Wild Child and Other Stories

THIRTEEN HUNDRED RATS

There was a man in our village who never in his life had a pet of any kind until his wife died. By my calculation, Gerard Loomis was in his mid-fifties when Marietta was taken from him, but at the ceremony in the chapel he looked so scorched and stricken people mistook him for a man ten or twenty years older. He sat collapsed in the front pew, his clothes mismatched and his limbs splayed in the extremity of his grief, looking as if he’d been dropped there from a great height, like a bird stripped of its feathers in some aerial catastrophe. Once the funeral was over and we’d all offered up our condolences and gone back to our respective homes, rumors began to circulate. Gerard wasn’t eating. He wouldn’t leave the house or change his clothes. He’d been seen bent over a trash barrel in the front yard, burning patent leather pumps, brassieres, skirts, wigs, even the mink stole with its head and feet still attached that his late wife had worn with pride on Christmas, Easter and Columbus Day.

People began to worry about him, and understandably so. Ours is a fairly close-knit community of a hundred and twenty souls, give or take a few, distributed among some fifty-two stone-and-timber houses erected nearly a century ago in what the industrialist B.P.

Newhouse hoped would be a model of Utopian living. We are not Utopians, at least not in this generation, but our village, set as it is in the midst of six hundred acres of dense forest at the end of a consummately discreet road some forty miles from the city, has fostered, we like to think, a closeness and uniformity of outlook you wouldn’t find in some of the newer developments built right up to the edges of the malls, gallerias and factory outlets that surround them.

He should have a dog, people said. That sounded perfectly reasonable to me. My wife and I have a pair of shelties (as well as two lorikeets, whose chatter provides a tranquil backdrop to our evenings by the fireplace, and one very fat angelfish in a tank all his own on a stand in my study). One evening, at dinner, my wife glanced at me over her reading glasses and said, “Do you know that according to this article in the paper, ninety-three percent of pet owners say their pets make them smile at least once a day?” The shelties — Tim and Tim II — gazed up from beneath the table with wondering eyes as I fed scraps of meat into their mobile and receptive mouths.

“You think I ought to speak with him?” I said. “Gerard, I mean?”

“It couldn’t hurt,” my wife said. And then, the corners of her mouth sinking toward her chin, she added, “The poor man.”

I went to visit him the next day — a Saturday, as it happened. The dogs needed walking, so I took them both with me, by way of example, I suppose, and because when I’m home — and not away on the business that takes me all over the world, sometimes for weeks or even months at a time — I like to give them as much attention as I can. Gerard’s cottage was half a mile or so from our house, and I enjoyed the briskness of the season — it was early December, the holidays coming on, a fresh breeze spanking my cheeks. I let the dogs run free ahead of me and admired the way the pine forest B.P.

Newhouse had planted all those years ago framed and sculpted the sky. The first thing I noticed on coming up the walk was that Gerard hadn’t bothered to rake the leaves from his lawn or cover any of his shrubs against the frost. There were other signs of neglect: the storm windows weren’t up yet, garbage overspilled the two cans in the driveway, and a pine bough, casualty of the last storm, lay across the roof of the house like the severed hand of a giant. I rang the bell.

Gerard was a long time answering. When finally he did come to the door, he held it open just a crack and gazed out at me as if I were a stranger. (And I was nothing of the sort — our parents had known each other, we’d played couples bridge for years and had once taken a road trip to Hyannis Port together, not to mention the fact that we saw each other at the lake nearly every day in the summer, shared cocktails at the clubhouse and basked in an air of mutual congratulation over our separate decisions not to complicate our lives with the burden of children.) “Gerard,” I said. “Hello. How are you feeling?”

He said nothing. He looked thinner than usual, haggard. I wondered if the rumors were true — that he wasn’t eating, wasn’t taking care of himself, that he’d given way to despair.

“I was just passing by and thought I’d stop in,” I said, working up a grin though I didn’t feel much in the mood for levity and had begun to wish I’d stayed home and let my neighbor suffer in peace.

“And look,” I said, “I’ve brought Tim and Tim II with me.” The dogs, hearing their names, drew themselves up out of the frost-blighted bushes and pranced across the doormat, inserting the long damp tubes of their snouts in the crack of the door.

Gerard’s voice was hoarse. “I’m allergic to dogs,” he said.

Ten minutes later, after we’d gone through the preliminaries and I was seated on the cluttered couch in front of the dead fireplace while Tim and Tim II whined from the front porch, I said, “Well, what about a cat?” And then, because I was mortified at the state to which he’d sunk — his clothes were grubby, he smelled, the house was like the lounge in a transient hotel — I found myself quoting my wife’s statistic about smiling pet owners.

“I’m allergic to cats too,” he said. He was perched uncomfortably on the canted edge of a rocker and his eyes couldn’t seem to find my face. “But I understand your concern, and I appreciate it. And you’re not the first — half a dozen people have been by, pushing one thing or another on me: pasta salad, a baked ham, profiteroles, and pets too. Siamese fighting fish, hamsters, kittens. Mary Martinson caught me at the post office the other day, took hold of my arm and lectured me for fifteen minutes on the virtues of emus. Can you believe it?”

“I feel foolish,” I said.

“No, don’t. You’re right, all of you — I need to snap out of it. And you’re right about a pet too.” He rose from the chair, which rocked crazily behind him. He was wearing a stained pair of white corduroy shorts and a sweatshirt that made him look as gaunt as the Masai my wife and I had photographed on our safari to Kenya the previous spring. “Let me show you,” he said, and he wound his way through the tumbling stacks of magazines and newspapers scattered round the room and disappeared into the back hall. I sat there, feeling awkward — was this what it would be like if my wife should die before me? — but curious too. And, in a strange way, validated.

Gerard Loomis had a pet to keep him company: mission accomplished.

When he came back into the room, I thought at first he’d slipped into some sort of garish jacket or cardigan, but then I saw, with a little jolt of surprise, that he was wearing a snake. Or, that is, a snake was draped over his shoulders, its extremities dangling beyond the length of his arms. “It’s a python,” he said. “Burmese. They get to be twenty-five feet long, though this one’s just a baby.”

I must have said something, but I can’t really recall now what it was. I wasn’t a herpetophobe or anything like that. It was just that a snake wasn’t what we’d had in mind. Snakes didn’t fetch, didn’t bound into the car panting their joy, didn’t speak when you held a rawhide bone just above shoulder level and twitched it invitingly. As far as I knew, they didn’t do much of anything except exist. And bite.

“So what do you think?” he said. His voice lacked enthusiasm, as if he were trying to convince himself.

“Nice,” I said.

I don’t know why I’m telling this story — perhaps because what happened to Gerard could happen to any of us, I suppose, especially as we age and our spouses age and we’re increasingly set adrift. But the thing is, the next part of what I’m going to relate here is a kind of fiction, really, or a Active reconstruction of actual events, because two days after I was introduced to Gerard’s python — he was thinking then of naming it either Robbie or Siddhartha — my wife and I went off to Switzerland for an account I was overseeing there and didn’t return for four months. In the interval, here’s what happened.

There was a heavy snowfall the week before Christmas that year and for the space of nearly two days the power lines were down.

Gerard woke the first morning to a preternaturally cold house and his first thought was for the snake. The man in the pet shop at the mall had given him a long lecture before he bought the animal.

“They make great pets,” he’d said. “You can let them roam the house if you want and they’ll find the places where they’re comfortable.

And the nice thing is they’ll come to you and curl up on the couch or wherever, because of your body heat, you understand.” The man — he wore a nametag that read Bozeman and he looked to be in his forties, with a gray-flecked goatee and his hair drawn back in a patchily dyed ponytail — clearly enjoyed dispensing advice. As well he should, seeing that he was charging some four hundred dollars for a single reptile that must have been as common as a garden worm in its own country. “But most of all, though, especially in this weather, you’ve got to keep him warm. This is a tropical animal we’re talking about here, you understand? Never — and I mean never — let the temperature fall below eighty.”

Gerard tried the light on the nightstand, but it was out. Ditto the light in the hall. Outside, the snow fell in clumps, as if it had been preformed into snowballs somewhere high in the troposphere. In the living room, the thermostat read sixty-three degrees, and when he tried to click the heat on, nothing happened. The next thing he knew he was crumpling newspaper and stacking kindling in the fireplace, and where were the matches? A quick search round the house, everything a mess (and here the absence of Marietta bit into him, down deep, like a parasitical set of teeth), the drawers stuffed with refuse, dishes piled high, nothing where it was supposed to be.

Finally he retrieved an old lighter from a pair of paint-stained jeans on the floor in the back of the closet and he had the fire going. Then he went looking for Siddhartha. He found the snake curled up under the kitchen sink where the hot water pipe fed into the faucet and dishwasher, but it was all but inanimate, as cold and slick as a garden hose left out in the frost.

It was also surprisingly heavy, especially for an animal that hadn’t eaten in the two weeks it had been in the house, but he dragged it, stiff and frigid, from its cachette, and laid it before the fireplace. While he was making coffee in the kitchen, he gazed out the window on the tumble of the day, and thought of all those years he’d gone in to work in weather like this, in all weathers actually, and felt a stab of nostalgia. Maybe he should go back to work — if not in his old capacity, from which he was gratefully retired, then on a part-time basis, just to keep his hand in, just to get out of the house and do something useful. On an impulse he picked up the phone, thinking to call Alex, his old boss, and sound him out, but the phone line was down too.

Back in the living room, he sank into the couch with his coffee and watched the snake as it came slowly back to itself, its muscles shivering in slow waves from head to tail like a soft breeze trailing over a still body of water. By the time he’d had a second cup of coffee and fixed himself an egg on the gas range, the crisis — if that was what it was — had passed. Siddhartha seemed fine. He never moved much even in the best of times, with the heat on high and the electric blanket Gerard had bought for him draped across the big Plexiglas terrarium he liked to curl up in, and so it was difficult to say. Gerard sat there a long while, stoking the fire, watching the snake unfurl its muscles and flick the dark fork of its tongue, until a thought came to him: maybe Siddhartha was hungry. When Gerard had asked the pet shop proprietor what to feed him, Bozeman had answered, “Rats.” Gerard must have looked dubious, because the man had added, “Oh, I mean you can give him rabbits when he gets bigger, and that’s a savings really, in time and energy, because you won’t have to feed him as often, but you’d be surprised — snakes, reptiles in general, are a lot more efficient than we are. They don’t have to feed the internal furnace all the time with filet mignon and hot fudge sundaes, and they don’t need clothes or fur coats either.”

He paused to gaze down at the snake where it lay in its terrarium, basking under a heat lamp. “I just fed this guy his rat yesterday. You shouldn’t have to give him anything for a week or two, anyway. He’ll let you know.”

“How?” Gerard had asked.

A shrug. “Could be a color thing, where you notice his pattern isn’t as bright maybe. Or he’s just, I don’t know, what you’d call lethargic.”

They’d both looked down at the snake then, its eyes like two pebbles, its body all but indistinguishable from the length of rough wood it was stretched out on. It was no more animate than the glass walls of the terrarium and Gerard wondered how anyone, even an expert, could tell if the thing was alive or dead. Then he wrote the check.

But now he found himself chafing at the cusp of an idea: the snake needed to be fed. Of course it did. It had been two weeks — why hadn’t he thought of it before? He was neglecting the animal and that wasn’t right. He got up from the couch to close off the room and build up the fire, then went out to shovel the driveway and take the car down the long winding community road to the highway and on into Newhouse and the mall. It was a harrowing journey. Trucks threw blankets of slush over the windshield and the beating of the wipers made him dizzy. When he arrived, he was relieved to see that the mall had electricity, the whole place lit up like a Las Vegas parade for the marketing and selling of all things Christmas, and with a little deft maneuvering he was able to wedge his car between a plowed drift and the handicapped space in front of the pet store.

Inside, Pets & Company smelled of nature in the raw, every creature in every cage and glassed-in compartment having defecated simultaneously, just to greet him, or so he imagined. The place was superheated. He was the only customer. Bozeman was up on a footstool, cleaning one of the aquariums with a vacuum tube. “Hey, man,” he said, his voice a high singsong, “Gerard, right? Don’t tell me.” He reached back in a practiced gesture to smooth down his ponytail as if he were petting a cat or a ferret. “You need a rat. Am I right?”

Gerard found himself fumbling round the answer, perhaps because the question had been put so bluntly — or was it that Bozeman had become clairvoyant in the instant? “Well,” he heard himself say, and he might have made a joke, might have found something amusing or at least odd in the transaction, but he didn’t because Marietta was dead and he was depressed, or so he reminded himself, “I guess so.”

The rat — he didn’t see it; Bozeman had gone into the back room to fetch it — came in a cardboard container with a molded carrying handle on top, the sort of thing you got if you asked for a doggie bag at a restaurant. The animal was heavier than he’d expected, shifting its weight mysteriously from one corner of the box to another as he carried it out into the snow and set the box on the seat beside him.

He turned on the fan after he’d started up the engine, to give it some heat — but then it was a mammal, he figured, with fur, and it didn’t have as much of a need because it could warm itself. And in any case it was dinner, or soon to be. The roads were slick. Visibility was practically zero. He crawled behind the snowplow all the way back to Newhouse Gardens and when he came in the door he was pleased to see that the fire was still going strong.

All right. He set down the box and then dragged the python’s terrarium across the floor from the bedroom to the living room and set it to one side of the fireplace. Then he lifted the snake — it was noticeably warm to the touch on the side that had been closest to the fire — and laid it gently in the terrarium. For a moment it came to life, the long run of muscles tensing, the great flat slab of the head gearing round to regard him out of its stony eyes, and then it was inert again, dead weight against the Plexiglas floor. Gerard bent cautiously to the rat’s box — would it spring out, bite him, scrabble away across the floor to live behind the baseboard forever as in some cartoon incarnation? — and, with his heart pounding, lowered the box into the terrarium and opened the lid.

The rat — it was white, with pink eyes, like the lab rats he’d seen arrayed in their cages in the biology building when he was a student — slid from the box like a lump of gristle, then sat up on its haunches and began cleaning itself as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be transported in a doggie bag and dumped into a glass-walled cavern in the presence of a tongue-flicking reptile. Which might or might not be hungry.

For a long while, nothing happened. Snow ticked at the windows, the fire sparked and settled. And then the snake moved ever so slightly, the faintest shifting of the bright tube of its scales, energy percolating from the deepest core of its musculature, and suddenly the rat stiffened. All at once it was aware of the danger it was in. It seemed to shrink into itself, as if by doing so it could somehow become invisible. Gerard watched, fascinated, wondering how the rat — reared in some drowsy pet warehouse, slick and pink and suckling at its mother’s teats in a warm gregarious pack of its pink siblings, generations removed from the wild and any knowledge of a thing like this snake and its shining elongate bulk — could recognize the threat. Very slowly, by almost imperceptible degrees, the snake lifted its head from the Plexiglas floor, leveling on the rat like a sculpture come to life. Then it struck, so quickly Gerard nearly missed it, but the rat, as if it had trained all its life for just this moment, was equal to it. It sprang over the snake’s head in a single frantic leap and shot to the farthest corner of the terrarium, where it began to emit a series of bird-like cries, all the while fastening its inflamed eyes on the white hovering face of Gerard. And what did he feel? He felt like a god, like a Roman emperor with the power of fatality in his thumb. The rat scrabbled at the Plexiglas. The snake shifted to close in on it.

And then, because he was a god, Gerard reached into the terrarium and lifted the rat up out of the reach of his python. He was surprised by how warm the animal was and how quickly it accommodated itself to his hand. It didn’t struggle or try to escape but simply pressed itself against his wrist and the trailing sleeve of his sweater as if it understood, as if it were grateful. In the next moment he was cradling it against his chest, the pulse of its heart already slowing. He went to the couch and sank into it, uncertain what to do next. The rat gazed up at him, shivered the length of its body, and promptly fell asleep.

The situation was novel, to say the least. Gerard had never touched a rat in his life, let alone allowed one to curl up and sleep in the weave of his sweater. He watched its miniature chest rise and fall, studied the intricacy of its naked feet that were like hands, saw the spray of etiolated whiskers and felt the suppleness of the tail as it lay between his fingers like the suede fringe of the jacket he’d worn as a boy. The fire faltered but he didn’t rise to feed it. When finally he got up to open a can of soup, the rat came with him, awake now and discovering its natural perch on his shoulder. He felt its fur like a caress on the side of his neck and then the touch of its whiskers and fevered nose. It stood on its hind legs and stretched from his lap to the edge of the table as he spooned up his soup by candlelight, and he couldn’t resist the experiment of extracting a cube of potato from the rich golden broth and feeding it into the eager mincing mouth.

And then another. And another. When he went to bed, the rat came with him, and if he woke in the dark of the night — and he did, twice, three times — he felt its presence beside him, its spirit, its heart, its heat, and it was no reptile, no cold thankless thing with a flicking tongue and two dead eyes, but a creature radiant with life.

The house was very cold when he woke to the seeping light of morning. He sat up in bed and looked round him. The face of the clock radio was blank, so the electricity must still have been down.

He wondered about that, but when he pushed himself up and set his bare feet on the floor, it was the rat he was thinking of — and there it was, nestled in a fold of the blankets. It opened its eyes, stretched and then climbed into the palm he offered it, working its way up inside the sleeve of his pajamas until it was balanced on his shoulder.

In the kitchen, he turned on all four gas burners and the oven too and shut off the room to trap the heat. It wasn’t until the kettle began to boil that he thought about the fireplace — and the snake stretched out in its terrarium — but by then it was too late.

He returned to the pet store the following day, reasoning that he might as well convert the snake’s lair into a rat’s nest. Or no, that didn’t sound right — that was what his mother used to call his boyhood room; he’d call it a rat apartment. A rat hostel. A rat — Bozemen grinned when he saw him. “Not another rat,” he said, something quizzical in his eyes. “He can’t want another one already, can he? But then with Burms you’ve got to watch for obesity — they’ll eat anytime, whether they’re hungry or not.”

Even under the best of conditions, Gerard was not the sort to confide in people he barely knew. “Yes,” was all he said, in answer to both questions. And then he added, “I may as well take a couple of them while I’m here.” He looked away. “To save me the trip.”

Bozeman wiped his hands on the khaki apron he wore over his jeans and came out from behind the cash register. “Sure,” he said,

“good idea. How many you want? They’re six ninety-nine each.”

Gerard shrugged. He thought of the rat at home, the snugness of it, the way it sprang across the carpet in a series of little leaps or shot along the baseboard as if blown by a hurricane wind, how it would take a nut in its hands and sit up to gnaw at it, how it loved to play with anything he gave it, a paper clip, an eraser, the ridged aluminum top of a Perrier bottle. In a moment of inspiration he decided to call it Robbie, after his brother in Tulsa. Robbie. Robbie the Rat. And Robbie needed company, needed playmates, just like any other creature. Before he could think, he said: “Ten?”

“Ten? Whoa, man, that is going to be one fat snake.”

“Is that too many?”

Bozeman slicked back his ponytail and gave him a good long look. “Hell, no — I mean, I’ll sell you all I’ve got if that’s what you want, and everything else too. You want gerbils? Parakeets? Albino toads? I’m in business, you know — pets for sale. This is a pet shop, comprende? But I tell you, if that Burm doesn’t eat them PDQ, you’re going to see how fast these things breed… I mean, the females can go into heat or whatever you want to call it at five weeks old. Five weeks.” He shifted his weight and moved past Gerard, gesturing for him to follow. They stopped in front of a display of packaged food and brightly colored sacks of litter. “You’re going to want Rat Chow,”

he said, handing him a ten-pound sack, “and a bag or two of these wood shavings.” Another look. “You got a place to keep them?”

By the time he left the store, Gerard had two wire cages (with cedar plank flooring so the rats wouldn’t contract bumblefoot, whatever that was), twenty pounds of rat food, three bags of litter and two supersized doggie bags with five rats in each. Then he was home and shutting the door to keep out the cold even as Robbie, emerging from beneath the pillows of the couch, humped across the floor to greet him and all the lights flashed on simultaneously.

It was mid-April by the time my wife and I returned from Switzerland. Tim and Tim II, who’d been cared for in our absence by our housekeeper, Florencia, were there at the door to greet us, acting out their joy on the doorstep and then carrying it into the living room with such an excess of animation it was all but impossible to get our bags in the door before giving them their treats, a thorough back-scratching and a cooed rehearsal of the little endearments they were used to. It was good to be home, back to a real community after all that time spent living in a sterile apartment in Basel, and what with making the rounds of the neighbors and settling back in both at home and at work, it wasn’t till some weeks later that I thought of Gerard. No one had seen him, save for Mary Martinson, who’d run into him in the parking lot at the mall, and he’d refused all invitations to dinner, casual get-togethers, ice-skating on the lake, even the annual Rites of Spring fund-raiser at the clubhouse. Mary said he’d seemed distracted and that she’d tried to engage him in conversation, thinking he was still locked in that first stage of grieving and just needed a little nudge to get him on track again, but he’d been abrupt with her. And she didn’t like to mention it, but he was unkempt — and he smelled worse than ever. It was startling, she said. Even outdoors, standing over the open trunk of his car, which was entirely filled, she couldn’t help noticing, with something called Rat Chow, even with a wind blowing and a lingering chill in the air, he gave off a powerful reek of sadness and body odor. Someone needed to look in on him, that was her opinion.

I waited till the weekend, and then, as I’d done back in December, I took the dogs down the wide amicable streets, through the greening woods and over the rise to Gerard’s cottage. The day was glorious, the sun climbing toward its zenith, moths and butterflies spangling the flower gardens, the breeze sweetened with a scent of the south. My neighbors slowed their cars to wave as they passed and a few people stopped to chat, their engines rumbling idly.

Carolyn Porterhouse thrust a bouquet of tulips at me and a mysterious wedge-shaped package wrapped in butcher’s paper, which proved to be an Emmentaler—“Welcome home,” she said, her grin anchored by a layer of magenta lipstick — and Ed Saperstein stopped right in the middle of the road to tell me about a trip to the Bahamas he and his wife had taken on a chartered yacht. It was past one by the time I got to Gerard’s.

I noticed right off that not much had changed. The windows were streaked with dirt, and the yard, sprouting weeds along the margins of the unmowed lawn, looked as neglected as ever. The dogs bolted off after something in the deep grass and I shifted the bouquet under one arm, figuring I’d hand it to Gerard, to cheer him up a bit, and rang the bell. There was no answer. I tried a second time, then made my way along the side of the house, thinking to peer in the windows — for all anyone knew, he could be ill, or even, God forbid, dead.

The windows were nearly opaque with a scrim of some sort of pale fluff or dander. I rapped at the glass and thought I saw movement within, a kaleidoscopic shifting of shadowy forms, but couldn’t be sure. It was then that I noticed the odor, saturate and bottom-heavy with ammonia, like the smell of a poorly run kennel. I mounted the back steps through a heavy accounting of discarded microwave dinner trays and a tidal drift of feed bags and knocked uselessly at the door. The wind stirred. I looked down at the refuse at my feet and saw the legend Rat Chow replicated over and over in neon-orange letters, and that should have been all the information I needed. Yet how was I to guess? How was anyone?

Later, after I’d presented the bouquet and the cheese to my wife, I tried Gerard’s phone, and to my surprise he answered on the fourth or fifth ring. “Hello, Gerard,” I said, trying to work as much heartiness into my voice as I could, “it’s me, Roger, back from the embrace of the Swiss. I stopped by today to say hello, but—”

He cut me off then, his voice husky and low, almost a whisper.

“Yes, I know,” he said. “Robbie told me.”

If I wondered who Robbie was — a roommate? a female? — I didn’t linger over it. “Well,” I said, “how’re things? Looking up?” He didn’t answer. I listened to the sound of his breathing for a moment, then added, “Would you like to get together? Maybe come over for dinner?”

There was another long pause. Finally he said, “I can’t do that.”

I wasn’t going to let him off so lightly. We were friends. I had a responsibility. We lived in a community where people cared about one another and where the loss of a single individual was a loss to us all. I tried to inject a little jocularity into my voice: “Well, why not?

Too far to travel? I’ll grill you a nice steak and open a bottle of Cotes du Rhone.”

“Too busy,” he said. And then he said something I couldn’t quite get hold of at the time. “It’s nature,” he said. “The force of nature.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m overwhelmed,” he said, so softly I could barely hear him, and then his breathing trailed off and the phone went dead.

……

They found him a week later. The next-door neighbors, Paul and Peggy Bartlett, noticed the smell, which seemed to intensify as the days went on, and when there was no answer at the door they called the fire department. I’m told that when the firemen broke down the front door, a sea of rodents flooded out into the yard, fleeing in every direction. Inside, the floors were gummy with waste, and everything, from the furniture to the plasterboard walls and the oak beams of the living room ceiling, had been gnawed and whittled till the place was all but unrecognizable. In addition to the free-roaming animals, there were hundreds more rats stacked in cages, most of them starving and many cannibalized or displaying truncated limbs.

A spokeswoman for the local ASPCA estimated that there were upwards of thirteen hundred rats in the house, most of which had to be euthanized at the shelter because they were in no condition to be sent out for adoption.

As for Gerard, he’d apparently succumbed to pneumonia, though there were rumors of hantavirus, which really put a chill into the community, especially with so many of the rodents still at large.

We all felt bad for him, of course, I more than anyone else. If only I’d been home through the winter, I kept thinking, if only I’d persisted when I’d stood outside his window and recognized the odor of decay, perhaps I could have saved him. But then I kept coming back to the idea that there must have been some deep character flaw in him none of us had recognized — he’d chosen a snake for a pet, for God’s sake, and that low animal had somehow morphed into this horde of creatures that could only be described as pests, as vermin, as enemies of mankind that should be exterminated, not nurtured.

And that was another thing neither my wife nor I could understand — how could he allow even a single one of them to come near him, to fall under the caress of his hand, to sleep with him, eat with him, breathe the same air?

For the first two nights I could barely sleep, playing over that horrific scene in my mind — how could he have sunk so low? How could anyone?

The ceremony was brief, the casket closed (and there wasn’t one of us who wanted to speculate on the reason, though it didn’t take an especially active imagination to picture Gerard’s final moments). I was very tender with my wife afterward. We went out to lunch with some of the others and when we got home I pressed her to me and held her for a long while. And though I was exhausted, I took the dogs out on the lawn to throw them their ball and watch the way the sun struck their rollicking fur as they streaked after the rumor of it, only to bring it back, again and again, and lay it in my palm, still warm from the embrace of their jaws.