Lisa Unger: Fragile

She’d never witnessed the tendency for violence in him, was startled by what she saw this session. What had happened? What had changed?

He bent over and picked up his battered backpack where it had rested near his feet, exiting without a glance back and closing the door quietly behind him. She sat for a full minute with her heart a turbine engine in her chest before she got up, walked over to her desk, and picked up the phone.

Rodents. They were everywhere. People didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. He’d seen colonies of mice, rats, squirrels, raccoons in attics, basements, inside walls, under toolsheds. Colonies that had lived beside humans, separated by an inch of drywall, for years. Living, breeding, dying, decaying to dust. There was a kind of beauty to them, their slippery bodies, their savage natures, their sharp little teeth and black eyes. The babies were cute, like the babies of every species. Tiny pink balls covered in downy gray fur, blind and squeaking.

The rat he had in his trap, a full-grown male, was definitely not cute. He’d died ugly, all bared teeth and reaching claws. He was big, too, maybe inches from nose to rump, weighing nearly half a pound if Charlie Strout were to hazard a guess. He’d seen them bigger, as big as a small cat. He’d seen them mean. He’d been bitten twice, once in an elderly woman’s attic-she’d bandaged up the web of his hand and made him some tea. Ambushed. Once, he’d been bitten removing an animal he thought was dead from a trap. Careless. Mainly, they just ran from him, wanted to be left alone like everyone else.

He tossed the trap into the flatbed of his Ford. It landed with a thunk , and he covered it, along with two other bodies, under a thick canvas tarp.

“Catch anything?”

He turned to see the woman who’d hired him standing at the end of the path that led to her door. He was used to the look of revulsion, the wrapped-up body language. She had her hands firmly tucked in her pockets, her arms pressed tight to her sides, her shoulders hiked up. She squinted at him in the bright, late-afternoon light. It caught on the gold of her hair, glinted off the diamonds in her ears. She was pretty, a youngish forty-something. Women stayed attractive and girlish so much longer these days; he didn’t remember his mom or her friends looking so good when he was the same age as his client’s kid.

“I did, ma’am.”

“Maybe the last one?”

“I started sealing off the exits. If there are any left, they’ll get nervous, be more likely to go for the food in the traps when they get hungry and can’t escape.”

Her squint deepened. “But they can’t get in the house?”

“No, ma’am, not likely.” But they could. Of course they could. They were smart, stealthy. They’d come in holes she didn’t even know were there, behind the entertainment center, maybe, up through the toilet if they could, through the central air vents if they found an opening and smelled food. “Just don’t leave anything out. Make sure you take the garbage to the outdoor bin at night.”

She nodded uneasily.

“We’ll have you clear of this soon.”

She gave him a grateful smile and walked over to hand him a folded-up ten. She was a good tipper, polite and friendly with him. “Thanks for all your help.”

“No problem. And don’t worry.”

He felt a little bad; there weren’t as many rats up there as the sales guy who made the first visit had probably led her to believe. He would have used words like infestation. Well, I’m sure there aren’t more than thirty up there . Then he’d have talked about how bacteria from feces and decay could make its way into air vents and cause respiratory problems. The sales guy would have asked something like Have you or your kids been getting more colds than usual? By the time he was done, she’d agreed to two thousand dollars’ worth of work for their “three-phase plan”: trapping and removal, entry sealing, and cleaning up decay and feces, with their “patented formula” cleaner, which was really just some cherry-scented stuff they sprayed around. It was a total rip-off; most jobs took him about three hours-set the traps, remove the corpses, plug up a few holes, and spray the cleaner around. He’d space out his visits over a couple of weeks so it looked like more work than it was. But people would pay anything to be rid of rats, especially if they had kids. They all wanted humane trapping for the raccoons, moles, or squirrels. But no one cared about the rats, how they died. They didn’t like to hear the snap of the trap or the squealing that might follow. Still, few asked for the rats to be removed alive and relocated.

He supposed it had something to do with the Black Plague-a bad history, over centuries and continents. Rats were regarded as the bringers of pestilence and death. In the projects of New York City, rumors abounded that they crawled into cribs and bit babies as they slept. He’d never seen anything like that in The Hollows. To him they were no different than the other animals people didn’t want around. They were just critters, trying to get by.

He got into his truck. It was one of the nicer vehicles in the fleet the company he worked for owned. Wanda was working dispatch today, and she liked him, thought he was a gentleman, so she made sure he got one of the newer trucks with good air-conditioning and XM radio.

He cranked the air. October and it was still hot as a bitch. Global warming: that’s what people needed to be worried about. They spent thousands for him to crawl around in their attics. But how many of those people had given a dime to save the rest of the planet? Not that he was any philanthropist. But he was making fifteen dollars an hour, not living in some 4,500-square-foot McMansion.

Driving out of the wealthy development past the towering faux Tudors and sprawling new Victorians nestled among old-growth trees, landscaping like botanical gardens, expensive, late-model cars lounging on winding drives, he wondered what people did to afford such opulent homes. How much did it cost to heat and cool these places, to clean, to maintain their yards and pools?

He’d always imagined himself in a nice house-a big corporate job, a pretty wife and well-groomed children. But thirty-five had come and gone, thirteen years since he’d graduated from university. Though he’d always been frugal, had some money saved, partially from a generous inheritance from his grandmother, he doubted he even had enough for a down payment on one of these places. And he had never come close to marriage.

His Nextel beeped as he was pulling onto the main road through town, heading back to the office. He pressed the button without lifting the phone from the center console.

“Hello, Miss Wanda,” he said. “How’s your day going?”

Wanda was a pretty woman who wore a little too much makeup, dyed her hair a red that was a bit too brassy. But still on the right side of forty, she had a tight little body and a sweet, sweet smile. And lately he’d been wondering if she might like to have dinner with him. With her he wouldn’t have to dread the question about his work. It wasn’t exactly a sexy job. Woman might purr when you say you’re a doctor or a lawyer, or raise their eyebrows with interest if you tell them you’re a professor or an architect. But tell them you’re an exterminator, they literally recoil, wrinkle their noses in disgust.

Whatever got you into that line of work?

What a question. Most careers were just accidents, weren’t they? You wound up doing something after school to bridge the gap while you decided what you really wanted to do, and thirteen years later, you still hadn’t figured it out.