly while still staring at the screen. “But . . . no. Don’t have Old von Steuben Had a Farm.”

  He had thrown his best at her. These were easily his most popular books, and if Old von Steuben was not in stock, And Tyler, Too: In the Shadow of Harrison most certainly would not be. And forget about Czech and Sea: Dvořák’s Voyages to America. There was no more chance of that being in stock than there was the dismal failure You Can Bank on It: Senator Carter Glass and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. He bought the latest Bunt Casey and went home, defeated.

  That evening Ponty sat at the small desk in the untidy second-story room he shared with Sags distractedly doodling small, neat cartoons of men with large noses and blank expressions.

  “Look Skyward, Missile,” Ponty whispered to himself with deep bitterness, while inking an obscenely large mustache onto one of his creations. He sniffed derisively through his nose and circled his pen over his yellow legal pad, waiting sarcastically for inspiration.

  Ten Thousand Leagues, Ponty wrote mockingly, then sat staring at it for half a minute before adding, of Intrigue. He crossed it out. I Kill for a Fee, he wrote and did not cross it out. After twenty minutes of thinking and scribbling, he had a small, messy column of titles that included Three Men, Two Guns, . . . Or Give Me Death, To Sleep with Weapons, The Magna Cartel, My War Never Ended, and Over a (Gun) Barrel. He reread them, laughing mirthlessly, before scratching them out, tearing the page from the tablet, ripping it into pieces, and depositing it in Sags’s Chicago Bulls trash can.

  Later, as he sat on a beanbag chair in Beater’s room watching a Twins game, his thoughts strayed back to the book about the man and the moose. There was something compelling about it, something elemental—a man facing death, facing nature without technology to rescue him. And also life from death, the inescapable theme of birth, and, holding it all together, the notion that God’s universe, even in the modern age, still had the ability to surprise. His blessings weren’t always neat and tidy. Now and again it came down to a lone, dying man crawling into the chest cavity of a deceased ruminant.

  Ponty abandoned the game (the Twins were down 16–3 to the Indians anyway) and returned to his desk. He began to ink more titles on the page now, and with more purpose. Killer Caribou, he wrote, just to get his mind working. Combat, he wrote, and quickly added Wombat. Antlers of Horror was followed by White Bison of Death. He was unsatisfied with the direction in which the large mammals were taking him, so he tried a new tack. Lizard!, They Chew Your Flesh, Day of the Kangaroo Mice, and Wrath of the Rodents soon joined the list. He then wrote down Rat Patrol, before quickly realizing that it had already been a TV series with Christopher George. Ponty flipped the page, wet the point of his pencil with his tongue, and wrote the two words that would change his life and shape his future.

  Death Rat, wrote Ponty.

  He was on to the next, Death Pig, before he stopped and lightly circled Death Rat.

  “Death Rat,” he said quietly before circling it again.

  “Death Rat,” he said, with a little more force.

  All through the night Ponty lay still in his bunk, quite awake, staring at the ceiling.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON Phil padded downstairs after an especially long night of sleep—somewhere close to thirteen hours spent in bed—to find Ponty stretched out on their living room couch reading a book with color pictures.

  “Didn’t know you were into picture books,” he said good-naturedly.

  Ponty started. “Daaa! Don’t do that!” he said sharply.

  “Sorry, man. So what is that? You looked pretty engrossed,” asked Phil while readjusting his sweatpants.

  “It’s just a book on . . . this . . . stuff, that I have to do,” Ponty said nervously.

  “Uh-huh,” said Phil. Ponty read some suspicion into his answer.

  “A book on capybaras,” said Ponty quietly. Phil said nothing. “They’re a—”

  “Yeah, I know. They’re kind of like a hutia.”

  “A hutia?”

  “Yeah. Hutia.”

  The word hutia hung in the air, and there was palpable tension between the two roommates. Ponty did not want to discuss capybaras any further, but he did not want to rouse Phil’s suspicions by cutting short their conversation. And he was tantalized by this “hutia,” whatever it might be.

  “What . . . what is a hutia?” he asked finally.

  “Cuban rat. Pretty good-sized. Not as big as a capybara.”

  “No? No. No, I guess it wouldn’t be.”

  “Why you readin’ about capybaras?” Phil asked casually, while yawning and running a hand through his wispy tangle of hair.

  “Because,” said Ponty defensively, his ears reddening, “I heard it was a good book.”

  “What else you got there?” Phil asked, gesturing halfheartedly at the small stack of books on the end table next to Ponty.

  “Just some books. A thing on the—what do you call it . . . ?” he said, and pretended to think. “Well, anyway,” he finished, waving at the air. Phil, he knew, wouldn’t understand Death Rat, wouldn’t know the costs. He glanced at Phil’s yellowing T-shirt with its cryptic slogan, BREAK IT IF YOU GOT IT, and decided Death Rat was too good for Phil.

  He did not want to answer his roommate’s questions, so, to preserve secrecy, Ponty shifted his base of research to a public library in Pelican Falls, a suburb of Minneapolis just fifteen minutes away by bus. The Pelican Falls public library remained largely unvisited at most times, and Ponty was free to use its resources without having to answer to anyone. Ponty enjoyed research, and for this project he was committed and excited by the material even more than he had been for Everett M. Dirksen: The Other McKinley, a topic that had energized him greatly.

  For three weeks his days consisted of waking, showering, eating Fam-a-lee Brand bagged cereal with his roommates, and catching the 8:42 bus to Pelican Falls, where he would spend the morning researching. Here Ponty was fully in his element, impressing the librarian, a fastidious man in his early thirties, with his extensive knowledge of the Dewey decimal system.

  When he had completed his research, he returned his base of operations to his room, because for his actual writing, Ponty needed even more solitude than could be provided by the oft-empty Pelican Falls branch. On a warm, windy day in early July, Ponty sat down with nearly one hundred pages of handwritten notes by his side and began work on the manuscript.

  Though he was on fire to complete it, progress went more slowly than he thought it might. Sags, who Ponty knew was within his right to do so, would come in and out of the room dozens of times a day. That was not so much a distraction as was his absurdly exaggerated “sneaking” demeanor. He produced the same amount of noise no matter what he did, but his tiptoeing with hands at his side like an actor at a children’s theater disturbed Ponty more than anything. He would have preferred the earsplitting levels of old Ted Nugent albums to Sags’s histrionics.

  “Try the attic,” Scotty had suggested when Ponty had laid out his problem before him.

  “There’s an attic?” Ponty asked. He’d never been good with houses. He didn’t get them. The reason he’d never bought a house was that a drain trap in the extra bathroom of a place he was renting had once corroded through when his landlord was away. This alone had put him off houses forever.

  When Scotty suggested the attic, Ponty had imagined a quaint, dusty, and spacious room littered charmingly with old oak-based dressmaking forms, steamer trunks, and yellowing silk lampshades. The attic in which he set up his writing space was more like a medium-size closet with a peaked ceiling. It smelled like discarded sneaker inserts, and it was hellaciously hot. Ponty brought a thermometer up with him, and one day when the temperature outside reached 95 degrees, it was 126 in the attic. The next morning, for the first time in his life, he made a trip to the Tom Thumb convenience store and invested in a “sports drink,” figuring that if he ever needed to replace his electrolytes, now was the time. It tasted like Kool-Aid made with melt
ed plastic instead of water.

  He devoted himself to his book throughout the days and into the evenings, often shirtless, a fact that was as upsetting to himself as it was to anyone who happened to see him in such a state. Access to his space was available only through a ladder that went up into the ceiling of Beater’s room, so he would have to peek through the trapdoor to see if the coast was clear and then maneuver his sweaty body down the ladder, refill his thermos with water, perhaps grab a box of one of the many varieties of snack crackers from their cupboard, and return to his labor. He wrote in longhand on yellow legal pads, stopping occasionally to fan himself with his own prose.

  Ponty had always had confidence that he was a good, if not great, writer—even before his nomination for the Dwee Award. And as he toiled, he found himself recalling an incident that began to grow in significance: When he was a sophomore in high school, he’d penned a rather purple short story in the style of Poe for his creative-writing class, and Mr. Blanding had called him aside to offer special, pointed praise.

  “Marvelous, Pontius. Just marvelous,” he’d said.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “‘From The Murderer’s Gibbet,’” Mr. Blanding said with admiration.

  “Yes,” said Ponty.

  “‘And the final desperate thrum of some distant, dying night, the weak but incessant beat of its faint, clashing overtones sounding in the hollows of my heart, signaled the end, not of the darkness, but of my hope’” he quoted in his reedy tenor. “Quite evocative.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And the bit about the thrush trapped in the quadrangle, screaming—very good.”

  “Oh, thank you, sir.”

  “The narrator’s vision of fighting with his mother’s ‘ragcovered, rattling skeleton.’ Quite good.”