Fragile

4

Rodents. They were everywhere. People didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. He’d seen colonies of mice, rats, squirrels, raccoons in attics, basements, inside walls, under toolsheds. Colonies that had lived beside humans, separated by an inch of drywall, for years. Living, breeding, dying, decaying to dust. There was a kind of beauty to them, their slippery bodies, their savage natures, their sharp little teeth and black eyes. The babies were cute, like the babies of every species. Tiny pink balls covered in downy gray fur, blind and squeaking.

The rat he had in his trap, a full-grown male, was definitely not cute. He’d died ugly, all bared teeth and reaching claws. He was big, too, maybe inches from nose to rump, weighing nearly half a pound if Charlie Strout were to hazard a guess. He’d seen them bigger, as big as a small cat. He’d seen them mean. He’d been bitten twice, once in an elderly woman’s attic-she’d bandaged up the web of his hand and made him some tea. Ambushed. Once, he’d been bitten removing an animal he thought was dead from a trap. Careless. Mainly, they just ran from him, wanted to be left alone like everyone else.

He tossed the trap into the flatbed of his Ford. It landed with a thunk, and he covered it, along with two other bodies, under a thick canvas tarp.

“Catch anything?”

He turned to see the woman who’d hired him standing at the end of the path that led to her door. He was used to the look of revulsion, the wrapped-up body language. She had her hands firmly tucked in her pockets, her arms pressed tight to her sides, her shoulders hiked up. She squinted at him in the bright, late-afternoon light. It caught on the gold of her hair, glinted off the diamonds in her ears. She was pretty, a youngish forty-something. Women stayed attractive and girlish so much longer these days; he didn’t remember his mom or her friends looking so good when he was the same age as his client’s kid.

“I did, ma’am.”

“Maybe the last one?”

“I started sealing off the exits. If there are any left, they’ll get nervous, be more likely to go for the food in the traps when they get hungry and can’t escape.”

Her squint deepened. “But they can’t get in the house?”

“No, ma’am, not likely.” But they could. Of course they could. They were smart, stealthy. They’d come in holes she didn’t even know were there, behind the entertainment center, maybe, up through the toilet if they could, through the central air vents if they found an opening and smelled food. “Just don’t leave anything out. Make sure you take the garbage to the outdoor bin at night.”

She nodded uneasily.

“We’ll have you clear of this soon.”

She gave him a grateful smile and walked over to hand him a folded-up ten. She was a good tipper, polite and friendly with him. “Thanks for all your help.”

“No problem. And don’t worry.”

He felt a little bad; there weren’t as many rats up there as the sales guy who made the first visit had probably led her to believe. He would have used words like infestation. Well, I’m sure there aren’t more than thirty up there. Then he’d have talked about how bacteria from feces and decay could make its way into air vents and cause respiratory problems. The sales guy would have asked something like Have you or your kids been getting more colds than usual? By the time he was done, she’d agreed to two thousand dollars’ worth of work for their “three-phase plan”: trapping and removal, entry sealing, and cleaning up decay and feces, with their “patented formula” cleaner, which was really just some cherry-scented stuff they sprayed around. It was a total rip-off; most jobs took him about three hours-set the traps, remove the corpses, plug up a few holes, and spray the cleaner around. He’d space out his visits over a couple of weeks so it looked like more work than it was. But people would pay anything to be rid of rats, especially if they had kids. They all wanted humane trapping for the raccoons, moles, or squirrels. But no one cared about the rats, how they died. They didn’t like to hear the snap of the trap or the squealing that might follow. Still, few asked for the rats to be removed alive and relocated.

He supposed it had something to do with the Black Plague-a bad history, over centuries and continents. Rats were regarded as the bringers of pestilence and death. In the projects of New York City, rumors abounded that they crawled into cribs and bit babies as they slept. He’d never seen anything like that in The Hollows. To him they were no different than the other animals people didn’t want around. They were just critters, trying to get by.

He got into his truck. It was one of the nicer vehicles in the fleet the company he worked for owned. Wanda was working dispatch today, and she liked him, thought he was a gentleman, so she made sure he got one of the newer trucks with good air-conditioning and XM radio.

He cranked the air. October and it was still hot as a bitch. Global warming: that’s what people needed to be worried about. They spent thousands for him to crawl around in their attics. But how many of those people had given a dime to save the rest of the planet? Not that he was any philanthropist. But he was making fifteen dollars an hour, not living in some 4,500-square-foot McMansion.

Driving out of the wealthy development past the towering faux Tudors and sprawling new Victorians nestled among old-growth trees, landscaping like botanical gardens, expensive, late-model cars lounging on winding drives, he wondered what people did to afford such opulent homes. How much did it cost to heat and cool these places, to clean, to maintain their yards and pools?

He’d always imagined himself in a nice house-a big corporate job, a pretty wife and well-groomed children. But thirty-five had come and gone, thirteen years since he’d graduated from university. Though he’d always been frugal, had some money saved, partially from a generous inheritance from his grandmother, he doubted he even had enough for a down payment on one of these places. And he had never come close to marriage.

His Nextel beeped as he was pulling onto the main road through town, heading back to the office. He pressed the button without lifting the phone from the center console.

“Hello, Miss Wanda,” he said. “How’s your day going?”

Wanda was a pretty woman who wore a little too much makeup, dyed her hair a red that was a bit too brassy. But still on the right side of forty, she had a tight little body and a sweet, sweet smile. And lately he’d been wondering if she might like to have dinner with him. With her he wouldn’t have to dread the question about his work. It wasn’t exactly a sexy job. Woman might purr when you say you’re a doctor or a lawyer, or raise their eyebrows with interest if you tell them you’re a professor or an architect. But tell them you’re an exterminator, they literally recoil, wrinkle their noses in disgust.

Whatever got you into that line of work?

What a question. Most careers were just accidents, weren’t they? You wound up doing something after school to bridge the gap while you decided what you really wanted to do, and thirteen years later, you still hadn’t figured it out.

But what I’d really like to do is write, he’d add quickly. Some of the more arty ones might perk up a bit. But for a woman looking for some indication that success might lurk in his future, that was generally the last nail in the coffin.

“It’s going all right, Charlie. Thanks for asking,” Wanda said. He loved the shade of a drawl he heard on her words. Where had she said she was from originally? New Orleans, wasn’t it? “How was your last call?”

“Big, nasty old critter,” he said. “Dead as they get. Might be one or two more up there. We’ll see when I go back next time. He could have been the last.”

“Time for one more visit?”

Crap. All he wanted to do was go home and wash the stink off of him and open a beer, forget about his day, his life or lack thereof. He was even thinking he might try to hammer out a few pages on the novel he was writing, though he hadn’t written a word in months. Of course, he was always thinking he might do that. Instead he’d go home, eat fast food in front of the television, and then go to bed.

“Anything for you, Wanda. You know that.”

“You’re a sweet talker, Charlie.” Before he could flirt back, she rattled off an address. “I’ll text it to you, and the directions. I wouldn’t bother you this late, but the woman sounded really upset, and the sales team is gone for the day. She says there’s something huge up there, making a lot of noise.”

“Oh, really? Most things are pretty quiet during the day.”

“That’s what she told me.”

“Well, I’ll check it out.” He decided to go for it. “So, Wanda. Will you still be there when I get back in?”

In the crackling silence that followed, he felt a wash of disappointment. He’d blown it. She was just flirting to be friendly. Not interested. Now he’d gone and ruined their easy working relationship. He was about to backpedal by asking her to sign his overtime form.

But then, “I might be, Charlie.” There was that smile in her voice again.

“Something I can do for you?”

He cleared his throat. He knew his voice sounded too boyish sometimes. Women didn’t always like that. He tried to modulate it slightly. “I was just thinking-um, wondering if you might like to get a drink.”

When she spoke again, she dropped her voice down low. He knew she wouldn’t want any of the other people in the office to hear. “I’d like that, Charlie.”

He felt the first smile he’d felt all day, maybe all week. Hell, maybe all month.

“Then wait for me, Miss Wanda,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

“See you soon.”

In Charlie’s experience, service people were almost invisible to the rich. And once he’d disappeared into the attic, they generally forgot about his existence entirely. Through the thin ceilings of shoddily constructed homes, he’d heard people say and do things-awful things, funny things, embarrassing things. Some of it he wrote down, hoping his observations might come in handy for his novel, if he ever sat down at his computer again and managed something more productive than downloading porn.

He’d heard a toddler call his mother a bitch; she’d slapped him-he’d heard the sharp smack of palm against flesh-and they’d both started to wail. While he was plugging up a hole mice had chewed through some drywall, he couldn’t help but eavesdrop on a man having phone sex and jerking off in his garage while his wife cooked in the kitchen.

I love you. I hate you. Take me hard. Don’t touch me. I miss you. What time will you be home for dinner? Don’t forget to call your mom. He’s away on business this week; I can’t wait to make you come in his bed. Can you bring home some milk?

He was a silent witness to the full rainbow of the human experience, from the mundane to the tawdry. This condition wasn’t informing his fiction, as he’d hoped. It was causing him to prefer the company of rodents.

“There’s something up there. Something big.”

The client was unapologetically old, with a snow-white head of tight curls, a face where skin hung like melting wax, but thin and alert. She had bright blue eyes that seemed to assess him from head to toe in a blink-not in a judgmental way. In the way of the wise, knowing, accepting what is. She wore a snug pair of jeans and a big sweatshirt that said ATTITUDE PROBLEM. Her Nike trainers looked like they’d seen some miles.

Wanda had said the old lady was upset, but she didn’t seem upset to Charlie.

“I can’t get to the attic anymore, or I’d find it myself and beat it to death with this.” She glanced toward her cane, lifted it a little for emphasis. “I’ve had every critter imaginable up there-been in this house more than fifty years. Never heard anything like that.”

She looked up at the ceiling, and he found himself doing the same.

“What did it sound like?” he asked. They’d climbed two flights of stairs together-in spite of the cane, she was fast-and now stood beneath the attic entrance. He was still catching his breath a bit. It was a big, old house, a veritable museum of dusty carpets, mediocre oil paintings of nature scenes and stiff-looking people, heavy, ornate furniture. A grand piano in a room filled with books, working fireplaces with mantels covered in framed photographs. Beds with handmade quilts, dolls reclining in window seats. A real house, echoing with life lived-full of memories and irregularly shaped rooms.

“Thumping, banging. Almost… rhythmic.”

Probably not rats. Raccoons did a lot of thumping and pounding for some reason.

“Okay, Mrs. Monroe,” he said, reaching up for the cord that would release the attic door and ladder. “Let’s see what you have up there.”

The door came down easily, and he unfolded the ladder until it reached the floor. Mrs. Monroe flipped on a light against the encroaching darkness. He looked at his watch; it was already after six. He wondered if Wanda would really wait for him or if she was just being polite. Maybe he’d go in and find a note-Sorry, Charlie. I had to run. Another time? He wouldn’t be surprised; he didn’t have much luck with women. After a few dates, they always seemed to want to be friends. He was already feeling the crush of disappointment before they’d even had their first drink.

“You just be careful,” Mrs. Monroe said. “And holler if you need anything.”

He hoisted his bag over his shoulder and climbed up, feeling the old ladder groan beneath his weight.

The only light source in the attic was a small circular window at the far end. But in the waning hours of the day, it just served to create a field of shadows. He could stand but with an uncomfortable bowing of his head and scrunching of his shoulders. He pulled out his flashlight and shone the beam around, expecting to hear skittering, maybe something knocked over in flight. But there was only silence. Boxes, an old rocker, a small rolltop desk-a landscape of old and forgotten things. Why didn’t people just get rid of their junk? The old lady said herself she hadn’t been up here in years.

He looked around the floor for feces, lifting his nose to the air for the telltale smell of urine. But all he smelled was dust and mold as he made his way through the junk-an old radio, a box of rotary phone parts, piles and piles of books.

He was sniffling, holding back a sneeze, by the time he’d reached the end of the space. He looked out the window. He could see the roofs of other houses, the church steeple peeking through the gold, brown, and orange of northern fall on the trees-oaks, maples, some old pines and birch, aspen, sycamore. A Florida native, he loved the seasonal slide show of the North-the bright green springs and tawny autumns, the black-and-white winters. All he knew when he’d come up for college was the perennial summer, the swaying of palms, the white sand against green ocean. A beautiful single note that wavered only in extremes of weather-hurricanes, dramatic thunderstorms. Bright, hot sun and still, stifling air, or black skies and ferocious winds, sheets of rain. A couple months of perfect, dry, seventy-degree winter weather seduced the folks from Michigan and New York, only to leave them wilting when August turned to September turned to October and the weather still rivaled saunas and blast furnaces.

Walking back through the attic, he kept his eyes to the floorboards-still not detecting any critter presence by smell, sight, or sound. And then there it was, just as he was about to climb back downstairs. On a draft, he caught just the lightest odor of something foul, the curling, unmistakable scent of death.

He looked around a bit more, moving boxes, garment bags thick with old clothes, and accordion files bloated with yellowed papers, but the beam of his flashlight revealed nothing. If something had crawled up here and died, he’d have trouble finding it in all this clutter. He’d have to wait until the scent got worse. Luckily, the weather was warm. By tomorrow, late afternoon, it’d be ripe. He’d follow his nose.

He climbed downstairs to find Mrs. Monroe where he’d left her.

“Find anything?”

“Well, no. But I do smell something. So I’ll set a couple of humane traps and come back tomorrow afternoon to see what we’ve got. I suspect raccoons.”

She nodded but looked skeptical. She followed him down the stairs and out to the truck, where he got the traps. He should have been up-selling her, telling her she had an infestation, getting her to sign a contract for more service than she needed. There were bonuses in it for him if he did the sales job as well as the trapping work. But he just didn’t have it in him. He didn’t have that sales personality, that ability to see a need, a fear, or a desire, and then manipulate it. His father was a salesman, always knowing how to mold himself to please, to work a room, to schmooze with a client. But the gene didn’t pass on to Charlie. He could only be himself.

Back at the office, he’d tell them that she was difficult and they’d leave her be. There were enough suckers out there. The difficult ones weren’t worth it, especially these days, when people could post their discontent online. He’d come back and check the traps when he was done for the day tomorrow, write her a bill for the service.

In the late dusk, Mrs. Monroe didn’t seem as tough as she’d appeared inside. She cast a worried glance back at the house, holding the paperwork he’d handed her.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Monroe. I’ll get rid of whatever you have up there.”

She gave a little laugh. “At this age, it takes more than critters in the attic to worry me.”

But he could tell it was bravado. In the rearview mirror, she was just a tiny, frail shadow in the gloaming.