The Rat on Fire Read Free

chickens in there and a compressor goin’ nuts and it’s gotta be seventy-five degrees out there, which means that goddamned thing’s gonna break down on me any minute, and you’re tellin’ me I oughta stop for nookie? I do that and that damned thing’s gonna quit on me while I’m in there and I’ll get to Hyde Park with that truck smellin’ worse’n Alice after a hard night. That bastard down there, the night checker, he didn’t shit in years, he’s gonna take one whiff and tell me, “Rotten. Keep ’em.” Which is gonna leave me with a busted rig and no dough and a mad wife which I already had and didn’t want, and a three-ton loada spoiled chickens. Which I don’t think my kids’re gonna want to eat, and which
I
certainly don’t want and right now I haven’t got, like I do have the wife.’ So I says to him, ‘No, there’s enough rotten shit in my life as it is.’ ”
    “Well,” Malatesta said, “inna first place, you gotta keep in mind that if you got yourself mixed up with Fein you are already obviously not very smart and you probably need as many guys as you can find, if you got any plans involve staying out of jail, on account of if you’re listening to Fein, if you are in a position which has got you listening to him, then you obviously do not know how things are yourself, on your own, and you need somebody to tell you. I was you, I would not want to listen to Fein either, because I have got good reason to know that Fein is an asshole, is what Fein is, and the only reason nobody has put him away for a long time yet’s because he’s just cute enough to find a bigger asshole’n himself to do the things he ought to’ve gone to jail for himself. Which in this case is you.”
    “I don’t have no choice,” Proctor said. He rubbed his hand over his face. “I did that stupid thing.… The last stupidthing I did recently was when Clinker Carroll got outta Walpole there and they had this homecoming thing for him the Saturday night before Memorial Day up there in that joint in Swampscott, you know?”
    “Clinker didn’t last long, I’ll say that for him,” Malatesta said. “How long was he on the street, he got hooked again? A week? Less’n that.”
    “About a week,” Proctor said. “Week or ten days. He has the usual problem which a guy has when he gets out, which is he gets all itchy with all the catchin’ up he’s gotta do. You come out of one of those places, they oughta give you a new car, good-lookin’ broad, ten grand walkin’ around, save a hell of a lot of chasin’ guys around that just came out. But, he’s out on bail now. Which is another thing of course.
    “Anyway,” Proctor said, “like a fuckin’ asshole I go to Clinker’s party. And like the horse’s hang-down that I am, I get myself shitfaced. And I agree, I’m gonna take this guy home that I don’t even know his
name
, even, that lives in Framingham. And naturally, we get inna car onna Mass Pike and he’s drunker’n a goat himself, and we’re doing sixty-five, seventy. I’m all over the road and it’s a perfect night for that, of course, because there ain’t no more cops out that weekend’n there are at your average riot down the prison, and what does this asshole that I don’t even know, that I’m being nice enough, I’m drivin’ him home? What does
he
want to do? He wants to fight.
    “I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it,” the fat man said. “As drunk as I was, and I was pretty drunk, I could not fuckin’ believe it. Just a little piece of shit, this guy, and he didn’t have no knife or anything, and I says to him, I am tryin’ talk him out of it, I couldn’t believe it. I’m all over the road. By now I’m doin’ at least eighty. Everything I see in front of me, there’s two of them. Every car’s got at least four taillights and ones that come with four’ve got eight, maybe sixteen, and I went through two tollbooths without, I didn’t hit nothin’, andI’m trying to
reason
with