by Susan Conant
Because I do most of the maintenance and repair on my own house, I knew that the loose doorbell wires didn’t carry enough current to hurt anyone, but instead of making the contact, I tried the door, found it unlocked, and walked in. Piled in a tiny foyer were two pairs of old-fashioned galoshes, a broken ski pole, three unmatched cross-country skis, and a stack of telephone directories still in the plastic bags in which they’d been delivered. Grasping the knob on the inner door, I scratched my hand on a loose screw. When I pushed the door open, escorted Rowdy in, and glanced around, it hit me that a loose screw was, indeed, the perfect introduction to the place.
A wide hallway lay ahead of me. To my left, an archway opened into a big front office that must have combined the original living room and parlor of the house. Everywhere, and I mean everywhere, were the greatest number and variety of objects I’d seen piled, heaped, stacked, and just plain dumped since my last visit to my hometown sanitary landfill. Antique IBM PC system units with gaps in place of floppy drives supported ancient dot-matrix printers on which teetered fat old monitors with dirty screens. A gooseneck lamp with a broken neck perched lifelessly on a radiator that was shedding dandrufflike chips of aluminum paint. What else? Rolled-up carpets; snakelike lengths of cable; overstuffed trash bags; a framed print displaying Notre Dame Cathedral through cracked glass; six or eight four-drawer file cabinets in different colors—green, brown, tan—with what looked like twenty years of unfiled letters, invoices, and folders mounded on top; scarred oak school-teacher’s desks covered with thick manuscripts and loose sheets of paper; unplugged answering machines wrapped in their own cords; and cartons stamped with book titles, for instance, The Damned Yankee in Vermont, The Damned Yankee in Connecticut, The Damned Yankee on Nantucket, What She Had Done: The Legend of Lizzie Borden, Perennials for the Maine Seacoast Garden, Viking Visitors to Precolonial Cape Cod. Dozens of copies of Damned Yankee books in every condition from mint to battered squatted atop one another as if engaged in prolonged efforts to breed yet more Damned Yankee books; Estelle Grant’s transformation of the small press to a brothel finally made sense. Here and there, fast-submerging islets of order testified to doomed efforts to conquer the chaos. A column of neatly aligned boxes bore labels in block capitals. Above a dusty rectangle on a wall hung a plastic-covered sheet of instructions for a photocopier that wasn’t there.
From somewhere behind the folders, books, mailing envelopes, telephones, and “While You Were Out” slips clustered around a modern computer on what I supposed was a desk, a melodious feminine voice with a trace of an accent announced, “I don’t work here! I’m just a temp! It’s only my third day! But may I help you?” Before I could respond, a phone rang. “Damned Yankee Press!” the voice said pleasantly. After a pause, I heard, “I’m so terribly sorry. The check is definitely in the mail. It was sent yesterday.” Arising from behind the barricade, a pretty young Asian woman with fine bones and immense glasses smiled at me and said, “Sorry about that! I really don’t know what’s going on here.”
Taking another look at the multitudes—ah, yes, multitudes! —of boxes, trash bags, and assorted rubbish, I asked, reasonably enough: “Is the press moving? Or maybe . . . ?” I left unspoken the thought that it was going out of business.
“I wondered the same thing!” the woman replied. Her articulation was precise. Raising a hand above the pile of stuff that separated us, she made a gesture that I took as an invitation to approach. I got within a yard. Rowdy did his agile best to follow. The woman smiled puckishly and whispered, as if eager to share a heretofore secret delight, “Don’t ask me! I’m only a temp!”
Returning her smile, I asked whether anyone else was around.
“Heaven knows!” she exclaimed gleefully. “I feel like Alice in Wonderland: ‘People come and go so quickly here.’”
What inspired Rowdy to push past me was perhaps the happy tone of the word here. Or maybe he mistook the various obstacles in his path as a novel sort of agility course for dogs. For whatever reason, he wove and squeezed by me to present himself to the woman, who gave his head a tentative pat and announced as if conveying great news to both Rowdy and me, “In my country, dog meat is a very popular food!” To my mixed relief, she added, “Among the poorer classes. Savages! Barbarians! Here, everything is much better: Burger King, McDonald’s. At night, I go to school, and in the daytime, I answer telephones and—”
“Jack Andrews!” I blurted out. “On the list on the wall!” In the same block capitals I’d noticed on the cartons, some unknown calligrapher had long ago printed a list of names and telephone extensions. Like the instructions for the vanished photocopier, the list was covered in protective plastic. Shaun McGrath’s name was there, too.
“An old list!” the woman pronounced. “At Harvard Extension School, I take courses in philosophy. Here, I ponder archaeology! Dig, dig, and who knows? At the bottom perhaps are artifacts of prehistoric cultures.”
“Jack Andrews,” I said, “died eighteen years ago.”
Lowering her voice, tilting her head downward, and peering rather ominously over her huge glasses, she said in weirdly dire tones, “In the cellar is a box with his name: ‘Jack Andrews. Contents of desk.’”
So thoroughly unaccustomed am I to uttering even the most innocent and innocuous of white lies that on the rare occasions when I deviate from the truth, I veer wildly from veracity by venting all my pent-up mendacity at once. Bursting into what I am chagrined to admit were real, or at least wet, tears, I let out a cry of ecstasy: “Uncle Jack’s desk! The picture of Aunt Claudia! The special pen set! Oh, my cousins will be thrilled!” Regaining genuine control, I asked timidly and solemnly whether it might be possible for me to take a peek at the box that bore the name of my beloved Uncle Jack.
In response to my inquiry, the young woman disclosed yet another respect in which Damned Yankee Press had, in the eighteen years since Jack Andrews’s murder, retained what I took to be its original character: The cellar, she informed me, had rats! On her first day here, the coffee machine had broken. Instead of following the admirable American course of sending her to buy a new one, someone called Leo—her employer, I gathered—had insisted that there was a perfectly good percolator on a shelf in the basement and, with no warning about the rats, had dispatched her in search of it. The dirty, dented percolator and its frayed electric cord had rested on the box labeled with Jack Andrews’s name.
“Did you actually see a rat?” I asked.
She nodded.
“It couldn’t have been a mouse?”
Playfully wagging a finger at Rowdy, who wagged his tail in return, she shook her head and replied with the confidence of true expertise, “In my country, you too could be food.” As before, she amended the statement: “Among the poorer classes.”
“Well,” I said, suppressing a shudder of nausea, “family pictures are priceless, and what’s the worst thing a rat can do?”
“Bite you,” she informed me promptly. “Transmit diseases.”
What drove me into that cellar was not really, I think, the hope of finding anything relevant either to Jack’s murder or to Professor Foley’s. Rita subsequently made much of the nature of my lies about “Uncle” Jack: In claiming kinship with Jack, she insisted, I had told the psychological truth. At the time, I felt only the impulse to touch objects that had been Jack’s: pens, pencils, paper clips, the debris of the life he’d lived in the office where he’d been poisoned.
After extracting herself from behind the computer and the other components of the barricade, the smiling young woman led me to a door, unlatched and opened it, reached in to flick on bright fluorescent lights, and provided clear, detailed directions to the shelf where she’d found the percolator. I was embarrassed to speak my mind to Rowdy in a stranger’s presence. I therefore fell back on an effort at thought transmission: “You go first, pal, because I’m sc-sc-sc-scared!” After he’d compliantly barged ahead and gone halfway down the steep flight of dirty stairs, I had second thoughts,
not about my cherished position as the alpha figure in his life, but about the possibility that where there were rats, there might also be poison.
“Rowdy, wait!” Gathering his leash in my hands, I hurried down after him. To make mortally certain that I had full control and could prevent him from gobbling up whatever deadly snacks he might encounter, I grabbed his collar, raised his head, and kept him tucked next to me.
The basement turned out to be a damp, musty-smelling version of the upstairs, but with dozens of free-standing, or in some cases free-falling, shelf units. Following the precise directions I’d been given, I turned right at a Xerox machine that had probably started to acquire value as an antique. Making my way down a sort of alleyway between shelves, I passed several eye-level landmarks the young woman had mentioned: a greasy-looking toaster oven and a box that had once contained Gordon’s Gin. A few steps past the Gordon’s, I came to a set of shelves with boxes boldly labeled with red marker. As I’d been told, on my left I found one about twice the size of a shoe box that read:
JACK ANDREWS
CONTENTS OF DESK
It was sealed with heavy brown tape. Scattered on the strip of tape across the top of the box were what I hoped were coffee grounds deposited by the old percolator. After checking for anything that could possibly be rat poison, I released my grip on Rowdy’s collar, looped his leash around my left wrist, and reached for the box with both hands.
Just as I was getting the filthy box settled on my right hipbone, where I could support it with my arm, Rowdy, with no warning whatsoever, hit the end of his leash. With the reflexes of a real dog person, instead of sensibly letting him bolt, I did exactly what I’d been schooled from birth to do. As I tightened my grip on the leash, tripped, and got dragged across that grimy, gritty concrete floor, I could practically hear my mother’s injunction: Never, under any circumstances whatsoever, Holly, do you ever let go of the dog’s lead! Never, never! Is that crystal clear? Never!
The warning had been a standard feature of her lecture on my behavior at dog shows. What’s more, she’d been talking about golden retrievers, not Alaskan mala-mutes. She was, however, an obedience trainer of the old school—dentists drill with less fervor than hers—and it never even crossed my mind to obey common sense. Ahead of me, Rowdy had his head lowered in the classic, correct pose of a sledge dog hauling weight, but the force that drove him was far deeper than the urge to pull. Not a yard beyond Rowdy’s jaws, a rat scuttled across the floor. Like a separate animal, its tail slithered behind it. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that rats are creatures of God. This one was fat with evil, and greasy-coated and nasty-looking, as if it had just come from filthy places where it had committed vile acts of repugnant ratness.
Hitting the concrete floor, I’d landed on my left elbow. Pain ran up through my shoulder and down my back. As I struggled to raise myself, I could feel the blood drain from my head. Through the pain and the rising nausea, I fought off the fear that, within seconds, that loathsome rodent would be locked in Rowdy’s predatory jaws and that I—the dog-obedience pooh-bah, the alpha figure in Rowdy’s life—would be powerless to make him drop his mauled and bloody and probably poison-infested prey.
After what felt like several hours—five seconds?—I managed to crawl from my knees to a firm sitting position. Finding myself near the ancient Xerox copier, I braced my feet against it, gave Rowdy’s leash the kind of neck-wrenching jerk I hadn’t administered for years, and finally succeeded in finding my voice and croaking Rowdy’s name. As Rowdy briefly turned his head, the rat must have seized its chance to escape. “Rowdy, watch me! Rowdy, here! Good, good boy! Good dog. Good dog.” With sweet words and tugs on his leash, I drew him to me. Digging scraped, bleeding hands into my pockets, I found scraps of desiccated cheese. Rowdy licked them off my palms. His eyes were bright. His beautiful white tail was tailing back and forth across his back. The escape of the rat bothered Rowdy not at all. “You disgust me,” I told him.
Leaning on Rowdy, I finally got to my feet and retrieved the box I’d dropped, the one marked with Jack Andrews’s name. My retreat from Damned Yankee Press was uneventful. The cheerful young woman paid no attention to the box I carried, to the holes in the knees of my jeans, or to what must have been the pallor of my face.
“There really are rats there,” I told her.
“Yes,” she said with a smile.
An hour later, in my own kitchen, when I’d disinfected and bandaged the wounds on my hands and knees, I drew a kitchen knife across the tape that sealed the box. Rowdy sniffed eagerly. The scent, no doubt, awakened happy memories. Kimi explored my shoes with her nose. I opened the box. Inside were the pens, pencils, and paper clips I’d expected. To my amazement, there actually was a small framed photograph of Claudia, Brat, and Gareth. Among the other odds and ends, I found only one item of interest, a slip of paper on which someone had scrawled four words: And One Fought Back.
The privately printed book about Hannah Duston.
CHAPTER 22
In case you, too, are ever traumatized by a rat, let me give you some advice: Don’t expect any sympathy from your vet. Steve’s attitude that same Monday evening made me half wish I’d started an affair with an exterminator instead. Steve did, however, insist on examining the physical damage. For strictly medical reasons, he made me take off my jeans. Wearing nothing but panties, socks, and a Big Dog T-shirt he’d given me—YOU CAN MOVE A MOUNTAIN, BUT YOU CAN’T BUDGE A BIG DOG—I sat shivering on a kitchen chair as he gently removed the gauze and tape from my knees.
“What’s this grease you’ve smeared on?” he asked.
“Panolog,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“Panolog cream. Prescribed by you. It worked just great on Kimi’s—”
“Into the bathtub,” he ordered. “Soap and hot water. These abrasions are filled with grit. Don’t they teach first aid in Maine?”
“They teach you to go to the dump and shoot rats, only it’s a nighttime sport, and you just see the ugly things from a distance in the headlights of your car.”
As Steve led me to the bathtub, scrubbed my knees and elbows with soap, and made me rinse the scrapes under hot water, he accused me of maligning some of his favorite patients. “Clean, intelligent pets,” he said.
“Cop-out pets! You ever hear of ‘a boy and his rat’? ‘A girl and her rat’?”
“Some people don’t have time for dogs.”
“Cats. Cats are real pets. They’re not disgusting, beady-eyed, humongous rodents. This one weighed a minimum of five pounds. Steve, that’s rinsed enough. I’m freezing. Can’t I get out of here?”
“No, and if it weighed five pounds—”
“Oh, it did! Professor Foley’s neighbor, Lydia, said that he told her he saw one the size of a woodchuck, and naturally, I thought that was an exaggeration. But now I realize it was probably an underestimate. I am getting out of this tub now!”
“Whoever would’ve guessed,” he said, handing me a clean white towel, “that beneath this feminist exterior—”
“Rats are the enemy of the human race. It’s just that women are a lot freer than men to express everyone’s true feelings on the subject.”
Back in the kitchen, as the dogs assisted Steve by licking my injuries and running off with gauze pads, I said, “Besides, this was a sick rat. All the hair had fallen off its tail, and the bare skin was all scaly . . .” I shuddered at the memory.
“Rats have hairless tails. The skin on their tails is supposed to be scaly.”
“All the more reason to exterminate the damned things. Now I finally understand why Jack Andrews had that sodium fluoroacetate. If what you’re dealing with is rats, no measure is too strong!”
Steve’s Fletcherizing relative must have forced him to chew his thoughts as well as his food. He ruminated for thirty seconds before he said, “The only good rat is a dead . . . ?”
Another half-minute passed in silence.
“Rats are rats,” I finally said.
“There is nothing inherently evil about rats.”
“Rats are rats,” I repeated. “The situations are not comparable.” I now had a towel wrapped around my waist. I’d left my socks in the bathroom. My legs and feet were an unattractive shade of winter white; by comparison, the fresh bandages had a great tan. I was still wearing the T-shirt, but its sleeves were damp. I went to Steve and held his face between my gauze-encased hands. “But the feelings are.”