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The next day I drove to town in my truck and did what I never would have thought of doing if I hadn’t needed to borrow 35 dollars: I took out a mortgage for 750. In the end we are all caught in devices of our own making. I believe that. In the end we are all caught.
In Omaha that same week, a young man wearing a plainsman’s hat walked into a pawnshop on Dodge Street and bought a nickel-plated.32 caliber pistol. He paid with 5 dollars that had no doubt been handed to him, under duress, by a half-blind old woman who did business beneath the sign of the Blue Bo
As he left, stuffing the money into his pants with one hand (clearly nervous, he dropped several bills on the floor), the portly guard-a retired policeman-said: “Son, you don’t want to do this.”
The young man fired his.32 into the air. Several people screamed. “I don’t want to shoot you, either,” the young man said from behind his banda
The young man ran out, already stripping the banda
I took 200 dollars of my mortgage money in cash and left the rest in Mr. Stoppenhauser’s bank. I went shopping at the hardware, the lumberyard, and the grocery store where Henry might have gotten a letter from his mother… if she were still alive to write one. I drove out of town in a drizzle that had turned to slashing rain by the time I got home. I unloaded my newly purchased lumber and shingles, did the feeding and milking, then put away my groceries-mostly dry goods and staples that were ru
I knew it wasn’t a good idea to have so much cash money around. It would have to go back to the bank, where it could earn a little interest (although not nearly enough to equal the interest on the loan) while I was thinking about how best to put it to work. But in the meantime, I should lay it by someplace safe.
The box with the red whore’s hat in it came to mind. It was where she’d stashed her own money, and it had been safe there for God knew how long. There was too much in my wad to fit in the band, so I thought I’d put it in the hat itself. It would only be there until I found an excuse to go back to town.
I went into the bedroom, stark naked, and opened the closet door. I shoved aside the box with her white church-hat in it, then reached for the other one. I’d pushed it all the way to the back of the shelf and had to stand on tiptoe to reach it. There was an elastic cord around it. I hooked my finger under it to pull it forward, was momentarily aware that the hatbox felt much too heavy-as though there were a brick inside it instead of a bo
You might say to me, “Wilf, one rat looks like another,” and ordinarily you’d be right, but I knew this one; hadn’t I seen it ru
The hatbox came free of my bleeding hand, and the rat tumbled to the floor. If I had taken time to think, it would have gotten away again, but conscious thinking had been canceled by pain, surprise, and the horror I suppose almost any man feels when he sees blood pouring from a part of his body that was whole only seconds before. I didn’t even remember that I was as naked as the day I was born, just brought my right foot down on the rat. I heard its bones crunch and felt its guts squash. Blood and liquefied intestines squirted from beneath its tail and doused my left ankle with warmth. It tried to twist around and bite me again; I could see its large front teeth gnashing, but it couldn’t quite reach me. Not, that was, as long as I kept my foot on it. So I did. I pushed harder, holding my wounded hand against my chest, feeling the warm blood mat the thick pelt that grew there. The rat twisted and flopped. Its tail first lashed my calf, then wrapped around it like a grass snake. Blood gushed from its mouth. Its black eyes bulged like marbles.
I stood there with my foot on the dying rat for a long time. It was smashed to pieces inside, its i
As I held my hand under the pump and froze it with cold water, I could hear someone saying, “No more, no more, no more.” It was me, I knew it was, but it sounded like an old man. One who had been reduced to beggary.
I can remember the rest of that night, but it’s like looking at old photographs in a mildewy album. The rat had bitten all the way through the webbing between my left thumb and forefinger-a terrible bite, but in a way, lucky. If it had seized on the finger I’d hooked under that elastic cord, it might have bitten the finger entirely off. I realized that when I went back into the bedroom and picked up my adversary by the tail (using my right hand; the left was too stiff and painful to flex). It was two feet long, a six-pounder, at least.
Then it wasn’t the same rat that escaped into the pipe, I hear you saying. It couldn’t have been. But it was, I tell you it was. There was no identifying mark-no white patch of fur or conveniently memorable chewed ear-but I knew it was the one that had savaged Achelois. Just as I knew it hadn’t been crouched up there by accident.
I carried it into the kitchen by the tail and dumped it in the ash bucket. This I took out to our swill-pit. I was naked in the pouring rain, but hardly aware of it. What I was mostly aware of was my left hand, throbbing with a pain so intense it threatened to obliterate all thought.
I took my duster from the hook in the mudroom (it was all I could manage), shrugged into it, and went out again, this time into the barn. I smeared my wounded hand with Rawleigh Salve. It had kept Achelois’s udder from infecting, and might do the same for my hand. I started to leave, then remembered how the rat had escaped me last time. The pipe! I went to it and bent over, expecting to see the cement plug either chewed to pieces or completely gone, but it was intact. Of course it was. Even six-pound rats with oversized teeth can’t chew through concrete. That the idea had even crossed my mind shows the state I was in. For a moment I seemed to see myself as if from outside: a man naked except for an unbuttoned duster, his body-hair matted with blood all the way to the groin, his torn left hand glistening under a thick snotlike coating of cow-salve, his eyes bugging out of his head. The way the rat’s had bugged out, when I stepped on it.