The Rat on Fire (3 page)

“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 console
and my tapes, but what the hell, huh? And I took out a few of them little trees on the way in. But, I never did like that Monte Carlo anyways. Lousy car. Lousy on gas. This guy Carter got any idea what he’s doing, you think, on the gas thing? Jesus, first he makes me, I can’t use nothing that burns the stuff with lead in it and then he tells me I can’t use none of the stuff that hasn’t got lead in it and when I do I can kiss my house goodbye. What the hell is he doing? You got any ideas?”

“No,” Malatesta said.

“Neither’ve I,” Proctor said. “I have no idea in the world what he is doing. I wished I could convince myself that he does. It’s bad enough,
I
got to be an asshole, but if the goddamned President’s an asshole we are all in trouble, including poor assholes like me that can’t stay out of trouble anyway, and
then
what the fuck we do, huh?

“Anyway,” Proctor said, “I was thinkin’ about gettin’ rid the damned car anyway, although what I had in mind was, I was gonna sell it, not drown it, because it was all shot. But the water was kind of cold and it sobers me up. I’m soaked and I’m walkin’ around in the mud with the water up to my balls and it’s three inna morning, but then I think, Hey, somebody could’ve got themselves killed in this thing, and it could’ve been me, even. See, the little cocksucker, him I don’t care about. I wished he
was
dead, him causing all the trouble, except I don’t want him dead in my car, I want him dead in somebody else’s car.

“Because,” Leo said, “you know what them cops’re gonna do with somebody that’s got a record like I got, that he ends up inna swamp at three inna mornin’ and there’s a body of a dead guy inna car with him, or maybe inna swamp and there doesn’t happen to be no other way that body could’ve gotten there, huh? They’re gonna blame me for it, and then they’re gonna charge me manslaughter.

“This,” Leo said, “I do not need. He is a little shit and the
whole goddamned world will be better off for all of us if he is dead, and that includes the cops, but I was glad he was alive. Because if he is dead, I certainly cannot afford to take the credit.”

“So what’d you do?” Malatesta said.

“Well,” Leo said, “like I said, what I did was sober up. Which maybe would’ve been a good idea earlier, when I wasn’t so tired and then maybe I never would’ve gotten myself in this mess where I drowned my own car like a cat. What am I, a United States Senator or something, I drown my own car? But it was not such a hot idea, because I decide I can charm a dog offa meat wagon and I am gonna think up this story that’ll explain the whole thing. When I am finished, the cop is probably gonna be cryin’ his eyes out and put me in for an award, I was such a quick-witted citizen when this emergency hits and I probably even saved the guy’s life. The worthless little piece of shit he is that started the whole thing inna first place.”

“What’d you tell them?” Malatesta said.

“I told them,” Proctor said, “I told them I was, I was standing there inna water up over my ankles, I sort of waded over to where I saw the headlights, and I would’ve been freezing my balls off except it was summer and anyway I was so shitfaced I was probably good for about twenty below, and honest to God, Billy, I must’ve thought I was Winston Churchill or something. Here is this cop. I saw something once that was also alive and was just as big, but it was gray and it couldn’t talk and it had a very long nose and I saw it in the circus when I took the kids the Garden and it cost me about seventy bucks and there was this guy that had on a silver suit and made a tiger jump on the back of this thing with a long nose and then the guy jumped on the tiger’s back and rode the two of them around the room and that big gray thing was an
elephant
. That’s how big this cop was.

“But he could talk,” Leo said. “He could talk and he did talk. What he said was impressive, but he did not say as much as I did, which was my mistake. My ninth and tenth mistakes for the night, a little over my usual quota, maybe, but not that much over, and I told him that the tire blew and I steered it in the pond so I wouldn’t hit nobody that was alive.

“And he says,” Leo said, “he says, ‘Bullshit. Those tires’re all fine. They’re all that’s keeping that thing afloat.’ Which is when it occurs to me, maybe I better look at the tires, I’m gonna tell stories like that. I did. They were all fine. I wished I thought of doing that a little earlier, maybe before the cop showed up, so I didn’t try something dumb as that.”

“What’d he do?” Malatesta said.

“The fuck you think he did?” Leo said. “For Christ sake, you’re a cop. The fuck’d you do? You’d write me up. You oughta know.”

“Yeah,” Malatesta said, “I guess I would’ve. I don’t think the same I used to.”

“He ran me in,” Leo said. “Driving Under, Driving So As To Endanger. Drunk. The usual stuff.”

“What about the passenger?” Billy said.

“Locked him up to sleep it off,” Leo said. “Let him go the next day. Which was when, of course, I hadda call Fein.”

“Well,” Billy said, “you are a sorry son of a bitch if you had to call Fein, and I don’t rate your chances none too good if that jamoke’s going to defend you at a trial in a court of law and all that stuff.”

“Billy,” Leo said, “I admit to being stupid. You yourself can ask me, and I will personally admit it. I only got an eighth-grade education and the stuff was gettin’ a little hard for me the year before that. The nuns down Our Lady of Victory practically made a public announcement and printed it in the newspaper that Leo Proctor was thick as shit and would never get anywhere except in jail, and they
should’ve known they were right in the first place when they let him in even though his father was English but they hoped his Irish mother maybe gave him some sense and she didn’t.

“Well,” Leo said, “they were right about the jail, but they were wrong about the other part, because I have gone and I have transcended what the nuns give me to the point at which I probably owe various people close to half a million dollars if I was to sit down and take the time to add them up, which I am not about to do, on account of how I do not need that shit. This is a great country and it is a land of opportunity, so that even a dumb shit like me, who cannot get rid of a few noisy niggers, can wind up owing various people half a million dollars or so with just about no hope to God that he will ever pay them back. If this was not a great country, I would be out someplace with a shovel and some guy’d be whipping me on the naked back for not diggin’ fast enough, but it is and so I’m not.

“Still,” Leo said, “I am not so stupid that even I do not know that Four-flusher Fein is not your very best legal-type counselor and could on his best day probably not get Jack Kennedy off on a charge that he murdered Lee Harvey Oswald.

“The trouble is, Billy,” Leo said, “the trouble is that when you owe various people about half a million dollars or so which you are not in a position to pay back right away, they start looking around all the time and gettin’ jittery, you know? And they say, ‘Gee, uh, Mister Proctor, we loaned you all that money and stuff and you bought these here buildings with it and everything that’ve got apartments in them and you’re supposed to have people living there. But we took a look at the buildings and there don’t seem to be a large number of people floatin’ around. Oh, there’s a few of the minority groups shuckin’ and jivin’ on your stoops and stuff like that, and we’re certainly glad to see you’re doing
your bit for low-cost housing for the underprivileged. We mean it. You’re a prince of a guy, and we got to compliment you for it. But then again on the other hand, we’ve been lookin’ at your statements here for the past few months, and you haven’t been payin’ us.’

“Billy,” Leo said, “you ever see one of them metal-framed bankers, with the gray hair and the three-piece suits and their black shoes and the glasses with the metal frames? You ever talk to one of them guys? They don’t live in the real world, I’m tellin’ you. What they do is live in the banks. They got their desks out in front of everybody and that is where they live. They can’t fuck, fight, frown, wash, shit or change their underwear. The hell, everybody goin’ by on the street could see them and so could everybody at all the other desks on the red rug, and I finally figured it out, how they do it: they hire people that don’t do none of those things, so they don’t need to.

“Now those guys, Billy,” Leo said, “those guys’re all in favor of helping everybody inna whole wide world as long as it don’t involve none of their money. Which is another thing about bankers—they may be all vice-presidents or something, and they’re making nine grand a year and they all eat lunch at Slagle’s and have the vegetable special and the iced tea that goes with it and it costs a buck twenny-five and they leave a fifteen-cent tip, but there’s millions in those vaults and it all belongs to them. Other people maybe put it there, and someday they’re gonna come and take it out again, but in the meantime it all belongs to the bankers.

“What they are all for,” Leo said, “they are all for helping the fuckin’ niggers. They think helpin’ niggers is the greatest thing since people started coming in and depositing their money, and the reason they think this is because if they don’t ship that money out to help the niggers, on the understanding that they’re gonna get it all back on time with plenty of interest, of course, pretty soon some hairy Jew
kid with about ten degrees from Harvard’s gonna get a poverty law grant and start dragging them out of the bank and into court, they’re not doin’ enough for civil rights and they should lose their charters. They are all for loanin’ money to guys like me that’re gonna rehab old joints and rent ’em out to low-income people, until we do it and they find out them low-income people is fuckin’
niggers
, and if that wasn’t bad enough, they don’t pay their fuckin’ rent, neither. Which means you’re not makin’ payments on your fuckin’ loans, and I bet you could dump a fuckin’ rattler down a banker’s back without makin’ him as nervous as he gets when you’re not payin’ off those goddamned loans.

“Now here is what it is, all right?” Leo said. “I will tell you what it is: fuckin’ niggers’ve got
rights
. If the niggers can’t find no apartments they can get a Jew or two and go to federal court and pretty soon every landlord in the city’s gonna be in federal court with his own high-priced loudmouth tryin’ to stop the judge from throwin’ him in jail because he didn’t take in every nigger that came down the street and make sure he had a warm bed and a good dinner in addition to, the roof didn’t leak. But when the niggers get
in
the apartments, then it is a different story. They don’t pay their rent. They stick out their lower lips and they look at you and they roll them big white eyes and they say, ‘Muhfuck, I ain’t payin’ you no rent. I ain’t payin’ you no hundred thirty-five this month for them five rooms. I ain’t been warm enough. You ain’t got the heat up high enough. I is
withholdin’
mah rent until you gets the heat up there.’ And then they go shuckin’ and jivin’ down the street and you just try to get them into court, collect from them. You can’t get ’em into court and you can’t get ’em out the building, and they won’t pay you nothin’ while they’re in it, and your lawyer costs you money but theirs is free.

“Try and tell a banker that, sometime,” Leo said, “you got a half a day and nothin’ else to do. He won’t even hear you.
He won’t understand a single word you’re saying. He will just keep telling you, you got to pay some money to him and it’s not his responsibility, get it for you.

“And that, Billy boy,” Leo said, “is when you learn to play with matches.”

“Leo,” Malatesta said, “that was a different kind of thing. A different kind of thing entirely. That was a vacant warehouse. There wasn’t anybody living in it. The only thing in it was that old truck. I had no problem with that at all.”

“That isn’t what you told me, Billy,” Leo said. “You said it’d take at least five hundred to get that one traced to the wiring.”

“That was for somebody else,” Billy said. “That was for somebody else I hadda take care of, or he would’ve gone down there and started poking around and then his price would’ve gone up. Double, at least. I wasn’t in the same position then. I was new. I hadda clear things through guys. I didn’t make a dime off of that deal.”

“Yeah,” Leo said.

“I didn’t,” Billy said. “I hadda keep that guy out of there. That was a dog-ass amateur job. If he’d’ve gone in there he would’ve known right off, the way those charrings, alligator burns, showed, he would’ve known you torched it. I hadda keep him out.”

“Yeah,” Leo said. “Well, it don’t matter. I’m outta warehouses now. I still got loans, and I still can’t pay them, but now there’s niggers livin’ in the collateral, and I can’t get ’em out. I’m no amateur anymore, but I can’t get those bastards out. And I have got to do something.”

“Don’t come to me, you do,” Billy said.

“Billy,” Leo said, “I
already
came to you, long time ago. Don’t give that kind of talk, an old buddy.”

“Leo,” Billy said, “you can come to me any time. I’m just telling you, I’m not gonna be able to cover you, you do. You touch off one of those joints with niggers in it, you just burn
yourself one nigger, and you are on your own. You own those buildings, my friend. They maybe aren’t worth what you owe on them, but you own ’em, and if some tenant goes up with the parapet roof, you’ll be right behind them.”

“Billy, my friend,” Leo said, “you remember you asked me how come I hired Four-flusher Fein to represent me?”