Mike Nelson's Death Rat! (4 page)

“What book of yours was up for the award?” asked Beater.

Ponty was glad the topic had shifted slightly from his assault on Bromstad. “Oh, I was nominated for
Old von Steuben
.”

“Did you win?”

“Nnno. Bromstad's
Letters from Jenny
took the prize, so they put some advertising dollars behind it, but it still didn't really take off. But Bromstad left, and Jack Pine kind of shifted most of their business to trade magazines, so I ended up being their
only author, really—in addition to spearheading a few of the trades,” Ponty said.

“Wow, so Bromstad beat you like a drum and then jumped ship, huh? You pretty bitter?” asked Beater, not even looking at Ponty.

“No, actually. I always loved what I did. Bromstad didn't have anything to do with me. I may not like him personally, but—”

“What's that you were talking about, the trades?” asked Phil, who was currently sporting a particularly undignified milk mustache.

“Oh, right. Well, like
Variety
for the entertainment industry, the trades just keep everyone in a specific business up-to-date with the latest news, technology, business trends, that kind of thing,” said Ponty, warming to his topic.

“What did you work on?” asked Scotty politely.

“Well, I worked on the
Journal of Plasma Beam Annealing,
which was pretty cool. And there was the journal of the barcode-scanning industry,
Bar Code Solutions
. I did a lot with that particular mag,” said Ponty, and then he waited for more questions.

“But they fired you, huh?” asked Beater.

Ponty shifted his weight in his chair. “Well, they . . . it's more that they eliminated their entire book-publishing division, which was, as I said, really just me.”

“Is that why you went berserker on that cop?” asked Scotty.

“That was an accident, man,” said Phil. “His hand got pinned in his car, okay?”

“No, it's all right,” Ponty said, looking down.

Ponty carried his shame with him into the evening like a knapsack. As he sat in the cramped room he shared with Sags,
he thought about calling his younger brother in Tucson, but he knew he couldn't face any questions about the accident, his job, his new living situation. Scotty, Phil, and Sags, were playing hockey in the hallway, too, and it would be difficult for him to hear anyway. In adulthood their relationship had not been one of big brother/little brother. It was Thaddeus, the successful one, who had been watching over Ponty, and since Ponty had hit his mid-fifties, Thad had been, consciously or not, trying to prematurely age him, blaming any problem he might have on his advancing years. These latest events would only further Ponty's growing belief that he was eighty-five and feeble of mind and body, so he decided to send his brother a change-of-address card tomorrow and deal with the questions later.

Weaving his way through the hockey game in the hall, Ponty made his way to the street, wandered about the neighborhood in distracted thought for a time, and presently found himself at Prospero's Bookstore. He pushed open the door, heard the tinkling of the bell, and was greeted with the traditional smells of a college bookstore: the dusty, dry-moldy scent of the books themselves, an undertone of coffee, a dirty whiff of patchouli oil, and a hint of body odor. His attention was arrested almost immediately by a large cardboard cutout of a man with books in his chest. It was a corrugated likeness of Bunt Casey, dressed in a flight suit, arms akimbo, dispensing copies of his latest military thriller,
Shall Not Perish,
from his midsection. Ponty, almost to make himself feel worse, fished a copy from an area near Bunt's heart and turned it over to read the jacket copy. “Trent Corby has discovered a shocking secret: The president of the United States of America is a spy.” Ponty snorted derisively, then realized he was compelled to keep reading. “If he follows his training and eliminates the president, the secret—
and Trent himself—could die; if he doesn't, the most powerful country in the world could fall victim to an insidious plot involving corrupt coffee-plantation owners, the Russian mafia, and a secret organization known only as the Silent Arm.”

Ponty opened the book to read the bio on the dust jacket. “Bunt Casey is the bestselling author of
Red Debt; Go Skyward, Missile;
and the book that Colin Powell called ‘a quick read':
He Lived to Die
. He lives in Virginia with his Jack Russell terrier, Sun-tzu, his collection of antique muzzle-loaders, and one fully restored Patton tank. He owns a controlling share of the Washington Redskins.”

“Oh, for the . . .” Ponty said out loud. He knew, as anyone who bothered to check could, that Bunt Casey was a former finance manager for a medium-size GMC dealership in Topeka, Kansas, who just happened to have an interest in military hardware. In 1984 his first novel,
The Hammer of Nippon
, featured his picture on the dust jacket wearing his signature flight suit and baseball cap with the scrambled eggs on the brim. Though he had never served, people just assumed he was in the military, and he did nothing to dispel that belief. He made the news in 1990 when he blew off his left index finger while reloading his German-made Göerck 470, the model he used to shoot steel targets at the range behind his home in Virginia.

Critics were none too fond of his work, coming down especially hard on his propensity to write extended and agonizingly detailed descriptions of antitank missiles. Still, Ponty noted with some self-pity, even Casey's least successful book,
O'er the Ramparts
, sold close to 5 million copies, some twenty-three thousand times more than his own
Better than Great: A Maritime History of Lake Superior
.

He pushed the book back into its grim-faced author's
abdomen and headed off to find the history section, pausing at a display table situated on the end of an aisle.
LIVE THE ADVENTURE
, read a hand-lettered sign. Ponty, though in no mood to live any adventures, examined a few books and discovered that three of the ones featured—
Man One, Mountain Zero; White Pyramid of Doom;
and
On Belay
—were about the same ill-fated expedition up Nanga Parbat. Two more were about shipwrecks in which men ate each other, and another was about a man who got lost in the Canadian wilderness, killed a moose, and lived inside its body until he was found several weeks later. Grim, thought Ponty, though he admired the cover art, which featured a helicopter shot of a man on a frozen lake surrounded by thick woods. Knowing that he ended up in a moose somehow made it very effective.

He searched the history section. If he could see only one of his books sitting on a shelf in its natural habitat, he thought, he might mute the failure of the day and place himself, however insignificantly, in the world. But after about five minutes of unsuccessful hunting, he gave up and timidly approached the young woman at the information counter. Despite his inherently charitable nature, he had to suppress the thought that she was the filthiest-looking creature he had ever seen. She had on an array of tank tops, all of slightly varying shapes and sizes, most of them—and he guessed there might be six in total—bleached and frayed; a pair of shockingly dirty jeans cut off at the knees, replete with penned words of an indeterminate, though probably Germanic, language; and studs gracing numerous piercings, most noticeably in her tongue, each nostril, and her bottom lip. Most of her head was shaved to Curly Howard length, though from the right lower half a shock of chartreuse hair hung greasily down.

“Hi! Can I help you?” she said in a bright, enthusiastic manner that for some reason made Ponty feel ashamed.

“Um. Yes. Do you have
Without an Ore: The Decline of Minnesota's Mining Industry
?” he asked. “I didn't see it on the shelves,” he added in a tone that let her know that it was probably his fault.

“Do you know the author?” she asked kindly.

“No, never met him,” he said guiltily before realizing he had misinterpreted her meaning. “Oh, wait. Um, yeah. Pontius Feeb.”

“Feeb, F-E-E-B?” she asked, already tapping it into the computer.

“Yes.”

She entered a surprising amount of additional keystrokes, staring at the screen with concern.

She hit a few sharp backspaces and then an emphatic enter. “Hm. Okay, I'm not showing anything. And you didn't see it on the shelves?”

“No, that's okay. Could you maybe look for
Better than Great: A Maritime History of Lake Superior
?”

She looked at him blankly for a moment, then began entering keystrokes. “Okay. I'm not seeing it.”

“How about
Old von Steuben Had a Farm
? Same author,” he said, leaning over the counter slightly to look at the computer's monitor, as if doing that might somehow help.

“Had a Farm?”
she asked.

“
Had a Farm
, correct.”

“The Old Man and the Sea,”
she offered weakly while still staring at the screen. “But . . . no. Don't have
Old von Steuben Had a Farm
.”

He had thrown his best at her. These were easily his most
popular books, and if
Old von Steuben
was not in stock,
And Tyler, Too: In the Shadow of Harrison
most certainly would not be. And forget about
Czech and Sea: Dvořák's Voyages to America
. There was no more chance of that being in stock than there was the dismal failure
You Can Bank on It: Senator Carter Glass and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
. He bought the latest Bunt Casey and went home, defeated.

That evening Ponty sat at the small desk in the untidy second-story room he shared with Sags distractedly doodling small, neat cartoons of men with large noses and blank expressions.

“Look Skyward, Missile,”
Ponty whispered to himself with deep bitterness, while inking an obscenely large mustache onto one of his creations. He sniffed derisively through his nose and circled his pen over his yellow legal pad, waiting sarcastically for inspiration.

Ten Thousand Leagues
, Ponty wrote mockingly, then sat staring at it for half a minute before adding,
of Intrigue
. He crossed it out.
I Kill for a Fee,
he wrote and did not cross it out. After twenty minutes of thinking and scribbling, he had a small, messy column of titles that included
Three Men, Two Guns, . . . Or Give Me Death, To Sleep with Weapons, The Magna Cartel, My War Never Ended,
and
Over a (Gun) Barrel.
He reread them, laughing mirthlessly, before scratching them out, tearing the page from the tablet, ripping it into pieces, and depositing it in Sags's Chicago Bulls trash can.

Later, as he sat on a beanbag chair in Beater's room watching a Twins game, his thoughts strayed back to the book about the man and the moose. There was something compelling about it, something elemental—a man facing death, facing nature without technology to rescue him. And also life
from
death, the
inescapable theme of birth, and, holding it all together, the notion that God's universe, even in the modern age, still had the ability to surprise. His blessings weren't always neat and tidy. Now and again it came down to a lone, dying man crawling into the chest cavity of a deceased ruminant.

Ponty abandoned the game (the Twins were down 16–3 to the Indians anyway) and returned to his desk. He began to ink more titles on the page now, and with more purpose.
Killer Caribou,
he wrote, just to get his mind working.
Combat,
he wrote, and quickly added
Wombat. Antlers of Horror
was followed by
White Bison of Death.
He was unsatisfied with the direction in which the large mammals were taking him, so he tried a new tack.
Lizard!, They Chew Your Flesh, Day of the Kangaroo Mice,
and
Wrath of the Rodents
soon joined the list. He then wrote down
Rat Patrol,
before quickly realizing that it had already been a TV series with Christopher George. Ponty flipped the page, wet the point of his pencil with his tongue, and wrote the two words that would change his life and shape his future.

Death Rat,
wrote Ponty.

He was on to the next,
Death Pig
, before he stopped and lightly circled
Death Rat.

“Death Rat,”
he said quietly before circling it again.

“Death Rat,”
he said, with a little more force.

All through the night Ponty lay still in his bunk, quite awake, staring at the ceiling.

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON
Phil padded downstairs after an especially long night of sleep—somewhere close to thirteen hours spent in bed—to find Ponty stretched out on their living room couch reading a book with color pictures.

“Didn't know you were into picture books,” he said good-naturedly.

Ponty started. “Daaa! Don't do that!” he said sharply.

“Sorry, man. So what is that? You looked pretty engrossed,” asked Phil while readjusting his sweatpants.

“It's just a book on . . . this . . . stuff, that I have to do,” Ponty said nervously.

“Uh-huh,” said Phil. Ponty read some suspicion into his answer.

“A book on capybaras,” said Ponty quietly. Phil said nothing. “They're a—”

“Yeah, I know. They're kind of like a hutia.”

“A hutia?”

“Yeah. Hutia.”

The word
hutia
hung in the air, and there was palpable tension between the two roommates. Ponty did not want to discuss capybaras any further, but he did not want to rouse Phil's suspicions by cutting short their conversation. And he was tantalized by this “hutia,” whatever it might be.

“What . . . what is a hutia?” he asked finally.

“Cuban rat. Pretty good-sized. Not as big as a capybara.”

“No? No. No, I guess it wouldn't be.”

“Why you readin' about capybaras?” Phil asked casually, while yawning and running a hand through his wispy tangle of hair.