The Rat on Fire (7 page)

“I still don’t like it,” Jimmy said. “I am not sure about this. This is exactly the kind of thing I hear about from Bobby Coffey there, when he is telling me he has got a sure thing going and then it turns out that he didn’t, or if he did what was sure about it was that me and him was going to jail, which is what we did.

“ ‘Nothing to worry about, Jimmy,’ he’s always telling me, ‘nothing to worry about at all.’ And I keep thinking, ‘Yeah, but suppose maybe the guy’s not scared of us, and he goes to see the cops and he talks to them, huh? What if that happens?’ And that is exactly what he did, and what I ended up doing was time, and Bobby was still telling me, they’re carting me off to Norfolk, I shouldn’t worry about anything because
he will get me out. Except he didn’t. It was the parole board that got me out, and they took their own sweet time about it, too. I don’t want no more of that shit, Leo. I don’t want no more that shit at all.”

“Look,” Leo said, “if you’re gonna have your period here, go have it somewhere else, all right? You wanna back out the job, back out the job. Go ahead. Walk right down the street, take a right on Symphony Road, go down Mass Ave there and you come to the place they play the music, you’ll see this subway thing they got there, which says
Symphony
on it, and you go down the steps and give the machine there a quarter and pretty soon a train comes along and you get on it and I will go ahead with this matter and I will get somebody else who will help me with it. Because I can, you know, and he will get the money instead of you and I won’t have to hear no more
fuckin’ bitchin
out of your mouth. All right?”

“I’m not bitchin’, Leo,” Jimmy said. “I am just trying to tell you that I have been on a sure thing before, that was not going to get me in no trouble. And the only thing that was sure about it was that I was going to get in some trouble because exactly what I said to Bobby was exactly what happened. The guy came home early because he didn’t feel good or something and he sees where we got this truck backed up his house and he knows he didn’t order no movers and sure, he thinks it’s his ex-wife who’s taking all his furniture and his rugs and TV’s and stuff, but he didn’t give her no permission either. And he calls the cops, he’s gonna have her ass in a sling before dark, and the cops come and they find out it isn’t her, it’s us. Which I guess kind of disappointed the guy because he really didn’t like her a whole lot, but he took what he had and had us put in jail instead of her, that was perfect strangers to him and he didn’t even know us at all.

“Now,” Jimmy said, “I figure if Bobby Coffey can make a
mistake, Leo Proctor can make a mistake. And I am sick of doing time because Bobby Coffey made a mistake. I am also not interested in doing no further time because somebody else made a mistake and did not look at things without his eyes being all bloodshot.”

“Look,” Proctor said, “lemme tell you something, all right? It is eleven o’clock in the morning. I have got some work that I have got to do on account of how if I do not do the work, the man will come around and he will say to me, ‘Leo, I paid you some money to do some work, and I see where the work is not done. Now,’ he will say, ‘since the work isn’t done, where is my money that I would like back and I will get somebody else to do the job of work that I paid you to do and you didn’t do it, huh? Because I am going to take that money and give it to somebody else and he will do the work you did not do.’

“Now,” Proctor said, “this is going to cause problems for me. This is because I do not have that money anymore, on account of I spent a lot of it and gave it to people who do work for me and they sell me things like meat and the phone and the lights for the family. That kind of thing. In addition to which I got to tell the man I gave a whole bunch of it to this guy Jimmy who took the money with no strain, didn’t bother him at all, and he probably spent his share of it, and I dunno, I can get back from him.”

“You didn’t give me no money, Leo,” Jimmy said. “Don’t gimme
that
shit. You promised me money but you didn’t give me no money. I don’t mind you thinking I’m stupid, but I resent you thinkin’ I’m fuckin’
dumb
.”

“Jimmy,” Proctor said, “maybe the reason you get in so much trouble is you don’t listen to what a guy is saying. I didn’t say I gave you the money. I know what I did and what I didn’t do. I also know you. I’ve known you a long time. I know you got a tendency, you sometimes get kind of
nervous and you transcend your word there, you know? You get jittery and a man cannot always depend on you that when you say you will do something, you will actually go out and do it.

“Now this,” Proctor said, “this is all right, Jimmy. It is something like some guys’re bald and some other guys like me have trouble keeping their weight down. It is just the way we are. And that is the way you are, that you do not always deliver when you say you are gonna deliver. And everybody knows this about you.”

“I do so,” Jimmy said.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, you do,” Leo said. “It is something about you that everybody who knows anything at all knows. Which is that Jimmy Dannaher is a nice guy and he means all right and he will always agree with you that he will help you to do something if he thinks that what you are going to do will get him some extra money so he can go down Wonderland every night and always and invariably pick the wrong dogs on the card and lose all the money that he went out and took some risks to get. But that is the way he is and there is nothing you can do about it and you may as well just forget about it. There is nothing wrong with the guy except that he does not always listen to you, and there are lots of times probably when he does not even listen to himself too careful, and he does not remember what he said he would do when he accepted the money there.

“That is why, Jimmy,” Proctor said, “I did not give you any money. I did not say just now that I gave you any money. I said I was gonna tell the man who asked me to get somebody and do this work for him, I said I was gonna tell
him
that I gave you some money. I did not say that I actually gave you the money, because like I say, I know you pretty good and you do not get any money out of me until you have actually done what you said you were gonna do.
And when that is done, you can go down Wonderland and gamble your fuckin’ brains out and it will be all right with me as long’s the work’s done. Because then I don’t care what you do.

“Now,” Proctor said, “of course what you want to think about is this. If I tell the man I gave you some his money and you did not perform like you were supposed to for that money, then he will of course believe me and he will come around looking for you. You will try to talk to him, naturally, but he is not gonna believe you. Because like I say, a lot of people know about you and there have been too many times when you took some money from somebody who wanted you to do something and then it slipped your mind or something and you didn’t do it.”

“You cocksucker, Leo,” Dannaher said.

“I am not a cocksucker,” Proctor said. “I have done a lot of dumb things but I never sucked a cock in my life. Now are you gonna come in that cellar with me, or am I gonna get somebody else to help me and also put your tail inna crack, just on general principles?”

“I just hope you’re right,” Dannaher said. “You better be right, Leo, is all I can say. I’m not goin’ back to the can for anybody.”

“You are goin’ in the cellar, though,” Leo said. “You are gonna come into that cellar with me and you are gonna help me and if you help me you will get your fifteen hundred bucks and if you don’t, you won’t. Clear?”

There were four stone steps leading down to the green wooden door made of matched boards. There was a large padlock on a heavy hasp on the door. Proctor took a key out of his pocket and opened the lock with difficulty. “Fuckin’ thing’s all rusted,” he said.

“Those’re supposed to be good locks, too,” Dannaher said. “They cost a lot of money. They shouldn’t do that.”

“Shit,” Proctor said, removing the lock, “nobody makes anything right anymore. Look at these steps, all right? Been here probably a hundred and fifty years. They’re all right. Oh, they’re a little worn, sure, but they’re here and you can still go down them without figuring you’re gonna break your neck when they fall apart under you. You try gettin’ somethin’ like that done today. Just try it.

“You tell somebody,” Proctor said, “you want a cellarway put in a building, or you’re doing a job for somebody wants a cellarway put in, and the first thing that’s gonna happen if you’re the guy hiring the job is they’re gonna come back at you with the specs and you’re gonna get wooden steps, open-framed, and one of those goddamned steel bulkheads they sell down to Grossman’s. And you gotta paint the fuckin’ thing every year with about three hundred bucks’ worth of Rustoleum because if you don’t it’ll rust out in a year.

“Or you’re the guy,” Proctor said, “that’s doing the job and you try to tell the guy, ‘Look, you’re better off, leave it open, put some stone steps down there and the weather isn’t gonna hurt them and they’ll last forever. And besides that nobody can jump on them and probably wreck them inna month like they can a bulkhead.’ And he’s gonna look at you and ask you how the hell you expect him to pay for quality work like that.

“That’s what I mean,” Proctor said. “That’s why they don’t do it anymore. It makes a helluva lot more sense, but nobody does it because it’d cost too much money up front and nowadays the whole thing is, you put as much money into it as it takes to make it stand up straight for maybe six years and then you depreciate the ass off of it in five and you sell the fuckin’ thing to somebody else. That’s the way it works now, and if you don’t know that everybody figures that you’re just an asshole and there isn’t any point in talking to you anyway.”

“Come on, come on,” Dannaher said, looking around,
“open the fuckin’ door and let’s go in there, we’re gonna go in there, all right? Guy could paint pictures of us, we stand here long enough.”

Proctor opened the toolbox and removed a three-cell flashlight. “Not without this,” he said, closing the box. “I’m not goin’ in one of these places without no light.”

“J
ERRY
,” L
EO SAID
in Fein’s office, “it was darker’n a carload of assholes in there.”

“I never been in there,” Fein said. “You know that? I never been in there. I own the goddamned building and I have never been in that cellar long enough to know what’s in there. What the fuck is in there, anyway?”

“Well,” Proctor said, “naturally of course you’ve got the boiler.”

“Naturally,” Fein said. “The way them niggers’re screaming, there’ve been times that I wondered, but I thought I had one at least.”

“Right,” Proctor said, “and your boiler is one of those old things that they laid up with firebrick and then they wrapped her in about two tons, asbestos sheathing. I think it’s about shot.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Fein said. “Seems like everything else I hear about in that house’s gone to hell.”

“That’s a nice building actually, Jerry,” Leo said. “That boiler’s old, sure. Probably close to sixty, seventy years old at least. There’s an old coal bin over in the corner that doesn’t have anything in it except that somebody finished off the walls with this chicken wire and they got a lot of baby carriages and cribs and stuff in there and they got a tiny little padlock on it that I dunno why they bothered since you could go right through that screen with a pair of hedge clippers in about five minutes if it even took that long. Assuming anybody’d want to steal that junk.”

“Leo,” Fein said, “the people I got living in that building’d steal dogshit if they thought they could sell it to somebody.”

“I dunno about dogshit,” Proctor said, “but there is somebody
in that building who has got at least one cat, I can tell you that for sure.”

“Stinks, huh?” Fein said.

“It’s damp in that basement,” Proctor said. “There’s been water in there last winter, I think. Maybe the spring thaw. But it’s wet, and you can smell that there’s been cats in the building.”

“I told the bastards they couldn’t have pets,” Fein said.

“You should tell the bastards the pets can stay, but
they
gotta leave,” Proctor said. “That’s a nice old building you got there. Shame to have to take it out.”

“What else am I going to do with it, Leo?” Fein said. “You want to tell me that? You have some hot ideas how I can keep my building and I won’t go broke trying to keep it up and the fire inspectors and all them other people won’t be coming around all the time, telling me I got to turn it into some goddamned Hilton or they report me to everybody in sight and make my fucking life miserable for the rest of my life? You got some bright ideas, Leo? You know something I don’t?

“You’re so fucking smart, why don’t you figure out how to collect the rent off of your niggers and when it works, let me know what it is, all right?” Fein said. “What am I going to do? Go down there every month with a wheelbarrow full of cheap jewelry and sell them that so I can get the rent money? I don’t want to take that property out. I just can’t do anything else. I got the taxes and I got the repairs and the building’s not working for me—I’m working for the goddamned building. I’m sick of it. I got to take it out.”