The Tilting House

by Tom Llewellyn

  “Tell me the news,” said Mr. Daga. He sounded excited.

  “Well,” said Dad, still trying to catch his breath, “it’s the duplex next door. Since it’s a duplex, it has room for two families, but the owner hasn’t managed to rent either the upstairs or the downstairs for about a year and a half. I talked to him. He said he’s losing money on it every month and is willing to sell the whole thing for a good price.”

  “A duplex, huh?” asked Mr. Daga.

  “Yes. You could live in the top floor and rent out the bottom, if you wanted. It’s next door, which would make relocating much easier. I would help you buy it with the proceeds from the sale of your collection. If you rented out the bottom floor, you’d have income for paying taxes, insurance, and other upkeep costs.”

  “Yeah, a little extra dough would be okay. And it might be handy to have humans around, so long as they stayed downstairs. And didn’t kill us or nothin’.”

  “They would. Stay downstairs, I mean.”

  “Humans mean food. Cereal. And hotdogs. I hope they like hotdogs. So you’d help us buy this house, right, Peshik?”

  “I would.”

  “When can I see it?”

  “The owner said we could look at it anytime.”

  “How about now?”

  “I can’t do it now. I’m on my lunch break. My boss, Mr. Stevens, will throw a fit if I’m back late.”

  “Sounds like a swell guy.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “How about tomorrow? Say eight A.M.?”

  “Eight A.M. it is. Now how about fixing our electricity?” But all we heard were his tiny, scratching footsteps.

  The next morning at eight, Mr. Daga stood waiting for us on the bathroom counter, leaning against the cold water knob with his tail curled around his feet. I had forgotten how bright his eyes shone and how bad he smelled up close. On the mirror I saw the words rattus rattus again above his reflection. They read like a caption.

  “Since yer so stinking big,” Mr. Daga said to Dad, “I’ll let you carry me in your shirt pocket.” Dad nodded and held out his hand. Mr. Daga climbed on easily. He jumped into Dad’s pocket, rearranged himself, and poked his nose and eyes out. His whiskers twitched left, then right. “This’ll work,” he said. “Move it.”

  At the end of the tour, Mr. Daga said he thought the duplex would be “an okay joint, with a little work.” Over the next few days, he and Dad made numerous trips to the coin collector in town, as well as to one in Seattle, with Mr. Daga hiding in Dad’s shirt pocket. By the end of the week, they’d managed to collect just enough money to buy the house.

  That night, right as I climbed into bed, all the lights came on. “Hallelujah,” Mom shouted from downstairs.

  Dad, Aaron, and I helped the Daga family move the next day. Grandpa said he wanted no part in dealing with rats, so he stayed home.

  I had no idea rats kept so many things. Most of their belongings looked like garbage to me—bunches of seeds and wads of toilet paper and stashes of rotten food. Some things made no sense, like a sandwich bag stuffed with bird bones and feathers. Some were beautiful: tiny polished stones; old photographs of people who looked like my Grandpa, with the corners of the photos rounded off by tiny teeth; bits of metal and glass. I asked if there were any more coins, but Mr. Daga said they’d been forced to sell every last piece of the collection to purchase the duplex. “Nothing left of the collection but pennies. I miss the other coins a little,” he said. “They were nice to look at and touch, but that kind of thing ain’t worth much to a rat. That’s human stuff.”

  The last thing we moved was a bundle about three inches long, wrapped carefully in a piece of old corduroy that had disappeared from Mom’s sewing drawer. Mr. Daga told Dad it would be good for his soul if he’d carry it to their new home, explaining that it was the body of Jimmy, the young rat Dad had killed with his shoe. I stood back, watching the quiet faces of the rat family, thinking how I would feel if that were my little brother’s body.

  Dad set the bundle in a corner of the new living room, as instructed. Mr. Daga quietly explained that rat custom was to leave the body of a loved one wrapped in cloth until the flesh had completely decomposed and the bones lay clean and white.

  Once everything was moved in, the young rats ran around the duplex, exploring every nook and cranny of the rooms. Mr. Daga looked like a proud homeowner, sharpening his whiskers with his tiny claws, slapping his belly, and breathing in the air of his new home as if it smelled better than the air in our house. It did—it wasn’t covered in rat droppings. At least not yet.

  The upstairs unit of the duplex still looked empty by human standards: no chairs, no couches—just a few cardboard boxes here and there and mounds of paper shavings in the corners. The counters stood empty. The mantel over the fireplace was dusty but uncluttered.

  That mantel caught Dad’s attention. “Do me a favor, Josh,” he said to me, and then whispered instructions in my ear. I nodded and ran home. When I came back, Dad met me at the door and carried the mantel clock into the Dagas’ new living room.

  “I think this would look good in your home,” he said, setting the gift on the mantel.

  “Tilton’s old clock,” Mr. Daga said. “Nice touch, Peshik. You sure you want to give that away?”

  “We have no fireplace and no mantel,” Dad explained. “And you do. Besides, you should have a housewarming gift.”

  “Thanks,” said Mr. Daga. “I like it real good. Someday maybe I’ll show you how it works.” I wondered what he meant by that. It would be more than a year before I found out.

  “Do you think you’ll be happy here?” asked Dad.

  “I think so,” Mr. Daga said. “I’m almost sure of it. Heck, you might even end up thinkin’ I’m an okay neighbor. After all, I know even more about yer house than you do.”

  “I believe it.” Dad smiled.

  Mr. Daga smiled back. “You should. Remember, no one knows a house like a rat knows a house. Oh, and if you ever have trouble with your electricity, just let me know.”

  THANKS TO GRANDPA, it wasn’t long before the Dagas had rented the bottom floor of their duplex. A broken hip had recently forced Grandpa’s old fishing buddy Mr. Natalie into a wheelchair, so he and his wife had been looking for a house with all the rooms on one floor.

  On the day the Natalies moved in, Grandpa settled himself onto our porch swing like before, smoking his pipe. Aaron and I sat next to him, waiting for the moving truck to arrive. Mom had told the Natalies that we’d help them with the boxes. The three of us stared across the street at the Talker, who was chattering away to no one in particular. “Sometime I’m gonna sit down next to that man and just listen to him go,” Grandpa said. “Why, for all we know, he’s reciting the cure for cancer.”

  “Dad says he’s crazy as a loon.”

  “Watch it there, Josh. One of these days your dad’s gonna start talking that way about me.”

  The moving truck turned onto our street and before long Aaron, Dad, and I were lugging boxes. Mom was inside helping Mrs. Natalie unpack. I decided I really liked Mrs. Natalie, because she kept telling us what a good job we were doing and how strong we were, and she gave us pop to drink. I didn’t like Nat, as Grandpa called Mr. Natalie, because he yelled at us to stay out of his way. Nat was so fat that he filled his wheelchair side to side and front to back and even spilled over a little. He wore a captain’s hat pulled low over his eyes, and he smoked a pipe like Grandpa. He made a bubbly sound when he talked, as if his mouth were full of spit. I’d heard dozens of stories about Nat from Grandpa—how he’d loved hiking through the woods and fly-fishing in the middle of a river. Looking at him now, it seemed impossible this could be the same guy.

  After moving day, we saw Mr. Natalie only when he drove his motorized wheelchair down the porch ramp and around the block. He never said a word, but we could hear the whine of the chair’s motor and see the smoke from his pipe billowing out behind him. He looked like a tugboat. Dad said he always
wanted to tell Mr. Natalie that his engine was burning a little oil. Grandpa assured him Nat would not appreciate the joke.

  The front yard of the duplex gave Mrs. Natalie space to grow her beloved azaleas. “I am a gardener,” she told Aaron and me one morning, “and I’m going to spend my remaining days transforming this little piece of brown earth into a green paradise. If you boys would like to earn some extra money, I could use your help. I pay three dollars an hour for good work and four dollars an hour for great work.”

  We weeded and planted for her two mornings a week for the rest of the summer. I never did get more than three dollars an hour from her.

  It was on the third of those mornings that I first saw the black Cadillac.

  We saw fancy cars in our neighborhood sometimes, so I didn’t pay much attention until the Cadillac stopped in front of the Natalies’ house. Even then, Mrs. Natalie stayed on her knees, weeding away. The Cadillac doors opened and two men climbed out: one tall and thin, the other short. They wore matching black suits and narrow black ties. The tall one hunched his shoulders and jutted his chin out, which made him look like a perching crow. The short one shuffled along after him, twitching his ridiculously bushy mustache. They stepped up to Mrs. Natalie’s fence. “Good day, young gentlemen, madam.” The tall, thin one nodded in turn at Aaron and me, then at Mrs. Natalie. “Is this the home of … ahhh—” He turned to his companion. “Give me the list, Ludwig.”

  “I don’t have it. I gave it to you on our last call and you never gave it back.”

  The other man began to panic. “I certainly did give it back! Check your other pockets, you fool! We’ve only got the one copy!” He pulled out a hanky and mopped his forehead. I set down my trowel and watched as the short, chubby man called Ludwig ran his hands through all his pockets. He finally yanked out a long roll of yellowed paper. Both men sighed. The tall man snatched the list from Ludwig, gave his forehead one final mop, and carefully tucked his hanky back into his pocket. He took a deep breath and smiled at Mrs. Natalie.

  “I’m nothing without my list. You could say we live and die by the list. Please be more careful, Ludwig. Now then, where were we?” He ran a long, thin finger down the names. “Yes, here it is: Natalie, John. Is this the home of John Natalie?” Mrs. Natalie stood up, removed her gloves, and said it was.

  The man smiled toothily. “My name is Peat. Victor Peat. I believe I represent products and services of interest to you. Let me give you my card.”

  Mrs. Natalie took the card and read it out loud: “Victor Peat, Complete Funeral Arrangements.” She tried handing the card back with a simple “No thank you.”

  Victor Peat made no move to retrieve his card. “Let me leave you a few of our catalogs. You know, we have a complete line of coffins, from the sublimely elegant to the surprisingly economical. We also offer headstones, burial plots, complete funeral services, hearse rentals, and other related products.”

  “Fine,” said Mrs. Natalie, “but none of that is of interest to me. Nobody’s dead.”

  Victor Peat smiled again. “Of course not. But please take this information and put it someplace handy. If we ever can be of service, just call. Number’s on the card.”

  “Fine,” repeated Mrs. Natalie impatiently. She took the catalogs and watched as Victor Peat and his assistant walked back to their Cadillac.

  “Put the list in your inside coat pocket, like I told you,” said Victor Peat. Ludwig obeyed. They climbed in the car and drove slowly away.

  That night, John Natalie died of a heart attack. He was seventy-two years old and at least sixty pounds overweight.

  Two days later, I saw the black Cadillac again. It drove past our house and parked in front of the duplex. I watched through the front window as Victor Peat and Ludwig climbed up the stairs. Mrs. Natalie met them at the gate and invited them inside.

  Our family went to the funeral. A lot of people Grandpa’s age attended. They all seemed to know Grandpa from way back and kept calling him Red—Mom said that Grandpa’s hair was red before it went gray. I couldn’t remember ever seeing Grandpa—even in a photograph—with anything other than his thin silvery hair.

  A lot of those old people had interesting stories to tell about Nat, the fat, grumpy old man I’d only known for a few weeks. Considering how little I liked the guy, I was surprised by how much I didn’t hate his funeral. Victor Peat and Ludwig made sure everything ran smoothly. The punch tasted especially good. It had orange sherbet in it.

  I didn’t think about that black Cadillac or Victor Peat until two weeks later, when I saw the car parked in front of Lola’s house. The day before, her stepdad, Jerry, had died of a burst appendix. I wasn’t about to go to Lola’s to ask her about the car, since every time I saw her on the street, she made fun of our tilting floors or asked if I’d seen any rats in our house. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have said anything at all if Lola hadn’t said something first.

  We saw her at her stepdad’s funeral. The service had ended and a couple of women who looked like old versions of Lola were serving refreshments in the reception area of the funeral home. My brother and I were scooping that same orange sherbet punch into our glasses when Lola walked up.

  “What are you two doing here?”

  “We came with our parents.” No one spoke for a while, because what do you say at a funeral?

  “That guy gives me the creeps,” said Lola, finally.

  “What guy?”

  “That guy. Mr. Peat.” She pointed across the room at Victor Peat, who was standing next to Lola’s mom. He was smiling, jutting his chin in her direction.

  “He’s the same guy who arranged Mr. Natalie’s funeral,” I said.

  “He’s creepy. He came by our house and tried to sell us a coffin. Then Jerry died the very next day, out of the blue. It gives me the shivers just thinking about it.”

  “He came by Mr. Natalie’s house the day before he died, too,” I whispered. “We were there, helping Mrs. Natalie weed the garden. He gave her a catalog of coffins and gravestones.”

  “He did?” asked Lola. “That’s so creepy.” Then one of her relatives called her away.

  “Do you think maybe he had something to do with it?” Aaron asked.

  “Something to do with what?”

  “With them dying.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t see how he could have. They died in different ways. It’s not like they were murdered or anything. But it’s like he knew they were going to die. When he came to the Natalies’, he had Mr. Natalie’s name on a list.”

  “Vultures,” said Aaron.

  “What?”

  “They’re like vultures. Like those birds that circle over dying cows.”

  The next time I saw Victor Peat was early on a Saturday morning. Dad is a pancake fanatic and usually makes a big breakfast on Saturday. It was seven thirty and Grandpa, Aaron, and I were sitting at the kitchen table while Dad mixed ingredients. Mom was still in bed. Dad tried to let her sleep in each Saturday, but Aaron usually ended up waking her early to ask her where his shoes were or what we’d be having for lunch later.

  We were going to start painting the outside of the house that day, and Dad had forced Aaron and me to go to bed early the night before. When someone knocked on the door, it was so early that we assumed it was somebody we knew. Aaron yelled, “COME IN!”

  “Shush,” Dad hissed. “Mom’s still asleep.” No one came in.

  I raced Aaron to the door and won. I pulled the door open as Aaron stampeded down the hallway, while Dad shushed us again from the kitchen. Aaron stopped dead when he saw Victor Peat.

  “Good morning,” Mr. Peat said, smiling thinly. “I’m sorry to bother you so early, but I’m looking for the home of a young man named …” Ludwig handed him the list. “Ah! A young man named Aaron Peshik. Would one of you be Aaron Peshik?”

  I looked over at my brother. His face was turning white.

  “Who is it?” hissed Dad from the kitchen. “Tell ’em to come in!”

 
; Victor Peat removed his hat and stepped past us into the kitchen. Ludwig followed him, scanning the writing on our walls without comment. Aaron stared after Victor Peat, his eyes filling with tears and his lips quivering.

  “Don’t worry, Aaron,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything. He’s just some freaky guy. Don’t worry about it, okay?”

  Aaron burst out crying and collapsed onto the floor. Who could blame him? Wherever this weird guy went, people died the next day.

  Dad came in from the kitchen. “Josh, could you see what’s wrong with your brother?” He apologized to Victor Peat and Ludwig, then ushered them out the front door, saying he wasn’t interested in their services.

  “Please take this information and put it someplace handy,” Victor Peat said, stepping over a sobbing Aaron. “If ever we can be of assistance, just call. Number’s on the card.”

  Dad nodded and accepted a stack of papers. Victor Peat reached a bony hand down to Aaron and patted him on the head. “Don’t worry, young man. Whatever’s troubling you now will soon be a distant memory.”

  Aaron cried even louder as Dad closed the front door. Dad knelt down and tried to comfort Aaron, but when Aaron starts crying like that, it’s impossible to talk to him. Dad turned to me for help.

  “It’s that guy, Dad. Victor Peat.”

  “Victor Peat?” He looked down at the card in his hand and frowned. “How’d you know his name?”

  “He’s the same guy who planned the funerals for Mr. Natalie and Jerry.”

  “Oh, right,” said Dad. “That’s where I’ve seen him.”

  “And both times he showed up the day before those guys died and tried to sell them coffins.”

  “He’s a vulture!” blubbered Aaron. “And he said he was looking for me!”

  I think Dad understood how scary it would be, especially for a little kid like Aaron, but he didn’t believe there was any connection. He tried to comfort Aaron by tickling him and finally offering him candy. None of it worked, so he picked Aaron up, set him on the couch with the Saturday comics, and went to clean the breakfast dishes.