Mike Nelson's Death Rat!

by Michael J. Nelson

  Jack slumped his shoulders to show that all the kidding and the good times were over—that it was time for honesty. “Here’s what happened: Ponty come to me with this book, this history book about your gold rush.”

  Ponty squinted with distaste, noting Jack’s deliberately cornpone grammar and thinking he heard a previously absent twang reminiscent of Andy Griffith.

  “It was good, but nap-inducing. You know what I mean—again, no offense, Ponty,” Jack continued. “So I suggested he let me take it and spice it up a little, you know. So I came up with this crazy story about—you’re gonna laugh at me—but it was about a guy getting attacked by a giant rat.” The town of Holey laughed. “Sure, sure, dumbest thing you ever heard, but you know how sometimes dumb ideas can kind of rattle around and come back to you and all of a sudden they’re not so dumb anymore? Well, that’s how the book turned out. And Jack agreed, so I took it to an agent, and he sold the dang thing, and you’re never gonna guess what happened next.”

  Jack let it hang in the air for a moment, till someone finally said, “What? What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you what happened: It got into the hands of a New York book publisher—you ever seen one of these guys? No? Well, you take yourself the slickest Philadelphia lawyer you’ve ever laid eyes on and you slap a tweed coat on his back and throw some leather patches on his elbows, set him in a Manhattan restaurant in front of a fifty-dollar lunch, and I’d have to think you’re about as near to a New York book publisher as you could get.”

  This incited laughter in most everyone but Ponty, who was convinced that Jack had breezed past Andy Griffith–level hominess and had his sights set on Will Rogers now.

  “Well, this agent guy”—and here he turned to look at his partner—“Ponty, what was that poor dope’s name? Todd, was that it?”

  “Yes, I believe Todd was his name,” said Ponty, making it sound no more convincing than a confession coerced by KGB agents.

  “Yeah, Todd. He was a piece of work. Well, he sells it to his bosses as a—get this—a true story!” This got some bigger laughs. “Yeah. What can you say? He’s from New York. So they buy this thing and print up a couple hundred thousand copies and paste the words ‘a thrilling true story’ on the cover with one of those stickers, all ready to go to market before they realize—‘Hey, this can’t be true, can it?’ So they come back to me and say”—and here he put on a weak, reedy voice as parody of his New York publisher—“‘Ah, Jack, this is a true story right? You checked it out, didn’t you?’ So I realized what had happened. They messed up, and now it’s up to me to pull their bacon out of the fire. Well, at first I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me!’ Then I realized they’re gonna yank this book, they’re gonna blame it on us, they’re gonna get themselves about a football team’s worth of those fancy lawyers, and they’re gonna take our money away. For something that was their fault.” Jack shook his head with frustration.

  “Then I thought, well, maybe there’s a way we can keep our money, even spread some of it around to the good folks of Holey, and at the same time pull a pretty good joke over on Todd and his buddies in that glass skyscraper in Manhattan. So I said, ‘Well, of course, Todd. It’s all true. Every word of it.’” There was a spark in Jack’s dark eyes as he finished. Then it faded and he dropped his eyes and ran a hand through his wavy hair. “Ahhh. Now that I get up here and talk it through, it sounds pretty silly,” he said. Then he paused, made a motion to say something more, stopped himself, and walked to his seat, giving a little wave of thanks as he did. The crowd was silent.

  Sandi approached the podium. “Okay, well, thank you, Mr. Ryback,” she said, sounding a little too impressed for Ponty’s taste. “Why don’t we have our guests withdraw, and we’ll discuss and have their answer shortly—how does that sound?”

  THAT EVENING, BACK at the Bugling Moose, Ponty sipped a cup of cider while Jack flossed. “Jack?” Ponty called from his chair at their knotty-pine table. “Did you mean that about my book being a real snooze? Is it, do you think?” There was a long pause as Jack withdrew his floss, rolled and disposed of it, then rinsed. He appeared at Ponty’s side and crouched down to his level, which took a good amount of crouching.

  “Ponty,” he said cajolingly. “Hey, Ponty.” He lightly punched Ponty’s shoulder. “Come on, Ponty,” he pleaded, trying to incline his face under Ponty’s to get a look at his expression. “No, I don’t think your book is a snooze.”

  “No?” Ponty said, peeking out from under his hand.

  “No,” Jack said with emphasis. “It’s not my cup of tea, but it’s good. I made up all that stuff, Ponty. I was just trying to get us out of a jam.”

  “Yeah. Those were some real whoppers you told.”

  “Yeah, I kind of poached a lot of the attitude of it from a play called Logjam of Dreams by Samuel Boathers.”

  “I’ve never heard of that one. It’s about logging, huh?”

  “No. It’s about men returning home after the Spanish-American War.”

  “So no logs?”

  “No, not that I recall.”

  “So why the log-based title?”

  “I couldn’t say. It’s been a while.”

  Ponty sat up and sighed deeply. “Well, you had me worried at the bar the other day, but you did do a great job up there today. Perhaps we’re just delaying our arrests and subsequent jail terms, but still, nicely done.”

  “Hey, no doom and gloom, now. The whole town is behind us. They love us, Ponty. I made a lot of friends at the doughnut table there, after they took the vote. And I saw you cozying up to Sandi. We got it made. There’s a pile of our books coming out. What could possibly go wrong now?”

  CHAPTER 8

  The rustic back porch of Gus Bromstad’s log home was best accessed by the southern elevator, the route Ross Barnier took one winter night to answer a summons by his employer. The elevator door slid open, and Ross beheld Bromstad sitting in his rocking chair, bathed in a pool of yellow light, whittling.

  “How do, Ross?” Bromstad said in his familiar radio voice.

  “Good, Gus. You?” Ross could not see how Bromstad was getting his chair to rock; then he noticed that it was plugged in to a wall outlet.

  “Have a sit-down, Ross, and I’ll tell you how I am.”

  Ross took off his coat, selected a hickory-stick chair with a gingham cushion, and sat down. “This sure turned out nice,” he said, settling into the cushion’s comfortable gel insert.

  “Yes, I’m glad I decided on a retractable roof for the porch, or this weather would have chased us inside to the great room.”

  Ross sat quietly, being dutifully impressed by the spoils of Gus’s light and charming prose. “Yup,” he said. “Turned out real, real nice.”

  “Mm-hm,” Gus agreed, a curl of oak falling lazily to the unfinished ash flooring.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ayup.”

  Ross thought for a moment that he heard crickets chirping, but he dismissed it as impossible.

  “Mmm. Nice night.”

  “That it is.”

  During this artificial lull, Ross pretended to be taking in a view of the boxcar siding over Gus’s shoulder but was really spying the whittling knife with his peripheral vision, so that in the very likely event that Gus hurled it, he would have a sporting chance of getting his head out of the way.

  “Did you go with forced-air heat?” Ross asked.

  “Except for out here—this has baseboard heat.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Yup.”

  Gus suddenly exploded out of his chair and surprised Ross by stabbing the whittling knife into the table next to him and throwing the chunk of wood instead. It missed Ross by about thirteen feet and clunked weakly to the floor.

  “Who is he, Ross?” Gus sputtered. “Who’s Jack Ryback?”

  “Jack . . . ? The guy from that game-show scandal in the fifties?”

  “Don’t toy with me, Ross. An adventure book outselling me? The Dogwood books are adven
ture-book-proof. How did this happen?” Bromstad thundered.

  Ross crossed his legs and cleared his throat. “What can I say? People are fickle. Right now they like true stories of people overcoming odds—or huge rats, as the case may be. But when that dies down, they’ll come back home. To you.” He looked at Gus’s frown. “One would think,” he added.

  “Ross, I’d like to do a dramatic reading now from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, if I may?” Gus reached beneath his rocker where the paper sat loaded and ready, pulled it out, folded and smoothed it. “Ahem. ‘Jack Ryback just might be the perfect author for the nouveau-pop age. Hip, smart, and studly, he is both self-aware and disarmingly guileless.’ And I’m gonna stop right there, Ross. How can one be both self-aware and disarmingly guileless?” asked Bromstad sarcastically while resting his head in his free hand.

  Ross coughed demurely. “It’s not easy, no question about it. I can’t pull it off, that’s for sure. But this Ryback fellow . . . I don’t know. Maybe there’s something to it.”

  “Is there any bad press for that stupid rat book, Ross? Is there? ’Cause I called our clipping service, and I—”

  “You called our clipping service? You shouldn’t do that, Gus. That’s my job.”

  “And they couldn’t find any review of Death Rat that was flat-out negative. Who’s his press agent? How is he doing this?”

  “Gus, please let me call the clipping service for whatever you might need. They’re very fickle over there, and I don’t want—”

  “Look, shut up about the clipping service, will you? Death Rat sold more in its second week than Dogwood did in its first. We’re in trouble here, Ross.”

  “What trouble are we in?” asked Ross. “What do you care about this guy? Your book still sells the same. His just sells more.”

  “What do I care about this? He’s wearing a fisherman’s sweater in all his press photos, Ross. The fisherman’s sweater, in case anyone happens to drive up and ask you sometime, is my deal! Mine! I invented wearing fisherman’s sweaters, not him.”

  “Well, now, Gus. In all fairness, he’s wearing it in a kind of straightforward, ‘I’m rugged’ kind of way. I really don’t think he’s even trying to step on your modified Burl Ives, folksy, backwoods thing.”

  “And the scuttlebutt is—and this had better not be true—he’s been shortlisted for the Russell Dwee Award. Who always wins the Russell Dwee Award, Ross? Do guys named Jack Ryback win it? Or do I?”

  “You do, always, Gus.”

  Gus grabbed a wicker chair, placed it in front of Ross, and sat down, leaning into him. Then Gus Bromstad, the beloved author of the series of Dogwood books, editor of a bestselling book of light verse, and writer of the libretto for the long-running children’s musical Harry H. Hare: Hare for Hire, quietly ordered the death of Jack Ryback.

  Ross was horrified. “Gus, I don’t think I can do that,” he said.

  Gus rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and nodded in understanding, pointing to imagined listening devices. He nodded conspiratorially at Ross.

  “Well, good. I was just kidding anyway,” he said in a thick voice.

  Gus then arranged his hand into the classic pantomime “phone” shape and wiggled it next to his head. “Call . . . me . . . when . . . he’s . . . dead,” he mouthed deliberately to Ross.

  “Gus, no. I think you’ve been working too hard.”

  Bromstad came at it from a different angle.

  “I want him hurt—bad—or restrained indefinitely so that he can never write again,” he said.

  “Gus, no. I can’t and I won’t.”

  “Well, then, I’m just going to have to find someone who can. You’re fired,” he said, standing. “Here, let me punch in the code to let you out.”

  WHAT’S MARVELOUS ABOUT it is that it puts Minnesota on the map,” Darlene Pederson said. “It lets the rest of the country know that things other than playoff losses and blizzards do happen here. It says, ‘Hey, we’re not just odd, silent people who hoard gasoline and wear puffy coats.’”

  “Exactly. We’re that and so much more,” said Jack. Ms. Pederson was one of an army of Minnesota’s brightest lights, and the whole bright lot of them, at Fetters’s invitation, had stormed Beret for a nine o’clock cocktail reception in Jack’s honor.

  “Well, this is it,” Ms. Pederson agreed, holding out her left hand while sipping her old-fashioned with the other. “But your average New Yorker doesn’t even know we have electricity here, let alone culture, theater, and the arts—and bestselling authors like yourself.”

  “Oh, please. This whole book basically fell into my lap,” Jack said, fishing another stuffed mushroom from a plate.

  “You’re too modest. I think a book reception like this is a marvelous thing, and I adore Mr. Fetters. Don’t you just love him?”

  “He’s the most well-groomed man I’ve ever met,” said Jack honestly.

  “And a thing like this can only be good for our state. Anything that’s not bingo, or pull tabs, or one of those horrible meat raffles, is a cultural step up.”

  “Well, now, there’s nothing wrong with a good meat raffle. I once won over eighty dollars’ worth of kielbasa for an investment of five! And the beer was insanely cheap. Less than a dollar a glass—though it was Carling, I believe. But you take the good with the bad.”

  Ms. Pedersen’s smile, which had been broad and open, was beginning to show signs of strain.

  “Well,” she said, “look around. There’s Thomas Kaat over there. He chairs the—”

  “I’m sorry, that guy, with the . . . uh, the, um . . .” Jack was trying to describe a man standing near Beret’s kitchen entrance without having to refer to his gigantic puffy hairpiece, which in Jack’s opinion appeared a full forty years younger than the face beneath it. “With the marinated asparagus—there, he’s trying to scissor it off with his dentures there. That guy?”

  “Um, yes. He chairs the Greater Twin Cities and Southern First Tier Suburban Council for the Arts. Lovely man. And that’s Erica Sturgeon. She did so much work last year to send the Chamber Orchestra to Russia.”

  “They’re that bad, huh?” The smile dropped fully from Darlene Pedersen’s face. “Just kidding,” said Jack.

  “Well, anyway, it’s lovely to have something come out of Minnesota that’s a little more serious in tone, a little more ambitious in its scope than the usual fare,” Ms. Pedersen continued. “With Gus Bromstad, frankly, all that banjo music begins to grate, and with the forced homespun thing, that hat of his . . . well, it diminishes the image of our state in the eyes of the rest of the country.”

  “No place associated with banjo music can ever succeed on a national level,” said Jack.

  “It’s so true,” she said, apparently mistaking his joke for a comment with some depth.

  “So forgive me for putting you on the spot, but you liked Death Rat?” he asked, because he wanted time to try a cream cheese wonton and needed to get her talking.

  “Oh, yes. Very, very, very good, it was. And I understand it’s just flying off the shelves. Number one this week, right?”

  He was caught by surprise at the compendiousness of her answer and had barely begun to chew his wonton when she’d answered, so he simply nodded and gave her an apologetic wink. She waited patiently, looking at the inside of her glass and smiling wistfully. Jack had a way to go before his wonton could be safely swallowed, so they both waited. Salvation came in the form of a waiter who sidled up next to them.

  “Mr. Ryback,” he said in the hostile but officious manner of Minnesota’s service industry, “there is a phone call for you.”

  Jack begged his leave of Ms. Pedersen with a hand signal, and she waved him away graciously. “Oh, yes, please, you are a busy man.”

  He was shown to a phone in the coatroom, where, because of the length of the cord and the unergonomic placement of the door, he had little choice but to stand less than three feet away from the young woman doing the coat checking.

  “Sorry,”
he told her. She smiled at him weakly. “Hello?” he said very quietly into the phone.

  “Jack Ryback?” said a deep male voice.

  “Yes, this is Jack Ryback.”

  “The author?”

  “Who is this?”

  There was a pause, then a click on the line, then a beeping sound. The voice came back on. “Do I have your permission to tape this conversation?”

  “What? No. Who is this?” Jack heard the beep again.

  “Hang on.” There was some more clicking, then a beep cut off midway. “Okay. I’m not taping this anymore. But I am going to have to ask you to keep this conversation in the strictest of confidence.”

  “We haven’t said anything yet. Is this Earl?”

  “Who’s Earl?”

  “Never mind. Look, who is this?” Jack said, dodging the accusing look of the coat-check woman.

  “If I tell you, will you keep it under the bulldozer?” said the voice.

  “Well, okay, I suppose.”

  “Can I ask you that part again and tape just that?”

  “No! Look, I’m hanging up if—”

  “Okay. I think I can count on you. I work for a certain person.”

  Jack waited. “I trust you’ll tell me who it is at some point?”

  “Do I have your solemn vow that you’ll not say anything to anyone, under penalty of death?”

  “All right, I’m hanging up.” He made a motion with the phone and heard the voice pleading, “No! Don’t hang up.”

  Jack put the phone to his ear.

  “I’ll tell you. I work—for King Leo.” He let it sink in.

  “Well,” said Jack, “I thank you for your frankness. Now I have to be getting back to—”

  “You do know who he is?”

  “Didn’t he do that song ‘Love Death Tomorrow Jelly’?”