Mike Nelson's Death Rat! (8 page)

“Weird things?” said Jack, taking the bait again.

“Right. Cattle mutilations. Disappearances. Strange noises after dark. Well, one night a farmer's horses broke from their stalls, and when he tried to lead them back into the barn, they went crazy with fear and tried to eat each other. The townspeople got spooked, and they looked to the Reverend Fuller for the explanation. Well, Fuller was spooked, too. About the only thing he could think to do was to blame it on Lynch. He got the folks believing that Lynch was up to some sort of witchcraft that was bringing the evil to their town. Lynch, of course, was furious at their accusations and superstitions. Being a real woodsman and a crack hunter, he went out to solve the ‘mystery' of the strange doings all by himself. One day he followed some very bizarre and unfamiliar tracks into the woods. Deeper he went, until he noticed a change in the air, a strange silence that seemed to weigh on his mind. His heart began to beat faster, and he felt strongly as though he were being watched. Something pressed in on him. His steps became measured, and he could hear his own blood beating in his temples. He took a cautious step—and suddenly darkness, crashing, pain.” Ponty leaned back in his chair with a look of self-satisfaction.

“Yes?” said Jack coolly.

“He had crashed through a closed-off area of the deserted
gold mine. And now he lay at the bottom, injured, terrified, almost—but not quite—alone. For with him in the cold, cramped space was—”

Just then the front door of Jack's duplex flew open, and into the room burst a thin, bewhiskered man with a backpack slung over one shoulder.

“Hey,” he said, a look of cheerful bemusement on his scraggly face.

Jack rose and made an apologetic gesture toward Ponty. “Hey, Denny. This is a friend from work. Ponty, this is my roommate, Denny.”

Ponty rose and greeted Denny, then made an excuse to leave as Denny shuffled off to his room.

“All right, so long, Jack!” Ponty said cartoonishly as Jack showed him to the door. Then he whispered, “I'll get you the manuscript tomorrow at Medieval Burger, okay? Bring a backpack or something, so I can slip it to you without having anyone see it.”

“Okay, yeah. 'Cause I have to know what happens,” Jack said.

O
NE WEEK LATER
Ponty approached Jack near Medieval Burger's garbage area, and they huddled in a corner like teens discussing the purchase of a dime bag.

“Did you finish it?” Ponty asked, his head pivoting nervously around. Suzanne was condescending to another employee near the meat well.

“Yeah,” Jack said.

“And? What'd you think?”

“Really, really good,” said Jack.

Ponty stared at him for a moment without blinking. “Anything else?” he asked.

“No. No, I don't think so.”

“Jack? I'm going to have to insist that when you speak to people about this book, you are a little more articulate about it, okay?”

“I will. Be,” he added.

That same evening a jumpy Ponty rang Jack at home.

“Is it okay to speak?”

“Yes. I'm sorry, though. I had just taken a bite of carrot when you called.”

“That's okay. Listen, I think that as we get nearer to selling this thing, I should quit the Medieval Burger so it doesn't look too strange—you, a first-time author, working side by side with a well-known history author.”

“Whatever you think,” Jack said, swallowing.

“But I'm going to need your financial support just until this thing sells. You might have to work a lot of double shifts.”

Ponty heard the crack of a carrot chunk being severed from its source, then some muted crunching, a pause, then more crunching.

“Don't you think I ought to quit so that I can concentrate on getting an agent for this thing?”

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No,” Ponty said. “It's part of the Jack Ryback lore: ‘He toiled at a burger joint, often working double shifts to support himself, in the meantime working on his true passion in the small hours of the morning in the kitchen of his modest apartment.'”

Ponty listened to nearly half a minute of contemplative mastication.

“Ponty? Why does that part of it have to be true, when it's not even true that I wrote the book?” Now Jack heard silence, so he chewed as he waited for Ponty to respond.

“You're getting the lion's share of the take from this thing. You sling the burgers, okay?” came the reply.

“Fine. But I've got a meeting with Todd Fetters tomorrow. Think you can cover my shift?”

That night Ponty dreamed. His dreams were often flatly prosaic, revealing nothing. When he was younger, he often flew in his dreams, arms outstretched, fingertips touching treetops, wind whipping hair against forehead. These days his dreams were about bringing his shirts in to be laundered or shopping for a new mattress.

Now he dreamed he was at work, putting bun tops on a row of hamburgers.

Many miles away and across the wide Mississippi, Gus Bromstad dreamed he was a rat.

T
he instructions on a package of Mrs. Condresi's Crab Enchiladas are unequivocal:
DO NOT THAW BEFORE COOKING
!
KEEP FROZEN
! These words are printed on the front and the back of the sturdy paper microwave- and oven-safe package. The test kitchens of Mrs. Condresi's parent company, Telron Foods, had found a very slight risk that if the product were thawed in such a manner, naturally occurring bacteria
present in the extruded pollock used to manufacture the imitation crab could grow to toxic levels and cause illness.

Gus Bromstad was in a hurry to use his new FlameMaster convection oven and did not read the label. He glanced at it only briefly before cooking his enchiladas, ignoring everything but the suggested oven temperature. He did not even wait long enough for the oven to preheat, and this gave the naturally occurring bacteria an even more conducive environment in which to grow. It was, in fact, not he who had thawed the Mrs. Condresi's Crab Enchiladas in the refrigerator; it was his buying service. But that was of no help to Gus Bromstad on this particular night.

As Telron might have predicted, it was a fairly small amount of bacteria that affected him, and his most marked symptom was a low-grade fever that did not even come over him until the very early morning when Gus was dead asleep. He did not awake, but he dreamed fiercely.

Time, emotions, color, texture all smeared together, separated into meaningless parts, swirled, converged again, and finally came into focus. Bill Yaster, a guy in his poli sci class at St. Odo, was offering to paint Gus's old Mustang. Gus felt nothing so much as pure terror at the thought, and he was filled with a wild sense of betrayal. He shook his head furiously and tried to scream, but he couldn't. Bill Yaster made a mocking face back to him and then started laughing, his laugh a choked, deathly harsh noise with no antecedent in the natural world.

Suddenly Bill Yaster became Gus's aunt Pearl, and they were sharing poppy-seed cake. Aunt Pearl kept eating it, but the cake kept growing, and as it did, Aunt Pearl ate more and more, making obscene yummy noises and swallowing loudly. Gus
tried to chat amiably and pretend it wasn't happening, but it was too ghastly a display. He got up and ran.

Now he was at a rally, standing before a massive, cheering crowd at the Capitol Mall. He was vaguely aware that there were other celebrities onstage with him, but he had only the sense of them, as they were to his side or behind him. Ron Wood maybe. Tom Wolfe. Yevgeny Kafelnikov, the tennis player. He couldn't be sure. He distrusted the crowd for some reason, but they seemed pleased with him. He clasped his hands above his head in a victory gesture, and the people cheered wildly. When he brought his hands back down, he noticed that they had become paws. Gray-brown hair covered the backs of them, but otherwise they were thin, pink, the skin soft and nearly translucent, finished with tapered, sinister-looking claws. He immediately tried to hide them behind him, but he couldn't bend his arms enough to get them there. The crowd gasped, then started hissing, their sibiliant Ss hurting Gus's now-sensitive rodent ears.

“Please, please, stop! I'll take care of it!” he yelled to the crowd. He turned to ask a handler what he ought to do about this transformation, but when he did, his horrible, hairless tail whipped from behind him and came to rest, swaying gently right before his eyes. Gus woke up and clutched his stomach. He was breathing heavily, and a nocturnal flop sweat was evenly distributed about his ample body. He'd been in his new log home only a week now, so it took a moment for Gus to place himself spatially in his universe; his sense of self, his life experiences, his metaphysical beliefs soon followed.

“I'm Gus Bromstad,” he said quietly in the dark.

This dream was deeply disquieting, especially as the capper to a somewhat ominous day. He had been on KDQT's morning
show promoting the new Dogwood, and though the hosts had been fawning, the call volume brisk and their content nothing but loving, Gus couldn't seem to shake a sense that the very next caller was about to attack him as a fraud, accuse him of being,
au fond
, a mean-spirited hack. But of course it didn't happen. The next call would play out very like the one before it: an acknowledgment of love, some light banter, the quoting of a favorite passage, the promise to come to his signing. The caller would sign off, and as Gus exchanged the familiar patter with the hosts, he would feel a slight tugging of discomfiture, and it would unwillingly enter his consciousness that the next call would be pure condemnation—and so on throughout the morning.

And then there was the signing itself: long lines stretching outside the store and down Nicollet Avenue, great weather, a buoyant mood prevailing over the whole proceeding. And yet there was the comment by that woman. He was processing them through at a good clip (when it came to signings, Gus was obsessed with volume and would often compare the numbers of books he'd signed to those at previous signings), all was proceeding as normal, when a middle-aged woman wearing blue sweatpants and a Minnesota Wild T-shirt, holding a plastic shopping bag with
THE DILLY LILY
printed on the side, flopped her book in front of him and said, “I really love the new Dogwood, Gus.”

“Yup,” he said, scribbling his signature.

“When do you think you're going to do something new, like not Dogwood?” she asked. “I'd buy anything you write.”

He'd handed her book back without answering, of course, and her comment had caused him enough stress to throw him pretty badly off a very good signing pace (he was nearing the
record clip he'd managed at Atlanta's H. Thomas Booksellers in '96).

Write something new?
he thought now as he lay rolling slightly in his bed, kicking his legs and rubbing his stomach.
No. Make me, lady.

Besides, each Dogwood book was nothing if not new. Each word was hand-selected from the hundreds of thousands of words available at any given time. Its placement in the Dogwood firmament was not fickle, not based on past successes, not put there by rote experience. It was selected fresh, each and every time, you hockey-loving rube! What do you want from me, stark Russian novels set in gulags? Moist Southern gothic? Military techno-fiction, like that idiot Bunt Casey? Bunt Casey who, when he dons one of those ridiculous—and too tight, mind you—flight suits, actually stuffs to his advantage, the poor, insecure, underendowed idiot!

No, Mrs. Sweatpants. You'll get Dogwood and like it, do you hear?

A
S HE CRUISED
past the timidly seedy shops of East Lake Street, Jack Ryback wrestled with his conflicting emotions. In part he was ecstatic over the sale of his book, yet he was also severely apprehensive over the fact that when he'd called Ponty to tell him the news, Ponty had cut him off abruptly, then given him an unknown address and told him to show up there at two o'clock the next afternoon. He was to ask for “Earl.” Jack was not used to going to mysterious addresses on East Lake Street and asking for unknown people by name. Earls in general, he felt, were not to be trusted. Those lurking about at the old buildings and shops across 35W at two in the afternoon waiting to be asked for by name were especially suspect.

He parked his Buick Somerset on a side street, found the address he needed, and entered the narrow building, a pool hall called The Rack, situated between a massage parlor disguised as the “Utopia Health Club” and a store selling military memorabilia. Inside, there were three people: a middle-aged woman behind a counter reading a book, a man in a dirty T-shirt lining up a rail shot, and, sitting on a bench along the wall with his hands on his knees, Ponty, inexplicably decked out in a pair of stiff new blue jeans, cowboy boots, an embroidered gabardine western shirt with pearl snap buttons, and, pasted on his upper lip, a large, crepe-hair, “cookie duster”–style mustache. Jack wondered briefly if there were any conceivable way that Ponty could look more uncomfortable and out of place, but his effort yielded no fruit. He strode up to him.

“Ah, good, you've gone mad,” he said.

“Quiet. Sit down.”

“Earl?”

“Yes.”

“Ponty, why are you Earl?”

“Sit down.”

Jack sat down next to him.

“Well?” Ponty asked.

“
Death Rat
. . . is officially sold,” Jack said, patting the breast pocket of his jacket.

“Yes!”

They embraced briefly and clumsily, simultaneously hopping excitedly up and down on their bench, before parting just as clumsily. The man in the dirty T-shirt looked over at them.

“For the amount we discussed?” Ponty asked, his voice quite low.

“What?” Jack whispered.

“The amount? For the amount we discussed?”

Jack narrowed his eyes in thought. “I don't remember what that was the last time we talked.”

“It was—” Ponty began, before stopping himself and looking around the pool hall with great suspicion. Then, with some difficulty, due to the snug fit and fresh-off-the-rack stiffness of his boot-cut jeans, he reached into his back pocket and fished out his wallet. He produced a short stack of business cards from a subpocket of the wallet and shuffled through them, peering at each side, dismissing one, then moving to the next, finally finding one that seemed to satisfy him. Jack looked on in confusion as Ponty then patted his chest, produced a ballpoint pen from his right breast pocket, and leaned over to write on the card. Ponty could get nothing from his pen, so he shook it, tried again, and, when it failed, touched the tip to his tongue and tried again. It would not write. He held up his finger in a “hang on a second” gesture and was standing up when Jack yanked him back down.

“Would you just tell me the amount, Ponty? I just don't remember the amount.”

Ponty whispered in Jack's ear.

“Stop spitting. I can't hear you.”

Ponty tried again.

“Yes, exactly. That was the amount, exactly. I signed the contract a few days ago,” Jack said. “Fetters took his share and cut me a check yesterday. And don't forget the back end!”

“Yes!” said Ponty triumphantly.

They celebrated again in a more muted fashion, Jack more so than Ponty because he was now slightly frightened by both the elder man's behavior and his tight-fitting trucker's outfit.
When they'd settled down again, Jack gave Ponty a look of distaste mixed with pity.

“Ponty, what is this? The jeans and the ‘Earl' and the mustache? What's happened to you? You're not line-dancing are you?”

“It's nothing. I'm just trying to be careful. My picture was in the paper after my . . . accident, so I'm known all over town. And besides, these past few weeks I've had dreams. I never have dreams.”

“I agree—we do have to be careful, but there have got to be better ways to go about it than dressing up like Richard Farnsworth.”

“You laugh. Go get a rack, will you, before we start to look conspicuous.”

Jack returned with a tray of balls and racked them. Ponty broke, the cue ball glancing off the side of the rack gently, freeing up exactly two balls.

Looking at the floor Ponty half mumbled, “Oh, I'm going to need a few percentages of your share to buy off my roommates. It's in our best interest.”

“What?” said Jack, standing up straight. “You told them about this?”

“Well, they know enough about the plot that when it comes out, they'll know I wrote it. It won't take much. They're good guys. They understand the drill, and they're not going to get in our way. I just need to give them a good-faith bribe.”

“I can't believe you told them about it.”

“I didn't know at the time that you were going to be its author. It's just two percent.”

“Man,” said Jack, “I liked my percentage the way it was. It
was so symmetrical. It hadn't been pecked at by roommates.” He waved away the issue with his hand. “Fine. Have your stinkin' little two percent back.”

“You're a pal. Okay, so tell me how it went down.”

“Well,” said Jack, expertly sinking one of the freed balls, taking the cue ball off the railing, and breaking up the rack, “there's not much to tell. Fetters took it right away, and, like I told you, there was interest within the week.” He sank another while simultaneously looking over his shoulder at Ponty, “He told me he sold it at auction.”

“Auction? Hm, sounds a little farm implement–y to me. But whatever works.”

“Yup. Can't argue with the results,” Jack agreed, using the bridge to put one in the side and one in the corner with one shot. “He said they were all blown away by the fact that it was a true story. He warned that with a nonfiction book like this we have to be pretty hush-hush to the press, because another publisher can pay some other hack journalist to whip one up, and they'll rush into print before we get ours out.” He sank a long rail shot and pointed at it in a playfully self-satisfied manner.

Ponty blacked out for an instant, and when he woke, he was in the exact same spot watching Jack line up a shot. He shook his head.

“Jack, what are you talking about?” he said, his voice trembling.

“Yeah, I guess it can happen. There was another book about that moose deal—you remember that?—but it got to market a little late and didn't do much. This is going off the rail into the side, Ponty.”

“Jack. You said ‘nonfiction.' What book were you talking about when you said nonfiction?”

“Ponty, are you getting a little too into the Earl thing? I'm talking about
Death Rat
. Our book—your book.” He took his shot, finally missing. Ponty blacked out again. He awoke to see the rubber end of a cue stick several inches from his face. “Your shot there, Earl,” Jack said.

“Jack. I need to ask you a very important question now: You didn't read the book, did you?” Ponty said quietly.