by Tor Seidler
Same reaction.
“You need sustenance or you’ll waste away and die.”
“Good,” he muttered, closing his eyes.
She crouched there quite a while, but he didn’t open his eyes again, and watching him sleep began to make her drowsy. What with all the swimming and searching in the hot sun, it had been a long day, and as soon as she got home, she crawled into her loafer and conked out.
* * *
She woke before dawn. Beckett was in the shoe on her left, but the one on her right was still empty. She got up and shook her brother, worried that their father had passed out somewhere with heatstroke.
“Heatstroke?” Beckett said groggily. “Rats don’t get heatstroke.”
“Mrs. P. is taking care of three cases as we speak. Come on, Beck. We have to find him.”
Beckett rarely accompanied her to hunt down their father. The truth was, he and Mortimer hadn’t gotten along too well even before the throttling incident. Beckett’s theory was that their father blamed him and Lucy for the death of their mother, a delicate creature who’d never really recovered from the strain of giving birth to them. Mortimer was particularly nasty when he drank. But since he’d been missing for two whole days, Beckett went along now.
Outside the pier, the city skyline was still lit up, glimmering against an ashen sky. The jogging path was deserted, the West Side Highway a cinch to cross. A sour-smelling human was passed out in front of the first bar they checked, but otherwise the sidewalks were pretty much devoid of them. In the alley behind the second bar a sewer rat was nosing around in some garbage. Lucy asked if he’d seen a wharf rat with half a tail, but he just gave her a dirty look and popped down a drainage grate. Sewer rats were a surly bunch.
The sun came up. The rounds were going slowly because Beckett had to stop every other block to decipher the writing on a building or billboard or awning. Most of the buildings had lots of windows—the new luxury high-rises were almost entirely window—so when they passed a building with no windows at all, Beckett naturally had to try to figure out what it was. While he was staring up at a flag hanging from a pole under the high cornice, Lucy noticed Oscar creeping out of a deli across the street with his sack. She admired Oscar’s loyalty to Mrs. P., but he’d always seemed suspicious of her, so she didn’t call out. He hugged the edge of the buildings as he slunk down the block. At the corner he snatched a candy bar from a newsstand, shoved it in his sack, and moved on.
At last Beckett was ready to move on too. But only a few blocks to the west, he had to stop again to check out some writing stenciled on a green plywood fence.
“ ‘Post No Bills,’ ” he read out.
“And that?” Lucy said, pointing at some other writing.
“ ‘No Trespassing.’ ”
But trespassing was exactly what they did, for an alley cat came tearing across the street and chased them under the fence into a construction site. Lucy spotted a pipe, about six feet long, lying on the dusty ground between a stack of cinder blocks and a cement mixer. She yelled, “Follow me!” and wriggled in. The pipe was barely three inches in diameter, making it such a tight squeeze that, crouching in the middle, she couldn’t turn around or even look over her shoulder to see if Beckett had followed.
“Beck!” she squealed.
Her less agile brother dove and hit the pipe snout-on. For an instant he saw stars. The stars cleared up just as the alley cat pounced. A claw grazed Beckett’s back, but he darted to the other end of the pipe and squirmed in before the cat could grab him.
This left him and his sister face-to-face in the dark pipe.
“Can he get in?” Lucy asked tremulously.
“I guess we’ll find out.”
The cat certainly tried. But his skull was a hair too wide to fit in either end of the pipe. All he could do was prowl around outside, hissing. As the sun got higher in the sky, the pipe grew hotter and hotter.
“I’m dying,” Beckett announced.
“He can’t wait forever,” Lucy said.
“He can wait till we look like that squirrel.”
“Could we face him down?”
“Face him down? Do you have any idea what cats do to you?”
“Um . . . not really?”
“They maim and cripple you but don’t quite finish you off—so they can have fun torturing you.”
Lucy admitted this sounded bad. But by early afternoon the pipe had become so hot they had to twist over onto their backs to give their paws a break from the scalding metal. Every time they thought the cat might have given up on them, another menacing hiss wafted down the pipe. But it was a Saturday—the reason the construction crew wasn’t around—and at around 4:00 the weekend watchman came by to check the site. He had a German shepherd with him, and all it took was one deep-throated bark from the dog to send the cat skedaddling.
Luckily for Lucy and Beckett, mixing cement requires water, and they found a trough of it by the mixer when they finally backed out of the sweltering pipe.
“Home,” Beckett said, once they’d rehydrated.
But despite the ordeal, Lucy dragged him along to check one last place, a corner pub a couple of blocks to the south. The neon sign in the window perked Beckett up. He’d heard their father mutter the name—CLANCY’S—in his sleep.
They followed a pot-bellied human in the door and hid behind an umbrella stand. The pub was already doing a brisk business. Humans were leaning on a long counter; others were sitting on stools or in booths. Tiny ones, smaller than rats, were waving sticks and running around inside a lit-up box suspended over the bar. Large or small, the humans made a terrible racket, but the place was wonderfully cool—heavenly after the broiling pipe.
Lucy and Beckett didn’t see their father anywhere, but they crept along the baseboard till they were under a cage with a colorful bird in it at the near end of the bar. Lucy was about to ask the bird if he’d seen a rat with half a tail when the bird peered down and said: “He’s spreading the word, I see.”
“Excuse me?” said Lucy.
“About the A/C,” said the bird.
Always interested in letters, Beckett asked what “A/C” meant. Lucy repeated the question loud enough for the bird to hear.
“Air-conditioning,” the bird said. “Mortimer loves it.”
“Where is Mortimer?” Lucy asked.
“Hangs out behind the bar.” The bird shifted an eye to the lit-up box and squawked, “Strike three, you’re out!”
Getting behind the bar was no problem, for there was an open space under a fold-up section of the counter for bartenders to go in and out. At the moment, two bartenders were on duty, one in motorcycle boots, the other in sandals. As they rushed around, the boots stomped and the sandals flapped, and after the pipe ordeal this was more than Beckett could face. But Lucy dragged him along a low shelf that ran along the back, just above a damp rubber floor mat, and despite the din they soon heard a familiar voice singing off-key:
What a slender rat was Belle,
What a tender rat as well,
When I lost her, fiddle-di-dee,
I lost the better part of me.
Farther along the shelf Mortimer had made a nest for himself out of cocktail napkins among some dusty bottles of brandy and sherry that no one ever asked for. At the sight of his two children he quit crooning and frowned.
“What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here, Father?” Lucy said. “We’ve been worried sick.”
“Speak for yourself,” Beckett murmured.
“I live here,” said Mortimer. “Can’t take all those musty books of his.” He cocked his head at Beckett. “And the crate has no A/C.”
While Lucy was digesting this, Mortimer grabbed a paper cup, hopped off the shelf, and dashed right between the feet of the booted bartender. High up above, the bartender was filling four mugs with draft beer. He held the mug handles in one hand and left the spigot open as he filled them, so trickles of beer spilled down onto the
rubber mat. Or would have, if Mortimer hadn’t been there with his cup. When it was full, he carried it back to his hideaway with great care.
“Oh, Father,” Lucy said. “I hope you’re not on an all-liquid diet. It’s unhealthy.”
Her father pulled back one of the cocktail napkins, revealing a pile of Cheetos.
“They put these doo-dads out for the customers,” he said. “Try one.”
Lucy did. It was scrumptious. Not even Beckett could eat just one.
“How long are you staying here, Mort?” Beckett asked.
Mortimer slurped some beer and licked the froth off his whiskers. “At least till the heat lets up,” he said. “Who knows, maybe forever. I have a bad feeling about the pier.”
“Why’s that?” Beckett said.
“I came back early in the morning the other day and saw a couple of humans skulking around. Never a good sign.”
Wouldn’t you miss us? is what Lucy wanted to ask, but she settled for the less pathetic: “Wouldn’t you be lonely, Father?”
“Lonely? Are you out of your gourd? Think this place is mobbed now? Wait till later.”
“I mean . . . for someone you can talk to.”
“No worries. That parrot’s a first-rate conversationalist.”
Lucy was hurt. Mortimer could be difficult and curmudgeonly, but he was still their father. Beckett, on the other hand, rather liked the idea of the crate without him.
“Let’s go, Luce,” he murmured.
“So long,” said Mortimer, who preferred to drink alone.
Lucy wanted to ask if his song was about their mother, Arabella, who’d once worn the little bell that she wore now. But before she could find the words, the big humans at the bar let out a deafening cheer for something the little ones were doing inside the lit-up box. Beckett covered his ears and turned away, so Lucy gave her father a forlorn look and followed.
At the end of the low shelf she stopped and tugged Beckett’s tail. “What’s that say?” she asked, pointing at a row of cans.
Beckett squinted at them. “ ‘Mixed nuts, salted,’ ” he read.
“Are ‘mixed nuts, salted’ nuts?”
“Stands to reason.”
“That’s what Phoenix wanted. Let’s take him a can.”
“It looks heavy. We could never get it all the way to the pier.”
“We can roll it,” Lucy said.
Once they tipped one of the cans onto its side, it was easy enough to roll. But rolling it all the way from the bar to the door unseen would have been impossible, if humans were observant creatures. Luckily for the rats, they’re not, especially when guzzling beer and watching baseball. Lucy and Beckett made it to the umbrella stand unspotted, and when a raucous group of young men from the golf range barged into the bar with their golf bags, Lucy and Beckett scooted out with their can.
It was dusk now, but after the chilly pub it still felt like a blast furnace outside. Fortunately, they were just a block from the West Side Highway. On the way they had to duck behind a fire hydrant to avoid a nanny with a stroller, but there were no humans waiting on the corner to cross. When the light turned red, the furious flow of cars stopped, and Lucy and Beckett rolled the can onto the crosswalk. They barely got it across the three uptown lanes before the light turned green, so they had to cower on the median strip as cars whizzed by in both directions. Eventually, the light turned red again, and they started across the southbound lanes, unaware that an SUV and a yellow cab were waiting to make a left-hand turn into those lanes from the side street. As the SUV bore down on them, Beckett yelped and made a mad dash for the far curb. Lucy was too intent on the can to let it go. When the SUV’s huge front left tire missed her by just over the length of her tail, she froze, petrified. From the curb her brother watched in horror as the taxi headed right for her.
9
GREEN PELLETS
IF IT HAD BEEN JUST Lucy, the cab driver wouldn’t have swerved. In fact, he would have tried to hit her. One less rat in the world was always a plus. But the driver didn’t see Lucy, he saw a metallic flash from the bottom of the can. Just that Wednesday he’d gotten a puncture and spent the better part of an hour jacking up the car and putting on a spare instead of collecting fares. So he jerked the steering wheel to miss the piece of metal.
The cab’s undercarriage whooshed right over Lucy’s head, leaving her stunned. Beckett sprinted out onto the highway and tried to yank her back to the curb, but even then she refused to abandon the nuts. To desert his sister again was unthinkable, so Beckett moved beside her and started pushing. Shoulder to shoulder, they got the can to the other side just as the traffic signal turned green again.
They caught their breath on the edge of the jogging path, watching sweaty humans galumph by on their mysterious, food-seeking missions. When there was a break, they rolled the can across. To get it into the pier they went to the spot where the bottom of the door was warped up a bit.
Beckett figured his sister deserved credit for the nuts, so after helping her trundle them up to Mrs. P.’s door, he said he was beat and headed for their crate. Lucy pushed the can into Mrs. P.’s parlor. Mrs. P. wasn’t there, so Lucy rolled it through the gallery into the fromagerie. Phoenix was still lying on the wadded cheesecloth, looking thin and wasted.
“Nuts,” she said, righting the can.
He stared at her with glazed eyes.
“They’re mixed,” she said. “There must be some you like.”
It registered on Phoenix that Lucy had come into the reeking room with a can, but he was too intent on dying to say anything. Lucy gave him an appraising look, then, discouraged, went off to the infirmary, where Mrs. P. was still busy with her patients. There were four now.
“Sorry to bother you, Mrs. P., but I wondered if you’d given Phoenix any soup.”
“Oh, child,”—Mrs. P. waved toward her patients—“I’ve been up to my ears.”
“This heat wave is terrible,” Lucy said, eyeing the quartet of comatose rats.
“I’m not sure it’s heatstroke. It may be something more insidious.”
There was some tepid soup on the kerosene stove. Lucy took Phoenix a cup, but he didn’t seem interested, so she left it on the floor and went home. Beckett was reading a pamphlet in bed.
“What’s ‘insidious’ mean?” she asked him.
“Nothing good. Why?”
“Mrs. P. says her patients may have something more insidious than heatstroke.”
“Hmmp,” he said thoughtfully. “How did Phoenix like the nuts?”
“He didn’t even notice them,” Lucy said with a sigh.
The sigh turned into a yawn, and she crawled into her loafer and slept till Junior stopped by late the next morning. It was another scorcher, so Junior wanted her to come for a swim. She had a nibble of rock-hard Parmesan and went along.
Beckett wandered over to Mrs. P.’s. He knew her parlor well, but he’d never ventured into her gallery before. The collections impressed him. So did the cheese in the fromagerie. Phoenix was lying tangled in the cheesecloth by the can of nuts, which he hadn’t even opened. Beckett strode over to him and gave him a cross between a nudge and a kick with a hind foot.
“Do you know what Lucy went through to get you these?” Beckett said, pointing at the nuts.
Phoenix just blinked at him.
“She nearly got herself killed on the West Side Highway. Least you could do is eat a few.”
Beckett worked the plastic lid off the can and pulled back the foil. The nuts smelled better than he’d expected, so he popped one into his mouth before pushing the can closer to Phoenix.
As Beckett passed back through the gallery, the glassful of pens caught his eye. He’d been hankering to try his paw at fashioning letters. He found Mrs. P. in the infirmary, screwing the top on a canister of capsules, and asked if he could borrow one of her writing implements.
“Of course, dearie,” she said with a weary smile. “Help yourself.”
She looked exhausted, bu
t her patients looked far worse.
“Lucy said they might have something insidious?” Beckett said.
She set down the pill canister and picked up a thimble. “I found that on Moberly’s whiskers,” she said, tilting the thimble toward him.
By the light from the kerosene stove Beckett could make out a tiny green pellet inside. He gave it a sniff. “Smells . . . good,” he said.
“That’s what makes it insidious. It’s poison.” Mrs. P. tapped the canister. “I gave them all this antidote, but the poison may have been in their systems too long. I sent Oscar out to see if he could locate the source.”
This was calamitous news, but not quite calamitous enough to put the writing implement out of Beckett’s mind. He chose a ballpoint pen with ACME BODY SHOP on the side. When he got home, he started copying letters in the margins of a magazine. He soon felt as if he’d been writing his whole life and couldn’t wait to show Lucy his Ws and Qs.
Lucy was with Junior and the gang on the half-submerged dock. Hopping in and out of the river didn’t get rid of her worries—her father’s desertion, Phoenix’s refusal to eat, Mrs. P.’s overflowing infirmary—but it eased them. The highlight of the afternoon was a sensational flip Junior did off a piling. This was all the talk as the young rats headed back up the ramp late in the day.
But the flip was forgotten as soon as they stepped inside the pier. The place was in an uproar. Lucy and Junior joined a group gathered around his father, who was standing on a phonebook near the metal drum. Augustus Senior cut quite a figure with his impressive chest and a sword stuck in the scarlet sergeant-at-arms sash he wore around his middle.
“This cannot stand!” he was insisting. “It’s a violation of our rights as rats! Something must be done! We cannot allow . . .”
“What’s he talking about?” Lucy whispered.
Junior didn’t dare interrupt his father, but a nearby aunt of his told them that the so-called cases of heatstroke were actually cases of poisoning. Gulping, Lucy looked around for Beckett. In times of trouble the community traditionally turned to the mayor for guidance, and since everyone knew Old Moberly was in Mrs. P.’s infirmary, there was another cluster of rats outside her crate. But Beckett wasn’t in that group either. Worried he might have gotten into the poison, Lucy scurried off to check their crate.