The Rat on Fire

by George V. Higgins

  “Leo,” Fein said, “the people I got living in that building’d steal dogshit if they thought they could sell it to somebody.”

  “I dunno about dogshit,” Proctor said, “but there is somebody in that building who has got at least one cat, I can tell you that for sure.”

  “Stinks, huh?” Fein said.

  “It’s damp in that basement,” Proctor said. “There’s been water in there last winter, I think. Maybe the spring thaw. But it’s wet, and you can smell that there’s been cats in the building.”

  “I told the bastards they couldn’t have pets,” Fein said.

  “You should tell the bastards the pets can stay, but they gotta leave,” Proctor said. “That’s a nice old building you got there. Shame to have to take it out.”

  “What else am I going to do with it, Leo?” Fein said. “You want to tell me that? You have some hot ideas how I can keep my building and I won’t go broke trying to keep it up and the fire inspectors and all them other people won’t be coming around all the time, telling me I got to turn it into some goddamned Hilton or they report me to everybody in sight and make my fucking life miserable for the rest of my life? You got some bright ideas, Leo? You know something I don’t?

  “You’re so fucking smart, why don’t you figure out how to collect the rent off of your niggers and when it works, let me know what it is, all right?” Fein said. “What am I going to do? Go down there every month with a wheelbarrow full of cheap jewelry and sell them that so I can get the rent money? I don’t want to take that property out. I just can’t do anything else. I got the taxes and I got the repairs and the building’s not working for me—I’m working for the goddamned building. I’m sick of it. I got to take it out.”

  “Look,” Proctor said, “I didn’t mean anything. It’s just that it’s a nice old building. It’s well built. It’s got the stone foundation …”

  “Which sweats all winter and leaks all spring and that’s why the goddamned place’s so goddamned damp,” Fein said.

  “The beams’re in good shape,” Proctor said. “You got a little sagging problem with the main beam. But I figure, you put a couple jacks in there, you could crank her right back up to where she’s supposed to be.”

  “I’m not buying no goddamned jacks,” Fein said. “I already told you what I’m gonna do, and if you’re so attached to the fucking place you can either fucking buy it off me for what I owe, which is not a very good price, considering the trouble I had trying to take a fucking dime out of it, or you can take it out like I asked you to. And if you’re not going to do that, let me know and I will get somebody else.”

  “I’m not saying that,” Proctor said. “I’m just saying that it’s a nice old building and it’s well built. That’s all.

  “Now,” Proctor said, “what you have got in that there building which is not so nice is this: you have got a whole buncha fuckin’ rats, is what you have got. You have got rats up the gumpstump. You have got rats that are big rats and you have got rats that are little rats. They are all singers. They are practicing for the choir, is what I think. You go in that cellar and you open the door and you shine your light in there and they start squealing and running all over the place. I bet there was fifty of them taking off when me and Jimmy went in there, and some of them were bigger than dogs I used to own.”

  “Thanks,” Fein said. “More tenants who don’t pay any rent. At least they don’t complain about the heat all the time and keep bugging me about new bathrooms.”

  “This is not bad news, Jerry,” Leo said.

  “Rats?” Fein said. “Since when are rats good news? I know rats. When I was growing up on Blue Hill Ave in Mattapan it was a nice neighborhood. People took care of their yards. They raked them up and they cut the grass. In the winter they shoveled the snow and in the summer they got off their ass and cut the goddamned lawn. Saturdays everybody dressed up and went to temple. You had these fish stories where you could get a piece of fish from Mister Goldstein. Your mother and your father were friends with all the neighbors and their kids went to school with you. You all played baseball over Franklin Field. Two days a week you had Hebrew school and when somebody died you didn’t have any trouble at all getting ten full-grown Jewish men to chant Kaddish and sit Shiva with you.

  “You know what happened?” Fein said. “You want me to tell you what happened? I am sitting at home the other night and having a couple drinks with my friend Tommy Gallagher, who runs the restaurant down in Canton and they have a little floor show for which I occasionally get him some talent. Nothing big, nothing that’ll ever make anybody rich, but a nice little club where a kid can go and sing a few songs and maybe play the piano, and if she has the talent it will come out, and if she doesn’t, that will also come out. And maybe even if she has the talent she will decide the hubby’s doing pretty good down at the Fore River shipyard and why the hell should she take off for Las Vegas and peddle her ass to a lot of sleazes on the off-chance maybe she can make it big.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Fein said. “I had one girl who sang down at Tommy’s place over eight years, and she finally comes in to me and she says she is quitting, and I thought there was something wrong. So I said to her, ‘Gina, what the hell’s the matter, huh? I thought you and Tommy got along great.’ And she says, ‘We do. But you realize something? I am now forty-five years old. Forty-five. Frankie is forty-eight and he has his twenty years in with the MDC police and he is going to retire. The kids’re grown and they got their own lives. We don’t need the house anymore. You realize what we paid for heat last winter? Almost nine hundred dollars. So, Frankie’s got this job, he’s going to be the boss for a change, this little town outside Fort Lauderdale, and we’re gonna live in a trailer and I’m gonna sit in the sun and get a nice tan and enjoy myself. All right?’ Let me tell you, Leo, of all the guys I know, Tommy Gallagher is one of the best.

  “So I am sitting there with Tommy,” Fein said, “and we are having a couple drinks and the phone rings. It is my mother. My mother who’s living over at the Brook House in Brookline. Which looks like something that was headed for Miami but somebody fucked up the shipping invoice. And she says to me, ‘Jerry, you got to come over. Ellen’s husband died two days ago.’ Ellen is my mother’s best friend, they play gin all the time, her and my mother and her husband, Jack, who died two days ago. I don’t know these people. I met Jack and Ellen once or twice, I guess. He used to run a liquor store in Newton. Nice guy, but he’s dead. Dead two days, right? So what? What is that to me? I say, ‘Died two days ago? They should probably bury him.’ She says, this is my mother, she says, ‘They did bury him. They haven’t got enough men for Kaddish. You got to come over. They are two short and you have to come over and bring somebody else.’

  “I told her,” Fein said. “I said, ‘It is Sunday night. I don’t know where anybody is. I will come over myself, but I can’t find anybody else at this hour on a Sunday night. Are all the men dead who live in Brook House?’ She tells me, ‘Jerry, it is Sunday night. How the hell you expect me to find somebody who is a man here on a Sunday night?’ I tell her, ‘I cannot find another guy this late this fast on Sunday night.’

  “You know what happens?” Fein said. “I will tell you what happens. I make Tommy Gallagher into a Jew. I say to Tommy, ‘All right, you mick asshole, you are going to get into my car and we are going over to Brookline and you are going to put on a little hat and you are going to be a Jew for one night for a change.’ And he says to me, ‘I can’t do that. I don’t even go to church anymore. My own church. I went there last Christmas and they dumped the regular Gospel and read about the prodigal son, they saw me. How the hell can I be a Jew, I’m not even a good Catholic?’ I tell him, ‘Get in the car.’ He gets in the car and we go and Tommy does better with the chanting than I do. ‘All that altar boy training,’ he says.

  “Now,” Fein said, “the hell you think that is, huh, they got to haul in the goyim for a quorum, they can sit Shiva in Brookline, huh? I will tell yo
u what it is. It is rats. Rats, Leo. Big fat fuckin’ rats that run around all the time looking like the Pittsburgh Steelers, they’re so big. Rats in the basement. Rats in the yard. Rats in the garage and rats in the rubbish in the side yard. Big, fat, fuckin’ rats.

  “Rats,” Fein said, “rats was among the things that when my father died, I said to my mother, ‘You got to, you have got to move out of this fuckin’ neighborhood.’ I did not say fuckin’, because I didn’t need to and besides if I did need to, the minute I said that she would not have heard nothing else. And I said to her, ‘What you have here is this: you have people here who do not take care of the things they own and they are always throwing away food that they buy on the money I give them with the taxes I pay, and they attract rats. If I was a rat, I would also come around here for a while and sit down and have a nice lunch for myself every day. Looks like pretty good food to me. You got the chicken wings and the hambones and they throw out the vegetables and stuff and it isn’t bad. See? So, you got to get out of here. Because the niggers’re in and the rats’re on the way and the first kind of animals aren’t leaving and the second kind’s gonna come in larger numbers. If I make myself clear. And they’re gonna breed when they get here, because there is only one thing that a rat likes better’n a free lunch and that is making more rats. So you got to get out.’

  “Well,” Fein said, “you would’ve thought I went and told her, ‘Cut your foot off.’ She came out of the box like something that’d been penned up for a helluva long time, and she tells me she will not do it. That this is her home. That isn’t it enough, she lost her husband when he died too young. That I am no good as a son and not much better as a human being, and I also have other character defects and deficiencies. I thought I was getting indicted for something. I was sitting there waiting for my lawyer to come in, and I didn’t even have a lawyer at the time. I wasn’t even indicted. And she finally stops for breath and I tell her again. I go back to the rats.

  “Leo,” Fein said, “it was fucking awful. Now, you are sitting there and you are telling me that I got rats in that place. I suspected this, but I liked suspecting it a helluva lot better’n I like having somebody tell me it. And you are sitting there and you are telling me that this is good news, that I have these animals running around with all the other animals that I already knew were living in that house, that don’t pay their rent neither. And therefore I would like you to be so good as to tell me why I should be happy, I have rats in my building, considering that it was rats among other things that drove my mother outta Mattapan and I have to pay the fuckin’ rent in Brookline and in addition to which, I have to drag Gallagher over for Kaddish. You want to tell me that?”

  “Sure,” Proctor said. “You know what rats do?”

  “I am intimately acquainted with rats,” Fein said, “for the reasons which I already told you, all right? I know from rats. Speak to me.”

  “Rats run up inside walls,” Proctor said.

  “No shit, Dick Tracy,” Fein said. “Rats run up inside walls, huh? I didn’t know this. I thought probably the rats were on the third floor because God put them there and it was a punishment. Or maybe there was one rat tall enough to push the elevator button in a building where there was an elevator, and he invited all his friends up. ‘View’s much nicer on the third floor, ladies and gentlemen. We’ll all go up there. Folks on the third floor eat nothing but pork chops.’ Are you shittin’ me?”

  “No,” Proctor said. “I am trying to tell you something and you don’t seem to wanna listen to me.”

  “I am listening,” Fein said. “I already told you. Speak.”

  “Rats’re not the only thing which runs up inside the walls,” Proctor said. “There is also plumbing and heating and wiring.”

  “Right,” Fein said. “And, the sun comes up in the east and goes down in the west and when you get a lot of clouds it is often gonna rain. Except in winter, when it snows. What else you have for me?”

  “Plumbing does not start fires,” Proctor said.

  “Not so far as I know,” Fein said.

  “Heating can start fires, but it don’t happen very often,” Proctor said.

  “Not that I know about,” Fein said.

  “Wiring can start fires,” Proctor said.

  “Right,” Fein said.

  “Wiring is in the walls,” Proctor said, “and rats’re in the walls.”

  “Yeah,” Fein said.

  “There is no safe way to make a wire start a fire, as far as cops’re concerned. There’s too many things you got to do to get at it,” Proctor said.

  “This is true,” Fein said.

  “There is very little you have to do to get at a rat and have him start the fire,” Proctor said.

  “Back up a little bit,” Fein said. “How do you get a rat to set a fire?”

  “Very simple,” Proctor said. “You catch the rat. Just to be on the safe side, you catch maybe a dozen rats. This is not very hard. You just go down the fuckin’ dump and catch a few rats and you put them inna cage. Then you take the cage fulla rats to the place that’s got rats and you put the cage down onna floor and you take a can of gasoline and you pour it all over the rats while they’re in the cage.

  “They don’t like it,” Proctor said. “Makes their skin sting or something. And they start to go nuts. Then you take the fuckin’ cage over to where the wallboard starts, and you open it up, and them rats’re all running around in there and they’re looking for a place to run away to, and you just give it to them. Except just as they’re starting out, what you do is drop this here lighted match in there, in that cage, and all of a sudden those rats’ve got more’n stinging skin to look out for, because they are on fire.”

  “Ah,” Fein said.

  “And those rats that’re on fire go running right up inside all those walls where the wiring is, and they set the building on fire,” Proctor said.

  “And anybody,” Fein said, “that was looking at it, they would think that it was probably the wiring.”

  “See?” Proctor said. “That is why rats’re good news.”

  “Finally,” Fein said. “Finally, I am gonna get even with the rats.”

  WILFRID MACK WORE a light blue three-piece suit with silver blazer buttons, black Gucci loafers and a light blue shirt with a dark blue necktie knotted precisely over the gold collar pin. He had a gold identification bracelet on his right wrist and a gold Corum watch with a black alligator strap on his left wrist. On the brick wall behind his chromium and rosewood desk he displayed his diplomas from the University of Kentucky and the Syracuse Law School, his certificate of honorable discharge with the rank of captain in the Judge Advocate Corps of the U.S. Army, his certificates of admission to the Massachusetts and federal bars, his award from the Jaycees as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men of 1963, and his membership scrolls in the Urban League, NAACP, ACLU and American Legion. His appointment as a member of the Presidential Commission on Neighborhoods was preserved in a frame standing on his desk, next to the picture of his wife, Corinne, and the snapshots of his three children.

  Alfred Davis and Walter Scott sat in the blue tweed chairs in front of the desk. Walter wore a dark blue blazer and tan slacks. Alfred wore a dark green tee-shirt with sweat stains at the armpits and dirty blue jeans. Alfred talked and Walter listened, looking at Wilfrid.

  “I am telling you, Mister Mack,” Alfred said. “That is exactly what it is that I am doing. I am telling you. I am telling you that these guys are out doing a number on us, and that is exactly what they are doing and we all know it. Now if we can’t come in when this kind of thing starts going down and talk to you who is our elected representative and is always coming around the community center and stuff and telling the kids that he is on the job because he wants to help us and that is why we should all get out and vote him back in the job because he wants to help us, then what good are you, huh? What good’s that do us, huh? You tell me that? You tell me to tell you things and I am doing that. How about, you te
ll me something?”

  “Alfred,” Walter said, “Mister Mack isn’t arguing with you. He didn’t say that. He just said that it wasn’t doing anybody any good for you to just sit there and call people names. You’ve got to tell him what happened.”

  “That’s right,” Mack said. “Alfred, maybe I can’t do anything for you. Maybe I can do something for you. I won’t know until you tell me exactly what it is that’s bothering you, and what you think ought to be done about it. Maybe I will tell you something else that I think I can do, and maybe I will tell you I can’t do anything. I don’t know. And I won’t know, either, unless you can stop hollering and yelling like a little baby and tell me what happened that’s bothering you.”

  “Oh, shee-it,” Alfred said. He waved his hands. “You gonna try and give me that shit, man? You’re supposed to be our representative, right? We elected you. You’re supposed to help us, when somebody is doing this kind of thing to us. You’re supposed to give us all this here effective leadership thing. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “That’s what I said,” Mack said, “and that’s what I want to do. But I can’t lead you any place if I don’t know where you’re coming from, and so far you haven’t told me.”

  “All right,” Alfred said, “my sister, right? My sister Selene. Now my sister Selene, she is only seventeen years old, all right? She don’t hang out. She goes to school every day and she gets all A’s and B’s and she helps my mother and she works on the weekends and at nights down at the twenty-four-hour store. She comes home nights with that fuckin’ purple slush all over her uniform and she’s so tired she can’t hardly say anything, and she sits up there and she studies and next year she’s gonna go to Boston State and maybe after that she’s gonna be a lawyer like you, Mister Mack. And this guy, this Peters guy, he is buggin’ her all the time and askin’ her to go out with him and he’s a married man. He won’t leave her alone.”