Jennifer Toth - The Mole People

Many newcomers vomit here, he warns. No use wondering what the smell is, he says. It’ll just make you sick thinking of the possibilities. Ignore it, he advises.

I bury my nose and mouth deeper into the collar of my turtleneck. The cloth seems to filter the stench a bit. At least my eyes stop watering and my senses recover slowly from the shock.

A shuffling sound penetrates the quiet darkness, and Mac crouches low to the ground, like a wrestler preparing for a new round. This, he says, is how you hunt track rabbits.

A brown rat the size of a small adult raccoon sniffs its way out of the refuse and lumbers past Mac, undeterred by the stark beam of my flashlight pointed aimlessly at my feet. He is in no way frightened by humans and is prepared to ignore us.

“See,” Mac says proudly, “the biggest, healthiest, and boldest sons of bitches you’ve ever seen live down here.”

The rat turns at the sound of his voice and, teeth bared, darts toward Mac. In a sudden, graceful movement, Mac’s hand sweeps down as if throwing dice and seizes the base of the animal’s tail. The rat shrieks and claws the air as he lifts it high above the ground.

Mac lets out a short, powerful laugh. “He doesn’t look so almighty up there, does he?” he asks triumphantly. He flips his wrist with a snap and the rat’s body flies off into the dark and makes a dull thud as it strikes the wall.

“Shit,” he spits. “Where is that son of a bitch?” He allows that it’s harder than you expect to break those track rabbits’ necks.

“Sometimes I think they’re stronger than we are. They’re as mean, that’s for sure,” he says, walking toward the wall. Down here, the point is survival. “We’re both fresh meat. If I hadn’t grabbed him, he would have bit me.”

He spots the rat, which is still and bleeding from an ear. Dead.

“Dare’s da wabbit!” he mimics Elmer Fudd with a goofy grin.

When Mac picks it up, the rat hangs limp—as soft and unthreatening as a puppy. Its eyes are closed and its teeth, which were so sharp and menacing a few seconds ago, are clenched shut.

Mac drops the corpse into the blood- and dirt-stained white canvas bag he carries everywhere, and throws the bag over his right shoulder. He is a white man in his early fifties, small and wiry, filthy and bearded, with sandals that flop loosely against the bottom of his feet, which are blackened by tunnel soot.

He adds pieces of wood and metal to his sack as we walk back toward his camp. The wood will feed the fire, he explains, and the metal will serve as a leg for a table he is making, or maybe a club, or maybe part of a new trap. Everything has a purpose, he says, and if he can’t use it, he will give it away or just leave it for another tunnel dweller to discover.

“You may not be able to see what its purpose is,” Mac says, “but everything has a reason for being.”

We reach his camp, far beyond the operating subway tracks, and he walks behind a raised bunker, a ten-foot-high concrete wall that once served as a rest and tool shack for track maintenance workers. After a sharp, chopping sound, he returns with the headless body of the rat, its blood flowing freely over his hands. With a proud smile punctuated with crooked and rotten teeth, he strings the carcass by its hind paws in a corner of the tunnel beyond his space.

“Can’t leave them there too long or the other rats will eat them,” he explains. Quickly he builds a small fire and then skins the rat, shaving off the skin a strip at a time. Carefully and almost affectionately, like a small boy with a large fish he has caught, he skewers the rat from its neck through its anus and sets it over the fire.

“I took his head off for you,” he smiles. “You probably wouldn’t want to see it, but when you’re hungry, it’s very good. Juicy. Reminds me of pig’s feet. Tasty. But the fun is sucking out the gook. You can even eat some of the finer bones.”

As the rat cooks, he tells me about his favorite book, Thoreau’s On Waiden Pond .” He carries a worn, paperback copy of it in the back pocket of his jeans and is able to quote long passages from it.

I ask, dizzy from the scent of burning flesh and cracking hair that haunts the campsite, if he is a Transcendentalist.

“I am, myself,” he says, then pauses to look from the rat to me. “But that’s a surprisingly dumb question from you,” he says aggressively. “I am simply being myself, living for myself, so I can have things down here established when others come down and need me. It’s my calling, you might say.

“The one thing I can’t stand is labels,” he adds, as if growing even more irritated by my question. “I am simply a person. I don’t conform to any caste or group of people who are too lazy to think for themselves. Everyone up there has a self, but how many of them know it? How many define themselves by what society says?”

The belly of the rat is smoldering. One of the feet catches fire and quickly turns into a blackened claw of carbon. Mac rotates the spit to cook the back, and returns his attention back to me with a gentle smile.

“Please excuse my impatience,” he says carefully, adding an almost courtly element to his urban mountain man persona. “Sometimes I forget that it took me a good year to forget what society up there taught me.”

I’m not sure I know what he means, but I remain silent. I’m frightened now.

He watches the meat as he turns the spit to avoid overcooking the animal. Flames periodically lick up to envelop and claim the fresh body, igniting a few remaining hairs. Mac lifts the rat off the fire, pulls out the hairs, and places it back.

“The world’s going to end soon,” he announces. “There’ll be another holocaust. Men up there are too evil and people will come down here and ask me for help. We’ll be the presidents and heads of state. We’ll be the ones to teach them how to survive. That’s why I’m here.”

Do you feel you are sacrificing yourself for this vision? I ask. Aren’t you missing out on life?

“Hell, no,” he answers quickly and fiercely, as much because he seems prepared for the question as because of his certainty. “I am living my life to the fullest. ‘Only those who suffer can understand what life is about.’ Some guy wrote that—Patrick White, I think. He won a Nobel Prize. ‘We are betrayers by nature. We disappoint high hopes. The healthy tear the sick apart. Only those who suffer can understand what life is about.’

“That man knew the truth and wasn’t afraid of it,” Mac continues after a moment, toying again with the spit. “Happiness is for the weak. It’s an escape from life.” He mistakenly spears his thumb with the hot tip of the spit. His own deep red blood bubbles forth.

“Look, Miss,” he says, suddenly louder and sharper. His eyes seem to flash with anger in the firelight. “I don’t need your pity and I’m not asking for your help. Don’t mess with my mind or my plans!”

He looks away sharply, into the blackness beyond the fire. After a second, I follow his stare but see nothing. I hear only the sizzling rat.

“It’s alright,” he says, not to me but to the darkness. “She’s OK.”

I stare even harder, trying to catch the momentary glow of eyes. They are gone, as if the lids were closed to extinguish them.

Why didn’t he come forward? I ask.

Mac shrugs away any explanation. “It’s Smidge. He’s been guarding me.”

All the time?

“Yeah. That’s his job. He watches over me.”

Can’t he come and sit with us?

“He doesn’t trust you,” Mac says.

I can’t understand why, I say. You’ve already searched me for guns and knives.

“He’s afraid I might tell you some of our secrets. We have plans, you know. He wanted to watch you to see how you move. We tell everything by the way people move. We don’t just let anyone come in. You could be a spy.”