The Rat on Fire Read Free Page A

this crazy drunken cocksucker. ‘Will you for the luvva Christ and his goddamned Blessed Mother calm down before you get us both in the slammer and dead at the same time?’ And he won’t, naturally, so we get out there in Weston and there’s nothin’ around but weeds and water and he hits me onna head. Right onna fuckin’ head, and I’m doin’ eighty and I already got enough things on my mind with seeing double and everything, and he clocks me one.”
    “Auburn Alice,” Don said. “She the one that advertises, Channel 19?”
    “I guess so,” Mickey said. “I never turn the damned CB on anymore. Too many assholes ratchet-mouthin’ shit at each other. I never heard of her. I had six thousand pounds of chicken in there I was worried about, and that was more’n enough for me. I dunno who she is.”
    “That’s the one,” Don said. “That woman’s got diseases they never even heard of in Vietnam. She’s infected guys from Seattle, and guys from Monterey’ve given her new stuff to give to guys from Louisville. You oughta thank the Lord you had them goddamned chickens. You didn’t, you’d have something now they couldn’t cure unless they used a blowtorch on you.”
    “What’d he hit you with?” Malatesta said.
    “His fist,” Proctor said. “He didn’t have no gun or anything, thank God. And, it didn’t really hurt me much. He’s just a little guy. And he was also drunk. His aim wasn’t too good, even if he was strong. But it surprised me, you know? I was having trouble understanding things. The guy shocked the shit out of me. I didn’t expect it. I thought he was just screamin’ and hollerin’ and acting like a goddamned asshole and I was yelling at him and thinking I was either gonna calm the guy down before I got him home or else when I got him home and that car was stopped I would get out with him and cold-cock him into the rosebushes or something,and he got quiet. Then he comes barrel-assin’ out of nowhere and belts me.
    “So,” Proctor said, “naturally I do the reasonable thing and pull over the side of the road and stop the car and take the keys and get out and open his door and drag him out, beat the livin’ shit out of him and throw him inna goddamned lake, right? Wrong. I take my hands off the wheel and grab the little cocksucker. I am gonna beat the piss out of him. I don’t have to take this kind of shit from some little pisspot like that, that I am doing a favor for that is Clinker’s friend anyway and I don’t even know him. But I forget, of course, that I am right then doing eighty miles an hour in a car that I am the guy that’s supposed to be steering it, and I will tell you this: I am very glad this is the Mass Pike in Weston around three inna morning when there is much of nothing around on either side of me and it’s not like I’m down on Gallivan Boulevard there on a weekday afternoon doing the same thing when some big fat nun starts marching a whole buncha second-graders across the street so they can sing at Benediction, all right? Because I got him all right and belted him right into Labor Day, but at the same time I sort of went off the road some. Into this little pond they got there.”
    “Jesus,” Malatesta said.
    “It was all right,” Proctor said. “It wasn’t really a pond, actually. Well, it was a
pond
, but it wasn’t a very deep pond. The water just came up about, when you open the car door, all right? It came in the car then. It wasn’t too deep, and the bottom was all mud or else you could’ve driven through it like you would any other puddle that was just about as deep, only about a mile across, and the car stopped in the mud and I opened the door and the water came right in. Right up to about the bottom of the front seat, you know? If I’d’ve been able to keep going, I could’ve gone right across it. It was a little higher’n the seat, actually. Went all over the consoleand my tapes, but what the hell, huh? And I took out a few of them