TROUT AND PEE WEE

Episode 6 — Dry Rats

The rain came for two days straight and didn’t apologize for any of it. Not hard rain. Just permanent rain. The kind that didn’t have gaps or let up at night and by the second morning the fields ran a foot deep and the road in front of the house moved like something with a destination. Trout watched it from the porch. It was the kind of rain people in that town would talk about for the rest of their lives because it only happened once and once was enough to establish it as the measure of all future rains. Nothing was that rain. Everything else was less than that rain.

Aunt Nellie had been living with them since September. She was old enough that her birth year was in a different century and she had opinions about everything that had happened since. She didn’t like drafts. She didn’t like noise. She didn’t approve of most things Trout did or intended to do and communicated this through a system of silences and looks that had been refined over decades of disapproval.

She had rat poison in her closet on an aluminum plate. This was fine. This was just how houses worked when Aunt Nellie was born and she saw no reason to update the policy. The poison sat on its plate in the corner of the closet behind her good shoes and Trout’s father checked it periodically and that was the arrangement.

Trout had been running a mouse trap line since he was eight. His father had set it up. Ten cents a mouse. The traps ran along the baseboard behind the kitchen and the one in the back hallway and the two in the basement and Trout checked them every morning before school and collected what was there and reset what needed resetting. He had been doing this long enough that it was just part of the morning the way breakfast was part of the morning. The house had mice. The house did not have wet mice. This was a distinction that would become relevant later.

The rain stopped sometime before dawn on the third day. By morning the fields were still running but the road had settled back to road and Trout was off the porch and moving before Pee Wee arrived at the front gate. They went out to look at it the way boys went out after extraordinary weather, seriously and with full attention, because something had happened to the world overnight and the evidence was everywhere.

The evidence included rats. Not one or two. Many. Drowned in the flood and pushed up against fences and curbs and the bases of trees by the moving water and left there when it receded. They lay in the wet grass with their feet up in the specific stillness of things that had been through something they didn’t survive.

Trout looked at them the way he looked at things when a plan was forming.

Pee Wee looked at them the way Pee Wee looked at things.

“What are you thinking,” Pee Wee said.

Trout looked toward the house.

“Aunt Nellie’s closet has a poison plate,” he said.

Pee Wee considered this.

“Rats on the plate,” he said.

“In the dish,” Trout said.

Pee Wee looked at the rats again. Then at the house. Then back at the rats.

“How many,” he said.

“Two,” Trout said. “Hefty ones.”

Pee Wee nodded once. This was the full extent of the planning committee.

They found two good ones near the fence by the Hendersons’ property line. Hefty was the right word. Barn rats, not house rats. The flood had pushed them out of wherever they had been and left them in the grass looking substantial and thoroughly finished. Trout picked them up by the tails the way he picked up everything he collected. Pee Wee walked beside him back to the house.

At the porch steps Pee Wee stopped.

“I’ll wait here,” he said.

This was reasonable. The operation was Trout’s. Pee Wee had approved it and seen it to the door and that was a full contribution.

Trout went inside. Aunt Nellie was in the parlor. She looked at Trout the way she looked at Trout, which was the way she looked at most things that had happened since 1920, and then looked back at her hands.

Trout went upstairs.

The closet smelled like cedar and old wool and the faint chemical smell of the poison that sat on its aluminum plate in the corner behind the good shoes. Two rats. Heads in the dish. Positioned with the seriousness the operation required.

He looked at it once.

Even.

He went back downstairs.

He was in the kitchen maybe ten minutes. He knew the sequence. Aunt Nellie would go to her closet for something. She would see them. She would not handle this quietly. Then his father would come and look and come back downstairs and that would be the part that mattered. Trout stood in the kitchen and waited for the sequence to complete.

Aunt Nellie screamed. Not a small sound. A sound that had been saving itself for exactly this kind of occasion.

His father came out of the back room and went upstairs two at a time. Trout heard the closet door. Heard his father’s voice, low, saying something to Aunt Nellie that settled her down by degrees. Then footsteps on the stairs.

His father came into the kitchen with a rat in each hand. He held them the way he held most things, without drama, by the tails, the way a man held things he had been holding his whole life.

He looked at Trout.

He was trying to be stern.

His eyes were not cooperating.

“Don’t do anything like that again,” he said.

Trout looked at the rats.

“How did you know it was me,” he said.

His father looked at the rats too. Then back at Trout. “Two things,” he said. “Rats don’t eat poison and die in the dish. They go off somewhere else and die later.”

He waited.

“And these rats are soaking wet,” he said.

He looked at Trout steadily.

“Our house only has dry rats.”

He went back outside with them. Trout stood in the kitchen and listened to the screen door close and his father’s boots on the porch steps going down. Through the window he could see Pee Wee still at the gate.

His father walked past him toward the back field without stopping. Pee Wee watched him go. Then he looked at the kitchen window and found Trout’s face in it.

Trout shook his head once.

Pee Wee nodded.

They had both known this was how it ended. The operation had internal logic and the internal logic had a ceiling and the ceiling was a man born in 1912 who knew the difference between wet rats and dry ones and was not going to pretend otherwise.

Aunt Nellie did not come down for supper. This was not unusual. Trout’s mother put a plate together and took it up without comment. She came back down and sat and passed the bread and nobody mentioned the rats or the closet or the screaming or the ceiling on the operation.

Trout’s father ate his supper.

At some point he looked up.

“Hefty ones though,” he said.

He went back to his supper.

Outside the fields were still draining. The water moved through the grass in thin sheets catching the last of the light, running toward wherever flood water ran when it was finished, leaving the ground dark and clean behind it. The two rats were out there somewhere in the back field. Dry ground now. Returned to it.

.