Mike Nelson's Death Rat!

by Michael J. Nelson

  The smaller man ignored him. “Is he bribing us? I never thought I’d be the victim of a bribing crime. I’ve never done anything worthy of bribing me over. Not that I can recall. I’m not saying I’ve lived a sinless life, but to this point I’ve kept it bribe-free. Now look at me. I’ve—”

  “He doesn’t know, Ponty.” Jack reached into the paper bag and took out something wrapped in butcher paper. “I brought you a sandwich.”

  “What? You can’t bring me a sandwich!”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t know each other. Strangers don’t bring each other sandwiches.”

  “Where is that written? Besides, a guy doesn’t sit right next to some other strange guy when there’s an empty bench ten feet away either. Ponty, I knew you wouldn’t have eaten, so I brought you a sandwich.”

  “Put it in my coat pocket,” whispered Ponty. “Don’t be obvious about it.”

  Jack shoved the sandwich into the outer pocket of Ponty’s parka and began unwrapping his own sandwich. “Nope. He doesn’t know.”

  “Well, that’s good news, at least.”

  “Sort of,” he said, slurring his words because his mouth was full of egg salad and rye bread. “He wants to visit Holey, to see the spot where it happened. Maybe have a revival there.”

  “A what?”

  “A revival.”

  “A revival of what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s just what he said. He kept saying that something was coming. That we needed to be there for it. And, as I said, he hugged me.”

  “Is he insane?”

  “I think so.”

  Ponty took out his sandwich and began unwrapping it. “I borrowed one of his albums and listened to it. Filthy stuff. I’m still shaking.”

  “Yeah, it ain’t pretty. But it gets the job done. He’s got quite a little ranch house all set up for himself.”

  “Do you think he’ll go to Holey?” asked Ponty.

  “Well,” said Jack, chewing, “I think so. He asked me to go with him, and I don’t know if it was the hour or the Yank Me, Crank Me, but I said yes.”

  “What?”

  “He’s very persuasive. You’ll see when you meet him.”

  “I’m not meeting that weirdo. Why did his pants touch you?”

  “I’d rather not relive it.”

  “Why—why did you say you’d go with him?”

  “Well, I figured I could keep him from finding anything out.”

  Ponty shook his head and swallowed. “Oh, this is bad. Very bad. Strange people up there. All the attention. They’re bound to find out. Someone will spill it. We’re going to get caught.”

  The two sat eating in silence.

  “Well,” said Jack finally, “no reason to worry until we have to. You want an M&M cookie or a Rice Krispie bar?”

  Across Lake Calhoun a blue Volvo idled, a German-made Leica APO Televid 77 Angled Spotting Scope pressed against the tempered glass of the driver’s-seat window. Pressed against the eyepiece was the compact head of Jørgen Hunk, Den Institut Dansk’s finest man in the field. Vagns sat in the passenger’s seat reading Death Rat. Ülo sat in the back, humming quietly; Bromstad sat next to him, twitching.

  “What’s he doing now? Jørgen, what’s he doing?” pestered Bromstad.

  Jørgen did not immediately answer, but when he spoke, his voice was even. “It was not necessary for you to accompany us, Mr. Bromstad.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I want to nail this guy,” said Bromstad, rubbing his soft writer’s hands together.

  “Do you not have to be writing, or perhaps doing a book signing?” asked Vagns, without looking up from Death Rat.

  Bromstad looked at his watch. “You know what? I think I am missing a signing, but spying on this guy is a higher priority right now.”

  “It is extremely unlikely that anything of interest will occur,” said Jørgen, adjusting the eyepiece of the scope. “We have just begun our surveill— Oh, my.”

  “What? What?” said Bromstad, leaning into the front seat.

  “He has taken a seat next to a smaller, mustachioed man.”

  “A smaller, mustachioed man?” mused Bromstad. “What’s he look like?”

  “He is somewhat smaller and has a mustache. For now that will suffice. We will get photographs. Ülo,” Jørgen commanded briskly.

  “Right,” said Ülo, taking a camera bag from the floor.

  “He is handing the mustachioed man a small package,” said Jørgen.

  “Drugs?” said Vagns, without looking up.

  “With Americans it is so often the case,” said Jørgen sternly.

  “I knew it. Get him! Get him!” shrieked Bromstad.

  “The mustachioed man is refusing the package,” said Jørgen. “They are exchanging words.”

  Ülo began snapping pictures through the telephoto lens of his Nordisk Øresundsbron M6 TTL.

  “He is placing it surreptitiously into the pocket of the other man,” said Jørgen.

  “It is probably scag,” said Ülo contemptuously. “Americans and their scag.”

  “Hey—now, not all of us use scag,” Bromstad objected.

  “That is only because of economic barriers. If it were cheap enough, you would all use scag,” averred Ülo.

  “Quiet. The other man is eating something. It is a sandwich. I . . . cannot . . .” Jørgen adjusted the eyepiece. “I cannot make out the filling. If I had the fifty-millimeter eyepiece perhaps. Now the mustachioed man is taking the package out of his pocket. He is unwrapping it. He is sniffing it.”

  “Scag,” said Ülo.

  Jørgen strained to see, making fine adjustments to the scope. He scowled with the passion of a Dane unable to get a good look at a drug deal that he is highly committed to seeing, and seeing well. After a tense moment he separated his head from the eyepiece. Then he turned to look at Ülo.

  “I am sorry to say it is not scag. It, too, is a sandwich. He is consuming it now. Great bites is he taking,” he said sadly.

  Bromstad was reeling himself back in preparation for loosing curses but was stopped short by a rapping on the passenger-seat window. Their four heads swiveled to see a park police officer crouching down, peering in with a dispassionate expression. He made the “roll down the window” gesture, and Vagns obeyed, while Bromstad crouched low and pulled his hat over his eyes.

  “What you fellas up to?” he asked casually, as though Volvos stuffed with Danish ex-pats wielding spotting scopes and cameras were not at all an uncommon sight.

  Without pausing, Jørgen replied, “We are looking at the ducks.” The officer stood up, put a hand over his eyes, and peered across the lake to see the only ducks anywhere on the horizon. They were at least half a mile away. He crouched back down.

  “You’d get a better look at ’em if you drove over to the other side of the lake,” he said.

  “You don’t say?” said Jørgen.

  “Oh, yeah. Much better view. Probably wouldn’t even need the spotting scope.”

  “Okay, thank you,” said Vagns, improvising.

  “Yep. Just take this road right around.”

  “We will do that,” Jørgen promised earnestly.

  “All righty,” said the officer, giving a friendly salute and strolling away.

  Vagns rolled up the window, and there was silence in the Volvo save for the purr of its 2.3-liter 5-cylinder intercooled engine.

  “That was sloppy,” Jørgen said.

  “Is he gone,” asked Bromstad, from underneath his hat.

  PONTY’S CAREFUL PLANS to pack hurriedly, almost frantically, and drive wildly up to Holey in preparation for King Leo’s arrival were thwarted just as soon as he walked in the door to his house and Scotty handed off the phone to him like a football.

  “Whoa—hang on there. It’s your brother,” he said.

  “Son of a . . .” said Ponty, taking it from Scotty. “Hey, Thad. How are you?”

  “Hey, bro, you sound like you’re under a lot of
stress. Are you?”

  “No, not at all. Especially now that I’m not working—you know I’m not at Jack Pine anymore?”

  “What? What happened? You need me to wire you some sawbucks?”

  “No. No, don’t. Yeah, Jack Pine did a little downsizing, and I was lucky enough to get in on their outplacement program. You know, got a pretty sweet golden parachute.”

  “Hey, that’s great. So you’re eating?”

  “What? Right now?” Ponty said with irritation.

  “You’re eating well and all?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be eating well?” he asked, thinking of the dinner of Chicken in a Biskit crackers and dill dip he’d had the night before.

  “Look, Melissa and I were talking, we thought you might want to get into the Meals on Wheels program, so that you can get your basic nutrition at least.”

  “You mean delivering it to the seniors, right?”

  “Ha, ha! No, no. You know, you just get into the program. Get some good food delivered to your house.”

  “What? No! I’m sixty years old. And I’m not homebound. Heck, you’re fifty-five,” Ponty objected shrilly.

  “All right, all right. I’m just looking out for you, brother.” Thad sighed deeply, apparently wounded that Ponty had refused to accept his offer of hospital food delivered to his door. “When you moving to Tucson?”

  Ponty fended off his brother’s well-meaning advances, exchanged the usual pleasantries, and hustled Thad off the phone before he could make any plans for Ponty’s hospitalization. Then he packed hastily and headed north to Holey, determined not to fail, steeled for whatever lay ahead, a bag of corn chips at his side.

  JACK HAD FOLDED himself onto his couch and was asleep in front of the television when he heard the QE2 sound her horn in preparation for sailing at his front door. His limbs leaped into the air, followed by his body, and he gathered himself into a sitting position. After a moment he was able to piece together a vague semiconsciousness. The horn sounded again, and he now realized that it had the quality of a landgoing vessel, possibly an eighteen-wheeler. It sounded again in a short-long combination, and he thought he detected a beckoning tone to it, which he acknowledged by standing up and separating a portion of his front window blinds to see if it was meant for him. Idling out in front of his house was the hugest, most hot pink bus that he had ever seen, a sight made no less impressive by the fact that it was the only hot pink bus he’d ever seen.

  He padded outside in his socks. A tinted tilt-out window popped open, and though he could not see its source, he heard a voice say, “Woooooooo! Woo! Let’s go, Jack!”

  “I thought you were going to call first!” Jack yelled at the side of the bus. There was a twenty-second silence. Jack called out, “Hello?”

  “What?” called King Leo in a distracted voice.

  “I’m not ready.”

  “Woooooooo!” said King Leo. “We’re going to Holey, gonna get holy! Wooooo!”

  “I’m not ready. Why don’t you go ahead without me. Unless you want to come inside for a minute?”

  “Wooo—all right. Hang on.”

  The door hissed open, and a parade of people began flowing out of the bus and through Jack’s front door—seven people in all, including King Leo. The only member of the group not wearing a colorful feather boa—a middle-aged man in a gray coat with a patch above the pocket that read GARY—Jack guessed to be the driver. They stood in an awkward knot in his entryway.

  “Step into the living room there, why don’t you, while I go throw a bag together. No, you don’t have to take your shoes off,” he said to a guy in a red headband and huge diamond-shaped sunglasses who had made a motion to begin unlacing his thigh-high leather boots.

  “Let me do some intros,” King Leo offered. “Jack, that’s Sir Shock-a-Lot there. And Kaptain Kinetik. And that’s Wigs Jackson, and Tarzan Moe, Billy Moonbeam, and that’s Gary.”

  “Well, welcome, all of you. Have a seat while I rush off and get this done. Just throw your coats over the couch there, and . . . ah, help yourself to anything in the kitchen. Sorry, I don’t have much.”

  As they filed into his living room, Jack pulled King Leo aside. “I thought you were going to call first.”

  “Jack, Jack, Jack. I am sorry. I thought Don had called,” King Leo said, pulling off a pair of granny glasses with yellow lenses and polishing them on his silk peasant top.

  “No. No one called. I didn’t hear a thing.”

  “Well, that doesn’t surprise me in the least,” said King Leo with faint disgust. “Anyway, I had to fire Don.”

  “What? Why?” asked Jack, though he had no stake in it.

  King Leo shook his head vigorously. “I don’t remember. You can ask his replacement if you’re really interested. Jack, don’t be mad. We can’t have you going to the revival all mad.”

  “I’m not mad—I’m just not ready. ’Cause Don never called.”

  “As I said, I had to fire him. Now, get packing. We’ll wait.” Something caught his eye. “Billy! Get your feet off the man’s couch!” Billy Moonbeam looked sheepish and quickly put his feet on the floor. King Leo turned back to Jack and threw his arms out. “Jack, Jack, Jack. I’m sorry, my man,” he said and stepped forward to hug him.

  “No, really,” Jack objected, backing up a step. “I’m not much of a hugger. Well . . . okay.” And he received King Leo’s hug, relieved that he was not also receiving some of King Leo’s sweat.

  “There, there, there, there, Jack. Go throw a bag together,” King Leo said, and he patted Jack’s back. Jack took a step toward his room and then turned back.

  “I guess I don’t know what to pack,” he said.

  King Leo gave it some thought. “Well,” he said, “I packed my Jimmy Choo calfskin slingbacks, a tulle bodysuit, some jersey-knit sweaters, three chiffon peasant tops, my python pants, a Fendi cape . . . um, my Manolo Blahnik heels, a few sleeveless turtlenecks. Oh, and my mink sweatpants for just hanging around.”

  Sleep, for Jack, was difficult in the Funkabus. At all times Kaptain Kinetik was drumming on some surface: the large mahogany table, the cabinets above the stove, even the head of Billy Moonbeam. And Wigs Jackson was playing a video golf game against Sir Shock-a-Lot, who seemingly could play nearly flawless video golf, causing Wigs to yell and hit him on the shoulder. King Leo strummed mindlessly on a hollow-bodied Gibson and sang indeterminate words in a wavering falsetto. With the hum of the bus’s tires and the other riders’ conversations obfuscating his voice, to Jack it might just as well have been Tiny Tim.

  He was watching the yellow lines fly by when King Leo swung into the seat next to him. “Jack, Jack, Jack,” he said, a strange smile on his face that reminded Jack of his perpetually stoned freshman roommate, only a good deal less stupid-looking.

  “King Leo.”

  “You’re a writer, Jack.”

  “I am,” Jack lied.

  “I don’t want to put you on the spot, but I want you to take a look at something.” Jack became quickly and appropriately terrified. “I’ve written some poetry. . . .” said King Leo, producing a notebook.

  Jack scanned surreptitiously about him for an escape route, noticing with disappointment that his seat was not positioned near one of the emergency windows. “Well, King Leo, I’m really more of a journalist, you know. Not really a good judge of poetry, per se.”

  “But you know words, Jack. You bend them to your will.”

  “Oh, not so much bending, really.”

  King Leo thrust the notebook at him. “I’d be honored.”

  Jack was about to formulate a new line of objections when he concluded that it would probably be easier to capitulate and accept an inevitable fact of life: at some point some person will force you to look at his poetry. In any calendar year half of the people on the planet collar the other half and cajole them into looking at their bad rhymed couplets, free verse, poems about horses accompanied by crude drawings, or what have you. It was simply his turn. He took the notebo
ok gingerly from King Leo’s hand.

  “Okay. I’ll take a look at it—though understand, I’m no judge.”

  “Thank you,” said King Leo.

  “Sure,” said Jack with finality.

  Jack saw fresh difficulty on the horizon when King Leo, who by all accepted rules of human interaction surrounding the exchange of poetry should now have been leaving, was doing nothing of the sort. In fact, he was looking at Jack with an eager expression, as though Jack were about to bite into his famous home-baked Dutch apple pie. Jack devised a way to test his theory that King Leo was going nowhere until some unit of poetry was read by him. “Okay, I’ll take a look at it when I’ve got a minute,” he said, and turned away. Unfortunately, he was unable to begin any activity that seemed more important than reading poetry, and King Leo pounced.

  “What are you doing now?” he asked reasonably.

  “Oh. Now?”

  “Yeah. Read it now. Go ahead.” King Leo was excited.

  Jack thought briefly how nice it would be to die, but he simply smiled at King Leo and thumbed open the notebook.

  “All right. I’m excited,” said Jack. “First page, here?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Start there.”

  Jack noticed his use of the phrase “start there” and despaired. He tried to get the first page to come into focus, but it was difficult with the low light and the distraction of being able to hear its author breathing. Finally it did, and he read the title, written in flowery script with a gel pen: “My Flute,” it read. Because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, Jack coughed. He pointed to the page. “Right here?” he asked.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right there.”

  He was cornered now, with nowhere to go, so he read King Leo’s poem entitled “My Flute.”

  Toot, man.

  That what it says, says my flute.

  You’d think it would be a hoot.

  But it ain’t a hoot to toot my flute, brute.

  My life—my blood, my sweat, my tears—MY LIFE

  Is in that toot.

  That toot,

  From my flute.

  Toot.

  Jack was so delighted that it wasn’t filthy, he was certain he would be able to pretend that it was good, even though he felt very strongly that, like 99 percent of all the poetry ever produced, it was not good.