The Rat on Fire

by George V. Higgins

  “So I looked at him. I says, ‘You crazy? I gotta loada frozen chickens in there and a compressor goin’ nuts and it’s gotta be seventy-five degrees out there, which means that goddamned thing’s gonna break down on me any minute, and you’re tellin’ me I oughta stop for nookie? I do that and that damned thing’s gonna quit on me while I’m in there and I’ll get to Hyde Park with that truck smellin’ worse’n Alice after a hard night. That bastard down there, the night checker, he didn’t shit in years, he’s gonna take one whiff and tell me, “Rotten. Keep ’em.” Which is gonna leave me with a busted rig and no dough and a mad wife which I already had and didn’t want, and a three-ton loada spoiled chickens. Which I don’t think my kids’re gonna want to eat, and which I certainly don’t want and right now I haven’t got, like I do have the wife.’ So I says to him, ‘No, there’s enough rotten shit in my life as it is.’ ”

  “Well,” Malatesta said, “inna first place, you gotta keep in mind that if you got yourself mixed up with Fein you are already obviously not very smart and you probably need as many guys as you can find, if you got any plans involve staying out of jail, on account of if you’re listening to Fein, if you are in a position which has got you listening to him, then you obviously do not know how things are yourself, on your own, and you need somebody to tell you. I was you, I would not want to listen to Fein either, because I have got good reason to know that Fein is an asshole, is what Fein is, and the only reason nobody has put him away for a long time yet’s because he’s just cute enough to find a bigger asshole’n himself to do the things he ought to’ve gone to jail for himself. Which in this case is you.”

  “I don’t have no choice,” Proctor said. He rubbed his hand over his face. “I did that stupid thing.… The last stupid thing I did recently was when Clinker Carroll got outta Walpole there and they had this homecoming thing for him the Saturday night before Memorial Day up there in that joint in Swampscott, you know?”

  “Clinker didn’t last long, I’ll say that for him,” Malatesta said. “How long was he on the street, he got hooked again? A week? Less’n that.”

  “About a week,” Proctor said. “Week or ten days. He has the usual problem which a guy has when he gets out, which is he gets all itchy with all the catchin’ up he’s gotta do. You come out of one of those places, they oughta give you a new car, good-lookin’ broad, ten grand walkin’ around, save a hell of a lot of chasin’ guys around that just came out. But, he’s out on bail now. Which is another thing of course.

  “Anyway,” Proctor said, “like a fuckin’ asshole I go to Clinker’s party. And like the horse’s hang-down that I am, I get myself shitfaced. And I agree, I’m gonna take this guy home that I don’t even know his name, even, that lives in Framingham. And naturally, we get inna car onna Mass Pike and he’s drunker’n a goat himself, and we’re doing sixty-five, seventy. I’m all over the road and it’s a perfect night for that, of course, because there ain’t no more cops out that weekend’n there are at your average riot down the prison, and what does this asshole that I don’t even know, that I’m being nice enough, I’m drivin’ him home? What does he want to do? He wants to fight.

  “I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it,” the fat man said. “As drunk as I was, and I was pretty drunk, I could not fuckin’ believe it. Just a little piece of shit, this guy, and he didn’t have no knife or anything, and I says to him, I am tryin’ talk him out of it, I couldn’t believe it. I’m all over the road. By now I’m doin’ at least eighty. Everything I see in front of me, there’s two of them. Every car’s got at least four taillights and ones that come with four’ve got eight, maybe sixteen, and I went through two tollbooths without, I didn’t hit nothin’, and I’m trying to reason with this crazy drunken cocksucker. ‘Will you for the luvva Christ and his goddamned Blessed Mother calm down before you get us both in the slammer and dead at the same time?’ And he won’t, naturally, so we get out there in Weston and there’s nothin’ around but weeds and water and he hits me onna head. Right onna fuckin’ head, and I’m doin’ eighty and I already got enough things on my mind with seeing double and everything, and he clocks me one.”

  “Auburn Alice,” Don said. “She the one that advertises, Channel 19?”

  “I guess so,” Mickey said. “I never turn the damned CB on anymore. Too many assholes ratchet-mouthin’ shit at each other. I never heard of her. I had six thousand pounds of chicken in there I was worried about, and that was more’n enough for me. I dunno who she is.”

  “That’s the one,” Don said. “That woman’s got diseases they never even heard of in Vietnam. She’s infected guys from Seattle, and guys from Monterey’ve given her new stuff to give to guys from Louisville. You oughta thank the Lord you had them goddamned chickens. You didn’t, you’d have something now they couldn’t cure unless they used a blowtorch on you.”

  “What’d he hit you with?” Malatesta said.

  “His fist,” Proctor said. “He didn’t have no gun or anything, thank God. And, it didn’t really hurt me much. He’s just a little guy. And he was also drunk. His aim wasn’t too good, even if he was strong. But it surprised me, you know? I was having trouble understanding things. The guy shocked the shit out of me. I didn’t expect it. I thought he was just screamin’ and hollerin’ and acting like a goddamned asshole and I was yelling at him and thinking I was either gonna calm the guy down before I got him home or else when I got him home and that car was stopped I would get out with him and cold-cock him into the rosebushes or something, and he got quiet. Then he comes barrel-assin’ out of nowhere and belts me.

  “So,” Proctor said, “naturally I do the reasonable thing and pull over the side of the road and stop the car and take the keys and get out and open his door and drag him out, beat the livin’ shit out of him and throw him inna goddamned lake, right? Wrong. I take my hands off the wheel and grab the little cocksucker. I am gonna beat the piss out of him. I don’t have to take this kind of shit from some little pisspot like that, that I am doing a favor for that is Clinker’s friend anyway and I don’t even know him. But I forget, of course, that I am right then doing eighty miles an hour in a car that I am the guy that’s supposed to be steering it, and I will tell you this: I am very glad this is the Mass Pike in Weston around three inna morning when there is much of nothing around on either side of me and it’s not like I’m down on Gallivan Boulevard there on a weekday afternoon doing the same thing when some big fat nun starts marching a whole buncha second-graders across the street so they can sing at Benediction, all right? Because I got him all right and belted him right into Labor Day, but at the same time I sort of went off the road some. Into this little pond they got there.”

  “Jesus,” Malatesta said.

  “It was all right,” Proctor said. “It wasn’t really a pond, actually. Well, it was a pond, but it wasn’t a very deep pond. The water just came up about, when you open the car door, all right? It came in the car then. It wasn’t too deep, and the bottom was all mud or else you could’ve driven through it like you would any other puddle that was just about as deep, only about a mile across, and the car stopped in the mud and I opened the door and the water came right in. Right up to about the bottom of the front seat, you know? If I’d’ve been able to keep going, I could’ve gone right across it. It was a little higher’n the seat, actually. Went all over the console and my tapes, but what the hell, huh? And I took out a few of them little trees on the way in. But, I never did like that Monte Carlo anyways. Lousy car. Lousy on gas. This guy Carter got any idea what he’s doing, you think, on the gas thing? Jesus, first he makes me, I can’t use nothing that burns the stuff with lead in it and then he tells me I can’t use none of the stuff that hasn’t got lead in it and when I do I can kiss my house goodbye. What the hell is he doing? You got any ideas?”

  “No,” Malatesta said.

  “Neither’ve I,” Proctor said. “I have no idea in the world what he is doing. I wished I could convince myself that he does. It’s bad enough, I got to
be an asshole, but if the goddamned President’s an asshole we are all in trouble, including poor assholes like me that can’t stay out of trouble anyway, and then what the fuck we do, huh?

  “Anyway,” Proctor said, “I was thinkin’ about gettin’ rid the damned car anyway, although what I had in mind was, I was gonna sell it, not drown it, because it was all shot. But the water was kind of cold and it sobers me up. I’m soaked and I’m walkin’ around in the mud with the water up to my balls and it’s three inna morning, but then I think, Hey, somebody could’ve got themselves killed in this thing, and it could’ve been me, even. See, the little cocksucker, him I don’t care about. I wished he was dead, him causing all the trouble, except I don’t want him dead in my car, I want him dead in somebody else’s car.

  “Because,” Leo said, “you know what them cops’re gonna do with somebody that’s got a record like I got, that he ends up inna swamp at three inna mornin’ and there’s a body of a dead guy inna car with him, or maybe inna swamp and there doesn’t happen to be no other way that body could’ve gotten there, huh? They’re gonna blame me for it, and then they’re gonna charge me manslaughter.

  “This,” Leo said, “I do not need. He is a little shit and the whole goddamned world will be better off for all of us if he is dead, and that includes the cops, but I was glad he was alive. Because if he is dead, I certainly cannot afford to take the credit.”

  “So what’d you do?” Malatesta said.

  “Well,” Leo said, “like I said, what I did was sober up. Which maybe would’ve been a good idea earlier, when I wasn’t so tired and then maybe I never would’ve gotten myself in this mess where I drowned my own car like a cat. What am I, a United States Senator or something, I drown my own car? But it was not such a hot idea, because I decide I can charm a dog offa meat wagon and I am gonna think up this story that’ll explain the whole thing. When I am finished, the cop is probably gonna be cryin’ his eyes out and put me in for an award, I was such a quick-witted citizen when this emergency hits and I probably even saved the guy’s life. The worthless little piece of shit he is that started the whole thing inna first place.”

  “What’d you tell them?” Malatesta said.

  “I told them,” Proctor said, “I told them I was, I was standing there inna water up over my ankles, I sort of waded over to where I saw the headlights, and I would’ve been freezing my balls off except it was summer and anyway I was so shitfaced I was probably good for about twenty below, and honest to God, Billy, I must’ve thought I was Winston Churchill or something. Here is this cop. I saw something once that was also alive and was just as big, but it was gray and it couldn’t talk and it had a very long nose and I saw it in the circus when I took the kids the Garden and it cost me about seventy bucks and there was this guy that had on a silver suit and made a tiger jump on the back of this thing with a long nose and then the guy jumped on the tiger’s back and rode the two of them around the room and that big gray thing was an elephant. That’s how big this cop was.

  “But he could talk,” Leo said. “He could talk and he did talk. What he said was impressive, but he did not say as much as I did, which was my mistake. My ninth and tenth mistakes for the night, a little over my usual quota, maybe, but not that much over, and I told him that the tire blew and I steered it in the pond so I wouldn’t hit nobody that was alive.

  “And he says,” Leo said, “he says, ‘Bullshit. Those tires’re all fine. They’re all that’s keeping that thing afloat.’ Which is when it occurs to me, maybe I better look at the tires, I’m gonna tell stories like that. I did. They were all fine. I wished I thought of doing that a little earlier, maybe before the cop showed up, so I didn’t try something dumb as that.”

  “What’d he do?” Malatesta said.

  “The fuck you think he did?” Leo said. “For Christ sake, you’re a cop. The fuck’d you do? You’d write me up. You oughta know.”

  “Yeah,” Malatesta said, “I guess I would’ve. I don’t think the same I used to.”

  “He ran me in,” Leo said. “Driving Under, Driving So As To Endanger. Drunk. The usual stuff.”

  “What about the passenger?” Billy said.

  “Locked him up to sleep it off,” Leo said. “Let him go the next day. Which was when, of course, I hadda call Fein.”

  “Well,” Billy said, “you are a sorry son of a bitch if you had to call Fein, and I don’t rate your chances none too good if that jamoke’s going to defend you at a trial in a court of law and all that stuff.”

  “Billy,” Leo said, “I admit to being stupid. You yourself can ask me, and I will personally admit it. I only got an eighth-grade education and the stuff was gettin’ a little hard for me the year before that. The nuns down Our Lady of Victory practically made a public announcement and printed it in the newspaper that Leo Proctor was thick as shit and would never get anywhere except in jail, and they should’ve known they were right in the first place when they let him in even though his father was English but they hoped his Irish mother maybe gave him some sense and she didn’t.

  “Well,” Leo said, “they were right about the jail, but they were wrong about the other part, because I have gone and I have transcended what the nuns give me to the point at which I probably owe various people close to half a million dollars if I was to sit down and take the time to add them up, which I am not about to do, on account of how I do not need that shit. This is a great country and it is a land of opportunity, so that even a dumb shit like me, who cannot get rid of a few noisy niggers, can wind up owing various people half a million dollars or so with just about no hope to God that he will ever pay them back. If this was not a great country, I would be out someplace with a shovel and some guy’d be whipping me on the naked back for not diggin’ fast enough, but it is and so I’m not.

  “Still,” Leo said, “I am not so stupid that even I do not know that Four-flusher Fein is not your very best legal-type counselor and could on his best day probably not get Jack Kennedy off on a charge that he murdered Lee Harvey Oswald.

  “The trouble is, Billy,” Leo said, “the trouble is that when you owe various people about half a million dollars or so which you are not in a position to pay back right away, they start looking around all the time and gettin’ jittery, you know? And they say, ‘Gee, uh, Mister Proctor, we loaned you all that money and stuff and you bought these here buildings with it and everything that’ve got apartments in them and you’re supposed to have people living there. But we took a look at the buildings and there don’t seem to be a large number of people floatin’ around. Oh, there’s a few of the minority groups shuckin’ and jivin’ on your stoops and stuff like that, and we’re certainly glad to see you’re doing your bit for low-cost housing for the underprivileged. We mean it. You’re a prince of a guy, and we got to compliment you for it. But then again on the other hand, we’ve been lookin’ at your statements here for the past few months, and you haven’t been payin’ us.’

  “Billy,” Leo said, “you ever see one of them metal-framed bankers, with the gray hair and the three-piece suits and their black shoes and the glasses with the metal frames? You ever talk to one of them guys? They don’t live in the real world, I’m tellin’ you. What they do is live in the banks. They got their desks out in front of everybody and that is where they live. They can’t fuck, fight, frown, wash, shit or change their underwear. The hell, everybody goin’ by on the street could see them and so could everybody at all the other desks on the red rug, and I finally figured it out, how they do it: they hire people that don’t do none of those things, so they don’t need to.

  “Now those guys, Billy,” Leo said, “those guys’re all in favor of helping everybody inna whole wide world as long as it don’t involve none of their money. Which is another thing about bankers—they may be all vice-presidents or something, and they’re making nine grand a year and they all eat lunch at Slagle’s and have the vegetable special and the iced tea that goes with it and it costs a buck twenny-five and they leave a fi
fteen-cent tip, but there’s millions in those vaults and it all belongs to them. Other people maybe put it there, and someday they’re gonna come and take it out again, but in the meantime it all belongs to the bankers.

  “What they are all for,” Leo said, “they are all for helping the fuckin’ niggers. They think helpin’ niggers is the greatest thing since people started coming in and depositing their money, and the reason they think this is because if they don’t ship that money out to help the niggers, on the understanding that they’re gonna get it all back on time with plenty of interest, of course, pretty soon some hairy Jew kid with about ten degrees from Harvard’s gonna get a poverty law grant and start dragging them out of the bank and into court, they’re not doin’ enough for civil rights and they should lose their charters. They are all for loanin’ money to guys like me that’re gonna rehab old joints and rent ’em out to low-income people, until we do it and they find out them low-income people is fuckin’ niggers, and if that wasn’t bad enough, they don’t pay their fuckin’ rent, neither. Which means you’re not makin’ payments on your fuckin’ loans, and I bet you could dump a fuckin’ rattler down a banker’s back without makin’ him as nervous as he gets when you’re not payin’ off those goddamned loans.

  “Now here is what it is, all right?” Leo said. “I will tell you what it is: fuckin’ niggers’ve got rights. If the niggers can’t find no apartments they can get a Jew or two and go to federal court and pretty soon every landlord in the city’s gonna be in federal court with his own high-priced loudmouth tryin’ to stop the judge from throwin’ him in jail because he didn’t take in every nigger that came down the street and make sure he had a warm bed and a good dinner in addition to, the roof didn’t leak. But when the niggers get in the apartments, then it is a different story. They don’t pay their rent. They stick out their lower lips and they look at you and they roll them big white eyes and they say, ‘Muhfuck, I ain’t payin’ you no rent. I ain’t payin’ you no hundred thirty-five this month for them five rooms. I ain’t been warm enough. You ain’t got the heat up high enough. I is withholdin’ mah rent until you gets the heat up there.’ And then they go shuckin’ and jivin’ down the street and you just try to get them into court, collect from them. You can’t get ’em into court and you can’t get ’em out the building, and they won’t pay you nothin’ while they’re in it, and your lawyer costs you money but theirs is free.