Brad Felver - The Dogs of Detroit

We hunted the rats because we were so poor.

Years later and I can still see them bolting out from that dumpster at the end of the alley, dozens of rats, squealing and scurrying. They’re on fire. Roman and I are watching from the fire escape four stories up, these burning rats darting all over the place and yelping. “Burn harder, you rat-fucks!” Roman screams. He has this deranged look in his eyes, like a boxer who just got knocked out and is coming to. It’s dark out, so it’s almost pretty, all these burning rats scampering in every direction, like a meteor shower in the alley, and I almost say so but I decide not to. Instead, we just watch, open-mouthed, two young kids in awe of this cosmic power we’ve just unleashed.

The rats came from this pub on the garden level, which our landlord owned. We called him Old Irish because he had this thick brogue which sounded like a different language. Dad said that his skin was so pale it smelled like potatoes. That was Dad’s one joke, which he told whenever Old Irish knocked on the door and said he had to raise the rent again. His pub served a Guinness and black pudding breakfast, that’s it, and Old Irish made it all on site every morning, and so every afternoon, right before he closed up the kitchen, he tossed out a trash bag full of leftovers into the alley, a mixture of congealed blood, torn casings, and suet drippings, which is like Oreo cheesecake for rats. Old Irish didn’t live in the building, so it wasn’t his rat problem.

Dad threatened to call the health inspector one time after Roman woke up in the middle of the night with a rat gnawing at a scab on his knee. Old Irish stepped close, pointed a fat finger in Dad’s face. “You’re so cheesed about rats, maybe you should move to Brooklyn with the fancies.” Dad got real quiet and just walked away. Mom was already sick then, never even got out of bed anymore and always had that hollow-eyed look, like a porcelain doll. Dad couldn’t risk eviction, and Old Irish knew it.

He made his tenants rent everything: the refrigerator, the kitchen table, light bulbs, the plunger. We couldn’t afford to buy our own, but we couldn’t do without. Old Irish knew exactly how to get people on the hook, and he knew how to keep them there, flopping around in the shallows. “It’s not like he was always rich,” Dad told me one time. “I don’t know why he has to treat us like that.” Dad was a kind little man, and the thing about being kind is that if you don’t surround yourself with other kind people, you get exploited constantly. I think on it now, and I can’t imagine the humiliation Dad must have suffered, negotiating a ten-minute rental of a toilet augur, all because he had two young boys who ate too many grape-jellied meatballs at the school picnic.

For the longest time, Mom had worked first whistle and Dad worked second, which meant one of them was always gone, and one of them was always asleep. Which meant Roman and I did whatever we wanted with the understanding that we didn’t have any money for bail or hospitals. But then Mom got depressed all of a sudden and wouldn’t leave the apartment, so Dad started covering her shifts too. His boss told him that maybe Roman or I could slide into the job when we turned sixteen if Dad worked it for a quarter rate until then. Dad was one of those guys you’d see on the train wearing a dirty white jumpsuit, elbows on knees, not making eye contact with anyone, just bushed out because of the way his life ended up.

All of this made us easy prey, which turned me quiet and submissive like Dad. But it made Roman mean. He wanted to get even. He stole bikes from the Catholic school up the street and rode them straight down to the East River, jumping off at the last second and letting them glide on into the water without a sound. He picked fights before the other kids even had a chance to hassle him, always aiming for the nose because, he said, he liked to see rich kids cry. Some kids are poor but don’t ever know it because everyone else is poor too. We knew. Bottom of the food chain poor, and the way the food chain works is there’s a pecking order, you can hunt anything below you, and the only thing below us was the rats.

Jesus, the rats. They were everywhere, always just eating and chirruping their little mating calls, mating constantly, quick and violent, always making more rats like it was the most ruthless sort of addiction imaginable. It all had something to do with the way the sewers had been dug out, too shallow, lots of sewage that wouldn’t fully drain, and it attracted rats. Rumor was that for every human in the South Bronx, there were two rats. You’d think we were safe because we lived up on the fourth floor, but we weren’t. They climbed up through the walls, especially when it got cold out. You could hear them at night, clawing at the plaster and chirruping. We set traps, killing one or two at a time, which was like shooting a tank with a pellet gun. What we needed was needed more firepower, a full-out rat jihad.

Then one Friday afternoon, Roman showed up with a canister of potassium permanganate and a jug of antifreeze.

“What the hell?” I asked.

“Motherfucking napalm,” he said.

“Bullshit. Where’d you get all that?”

Turns out potassium permanganate is just a chemical people use to clean out wells and cisterns. Mix it with antifreeze and you’ve got trouble. As he explained it, I remembered Roman’s uncharacteristic interest in a lesson at school. It was about the moon landing, how NASA engineers developed this hypergolic engine that mixed two chemicals, and poof, the engine lit right there in the middle of space. No oxygen necessary.

“What if someone happened to mix both chemicals?” Roman had asked. “You know, just for yucks.”

“I imagine it would be very bad, Roman,” our teacher said.

“Fuckin’-A, it would,” Roman said and grinned that mischievous hyena grin of his. He could already see it.

We sat on the fire escape all afternoon, looking down at the back door of Old Irish’s pub, waiting for him to toss out the sausage slop. Roman got this calm look on his face, like he was in a trance, like you hear about guys getting just after some jungle firefight.

“So how will we—” I started to ask, but Roman cut me off.

“It’ll work,” he said. “It’s science.”

Truth is, the antifreeze probably would have killed them on its own, but that lacked style. Food chain: we outranked the rats, so we reserved the right to humiliate them.

Dad stopped home for a few minutes in between first and second whistle to check on Mom and get an apple for supper. He went into the bedroom to see her, and then he popped his head out the window. He hadn’t shaved in a couple days, which made him seem older and weaker. “You boys want me to make you some eggs?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “We’ll eat later.”

“Roman?” Dad said, but Roman didn’t seem to hear him.

“Love you boys,” he said and squeezed my shoulder.

“What if they don’t eat it?” I asked later, even though we both knew it was a stupid question. Rats will eat anything. A rat will eat beef so rancid it’s turned blue. A rat will chew through PVC pipe just to get at the raw sewage inside. Imagine the most disgusting thing possible, and rats will eat it.

Roman just kept glaring down at that door like a sniper waiting on his mark.

Finally, it burst open and the trash bag came flying out. It plopped on the asphalt next to the dumpster, but Old Irish didn’t even bother to come out and move it.

“We’re up,” Roman said.

We sat at the kitchen table with the sausage slop, separating it into two trash bags. In one bag Roman poured a heap of potassium permanganate, which was these little purple crystals about the size of shucked sunflower seeds. In the other bag I poured the antifreeze, almost the whole gallon. “Now mix,” he said, and we dug our hands into the bags. I mixed the one with the antifreeze, and it felt like a bag full of eyeballs and mud. “Keep to your side,” Roman said.