The Rats Under Pine Street Part Two

It was past midnight when I heard them.

I had fallen asleep in the chair with the lamp still on, the book open on my chest, and I woke to a sound I had not heard before. Not one set of small scurries but two, moving across the kitchen floor with the unhurried confidence of creatures who had decided a place was theirs.

I kept still.

Daisy came first, into the edge of the lamplight, her nose working at the air. Behind her came another rat, slightly larger, with a longer face and a watchful, considering quality that was different from Daisy’s bright attentiveness. She stopped at the border of the light and looked at me without moving.

Daisy crossed to the apple piece, picked it up, and carried it back toward the other rat.

I watched this for a moment.

“Well,” I said quietly.

The larger rat looked at me for another long moment, then looked away, which I took as neither welcome nor rejection. Simply an assessment rendered and set aside.

I got up very slowly and found another piece of apple in the kitchen and set it on the floor a few feet away. Daisy went to it immediately. The other rat approached after a considered pause, ate half, and retreated.

I named her Rose before I went to bed. It seemed to fit. There was something in her manner, a certain reserve, a self-possession that Daisy did not have, that called for something a little more formal. Daisy was Daisy because she was sunny and immediate. Rose was Rose because you had to come to her on her own terms.

I coaxed them both into the cage without much difficulty, added another layer of shirt strips to the bedding to accommodate the second occupant, and latched the door with care this time.

 

The days that followed were the best ones.

I am aware of how that sounds. A man alone in a basement apartment, finding his best days in the company of two rats. I understood it even then for what it was, and I did not much care. The apartment had a quality in those evenings that I had not felt in it before. Coming home was different when something was waiting.

Daisy came to the cage door when she heard my key in the lock. I do not know if she recognized the sound specifically or simply responded to any sound with hopeful enthusiasm, but I chose not to think too deeply over the distinction. She would press her nose to the wire and I would put my finger through and she would sniff it and sometimes she would lick it, and that was enough. More than enough.

Rose watched from the upper level. She was not unfriendly, exactly. She would take food from my fingers if I was patient and kept my hand still, and occasionally she would come down and investigate whatever Daisy was doing with the mild supervisory air of an older sister. But she did not seek me out the way Daisy did, and after the first several days I stopped expecting her to and simply appreciated her on her own terms, which seemed like the right approach.

They were social animals, I knew that much. The man at the pet shop had mentioned it, and the library book had confirmed it. They needed companions. They did not do well alone.

I understood that so very well and completely.

The basement felt less empty in those few days than it had in two years. I played the cassette deck in the evenings and told them about my day, which I recognized as eccentric behavior and engaged in anyway. Daisy listened with her usual bright attention. Rose occasionally glanced over from whatever she was doing, which I counted.

It was, for a little while, enough.

 

It was a Wednesday evening that I came home to an empty cage.

The door was open again. I stood in the doorway with my jacket still on and looked at it, and felt something drop in my chest that I did not care to name.

“Daisy?” I said, her name choking in my throat.

Nothing.

I checked behind the radiator. I checked under the furniture. I got down on my hands and knees and looked under the bed and found nothing again but a dust mouse and an old TV Guide. I stood in the middle of the living room and listened to the apartment and it listened back at me, empty, the way it used to sound before.

Then I heard something in the kitchen.

They were on the counter. All three of them, which took me a moment to process because there had only been two when I left. Daisy and Rose of course I recognized immediately. The third rat I did not recognize at all, and he was not the kind of rat you failed to notice. He was enormous, easily twice Daisy’s size, with patchy fur that seemed to have been distributed unevenly, as though assembled in some haste. One eye was red. The other was black. He was standing in the ruins of my bread loaf with the unhurried authority of something that had never seriously considered the possibility of being unwelcome anywhere.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

Daisy ran to the edge of the counter and stretched her nose toward me. Rose sat back and watched. The large rat looked at me for another moment and then looked back at the bread, which apparently interested him more.

“All right,” I said as I reached out to pet Daisy who eagerly took my fingers in her little hands and cleaned them.

I thought about it while I changed out of my work clothes. The situation was fairly clear. A large male could not share a cage with the girls, that much I knew without needing to refer to any book. I did not have another cage and the pet shop would be closed by now even if I had the money for another big cage, which I hadn’t. I stood in the bedroom doorway and looked around the apartment with the hopefulness of a man who has decided that a solution exists and is simply waiting to be found.

In the back of the closet I found an old plastic laundry basket, the kind with the latticed sides, and in the hallway storage area I found a beat-up plastic storage bin with a cracked lid. I brought them both into the kitchen and studied them for a while. Then I got the duct tape from the drawer.

It took the better part of a half hour. The storage bin formed the bottom, the laundry basket inverted on top provided ventilation and height. I used most of the roll of tape along the seam and cut out a flap of latticed plastic as a door that would need tape to keep closed. I lined the inside with strips of torn pajama shirts I guessed I didn’t need quite yet as the winter cold was still a couple of months away. I filled one of my soup bowls with water and another with lab blocks and set them inside. I stepped back and looked at it.

It was not a cage so much as an architectural argument for the existence of a cage. But it was solid, and it had air, and it was its own space.

Getting him into it was a separate problem. When I reached for him he moved away without urgency, as though my hand was simply an obstacle in his environment rather than an invitation. When I tried to guide him more firmly he turned and bit me on the thumb, not viciously, but with a clean decisiveness that made his position clear.

I bled on the kitchen towel and reconsidered my approach.

In the end I put a trail of crackers from the counter to the floor to the open flap of the laundry basket and waited. The big rat ate the trail at his own pace, climbed in, ate the rest, and looked around at his new quarters. I taped the flap down while he was busy investigating.

He looked up at me through the lattice with his odd, mismatched eyes, patient and utterly unreadable. I thought of Oscar Tremblay from grade school, who had the same quality of stillness when he was deciding what bad thing to do next and had an attempt at a beard that came in exactly as patchy as this rat’s fur. The name fit.

I washed my thumb, put a band-aid on it and looked at the two dwellings side by side, Daisy and Rose’s proper cage on the coffee table by the radiator, Oscar’s improvised apartment next to it on the floor. I felt a small and perhaps disproportionate sense of accomplishment. I had handled it responsibly. I had kept everyone separated and accounted for and nobody was eating my bread anymore.

“There,” I said, to no one in particular.

Daisy pressed her nose to the cage wire.

“Exactly,” I said.

 

By Thursday morning Oscar had chewed through the plastic at the base of the laundry basket, pulled the duct tape away from the seam and was asleep in Daisy’s cage when I came into the Livingroom before work. He had rearranged the flannel strips into a configuration that suited him, which appeared to have involved pushing most of them to one side. Daisy was on the upper level. Rose was in the wooden house.

I stood in my socks looking at this and thought about what could reasonably be done before eight in the morning.

Nothing presented itself.

I had already used most of the tape. The laundry basket had a fist-sized hole in the base that Oscar had apparently chewed through sometime in the night, the plastic curled back in neat scallops. The soup bowls were both empty.

I refilled the water. I put more lab blocks in the dish. I looked at Oscar, who was asleep with the absolute conviction of an animal that had resolved all outstanding questions to its satisfaction, and I thought about leaving the girls who seemed ok to let Oscar do what he wanted.

Then I thought about being late for work.

“I suppose you know better than I do,” I said, which felt like a reasonable position and troubled me slightly even as I said it.

I went to work.

 

When I came home Thursday evening there were six rats in the apartment.

I counted them twice. Daisy and Rose on the upper level of the cage, Oscar below with his head poking out of the now twisted and broken wire door, and three others moving through the kitchen with the comfortable ease of animals who had already completed the process of deciding they lived there. They were larger than Daisy and Rose but smaller than Oscar, brown and gray, moving along the baseboard and under the lip of the stove.

I stood in the doorway and watched them.

They had come through the wall, I realized, or through the pipes, or through whatever geography existed below and behind the apartment that I had never needed to think about before. The building was old. There were spaces in it. I had known this the way you know things about the place where you live without ever examining the knowledge too closely.

I picked up the lab block bag and felt how light it had become. I had bought it less than two weeks ago. I looked at the six of them and did a rough calculation that I did not care for. I gave what was left of the blocks to Daisy and Rose, which felt like the right priority, and then went to the kitchen cabinet and took out two packets of ramen. I boiled them up without the spice packs and spread the noodles on a plate on the floor. The newcomers gathered around it with a businesslike efficiency that suggested they were not accustomed to being picky. I thought that I should have enough of those until payday.

I told myself it was temporary. I told myself that Oscar had simply attracted them, that rats were social animals and had followed a known quantity. I told myself that once I obtained a proper second cage and addressed the situation calmly and methodically, the numbers would stabilize.

By the weekend there were fourteen.