Oh, Rats!

by Tor Seidler

  “Come on, Beck!” Lucy cried. “I know you can decipher it.”

  In fact, he already had. He just hadn’t wanted to read it aloud. But the rats pressed him till he gave in. The headline was: SUICIDE BOMBER?

  “What’s a ‘suicide bomber’?” a rat asked.

  Beckett squirmed. “I’m not sure,” he said at last.

  But of course he knew, and by the aghast look on Lucy’s face he could tell that she did too.

  19

  STALE PIZZA

  IT’S TERRIFYING TO GET SNATCHED off a flagpole eight stories up, but when it happened to Phoenix, his terror was mixed with disbelief. Could he really have let it happen again? This time there was no cutting pain in his shoulder. The bird’s talons hadn’t pierced his flesh. But they gripped him too fiercely for him to squirm free.

  The bird carried him over the tops of buildings, beyond the piers, and out over the river. After banking north, the bird quit flapping for a moment to inspect his catch, and they dipped down toward a Circle Line tour boat.

  “What’s on your back?” the bird asked as he flapped his great wings again.

  “Explosives,” Phoenix said.

  “Explosives!”

  “Well, nothing’s going to explode unless I light the wick, and it’s too windy up here to strike a match.”

  As soon as he said this, Phoenix realized it was probably a fatal mistake. A bird worried about getting blown up might drop him. It was a long way down to the river, but better that than being ripped apart by a hooked beak.

  “Are you a marten?” the bird said.

  “A marten?”

  “Just a guess. Never seen one in the city anyway. I hope you’re not a rat. I was looking for a treat for the missus. She’s not partial to rat.”

  “I am a rat,” Phoenix said—words he never thought he would utter. He twisted his head around and saw ruddy tail feathers. “Do you have a relative named Walter?”

  “What?”

  “It’s just you sound like him.”

  “But I am Walter. You’ve heard of me?”

  The bird gave a pleased flap of his powerful wings, lifting them higher. He’d always been secretly jealous of his famous cousin who lived by Central Park, and now it seemed that he, too, was a known entity! But when his prey identified himself as the squirrel he’d grabbed in Manahawkin, he felt a little deflated.

  “What are the chances?” Walter said with a sigh. “I almost never hunt in the city, but I’d gone after a couple of starlings—and there you were, easy pickings.”

  Easy pickings! The words should be etched on his tombstone, Phoenix thought. Though the chances of him ending up with a marker seemed highly unlikely at the moment.

  “But . . . I thought you said you were a rat,” Walter said. “You kind of look like one. What happened to you?”

  “I landed in some hot tar.”

  “You mean when I dropped you?”

  “Yup.”

  Far out ahead of them Walter could make out his destination: the cliffs of the Palisades, where his nest was. But directly below them was the bridge that connected Manhattan to New Jersey. He glided down and landed on the railing of the bridge’s outer bike lane.

  The landing was hard on Phoenix. For a moment he thought his backbone might be broken. But when the bird released him he managed to sit up dizzily on the railing.

  “Good grief,” Walter said, taking a good look at him.

  “I know,” Phoenix said ruefully.

  “You saved my life—and look how I repaid you!”

  “I saved your life?”

  Walter shook out his wings and sucked a deep, whistling breath through his beak. “If you hadn’t warned me, I would have gotten sucked into that jet’s engines for sure. As it was, I lost three tail feathers. Quite a shock to the system. After I got home I didn’t budge for a week.” Walter chuckled. “Though that had its plus side too. It finally got the kids out of the nest. All in all, I owe you a huge debt of gratitude.”

  Phoenix blinked, not at all sure he’d heard correctly. “Does that mean you’re not going to eat me?”

  “Eat you! If I were a night flier, I’d take you all the way back to Manahawkin.”

  Once Phoenix digested this miraculous offer, he gave a calculating squint at the setting sun. “Do you suppose it would be possible to fly me back where you grabbed me?”

  “But of course!”

  Moments later they were following the West Side Highway south. It was a scenic route, with the glittering city on their left and the sunset on their right, and under these new circumstances Phoenix could almost appreciate it. Walter was curious about the explosives, so Phoenix told him about his mission. This led to the rats and their pier problems.

  “Which pier?” Walter asked, swinging left to avoid a helicopter. It wasn’t a close call, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  When they got closer to the pier, Phoenix pointed it out. Walter said he’d once grabbed a pigeon off its roof.

  “You eat pigeon?” Phoenix said, grimacing.

  “In a pinch. But there aren’t any there now, just a couple of rats.”

  Before Phoenix had a chance to see this for himself, Walter veered in among the buildings, gliding right between the arm of a crane and the top of a growing high-rise. As they approached the substation, Phoenix pointed out the balcony above the double cornice.

  “There! Could you set me down there?”

  This time, thanks to a lot of last-second flapping, Walter came in for a gentler landing. “I know it’s rude to drop you and fly,” he said, setting Phoenix upright on the balustrade railing. “But it really is getting dark.”

  “That’s okay,” Phoenix said. “I appreciate you not eating me.”

  After watching Walter flap away into the sunset, Phoenix hopped down onto the balcony and scurried around the corner. With the cargo on his back he had to squirm on his belly to squeeze through the pipe. The upper chamber was hot as ever. He crept over to the coils. They were humming away, just as they had before he shorted them out the other day. While he was gnawing at the rubber band around his chest to release the stick of dynamite, he heard a sound and froze. He wasn’t alone. Looking cautiously around, he saw a guard sitting by the elevator, fanning himself with a magazine. Phoenix thought. He could still do this. He’d just have to be a lot quieter. So he lay on his side before continuing to gnaw through the rubber band. That way the dynamite wouldn’t clunk when it fell on the floor. The band finally split apart, and the cargo came free. He slid the dynamite under the coils. Then the human stopped fanning himself, and Phoenix froze again. When the man went back to fanning, Phoenix struck a match. The stupid thing didn’t light. He tried again. This time the match flared to life, but the sudden burst of heat reminded him so intensely of the hot tar that he dropped it.

  The guard quit fanning himself again, and Phoenix returned to freeze mode. Only when the man went to use the restroom did Phoenix strike another match. Holding the flame as far from himself as possible, he lit the fuse. Then he dropped the match and sprinted for the pipe.

  The dynamite exploded just as he stepped onto the balcony. The detonation wasn’t all that powerful. The balcony didn’t tremble under his paws or anything. Nevertheless, he watched one neighborhood after another blink out, till the entire city was dark again. The guard’s cursing echoed out of the pipe. Yells and honks drifted up from the streets.

  When Phoenix rounded the corner of the balcony, it didn’t surprise him to see that the flagpole’s support wire was still gone. There was no way to get down. But his predicament was softened considerably by the consolation of having accomplished his mission. In fact, as he crouched there looking out at the city he’d darkened, he felt a tickle of pride.

  After the sunset’s last gasp, it grew very dark, and he groped his way back to the pipe and into the substation. The emergency generator had kicked in, so the interior lights were on, showing five or six humans inspecting the damage. Phoenix crept up behind a metal
toolbox for a better look. The dynamite may have had no effect on the bulldozer, but the coils were a twisted mess.

  Two of the humans had on blue coveralls, and one of the two looked familiar. So did a canvas tool sack nearby. Phoenix dashed over to it. Climbing inside, he followed his own scent between a flashlight and a pair of Vise-Grips to a snug corner.

  Though he had no intention of falling asleep, experiences like getting snatched off a flagpole by a hawk can be sapping, and he soon conked out. When he woke up, he felt hungry and well rested, but the canvas sack didn’t seem to have moved. He peeped out. Four repairmen were hard at work, but the familiar one wasn’t among them. Confused, Phoenix slipped out of the sack and crept over to the pipe and out to the balcony. The sun was almost directly overhead, which meant it must be the next day. Crawling back into the substation, he followed an interesting smell to the chair by the elevator and hopped onto it. An old, half-eaten slice of pizza was sitting on a greasy paper plate. He finished it off, even the crust, before returning to the tool sack.

  In fact, the repairman had worked a night shift and left his tools behind, knowing he would be coming back. He returned that evening and put in another full shift. By that next morning the substation was still offline, but there was no more to be done till the new, custom-made coils were delivered. So this time he grabbed his tool sack, waking Phoenix from a light sleep, and took the elevator down to the lower level. Phoenix wasn’t about to make the same mistake as last time. As soon as the canvas brightened, indicating they were outside, he pushed off the head of a hammer and hurled himself out of the sack.

  He didn’t make the most graceful landing. In fact, he hit the sidewalk snout-first. Nor did he escape the notice of the repairmen, who watched, open-mouthed, as he scrambled into the gutter. But the man didn’t chase him, and at the end of the block Phoenix stopped under a parked minivan to rub his snout and catch his breath. Then he crossed the street and hurried toward the West Side Highway.

  Like everything else, the signals on the West Side Highway were out, and while there was less traffic than usual, it never seemed to stop. The idea of dodging through the cars conjured up the image of the flattened raccoon on Hilliard Boulevard, and as he crouched on the curb, the blazing sun began to bother his burn scars. So he finally backtracked along the edge of the sidewalk and stopped in the shade of a fire hydrant.

  Farther down the block Phoenix saw the owner of a steakhouse standing under his awning complaining to a passerby.

  “No business! I’m losing my shirt! All my food’s spoiling!”

  This meant nothing to Phoenix, but while looking that way he spied a rat creeping out the open door of the restaurant with a bulging sack. The incensed owner didn’t notice the rat dart across the awning’s shadow into the gutter, but Phoenix recognized the rat instantly and scurried down the gutter to meet him.

  “Hey, Oscar,” he said when they were almost snout to snout. “What’d you get?”

  “What’s it to you?” Oscar said.

  “Just curious.”

  In fact, Oscar was rather proud of his snatch. While the restaurant’s chef had been transferring meat from the refrigerator to the meat locker, which would hold the cold longer, Oscar had managed to grab two medallions of beef. He opened his sack a tiny bit to give Phoenix a glimpse.

  The medallions didn’t tempt Phoenix in the least, but he complimented Oscar on his scavenging skills. “I’ll bet you know this neighborhood like the back of your paw,” he added.

  Oscar grunted.

  “Is there an alternate way across that highway?” Phoenix asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Could you show me?”

  “You wharf rats are too uppity for it.”

  “I’m not a wharf rat.”

  Oscar gave him an appraising look. “Guess you’re not,” he said, and he trotted off down the gutter with his sack.

  As he followed, Phoenix stepped on a wad of gum and had to stop to scrape it off. When he looked up, Oscar was gone. Phoenix moved a little farther along and came to a drainage grate. Had Oscar disappeared down there? The subterranean world doesn’t hold much appeal for squirrels, but then he heard a dreadful sound and looked over his shoulder to see a street sweeper coming right at him. It was either throw himself through the grate or get pulverized by the churning bristles.

  He landed in a big concrete pipe right next to Oscar.

  “Is this a sewer?” Phoenix asked, trying not to sound uppity.

  “Storm sewer,” Oscar said. He pointed west. “Pier’s that way. Straight, left, right, then up.”

  Oscar dragged his sack off in the other direction. But after a few steps he stopped and looked back.

  “Think you’ll see Mrs. P.?” he asked.

  “I imagine so,” Phoenix said. After a silence he added, “Do you have a message for her?”

  Oscar opened his sack and pulled out what looked like a waxy red puck.

  “She likes these cheeses,” he said, rolling it to Phoenix.

  Phoenix picked it up, wishing he could read the label.

  “She’ll probably think I poisoned it, but I didn’t,” Oscar said.

  “Why don’t you give it to her yourself?” Phoenix suggested.

  Oscar shook his head. He knew he’d done something so unforgivable he could never go back to the pier. Living in the sewers, however, had made him realize how cushy his former existence had been.

  As Oscar dragged his sack away, Phoenix tucked the red disc under an arm and headed the other way down the pipe, walking alongside some water left over from the recent storm. After a while another pipe intersected the first, and he followed it to the left. This one was so dark he had to feel his way along. But when it intersected yet another pipe there was a faint glow off to his right. He scurried that way. It was tricky, climbing up through another grate without dropping the red disc, but he managed it.

  He blinked in the brilliant sunshine. He was right in front of a dilapidated pier. But there was no fencing, no bulldozer, no backhoe, no dumpster. He shuffled closer. There was no notice posted on the door either. Yet the place looked familiar. He scanned the piers to the north and south. They’d all been fixed up, with corrugated steel siding instead of wood. He studied this one some more. It had to be the rats’. Except for a gash in the front, it looked exactly as it had when Martha first showed it to him.

  20

  MINI BABYBEL

  A BUNCH OF YOUNG RATS were playing in the front part of the pier, batting around a ball of wadded-up foil. One of them smacked it so hard it rolled out under the door. The others insisted she go after it. When she did, her eyes widened. She whirled around and ran back inside without the ball.

  “He’s back!” she cried.

  The others fell over themselves racing to the door. At the sight of Phoenix they started yelling hysterically, and soon every rat in the pier came stumbling out to see what the commotion was. As Mrs. P. squeezed out of her crate, Lucy and Beckett hurried over to lend her a paw and joined the rear of the mob flooding toward the door. For a moment Beckett wondered if the uproar meant the demolition crew had come back. But the jubilant sounds coming from outside suggested otherwise, and when they walked out into the sunlight themselves, there were no humans around, just a big scrum of rats. At the sight of Mrs. P. rats moved aside, revealing the center of their attention.

  “Land sakes alive!” Mrs. P. exclaimed.

  Lucy blinked in astonishment. “Phoenix! You’re alive!” Her voice began to quake. “I thought that horrid bird . . .”

  Beckett tried to ask where Phoenix had been, but his voice was shaky too—even more strangled than usual—and hardly anyone heard. However, others wanted to know the same thing, so Phoenix let them in on the remarkable coincidence.

  “You’re never going to believe this, but it was the same hawk who brought me up here in the first place.”

  “But you said he was dead,” Lucy said, wide-eyed.

  “Turns out I was wrong.”


  “So the eyases didn’t lose their father?”

  “Seems not.”

  “But we saw him fly away with you!” said the youngest elder.

  Other witnesses chimed in. Phoenix explained how Walter had stopped at the great bridge and then flown him back to the substation.

  “Why would he do that?” Junior asked incredulously.

  Phoenix shrugged. “Evidently I saved his life.”

  “So you were right, Beck,” Lucy murmured, giving her brother an appreciative look.

  Beckett cleared his throat. “Saving lives seems to be something you’re good at, Phoenix,” he said.

  When Lucy repeated her brother’s words loud enough for everyone to hear, there was a chorus of agreement.

  “And you blew up the coils?” Junior said, impressed in spite of himself.

  “Well, Mrs. P.’s stick of dynamite did that,” Phoenix said.

  “You’re one for the books, dearie,” said Mrs. P. “I thought I’d seen everything till you came along.”

  The middle elder asked Phoenix what he’d been up to since the lights went out, so he filled them in on his time in the tool sack. They filled him in on the demolition crew’s surrender. A few joggers slowed down to look their way, but the Rat Pier had become so well-known that the sight of a horde of rats in front of it wasn’t all that disturbing.

  Beckett asked Phoenix about the waxy red puck.

  “It’s for Mrs. P.,” Phoenix said, holding it out.

  “Mini Babybel,” Beckett said, reading the label.

  “Oh, that’s one of my favorites,” Mrs. P. said. “That’s so sweet of you, Phoenix.”

  “Actually, it’s from Oscar. I just ran into him.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Beckett. “Better toss it.”

  “I don’t think he poisoned it,” Phoenix said. “I think it’s his way of apologizing.”

  After studying the offering thoughtfully, Mrs. P. tucked it under her arm. “Well, we seem to have weathered the storm,” she said. “It’s been a privilege to serve as your interim mayor, but it’s been exhausting, so if you don’t mind, I’ll retire now.”