T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

The rat — it was white, with pink eyes, like the lab rats he’d seen arrayed in their cages in the biology building when he was a student — slid from the box like a lump of gristle, then sat up on its haunches and began cleaning itself as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be transported in a doggie bag and dumped into a glass-walled cavern in the presence of a tongue-flicking reptile. Which might or might not be hungry.

For a long while, nothing happened. Snow ticked at the windows, the fire sparked and settled. And then the snake moved ever so slightly, the faintest shifting of the bright tube of its scales, energy percolating from the deepest core of its musculature, and suddenly the rat stiffened. All at once it was aware of the danger it was in. It seemed to shrink into itself, as if by doing so it could somehow become invisible. Gerard watched, fascinated, wondering how the rat — reared in some drowsy pet warehouse, slick and pink and suckling at its mother’s teats in a warm gregarious pack of its pink siblings, generations removed from the wild and any knowledge of a thing like this snake and its shining elongate bulk — could recognize the threat. Very slowly, by almost imperceptible degrees, the snake lifted its head from the Plexiglas floor, leveling on the rat like a sculpture come to life. Then it struck, so quickly Gerard nearly missed it, but the rat, as if it had trained all its life for just this moment, was equal to it. It sprang over the snake’s head in a single frantic leap and shot to the farthest corner of the terrarium, where it began to emit a series of bird-like cries, all the while fastening its inflamed eyes on the white hovering face of Gerard. And what did he feel? He felt like a god, like a Roman emperor with the power of fatality in his thumb. The rat scrabbled at the Plexiglas. The snake shifted to close in on it.

And then, because he was a god, Gerard reached into the terrarium and lifted the rat up out of the reach of his python. He was surprised by how warm the animal was and how quickly it accommodated itself to his hand. It didn’t struggle or try to escape but simply pressed itself against his wrist and the trailing sleeve of his sweater as if it understood, as if it were grateful. In the next moment he was cradling it against his chest, the pulse of its heart already slowing. He went to the couch and sank into it, uncertain what to do next. The rat gazed up at him, shivered the length of its body, and promptly fell asleep.

The situation was novel, to say the least. Gerard had never touched a rat in his life, let alone allowed one to curl up and sleep in the weave of his sweater. He watched its miniature chest rise and fall, studied the intricacy of its naked feet that were like hands, saw the spray of etiolated whiskers and felt the suppleness of the tail as it lay between his fingers like the suede fringe of the jacket he’d worn as a boy. The fire faltered but he didn’t rise to feed it. When finally he got up to open a can of soup, the rat came with him, awake now and discovering its natural perch on his shoulder. He felt its fur like a caress on the side of his neck and then the touch of its whiskers and fevered nose. It stood on its hind legs and stretched from his lap to the edge of the table as he spooned up his soup by candlelight, and he couldn’t resist the experiment of extracting a cube of potato from the rich golden broth and feeding it into the eager mincing mouth.

And then another. And another. When he went to bed, the rat came with him, and if he woke in the dark of the night — and he did, twice, three times — he felt its presence beside him, its spirit, its heart, its heat, and it was no reptile, no cold thankless thing with a flicking tongue and two dead eyes, but a creature radiant with life.

The house was very cold when he woke to the seeping light of morning. He sat up in bed and looked round him. The face of the clock radio was blank, so the electricity must still have been down.

He wondered about that, but when he pushed himself up and set his bare feet on the floor, it was the rat he was thinking of — and there it was, nestled in a fold of the blankets. It opened its eyes, stretched and then climbed into the palm he offered it, working its way up inside the sleeve of his pajamas until it was balanced on his shoulder.

In the kitchen, he turned on all four gas burners and the oven too and shut off the room to trap the heat. It wasn’t until the kettle began to boil that he thought about the fireplace — and the snake stretched out in its terrarium — but by then it was too late.

He returned to the pet store the following day, reasoning that he might as well convert the snake’s lair into a rat’s nest. Or no, that didn’t sound right — that was what his mother used to call his boyhood room; he’d call it a rat apartment. A rat hostel. A rat — Bozemen grinned when he saw him. “Not another rat,” he said, something quizzical in his eyes. “He can’t want another one already, can he? But then with Burms you’ve got to watch for obesity — they’ll eat anytime, whether they’re hungry or not.”

Even under the best of conditions, Gerard was not the sort to confide in people he barely knew. “Yes,” was all he said, in answer to both questions. And then he added, “I may as well take a couple of them while I’m here.” He looked away. “To save me the trip.”

Bozeman wiped his hands on the khaki apron he wore over his jeans and came out from behind the cash register. “Sure,” he said,

“good idea. How many you want? They’re six ninety-nine each.”

Gerard shrugged. He thought of the rat at home, the snugness of it, the way it sprang across the carpet in a series of little leaps or shot along the baseboard as if blown by a hurricane wind, how it would take a nut in its hands and sit up to gnaw at it, how it loved to play with anything he gave it, a paper clip, an eraser, the ridged aluminum top of a Perrier bottle. In a moment of inspiration he decided to call it Robbie, after his brother in Tulsa. Robbie. Robbie the Rat. And Robbie needed company, needed playmates, just like any other creature. Before he could think, he said: “Ten?”

“Ten? Whoa, man, that is going to be one fat snake.”

“Is that too many?”

Bozeman slicked back his ponytail and gave him a good long look. “Hell, no — I mean, I’ll sell you all I’ve got if that’s what you want, and everything else too. You want gerbils? Parakeets? Albino toads? I’m in business, you know — pets for sale. This is a pet shop, comprende? But I tell you, if that Burm doesn’t eat them PDQ, you’re going to see how fast these things breed… I mean, the females can go into heat or whatever you want to call it at five weeks old. Five weeks.” He shifted his weight and moved past Gerard, gesturing for him to follow. They stopped in front of a display of packaged food and brightly colored sacks of litter. “You’re going to want Rat Chow,”

he said, handing him a ten-pound sack, “and a bag or two of these wood shavings.” Another look. “You got a place to keep them?”

By the time he left the store, Gerard had two wire cages (with cedar plank flooring so the rats wouldn’t contract bumblefoot, whatever that was), twenty pounds of rat food, three bags of litter and two supersized doggie bags with five rats in each. Then he was home and shutting the door to keep out the cold even as Robbie, emerging from beneath the pillows of the couch, humped across the floor to greet him and all the lights flashed on simultaneously.

It was mid-April by the time my wife and I returned from Switzerland. Tim and Tim II, who’d been cared for in our absence by our housekeeper, Florencia, were there at the door to greet us, acting out their joy on the doorstep and then carrying it into the living room with such an excess of animation it was all but impossible to get our bags in the door before giving them their treats, a thorough back-scratching and a cooed rehearsal of the little endearments they were used to. It was good to be home, back to a real community after all that time spent living in a sterile apartment in Basel, and what with making the rounds of the neighbors and settling back in both at home and at work, it wasn’t till some weeks later that I thought of Gerard. No one had seen him, save for Mary Martinson, who’d run into him in the parking lot at the mall, and he’d refused all invitations to dinner, casual get-togethers, ice-skating on the lake, even the annual Rites of Spring fund-raiser at the clubhouse. Mary said he’d seemed distracted and that she’d tried to engage him in conversation, thinking he was still locked in that first stage of grieving and just needed a little nudge to get him on track again, but he’d been abrupt with her. And she didn’t like to mention it, but he was unkempt — and he smelled worse than ever. It was startling, she said. Even outdoors, standing over the open trunk of his car, which was entirely filled, she couldn’t help noticing, with something called Rat Chow, even with a wind blowing and a lingering chill in the air, he gave off a powerful reek of sadness and body odor. Someone needed to look in on him, that was her opinion.