Daylight is Your Only Escape, Part 3
The conclusion of the story of a skid row rat.
Author’s note: Read parts one and two of the story if you haven’t already.
You forage along the riverbank while the white rat stays inside the hollow log with four pups: one white like her, two gray like you, and one all black except for a small patch of white over his right eye.
The seasons have turned, and the grapevines are brown and papery, with fruit that’s shrivelled but chewy and sweet. You pull as many as you can off their brittle stems and pack them into your mouth, stretching the skin of your cheeks.
You hear a sound, the same sound a broom makes when it falls from above, and you know it's the wings of one of those birds. You freeze even though the sound isn’t coming from directly above you. The bird has found prey, but isn’t you. It’s a vole. You know it from its high-pitched death rattle.
After the shrieking stops and the sound of beating wings is gone, you follow the tangle of dried vines back to the hollow log where a gray rat is sniffing around the entrance. You charge him and he darts under a small, naked bush, whose fallen yellow leaves make a tidy carpet where he huddles and turns to look back at you.
He’s from Skid Row. You know it from the smell: beans, that sweet brown stuff humans drink, tinned meat. Worst of all, there’s that human smell, the smell they get when they don’t wash, the smell that changes the air when there’s enough of them around.
You give him a hard stare before climbing into the log and spitting out the raisins, adding them to your hoard so your family will have enough to eat when winter comes. The white rat and three of the pups are asleep, but the black pup with the white eye patch presses his little body against yours, and you run your paws over his face.
The next time you leave the log, there’s another rat under the leafless bush. You watch them press together, shivering. There’s better shelter out here, but for some reason, they haven’t found it. You could show them the broken plastic bucket that’s closer to the river and half buried in sand or the dense thicket of wild raspberries at the foot of the train bridge.
You hunt for seeds instead.
Days later, the log vibrates, waking all six of you out of sound sleep. It’s a bright, chilly morning. Outside the log, the vibration is stronger, and there’s a loud noise, a crumbling sound. You run toward the edge, where the riverbank’s brush meets the street. The two Skid Row rats are already there, watching.
A car rolls across the cobblestones, and after it passes, you see that the triangular park is empty. No men sleeping, fighting, curling around wine bottles. Beyond the park, a strange car with a long arm and a set of jaws on the end sits in front of the Skid Row buildings. You watch as the jaws open, slam down on the top of a brick wall, and bite. The building shakes, and the bricks fall. Dust rises.
A group of men stands around watching. They’re Skid Row men, some of them, but those other men are watching too, the soap-and-shoeshine men.
Slowly, the machine eats the top part of the wall, and more bricks tumble, breaking into pieces as they hit the sidewalk. After dropping a pile of bricks onto the cobblestones, the mechanical arm raises again, and the jaws crash down hard on the wall. An underground thunder begins to rumble. The brick wall collapses, revealing the empty cafe with its motionless ceiling fan, and the narrow rooms and dark hallway of the flophouse on the floor above it.
One of the soap-and-shoeshine men coughs dust into a white handkerchief. You feel another vibration, hear another rumble of thunder, only it’s not from crumbling walls or falling bricks. It’s the thunder of thousands and thousands of tiny paws, all striking at once.
Suddenly, they pour out of the hole in the cafe wall, the whole mass of them covering the cafe floor, leaping together over the pile of bricks on the sidewalk. Sunlight catches hints of silver on their backs as they rush the triangular park and gallop across the cobblestone street.
You turn and run, but you can’t get away fast enough, and you flatten yourself against the ground as the crowd runs over your back. Once the stampede is over, you rush back to the hollow log and hunker down in the, dark, warm, dry wood, trembling as the white rat and the pups cover your body with theirs.
At dawn, you peer out of the log and survey the riverbank. Everywhere you look, there are rats.