The Rat on Fire

by George V. Higgins

  “Yeah,” Leo said.

  “I was in the middle of one the other morning,” Fein said. “I am not inspecting any one of them after the sun goes down, I can tell you that. My own property that I am renting out to give me and my family some security in our old age so that we do not have to go on welfare like a bunch of fuckin’ niggers, and it’s full of mean niggers on welfare that won’t pay me and’re tearing my property apart and I’m afraid, go in there. Into property that I fuckin’ own? You’re goddamned right I’m afraid. I would no more go in there when the sun is down than I would go over to the zoo and shack up in the snake house.

  “I go there in the morning,” Fein said. “I go there and here is this bastard leaning against the front door so I can’t get through it. And he is about nineteen, maybe, not very big, got on the jacket and the pants, doesn’t look like anything special, toothpick hanging out his mouth, and he looks at me. I say, ‘Excuse me.’ He says, ‘Whuffa?’ I say, ‘So I can get in the door.’ I don’t really see why I should have to explain to this fuckin’ kid why I want him to move on the steps of my own building, but it is possible that this kid has a knife in his pants and has been looking for somebody like me to stick it into. ‘Who you?’ he says. ‘Landlord sent me over,’ I say. ‘Just routine.’ He says, ‘You got any identification?’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, but there is no way I am taking my wallet out so he can see exactly where it is, ‘yeah, I got identification, and I’m going to have it when I leave here, too. Now get the fuck out the way.’

  “ ‘Landlord, huh?’ he says. But he did move a little. ‘You’re talkin’ that man, you tell him, see? You tell him there is bugs in here. Bugs, and rats. You tell him that. You tell him we want them bugs and rats out, we ain’t payin’ no rent.’ Shit. They’re not payin’ the rent now.”

  “Rats?” Proctor said.

  “Yeah,” Fein said, “rats. ’Course I’ve got rats in there. I got rats that walk on two legs. Why the hell wouldn’t I have the rats that walk on four? That place is a hellhole, what they’ve done to it. There’re holes in the walls in the hall. There is only about two ways that you could make those holes. One is with rocks and the other one is with a bat or something like that. This was done on purpose. Six months ago, I get a call that there is no hot water. I couldn’t get hold of Randy, the guy that does the plumbing, so I went over there and even I could tell the reason: somebody swiped the copper tubing that sends the water to the heater. I don’t know how many gripes I had with the light company—I keep telling them I’m not the guy who puts the pennies in the fuse box. And they don’t believe me. I got windows broken in the basement. Somebody ripped up the boards on the stairs. They piss in the hallways and they throw their garbage out the window on the third floor instead of carrying it downstairs. An alligator could get into that house and nobody would notice, no matter how bad he stunk. Of course I got rats. I got niggers and I got rats.”

  “Good,” Proctor said. “Since you got both, you get a package deal. Thirty grand and I will solve your problems for you.”

  “Thirty grand,” Fein said, “for a fire? You must be out of your mind.”

  “Two fires,” Proctor said. “Two fires and one lieutenant and guy to help me. Plus what I get. Thirty.”

  LEO PROCTOR AND Jimmy Dannaher, wearing green cotton Eisenhower jackets and green cotton pants, got out of the blue Ford Econoline van at the curb of Bristol Street and walked down the alleyway between the building that made up 21–25 Bristol and the building that was 27–31 Bristol Street. The buildings were three-story brick, with tall front windows and mansard roofs with parapets. They had been built during the Federal period. The front doors had arches over them and the street numbers were painted in faded gold. Proctor carried a large gray metal toolbox.

  “These people aren’t stupid you know, Leo,” Jimmy said. There was broken glass in the alleyway, and a discarded porcelain bathroom sink. There were eleven open rubbish barrels chained to the wall, and flies buzzed around them. “You tell them we come here to fix something, they’re gonna remember us. Besides, what if there isn’t anything like that that is broken? How we gonna be supposed to know the furnace is busted, it’s summertime and the goddamned thing isn’t on anyway? They’re gonna get suspicious. I wouldn’t be surprised, something happens, they’ll remember us, you know? Tell the cops.”

  “Now look,” Proctor said.

  “Now look nothing,” Jimmy said. He stopped. “Don’t tell me ‘Now look.’ I heard that kinda song and dance before. I heard that from a guy who was gonna do all these great things for me and all I had to do was help him, and he was always tellin’ me, everything was gonna be fine. Not to worry. I should not worry. And I did not worry, and everything did not turn out all right, which is a very kind way of putting it. So, do not start telling me ‘Now look,’ and ‘Stop worrying,’ because I had some experience with that shit and when somebody says it to me now I start thinking and remembering about how it was, my family, the only time my family sees me is on Sundays. Got it? So, don’t give me any of that shit, because it does not interest me.”

  “Now look,” Proctor said, “all right? I am a regular type of repairman, which is true. You are a regular type of repairman, which is also true. The guy who owns the building told me the tenants’re screaming about hot water and he asked me to go over and check out the furnace. Which is a perfectly legitimate thing, because the tenants have been screaming about no hot water and unless you get it offa the stove you will generally find that the hot water in most buildings is something that comes out the furnace thing there. They will have this boiler, unless they got gas or electric which these old buildings have not got because the people who live there’d rip the things out and sell them. All right? So anybody who wants to can remember seeing us all they want, and that will be all right too, because we are here on a job that they been screaming about having done. If something else happens in the next few days, then something else happens in the next few days, but that hasn’t got nothing to do with us.”

  “I still don’t like it,” Jimmy said. “I am not sure about this. This is exactly the kind of thing I hear about from Bobby Coffey there, when he is telling me he has got a sure thing going and then it turns out that he didn’t, or if he did what was sure about it was that me and him was going to jail, which is what we did.

  “ ‘Nothing to worry about, Jimmy,’ he’s always telling me, ‘nothing to worry about at all.’ And I keep thinking, ‘Yeah, but suppose maybe the guy’s not scared of us, and he goes to see the cops and he talks to them, huh? What if that happens?’ And that is exactly what he did, and what I ended up doing was time, and Bobby was still telling me, they’re carting me off to Norfolk, I shouldn’t worry about anything because he will get me out. Except he didn’t. It was the parole board that got me out, and they took their own sweet time about it, too. I don’t want no more of that shit, Leo. I don’t want no more that shit at all.”

  “Look,” Leo said, “if you’re gonna have your period here, go have it somewhere else, all right? You wanna back out the job, back out the job. Go ahead. Walk right down the street, take a right on Symphony Road, go down Mass Ave there and you come to the place they play the music, you’ll see this subway thing they got there, which says Symphony on it, and you go down the steps and give the machine there a quarter and pretty soon a train comes along and you get on it and I will go ahead with this matter and I will get somebody else who will help me with it. Because I can, you know, and he will get the money instead of you and I won’t have to hear no more fuckin’ bitchin out of your mouth. All right?”

  “I’m not bitchin’, Leo,” Jimmy said. “I am just trying to tell you that I have been on a sure thing before, that was not going to get me in no trouble. And the only thing that was sure about it was that I was going to get in some trouble because exactly what I said to Bobby was exactly what happened. The guy came home early because he didn’t feel good or something and he sees where we got this truck backed up his house and he kn
ows he didn’t order no movers and sure, he thinks it’s his ex-wife who’s taking all his furniture and his rugs and TV’s and stuff, but he didn’t give her no permission either. And he calls the cops, he’s gonna have her ass in a sling before dark, and the cops come and they find out it isn’t her, it’s us. Which I guess kind of disappointed the guy because he really didn’t like her a whole lot, but he took what he had and had us put in jail instead of her, that was perfect strangers to him and he didn’t even know us at all.

  “Now,” Jimmy said, “I figure if Bobby Coffey can make a mistake, Leo Proctor can make a mistake. And I am sick of doing time because Bobby Coffey made a mistake. I am also not interested in doing no further time because somebody else made a mistake and did not look at things without his eyes being all bloodshot.”

  “Look,” Proctor said, “lemme tell you something, all right? It is eleven o’clock in the morning. I have got some work that I have got to do on account of how if I do not do the work, the man will come around and he will say to me, ‘Leo, I paid you some money to do some work, and I see where the work is not done. Now,’ he will say, ‘since the work isn’t done, where is my money that I would like back and I will get somebody else to do the job of work that I paid you to do and you didn’t do it, huh? Because I am going to take that money and give it to somebody else and he will do the work you did not do.’

  “Now,” Proctor said, “this is going to cause problems for me. This is because I do not have that money anymore, on account of I spent a lot of it and gave it to people who do work for me and they sell me things like meat and the phone and the lights for the family. That kind of thing. In addition to which I got to tell the man I gave a whole bunch of it to this guy Jimmy who took the money with no strain, didn’t bother him at all, and he probably spent his share of it, and I dunno, I can get back from him.”

  “You didn’t give me no money, Leo,” Jimmy said. “Don’t gimme that shit. You promised me money but you didn’t give me no money. I don’t mind you thinking I’m stupid, but I resent you thinkin’ I’m fuckin’ dumb.”

  “Jimmy,” Proctor said, “maybe the reason you get in so much trouble is you don’t listen to what a guy is saying. I didn’t say I gave you the money. I know what I did and what I didn’t do. I also know you. I’ve known you a long time. I know you got a tendency, you sometimes get kind of nervous and you transcend your word there, you know? You get jittery and a man cannot always depend on you that when you say you will do something, you will actually go out and do it.

  “Now this,” Proctor said, “this is all right, Jimmy. It is something like some guys’re bald and some other guys like me have trouble keeping their weight down. It is just the way we are. And that is the way you are, that you do not always deliver when you say you are gonna deliver. And everybody knows this about you.”

  “I do so,” Jimmy said.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, you do,” Leo said. “It is something about you that everybody who knows anything at all knows. Which is that Jimmy Dannaher is a nice guy and he means all right and he will always agree with you that he will help you to do something if he thinks that what you are going to do will get him some extra money so he can go down Wonderland every night and always and invariably pick the wrong dogs on the card and lose all the money that he went out and took some risks to get. But that is the way he is and there is nothing you can do about it and you may as well just forget about it. There is nothing wrong with the guy except that he does not always listen to you, and there are lots of times probably when he does not even listen to himself too careful, and he does not remember what he said he would do when he accepted the money there.

  “That is why, Jimmy,” Proctor said, “I did not give you any money. I did not say just now that I gave you any money. I said I was gonna tell the man who asked me to get somebody and do this work for him, I said I was gonna tell him that I gave you some money. I did not say that I actually gave you the money, because like I say, I know you pretty good and you do not get any money out of me until you have actually done what you said you were gonna do. And when that is done, you can go down Wonderland and gamble your fuckin’ brains out and it will be all right with me as long’s the work’s done. Because then I don’t care what you do.

  “Now,” Proctor said, “of course what you want to think about is this. If I tell the man I gave you some his money and you did not perform like you were supposed to for that money, then he will of course believe me and he will come around looking for you. You will try to talk to him, naturally, but he is not gonna believe you. Because like I say, a lot of people know about you and there have been too many times when you took some money from somebody who wanted you to do something and then it slipped your mind or something and you didn’t do it.”

  “You cocksucker, Leo,” Dannaher said.

  “I am not a cocksucker,” Proctor said. “I have done a lot of dumb things but I never sucked a cock in my life. Now are you gonna come in that cellar with me, or am I gonna get somebody else to help me and also put your tail inna crack, just on general principles?”

  “I just hope you’re right,” Dannaher said. “You better be right, Leo, is all I can say. I’m not goin’ back to the can for anybody.”

  “You are goin’ in the cellar, though,” Leo said. “You are gonna come into that cellar with me and you are gonna help me and if you help me you will get your fifteen hundred bucks and if you don’t, you won’t. Clear?”

  There were four stone steps leading down to the green wooden door made of matched boards. There was a large padlock on a heavy hasp on the door. Proctor took a key out of his pocket and opened the lock with difficulty. “Fuckin’ thing’s all rusted,” he said.

  “Those’re supposed to be good locks, too,” Dannaher said. “They cost a lot of money. They shouldn’t do that.”

  “Shit,” Proctor said, removing the lock, “nobody makes anything right anymore. Look at these steps, all right? Been here probably a hundred and fifty years. They’re all right. Oh, they’re a little worn, sure, but they’re here and you can still go down them without figuring you’re gonna break your neck when they fall apart under you. You try gettin’ somethin’ like that done today. Just try it.

  “You tell somebody,” Proctor said, “you want a cellarway put in a building, or you’re doing a job for somebody wants a cellarway put in, and the first thing that’s gonna happen if you’re the guy hiring the job is they’re gonna come back at you with the specs and you’re gonna get wooden steps, open-framed, and one of those goddamned steel bulkheads they sell down to Grossman’s. And you gotta paint the fuckin’ thing every year with about three hundred bucks’ worth of Rustoleum because if you don’t it’ll rust out in a year.

  “Or you’re the guy,” Proctor said, “that’s doing the job and you try to tell the guy, ‘Look, you’re better off, leave it open, put some stone steps down there and the weather isn’t gonna hurt them and they’ll last forever. And besides that nobody can jump on them and probably wreck them inna month like they can a bulkhead.’ And he’s gonna look at you and ask you how the hell you expect him to pay for quality work like that.

  “That’s what I mean,” Proctor said. “That’s why they don’t do it anymore. It makes a helluva lot more sense, but nobody does it because it’d cost too much money up front and nowadays the whole thing is, you put as much money into it as it takes to make it stand up straight for maybe six years and then you depreciate the ass off of it in five and you sell the fuckin’ thing to somebody else. That’s the way it works now, and if you don’t know that everybody figures that you’re just an asshole and there isn’t any point in talking to you anyway.”

  “Come on, come on,” Dannaher said, looking around, “open the fuckin’ door and let’s go in there, we’re gonna go in there, all right? Guy could paint pictures of us, we stand here long enough.”

  Proctor opened the toolbox and removed a three-cell flashlight. “Not without this,” he said, closing the box. “I’m n
ot goin’ in one of these places without no light.”

  “JERRY,” LEO SAID in Fein’s office, “it was darker’n a carload of assholes in there.”

  “I never been in there,” Fein said. “You know that? I never been in there. I own the goddamned building and I have never been in that cellar long enough to know what’s in there. What the fuck is in there, anyway?”

  “Well,” Proctor said, “naturally of course you’ve got the boiler.”

  “Naturally,” Fein said. “The way them niggers’re screaming, there’ve been times that I wondered, but I thought I had one at least.”

  “Right,” Proctor said, “and your boiler is one of those old things that they laid up with firebrick and then they wrapped her in about two tons, asbestos sheathing. I think it’s about shot.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Fein said. “Seems like everything else I hear about in that house’s gone to hell.”

  “That’s a nice building actually, Jerry,” Leo said. “That boiler’s old, sure. Probably close to sixty, seventy years old at least. There’s an old coal bin over in the corner that doesn’t have anything in it except that somebody finished off the walls with this chicken wire and they got a lot of baby carriages and cribs and stuff in there and they got a tiny little padlock on it that I dunno why they bothered since you could go right through that screen with a pair of hedge clippers in about five minutes if it even took that long. Assuming anybody’d want to steal that junk.”