Hear the Wind Sing

4

I’d first met the Rat three years before, in the spring. It was the year we both entered college, and the two of us were completely smashed. Why in the hell we were, at sometime after four in the morning, stuck in the Rat’s black Fiat 600, I almost can’t remember. We probably had some mutual friend. Anyway, we were sloppy drunk, and as an added bonus the speedometer was pointing at eighty kilometers-an-hour. Thanks to all that, we broke through the park’s immaculately-trimmed hedges, flattened a thicket of azaleas, and without thinking, not only smashed the car into a stone pillar, but came away without a single injury, which I can’t call anything but a stroke of luck.

Awakened by the shock, I kicked away the broken door and climbed out. The hood of the car was knocked ten meters away, coming to rest in front of the monkey cage, and the front end of the car bore the giant imprint of a stone pillar. The monkeys seemed to be terribly upset at being jarred awake by the noise.

The Rat, with his hands still on the steering wheel, was leaning forward, not because he was hurt, but because he was vomiting onto the dashboard the pizza he’d eaten just an hour before. I clambered up onto the roof of the car and peered through the sunroof onto the driver’s seat.

“You okay?”

“Mm, but I might’ve drank too much. You know, with the throwing up and all.”

“Can you get out?”

“Pull me up.”

The Rat cut the engine, took his pack of cigarettes from the dashboard and put it in his pocket, then slowly seized my hand and climbed up onto the roof of the car. Sitting side-by-side on the roof of the Fiat, we looked up at the dawning sky, silently smoking who knows how many cigarettes. For some reason, I was reminded of a tank movie starring Richard Burton. I have no idea what the Rat was thinking about.

“Hey, we’re pretty lucky,” said the Rat five minutes later. “Check it out, not a scratch on us. Can you believe it?”

I nodded. “The car’s busted, though.”

“Don’t worry about that. I can always buy another car, but luck I cannot buy.”

I stared at the Rat, shocked. “What are you, rich or somethin’?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, that’s great.”

To this, the Rat said nothing, just shaking his head a few times as if unsatisfied. “Still, anyway, we’re lucky.”

“Yep.”

The Rat crushed out his cigarette under the heel of his tennis shoe, throwing the butt towards the monkey cage.

“Say, how about the two of us become a team?

Together, we could do just about anything.”

“What should we do first?”

“Let’s drink beer.”

We went to a nearby vending machine and bought a half-dozen beers, then we walked to the beach. We layed ourselves down on the beach, and when we were finished drinking our beer, we gazed out at the ocean. It was incredibly good weather.

“You can call me ‘Rat,’” he said.

“How’d you get a name like that?”

“I forget. It was a really long time ago. Back then I used to hate being called that, but now I don’t care. For some reason I’ve gotten used to it.”

After we tossed our empty beer cans into the ocean, we leaned against the embankment, putting our duffel coats under our heads as pillows and sleeping for an hour. When I woke up, my body was pulsing with some kind of mysterious energy. It was a really strange feeling.

“I feel like I could run a hundred kilometers,” I told the Rat.

“Me too,” he said.

However, in reality, what we ended up doing was paying off the damage to the park in installments to the municipality over three years.