There are certain aspects to my decrepit old apartment that I find quite romantic. I’m not so sure if others would agree, but they don’t have to live so here, so it’s a moot point. For instance, here’s nothing cozier than positioning my armchair in front of my kitchen window, curling up with a mug of something and peering out over the rooftop in front of me as big fat raindrops splash and pool on the tarmac of the long-abandoned building across my alleyway. Another such instance of a romantic rainy day at home is when I’m sitting on my couch listening to my own personal soundtrack of rain beating up my fire escape.
And finally, a few weeks ago, I found myself pounding my way down my final type of romantic rainy day, once again, featuring my own alley. Wearing a trench coat and stumbling home one drink later that I’d meant to, I found myself wrestling with the stubborn old lock on my squeaky old gate. There was exactly one light, positioned right in the crevice of the alley so as to illuminate the entire place. My hair was already stringy from water, so at this point, as I shoved open the gate and slammed it shut behind me, announcing my presence to the other eight residents in the building, all I needed to do was strut my way down the glistening pavement and duck in through my door. I say strut because the only waterproof boots I owned are heeled and I had no other option… But also, it was just kind of fun to shove one foot in front of the other with purpose and power, pounding through puddles along the way.
This catwalk was abruptly interrupted however, as I made my way closer to the door. This time, there was another squeak, or it could have been a scream, but not from the familiarity of my gate crashing closed. I wasn’t the only one splashing through puddles in the dark and as I continued to take smaller steps, creeping slowly towards my door, with rain further saturating my hair, I held my breath and prayed I didn’t see what I thought I heard.
But I wasn’t wrong.
It jumped out of nowhere. Well, scurried more like. It scurried out of nowhere.
Furry. Or was it fluffy? Because on the one hand, I could have sworn there was a glow of light illuminating its fur like a halo, but on the other hand, I’d been moving slowly through rain and if I looked like a wet rat why wouldn’t an actual wet rat look like a wet rat?
As the rat disappeared at the far, slightly shadowy end of the alley where covered bicycles and a Vespa resided, I made sure to disappear into my building and slam the front door to ensure I wouldn’t be joined by any new possibly fluffy, furry friends.
I stripped off my coat and boots and crossed the threshold into my unit. My hair was still dripping, leaving a small trail of water as I walked into bathroom. Kind of like the girl from The Ring. She also looked like a rat. Well, I thought, that’s fine. It’s outside. Not my favorite, but the rat lives out there and I live in here. We can coexist. Except for the part where humans tore through all the natural growth that rats probably liked living in and erected buildings where we could live. But like, other than that, we can totally be friends.
They say that if you’re in a hostage situation you should start spewing out facts about yourself and your family and whatnot because it can humanize you to your killer and potentially save you. I don’t have any actual studies to cite on that one, it just feels like one of those things people say that can bring you comfort and logically, in my head at least, checks out so I accept it. I also can only assume that if giving your name can humanize you to a killer, then maybe giving someone else a name can humanize them to you. Basically, I’m trying to tell you that I named the rat Milton.
A rat is flighty; it can skitter around and squeak and scream. It is yet another random dart flying through a world of chaos. Plus, they can chew through door frames, die in your basement, and then you’ll have a whole other pest issue to deal with.
But Milton. No. Milton is a good name. A strong name. A Milton is dependable. A Milton can complete the New York Times crossword and uses phrases like, “don’t take any wooden nickels,” or “she’s a good egg.” I can trust a Milton. And so Milton the Rat was born, I decided. If I saw Milton again, I wouldn’t scuttle away or hop or scream. I would strut proudly past Milton under overcast skies and tip my non-existent cap to Milton, while wishing him a good evening in my head. I would adjourn to my living quarters and Milton could go off to whatever garbage pile suited him.
But fate had other plans…
Fate reached out and knocked on my door in the middle of a meeting one soggy afternoon. I slumped in my chair expecting it to be Angie. She had an incredible knack for timing. Never in the history of my interactions with this woman, had she decided to knock on my door when I wasn’t in a meeting.
The knocking persisted. So I rolled my eyes, offered a quick apology to my coworkers and muted myself. I dragged the door open, listening to it croak along the way. On rainy days, the old wood would swell and the moisture would sneak its way into the hinges raising a cacophony each time I dared pass over the threshold. Who I found standing on the other side wasn’t Angie though, but my upstairs neighbor, Gretchen. Gretchen was awfully nice, if you were me. God help you if you were the local councilperson at the monthly neighborhood meetings or a college kid trying to party on the roof at 2AM. For now though Gretchen looked scared, concerned. Sweat was pooling on her brow. Or it could have just been the sticky, stubborn moisture collecting on her face.
“There’s a dead rat in the middle of the alley.”
“Milton?!” spurted out of my mouth before I could stop myself. How did this happen to him? He was so young, so spry. Had the last week we spent together all been for naught?
She stared at me incredulously for a moment.
“Oh I named the rat Milton.” I offered, “It was a way of humanizing him.” I don’t think the explanation fully landed for her though.
“It’s just laying there in the middle. I think it’s dead. Do rats sleep during the day?”
“Yeah, but not out in broad daylight. More like in a nest.”
“I told Angie about the rats.”
The fate. The culprit. The woman… Who understandably took a more reasonable approach to dealing with rats than naming one like a pet.
“I don’t wanna go back down there.”
I sighed. I also didn’t wanna go down there at all, but even more than that, I didn’t want a rat decaying in my alleyway. “I’m in a meeting. I’ll go down and talk to Ang after.”
Temporary wrinkles smoothed out of her forehead, “Thanks.”
I sat back down and pinged my boss to let her know that it was, in fact, Milton’s untimely demise which was the cause for the knock on my door. Reaction emoji. A single teared sad face. It was kind, but I could see that the impact this was having on me wasn’t quite landing. To be honest, I had yet to understand the impact this was going to have on me too.
About thirty minutes later I learned.
The first goal was to make it to Angie. This would in fact require me to walk past the scene of the crime. I exited the building and walked down the three little steps. As I glanced over, I saw the small rain-soaked furry blob. There he lay. The rainstorm for the day had just ended.
I gingerly stepped toward him and gave him a wide berth as I passed. I wasn’t sure if it was the proximity to dead vermin causing a hallucination or if Milton hadn’t quite fully bit it yet, but I could have sworn his little paw twitched. That was about enough to make me go from zero to Usain Bolt trying to make it to Angie. I marched through the front door of her flower shop and straight toward the back where she loitered out of sight of her own customers.
She couldn’t ignore me that day however. I don’t ask for much as a tenant since the rent is dirt-cheap and I don’t need it getting raised on me. Unclogging a drain or replacing my toilet lever? Sure. But rat patrol was not on the menu for me.
She gingerly stepped out in her housecoat and offered a half-hearted smile with blank eyes.
“Hi Angie.”
“Hi?” I had been personally handing this woman a rent check once a month for the last 5 years and holding a fifteen-minute conversation with her each time. And yet, every time felt like the very first time she’d ever laid eyes on me.
“It’s me. Rachel.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Number 3.”
“What?!”
“I live in number 3.”
“Oh!” Recognition washed over her face. I don’t think it was recognition of me as a person, but more so just that she recognized the fact that she did own an apartment building that people resided in and paid rent for.
“There’s a rat in the alleyway.”
“I know that. My nephew is dealing with it.”
“Well I’d say he’s dealt with it. It’s dead.”
“Oh, God Almighty.”
“Can you have him come by and clean it up?”
The shoulders on her five-foot stature slumped down. “Where?”
“In the alley. There’s one right in the middle.”
“Ugh,” she threw her hands in the air. “I’m tired of this! Every day I say, God when will you take me?!”
Look, I’m all for the good work of geriatric psychologists, but I’m not one of them and this wasn’t the time to plumb the depths of Angie’s soul. I can sympathize. I get it. Life’s a slog and I can only assume it gets worse when you’re so old your aching joints let you know every time any sort of weather system is approaching. But, immediate present day Rachel needed a confirmation that Angie’s middle aged nephew would be coming by later to clean up the rat graveyard.
“So do you think he’ll come by later?”
“Well, where is it?”
Time for my shoulders to slump. “The middle, Angie,” I repeated. “There’s one right in the middle of the alley.”
Now, Angie may have fake flowers in the window of her flower shop, she may have left her Easter decorations up despite it being late August, and her solution to holding the hardwired fire alarm into the wall of our hallway was a hefty amount of duct tape, but don’t you dare say she didn’t care about appearances.
With a disgruntled, “Jesus,” I watched her hobble to the back corner of her shop and return with what would soon be my worst nightmare. A broom. A dust pan. A CVS bag. Clorox spray bleach.
What fresh hell.
“Come with me.”
Oh. God. “When’s your nephew done with work?”
“Five.”
“Well, it’s three.”
“Come on.”
I had intended for this excursion to be more of an FYI, but now what was I going to do? Leave someone who was probably at least eighty-three with arthritis in her back to dispose of Milton all on her own?
I marched behind her as she slowly meandered through the squeaky gate and toward Milton, who had surely crossed the rainbow bridge by now. We stood side by side staring down at him.
“This is almost like one of those noir films. I feel like there should be a tiny chalk outline of the rat body.” I said, trying to stave off the task that inevitably awaited me.
“Here,” She brandished the Clorox at me. “You gotta spray the rat.”
“Why? I think he’s already dead–”
“Spray it.”
“Yes mam.” Angie’s voice ruled supreme. Plus, she couldn’t hear most of what I said to her half the time and the other half she couldn’t understand what I was trying to tell her. I stooped down and stretched out my hand as though brandishing a gun and sprayed. I cracked an eye open to take a peek half expecting him to have sprung back to life. Poor, wet, Milton still laid in the same position as before. Unfortunately, now being closer to the ground meant I was eye level with a whole new world. Primarily a second, smaller rat by the abandoned next-door building and two more farther back where the Vespa lived. It dawned on me.
Oh no. Babies. Yes. I would eventually be forced to conclude that Milton and her babies had all met their demise that stormy day.
“Here,” Angie dropped a dustpan next me. “Hold this while I sweep it in.”
I’d always considered my arms freakishly long for my height, but that day they weren’t long enough. I stretched out the dustpan as far away from me as I could and watched in horror as Angie haphazardly started to try and sweep Milton into the pan, grumbling along the way.
“Where do they even come from?!” She took a swipe at the rat’s lifeless body.
“I think they’re probably drawn out from all the feasts.” The North End routinely held a feast every weekend in August and with the feasts came the flies and the rats, and worst of all, the tourists.
“Well, what’s the city doing about it?” SWIPE!
“Uhmmmm.”
“And this one!” She pointed at the building on the other side of the alleyway. “What’s she doing? This girl buys out the building and doesn’t put anything in there. That’s probably where they’re coming from.”
“Probably.” The building next door had sat empty and derelict for as long as I could remember. At that moment, I was more focused on Milton’s wet corpse doing barrel rolls toward the dustpan than I was at appeasing Angie’s gripes with her neighbors and the city of Boston.
“I mean what’s this girl doing?” She repeated. “Why doesn’t she put anything in there?”
“She wanted to put a sandwich shop in there and you said no.”
“What?!”
“Nothing.” Milton was getting stuck on the lip of the dustpan and Angie wasn’t muscling him in with enough force. I summoned my remaining inner strength, reached for the bottom of the broom and dragged it forward, launching the rat corpse onto my target at last and, quite embarrassingly, screeching out to the heavens in the process. “There,” I sighed.
“Alright, throw it in,” she held out the CVS bag.
I watched as Milton’s lifeless body slid from the dustpan to the bag. “Will you have your nephew deal with the rest?”
“Where are they?”
I pointed to Milton’s other babies, “There.”
“Where?!” She barked.
“Behind the Vespa. I don’t know how we can get to them though.” Which was only half a lie.
“Who’s is that?” She wandered over to it.
“I don’t know.”
“Here,” she brandished the Clorox at me again.
“Angie,” I said, taking it anyway, “I really think your nephew can do this.”
“People just leave their bikes back here.”
No. Shit. It’s a gated alleyway in the middle of the city. It’s parking gold.
“And nobody tells me anything.”
Based on the fact I told this woman my name once a month for five years while forking over money, I would wager someone did tell her about this.
“Here, squirt it. At the least, just squirt it.”
Fresh out of adrenaline at this point and resolved to the fact that since Milton had passed on, her offspring must have too, I held out my arm again and squirted only to realize that while Milton had certainly bit it, the babies were still clinging on.
I don’t know how rat poison works, but apparently, it’s more of a slow burn. With the shower of bleach I unleashed on this critter, it stuck out one paw followed by another one and pitifully dragged itself across the pavement and away from me. It was akin the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan.
I let out another shriek. Angie just stared at me. Say what you will about the silent generation, they’ve just got a hearty build to them. A nuclear implosion could occur and Angie would probably still be left standing in the window of her flower shop looking out over her neighborhood, cursing out the City of Boston, unfazed.
“That’s it,” I said watching the rat crawl away from us. “I’m tapped. I’m out. I’ll help you carry the broom and stuff back to the shop.
“Ugh. Every day I say, when is it gonna end!”
“I know,” I said, grabbing the broom back from her along with the pan. She’s threatened me and every other tenant with her own impending death on a monthly basis too. I doubt she remembers that either.
“I’m not young, you know. I can’t be doing this. My back still hurts from when I fell outside of that Santana Bank.” Indeed, I did know. “What’s the city doing about that?”
We both ambled back out of the alley to the street, exhausted; me from adventures in pest removal, her from the aggravation of life and lording over land.
There we stood taking each other in for a moment. “Well Angie, I gotta get back to work.”
“You’re a good kid.”
“Thanks, Ang.”
She dropped the bag over the edge of the sidewalk into the street. “There,” she said, “we’ll give it back to the city.”