Firmin (12 page)
Authors: Sam Savage
Tags: #Rats, #Fantasy Fiction, #Fiction, #Books and Reading, #Fantasy, #General
The pain came in the night, and by the next morning I could barely haul myself forward using only my front legs, the pain was so huge. I ate grass. From my hiding place I watched a man feed squirrels. He was sitting on a bench near me with a paper sack in his lap, and the squirrels climbed up and took peanuts from between his fingers.
Greed and Degradation among America’s Wildlife
. After a while he seemed to get bored. He turned the sack upside down and all the peanuts spilled out on the bench and on the ground. The man walked off and the squirrels rushed around snatching up peanuts, and when they thought there weren’t any more they left too. But they had missed one peanut, I could see it in the grass against the foot of the bench just a few feet from where I was hiding. Someone else came and sat on the bench, someone blue. I didn’t care. I wanted the peanut too much to care about anything but that, and I crawled out and got it. I remember how good it tasted.
Greed and Degradation among America’s Wildlife
. After a while he seemed to get bored. He turned the sack upside down and all the peanuts spilled out on the bench and on the ground. The man walked off and the squirrels rushed around snatching up peanuts, and when they thought there weren’t any more they left too. But they had missed one peanut, I could see it in the grass against the foot of the bench just a few feet from where I was hiding. Someone else came and sat on the bench, someone blue. I didn’t care. I wanted the peanut too much to care about anything but that, and I crawled out and got it. I remember how good it tasted.
Chapter 9
The next things I recall are a swaying motion and a strong human smell. When I came to I found myself swaddled like a papoose in human smell and suffocating layers of wool cloth. It was dark in there, and swaying, and full of pain. Clawing at the folds of rough cloth with my forefeet, I managed to work my head out into the fresh air. Gasping great mouthfuls of it, I saw a blue sky hatched by wires, edged by the tops of buildings. I pulled back another fold, folded it down, and I could see the cars that we were passing on one side, that were passing us on the other. Twisting my head back I looked into the sky straight above, and then, farther back, into a human eye of the same clear blue. It was looking straight at me, while its mate watched the traffic.
Jerry Magoon was breathing hard with the effort of pedaling and his breath was blowing his mustache out each time he exhaled. The bike swayed from side to side as he pedaled, and the wire basket rocked like a cradle. I rested my head on the redolent wool, which I later learned was Jerry’s sweater, Jerry’s smell, and closed my eyes. The thick cloth of the sweater dulled the jolts of the road but did not stop the pain in my leg. Beneath the basket the front wheel squeaked. I would have liked to tell Jerry good-bye zipper, but I did not have the strength, and anyway I doubted he would understand.
And that was how I came to Cornhill the second time. I had ridden in first on the swaying waters of Mama’s womb, and now in the folds of Jerry’s sweater. Like Moses, I rode in in a basket.
When we got to Pembroke Books, Jerry lifted the bike over the curb as gently as he could and leaned it against the shop window. Shine’s scowl flew at us through the glass - his wide face looked like an owl swooping at us through the window. Peering up from my woolly covert in the basket, I was closer to him than I had ever been before, closer even than on that fateful day when our eyes had first met, mine full of love and his full of . . . what? Looking back, I suppose it was contempt.
Jerry just ignored him as usual.
He cradled me in an armful of wool, and we went into the doorway under ROOMS. Using his elbows he pushed open the door that said DR LIEBERMAN PAINLESS DENTIST on the glass. It closed behind us with a sigh. It was darker inside, with a cold wet smell. Heavily and slowly, placing first his right foot on a tread and then bringing his left up to stand beside it, like a child, he carried me up three flights of dark stairs. His mustache rose and fell with his breathing, and we rested a while on the landings. There were several doors on each floor. All were painted brown except Dr Lieberman’s, which was green, and each had a frosted glass transom above it.
Jerry’s room was on the top floor at the back. Shifting the sweater onto a crooked elbow, he dug in his pocket. He excavated a handful of stuff - a book of matches, coins, a piece of white string, some peanuts, a brass screw. Spilling most of it onto the floor, he managed to extract a key. His fingers were short and thick. He unlocked the door, nudging it open with his foot, and we went in. He put me carefully down on the bed, easing his arm out from under the wool so as not to jostle, and arranged the sweater into a kind of nest around me. Then he pushed it down on one side so I could see over without lifting my head.
The room was not very big, and at first glance its primary function seemed to be storage. Besides the furniture - an iron bedstead, a leather armchair split and spilling white stuffing, a chest of drawers surmounted by a tilting mirror on which someone had drawn, in lipstick perhaps, a walleyed mustachioed face sticking its tongue out, bookshelves constructed of unpainted boards and concrete blocks, a table with a white enamel top chipped black along the edges - there were boxes, cardboard cartons and wooden crates, piled one on top of the other almost to the ceiling. Precariously on top of the tallest stack teetered a child’s red wagon, the kind that is pulled by a long metal handle. The sides of this wagon had been extended by the addition of wooden planks on which someone had painted by hand E. J. MAGOON in big red and yellow letters, as on a circus wagon. A few minutes later Jerry brought up his bicycle and wedged it in with all the rest. I have never seen a human live so much like a rat.
He opened a door next to the bookshelves and rummaged in a closet, digging with his arms and grunting and throwing things out on the floor behind him - clothes, boots, a partially demolished record player, a toaster, a lot of
Life
magazines, and more boxes. He reminded me of a dog digging in the dirt. On the other side of the bookshelves from the closet was a kind of alcove with a sink and a counter. A blue cloth hung from the counter to the floor, concealing, I later learned, a metal garbage can. On top of the counter, amid a litter of pans and plates, was a green Coleman camp stove. Daylight struggled through the greasy panes of a single large window. This had a pull shade but no curtains, and beneath it was a radiator that someone had tried - with only partial success - to paint red.
Life
magazines, and more boxes. He reminded me of a dog digging in the dirt. On the other side of the bookshelves from the closet was a kind of alcove with a sink and a counter. A blue cloth hung from the counter to the floor, concealing, I later learned, a metal garbage can. On top of the counter, amid a litter of pans and plates, was a green Coleman camp stove. Daylight struggled through the greasy panes of a single large window. This had a pull shade but no curtains, and beneath it was a radiator that someone had tried - with only partial success - to paint red.
Jerry found what he was looking for in the closet: a gray Florsheim shoe box, which he upended over the bed, spilling the contents out in a pile next to where I lay - letters, envelopes, a handful of blue and white playing cards with BICYCLE on the back, and lots of photographs. In one I saw upside down a much younger Jerry with short black hair and a long upper lip like Henry Miller’s. He was sitting at a table covered with papers. Interrupted at his writing, still holding a pen to the page, he was looking up and smiling stiffly. He had white teeth. The old gray one smiled too and spoke to me softly and told me not to worry or be frightened, and his mustache moved while the words crept out beneath it. His teeth were long and yellow now and his breath smelled like cigarettes and meat.
He placed a folded towel - it said ROOSEVELT HOTEL - at the bottom of the box and gently lifted me in and put the box on the floor. The towel had blue stripes on it. It did not smell of Jerry. He kept talking to me in that soft cheerful voice - deep and full of gravel - while he poked around in the refrigerator without turning his head.
‘What’s yours, Chief?’ he graveled. ‘Milk? . . . Milk’s good.’ He pulled out a jar with a red lid. ‘Ever try peanut butter?’ He knelt by my box, huge head bending over.
I never had tried peanut butter. Or milk, apart from the funny stuff I had scrounged from Mama. The milk came in a jar top and the peanut butter in a dollop on a piece of waxed paper. Peanut butter was the best thing I had ever tasted. It was named Skippy. And the milk too was good, so cool and sweet. He watched me eating. He watched me lap the milk, and he smiled. He said, ‘Yum yum, drink ’em up.’
Then he fussed around in the alcove. He cooked rice in a pot of water, and when it was cooked he drained it by tipping the pot over the sink while holding the lid on with a toweled hand. A cloud of steam rose from the sink and misted the window. He looked at me and said ‘Kavoom.’ He laughed, shaking the gravel around in his lungs. He shook soy sauce on the rice and stirred it around. He pushed aside stacks of books and papers and dirty dishes to clear a spot for his plate at the table. He ate the rice with a spoon, holding the spoon in his fist like a child and chewing very slowly. I hoped he would talk to me some more, but he did not that night.
After dropping all the dishes in the sink -
kavoom
- he took his jacket and went out and was gone a long time, and when he came back it was so late the city was almost quiet except for now and then a siren or car horn and the loud throbbing in my leg, and he went to bed without turning on the light again. He smelled like Mama. I could hear him sleeping, slow and heavy, and heard him laugh in a dream, and in the morning I saw that he was still in his clothes.
kavoom
- he took his jacket and went out and was gone a long time, and when he came back it was so late the city was almost quiet except for now and then a siren or car horn and the loud throbbing in my leg, and he went to bed without turning on the light again. He smelled like Mama. I could hear him sleeping, slow and heavy, and heard him laugh in a dream, and in the morning I saw that he was still in his clothes.
And that was how I began my life with Jerry Magoon, the second human I ever loved. I was not able to move around much for a few days, and the pain would not let me sleep. I lay quietly in my box and named things. The table, which was always loaded down with stuff, I named the Camel. I called my box the Hotel. The window became La Fontaine Lumineuse, and I named the leather armchair Stanley. I named things and I watched Jerry. I followed with my eyes everything he did in the daytime, and in the night I listened to his breathing.
He had folded my towel in such a way that it said VELT on top, and when I lay down with one eye shut and the other pressed close to the towel and sighted across the rolling hills of its nappy surface, I could see a vast savanna stretching away before me, from the huge T in the foreground like a great leafless baobab, to the little v standing for ‘vanishing’ in the distance. During those first days, whenever Jerry went out, I would lie quietly and watch the gazelles leaping over and over the E and the giraffes scratching their knobby heads on the L. I could do this for hours. And when, finally, I would hear Jerry’s key rattle in the latch and lift my head from the towel, the poor frightened animals would fly off like birds, their muffled cries receding over the grassy plain. It was so sad and beautiful. I thought that in the end I would prefer being a gazelle leaping and floating over E to being human and that I would rather have long legs than a chin.
My leg healed fairly quickly, and by the end of a week I was able to put weight on it again. And after a few more days it hurt scarcely at all, though it stayed crooked, and I have hobbled ever since.
Hobble
is a nice word. It does what it says. I was never a sportive type, and I did not really mind being crippled. If anything, I felt it lent me a distinguished look. I would have liked to add a little cane and sunglasses. I have always felt close to the words
panache
and
debonair
. I would have liked to be able to grow a small black goatee.
Hobble
is a nice word. It does what it says. I was never a sportive type, and I did not really mind being crippled. If anything, I felt it lent me a distinguished look. I would have liked to add a little cane and sunglasses. I have always felt close to the words
panache
and
debonair
. I would have liked to be able to grow a small black goatee.
Jerry called me Chief for a while, which I did not much like, then he tried out Gustav and Ben, and finally settled on Ernie. The importance of being Ernest. Ernest Hemingway. Ernie. He gave me all the peanut butter and milk I wanted, and he offered me bits of toast for breakfast and anything he was having that he thought I might enjoy, like rice, which he cooked, or creamed corn, which he got out of a can. We found out rats don’t care for pickles.
He was away a lot, sometimes in the day and sometimes at night, sometimes to the public library in Copley Square and sometimes to Flood’s Bar on the corner, but most of the time to places unknown. He always wore a dark blue suit when he went out. He had two suits just alike. He washed them himself in the sink and dried them on the fire escape or on the radiator, but he never ironed them. And he always wore a necktie, too, which he did not draw up tight. He never untied it - just slipped it on over his head and let it hang around his neck like a noose. He always looked as if he had just come off a binge, and if I had to summarize his appearance in a word it would be
rumpled.
rumpled.
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