Mike Nelson's Death Rat!

by Michael J. Nelson

  Ponty’s face reddened slightly. “It is good,” he said firmly. “It is. But I’m just old, and . . . well, to sell a book nowadays, you need the whole package. You, you’re the whole package. Well, besides the book, but I’ve got that covered for you.”

  Jack shook his head and stabbed a few strawberries with his fork. “Boy, I don’t know.”

  Ponty seemed slightly deflated, but he rallied. “Look, Jack, half the books out there are ghost-written. Think of this as a ghost-written book, nothing more.”

  “Ha!” said Jack, making his voice go high. “That’s possibly the weakest argument I have ever heard in defense of anything in my entire life.”

  “Oh, come on. Profiles in Courage. Extremely ghostwritten.”

  Jack considered this for a moment. “Well, it sounds like you need a U.S. president to be your front man. Thanks anyway, but I’m gonna say no.”

  “Maybe you want to think it over? You’re still suffering the effects of a full shift at Medieval Burger.”

  Jack repeated it, with finality: “No. Thanks anyway, Ponty.”

  “Oh, please, Jack! I need the money. You need the money. And it will work, you know.”

  “No.”

  Ponty pouted briefly and then dug into his pocket. “Well,” he said, laying down some change for his coffee, “I can’t get too full of caffeine or they won’t buy my plasma. I’ll see you tomorrow, Jack.”

  AMID THE DROWSY bustle of the evening crowd, Ponty morosely wandered the sidewalks near his home, lost in thought. As he strolled the tree-lined boulevards, he noticed with umbrage the spectacular beauty of the flame-orange leaves fringing the smaller maples, for all he could see in them was the long, unendurable death march of winter ahead. He saw shovels and mukluks, mittens and gigantic bags of ice-melt, oil-saturated slush thrown from passing trucks hitting him in the ear. And he saw himself, in the packaged-food aisle of Betsy’s Quik Mart trying to decide if he should buy the Our Family brand of macaroni and cheese and walk home, or leave it on the shelf and take the bus.

  Was it really wrong, what he was suggesting to Jack? When a film is projected, it is not explicitly stated that the skin tone Bruce Willis is presenting to the world is actually makeup master Ben Nye’s, and is that wrong? Is it wrong that a toaster is marketed and sold under one name when it was in fact the product of a great number of people, and not someone named General Electric? When a team of dolphins makes a synchronized leap into the air to ring bells simultaneously, does it matter that the maneuver was invented by trainers and not the dolphins themselves? (Ponty made a mental note not to lead with this particular argument.)

  No, it was not wrong, he concluded—not when compared to the many horrible things he could potentially be doing, like carjacking or arson. Though it was true that these would not be easily accessible occupations, given the circles he usually ran in, he had no doubt he could find that kind of work within a couple of weeks. But he chose not to do these things, even though they were perfectly viable options, given the two- to three-week period of searching. No, it was, if not exactly right, then not wrong. Especially when one considered that the alternative was a retirement spent dispensing sauces from a caulking gun.

  And his little brother: What would he think if Ponty bottomed out? If he were to be forced to fall back into Thad’s safety net, he could not bear the shame.

  The next day, his day off, he phoned Suzanne and told her that he needed Jack’s home address so that he could return the work hat that he’d borrowed. Suzanne seemed especially pinched even over the phone, but after clicking her tongue and offering a terse lecture on keeping track of his property, she finally acquiesced.

  Jack answered the door at his duplex in the bohemian Lyn-Lake area of Minneapolis wearing a faded green Henley shirt, tan cotton painter’s pants, and worn brown work boots.

  Ponty smiled at him. “Would you look at yourself? You look like you’re ready to go live in a moose or go conquer a mountain.”

  “Knock it off, will you?”

  “What are you doing, can I ask? Are you building something?”

  “I was just having some cereal. What do you want, Ponty?”

  “Jack,” he began, “about yesterday. I feel like I should explain.”

  “Yes?”

  Ponty sighed. “I’ll give you sixty percent of all profits from Death Rat.”

  Jack shook his head and sighed. There was a pause. He fixed his eyes on Ponty “How much does that amount to?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t sold it yet.”

  “What do you usually get for your books?”

  “I got four thousand for my last one. But if you adjust for inflation—”

  “Fine. I’ll do it. I’m not crazy about it, but . . .”

  “Okay! Okay, great. Fine.”

  “Well, I suppose I ought to know what it’s about?”

  “Yeah, good idea. I didn’t bring the manuscript with me, but . . . can I come in?”

  “Yeah, get in here.” Jack ushered him into an unspectacular and very actorly living room, packed with bookcases, two darkly stained built-ins and several more made of medium-density fiberboard and laminated in white plastic. There was no art on the walls, only one cheap torchère lamp and one exercise bike sitting behind the heavy glass-and-wood door. Ponty noted approvingly that, in contrast to his own place, there were no dirty clothes or crumpled beer cans lying about.

  “Why don’t you take the chair,” Jack offered, referring to the only piece of furniture in the room, a worn, green-velour-covered recliner. Though it was in the middle of the room, it did not face a television but simply sat alone, as though it had become unmoored from purpose.

  “Thank you,” said Ponty as he sank into it, stressing its already tired springs.

  “If we sell your book, I’ll be able to get a couch,” said Jack, sitting on the floor and leaning his back against his buffet.

  “Oh, we’ll sell it,” said Ponty, rubbing his palms together and looking around Jack’s living room. “Nice place. Yes, indeed. But it’ll be nicer after—”

  “Ponty? Could you tell me what the book’s about?”

  “Yes. Yes I can,” said Ponty, leaning toward Jack, causing the recliner to tip dangerously on its base. He settled back a bit and continued. “The year is 1865. The place is a town up in northern Minnesota called Holey. Do you know it?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” said Jack.

  “In connection with the Lake Vermilion gold rush of 1865,” said Ponty, raising his eyebrows like a villain in a nickel melodrama.

  “There was no gold rush in Minn—”

  “Ah, but there was!” said Ponty, springing the trap. “Like so many things in Minnesota, it turned out to be not nearly as big a deal as the one in California. The gold was embedded in rock that was so hard it was shattering the equipment used to extract it. But there was a gold rush.” He waited for questions from Jack, but none came, so he continued. “During that year a lot of unsavory people had made their way up there. People from strange places like Illinois and Indiana, even New York. The town had become a hotbed of gambling and prostitution, not like San Francisco or anything, but for Minnesota it was pretty wild. So when a charismatic preacher named Isaiah Fuller rolled into town and kind of took control, the people really rallied around him. Though he didn’t have much to do with it—it was the lack of gold that did it—the town returned to its quiet ways in just about a year, and Fuller became a powerful man. But there was one local, a man named Edward Lynch—sort of a wild character, a professed atheist, a guy who had never married, made strange inventions, built his own weapons, ate mostly pemmican and kept bees, lived in a one-room shack just outside of town—he butted heads with the parson, so Fuller whipped up the town against this fellow, tried to drive him out. Well, Lynch would have none of it. He stayed put. Now and then he’d confront the Reverend Fuller in public, or it’d be the other way around, and they’d have words, but this went on for a couple of years. Then, in about 1868, some w
eird things started to happen around Holey.” He leaned forward with more care this time.

  “Weird things?” said Jack, taking the bait again.

  “Right. Cattle mutilations. Disappearances. Strange noises after dark. Well, one night a farmer’s horses broke from their stalls, and when he tried to lead them back into the barn, they went crazy with fear and tried to eat each other. The townspeople got spooked, and they looked to the Reverend Fuller for the explanation. Well, Fuller was spooked, too. About the only thing he could think to do was to blame it on Lynch. He got the folks believing that Lynch was up to some sort of witchcraft that was bringing the evil to their town. Lynch, of course, was furious at their accusations and superstitions. Being a real woodsman and a crack hunter, he went out to solve the ‘mystery’ of the strange doings all by himself. One day he followed some very bizarre and unfamiliar tracks into the woods. Deeper he went, until he noticed a change in the air, a strange silence that seemed to weigh on his mind. His heart began to beat faster, and he felt strongly as though he were being watched. Something pressed in on him. His steps became measured, and he could hear his own blood beating in his temples. He took a cautious step—and suddenly darkness, crashing, pain.” Ponty leaned back in his chair with a look of self-satisfaction.

  “Yes?” said Jack coolly.

  “He had crashed through a closed-off area of the deserted gold mine. And now he lay at the bottom, injured, terrified, almost—but not quite—alone. For with him in the cold, cramped space was—”

  Just then the front door of Jack’s duplex flew open, and into the room burst a thin, bewhiskered man with a backpack slung over one shoulder.

  “Hey,” he said, a look of cheerful bemusement on his scraggly face.

  Jack rose and made an apologetic gesture toward Ponty. “Hey, Denny. This is a friend from work. Ponty, this is my roommate, Denny.”

  Ponty rose and greeted Denny, then made an excuse to leave as Denny shuffled off to his room.

  “All right, so long, Jack!” Ponty said cartoonishly as Jack showed him to the door. Then he whispered, “I’ll get you the manuscript tomorrow at Medieval Burger, okay? Bring a backpack or something, so I can slip it to you without having anyone see it.”

  “Okay, yeah. ’Cause I have to know what happens,” Jack said.

  ONE WEEK LATER Ponty approached Jack near Medieval Burger’s garbage area, and they huddled in a corner like teens discussing the purchase of a dime bag.

  “Did you finish it?” Ponty asked, his head pivoting nervously around. Suzanne was condescending to another employee near the meat well.

  “Yeah,” Jack said.

  “And? What’d you think?”

  “Really, really good,” said Jack.

  Ponty stared at him for a moment without blinking. “Anything else?” he asked.

  “No. No, I don’t think so.”

  “Jack? I’m going to have to insist that when you speak to people about this book, you are a little more articulate about it, okay?”

  “I will. Be,” he added.

  That same evening a jumpy Ponty rang Jack at home.

  “Is it okay to speak?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, though. I had just taken a bite of carrot when you called.”

  “That’s okay. Listen, I think that as we get nearer to selling this thing, I should quit the Medieval Burger so it doesn’t look too strange—you, a first-time author, working side by side with a well-known history author.”

  “Whatever you think,” Jack said, swallowing.

  “But I’m going to need your financial support just until this thing sells. You might have to work a lot of double shifts.”

  Ponty heard the crack of a carrot chunk being severed from its source, then some muted crunching, a pause, then more crunching.

  “Don’t you think I ought to quit so that I can concentrate on getting an agent for this thing?”

  “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No,” Ponty said. “It’s part of the Jack Ryback lore: ‘He toiled at a burger joint, often working double shifts to support himself, in the meantime working on his true passion in the small hours of the morning in the kitchen of his modest apartment.’”

  Ponty listened to nearly half a minute of contemplative mastication.

  “Ponty? Why does that part of it have to be true, when it’s not even true that I wrote the book?” Now Jack heard silence, so he chewed as he waited for Ponty to respond.

  “You’re getting the lion’s share of the take from this thing. You sling the burgers, okay?” came the reply.

  “Fine. But I’ve got a meeting with Todd Fetters tomorrow. Think you can cover my shift?”

  That night Ponty dreamed. His dreams were often flatly prosaic, revealing nothing. When he was younger, he often flew in his dreams, arms outstretched, fingertips touching treetops, wind whipping hair against forehead. These days his dreams were about bringing his shirts in to be laundered or shopping for a new mattress.

  Now he dreamed he was at work, putting bun tops on a row of hamburgers.

  Many miles away and across the wide Mississippi, Gus Bromstad dreamed he was a rat.

  CHAPTER 6

  The instructions on a package of Mrs. Condresi’s Crab Enchiladas are unequivocal: DO NOT THAW BEFORE COOKING! KEEP FROZEN! These words are printed on the front and the back of the sturdy paper microwave- and oven-safe package. The test kitchens of Mrs. Condresi’s parent company, Telron Foods, had found a very slight risk that if the product were thawed in such a manner, naturally occurring bacteria present in the extruded pollock used to manufacture the imitation crab could grow to toxic levels and cause illness.

  Gus Bromstad was in a hurry to use his new FlameMaster convection oven and did not read the label. He glanced at it only briefly before cooking his enchiladas, ignoring everything but the suggested oven temperature. He did not even wait long enough for the oven to preheat, and this gave the naturally occurring bacteria an even more conducive environment in which to grow. It was, in fact, not he who had thawed the Mrs. Condresi’s Crab Enchiladas in the refrigerator; it was his buying service. But that was of no help to Gus Bromstad on this particular night.

  As Telron might have predicted, it was a fairly small amount of bacteria that affected him, and his most marked symptom was a low-grade fever that did not even come over him until the very early morning when Gus was dead asleep. He did not awake, but he dreamed fiercely.

  Time, emotions, color, texture all smeared together, separated into meaningless parts, swirled, converged again, and finally came into focus. Bill Yaster, a guy in his poli sci class at St. Odo, was offering to paint Gus’s old Mustang. Gus felt nothing so much as pure terror at the thought, and he was filled with a wild sense of betrayal. He shook his head furiously and tried to scream, but he couldn’t. Bill Yaster made a mocking face back to him and then started laughing, his laugh a choked, deathly harsh noise with no antecedent in the natural world.

  Suddenly Bill Yaster became Gus’s aunt Pearl, and they were sharing poppy-seed cake. Aunt Pearl kept eating it, but the cake kept growing, and as it did, Aunt Pearl ate more and more, making obscene yummy noises and swallowing loudly. Gus tried to chat amiably and pretend it wasn’t happening, but it was too ghastly a display. He got up and ran.

  Now he was at a rally, standing before a massive, cheering crowd at the Capitol Mall. He was vaguely aware that there were other celebrities onstage with him, but he had only the sense of them, as they were to his side or behind him. Ron Wood maybe. Tom Wolfe. Yevgeny Kafelnikov, the tennis player. He couldn’t be sure. He distrusted the crowd for some reason, but they seemed pleased with him. He clasped his hands above his head in a victory gesture, and the people cheered wildly. When he brought his hands back down, he noticed that they had become paws. Gray-brown hair covered the backs of them, but otherwise they were thin, pink, the skin soft and nearly translucent, finished with tapered, sinister-looking claws. He immediately tried to hide them behind him, but he couldn’t bend his arms enough to get
them there. The crowd gasped, then started hissing, their sibiliant Ss hurting Gus’s now-sensitive rodent ears.

  “Please, please, stop! I’ll take care of it!” he yelled to the crowd. He turned to ask a handler what he ought to do about this transformation, but when he did, his horrible, hairless tail whipped from behind him and came to rest, swaying gently right before his eyes. Gus woke up and clutched his stomach. He was breathing heavily, and a nocturnal flop sweat was evenly distributed about his ample body. He’d been in his new log home only a week now, so it took a moment for Gus to place himself spatially in his universe; his sense of self, his life experiences, his metaphysical beliefs soon followed.

  “I’m Gus Bromstad,” he said quietly in the dark.

  This dream was deeply disquieting, especially as the capper to a somewhat ominous day. He had been on KDQT’s morning show promoting the new Dogwood, and though the hosts had been fawning, the call volume brisk and their content nothing but loving, Gus couldn’t seem to shake a sense that the very next caller was about to attack him as a fraud, accuse him of being, au fond, a mean-spirited hack. But of course it didn’t happen. The next call would play out very like the one before it: an acknowledgment of love, some light banter, the quoting of a favorite passage, the promise to come to his signing. The caller would sign off, and as Gus exchanged the familiar patter with the hosts, he would feel a slight tugging of discomfiture, and it would unwillingly enter his consciousness that the next call would be pure condemnation—and so on throughout the morning.

  And then there was the signing itself: long lines stretching outside the store and down Nicollet Avenue, great weather, a buoyant mood prevailing over the whole proceeding. And yet there was the comment by that woman. He was processing them through at a good clip (when it came to signings, Gus was obsessed with volume and would often compare the numbers of books he’d signed to those at previous signings), all was proceeding as normal, when a middle-aged woman wearing blue sweatpants and a Minnesota Wild T-shirt, holding a plastic shopping bag with THE DILLY LILY printed on the side, flopped her book in front of him and said, “I really love the new Dogwood, Gus.”