A RAT I KNEW AND LOVED

 
     My parents told me under no circumstances could I have a pet hamster, guinea pig, mouse or rat. I asked repeatedly, and the answer was always the same. A friends house that was on the way home from school owned rats. He had a wall in the garage next to his dads workshop filled with cages. He and his brother raised the rats and sold them to a local pet shop and to a man down the street that fed them to his snakes. Jack and his brother didn't make alot of money, but enough to save up for Christmas presents and an occasional model. His dad was always after him to clean the cages and the garage floor around the cages where stuff from the cages was all over the place from the rats somehow pushing it out of the cages.
     After school every now and then, we would stop at Jacks house to clean the rat cages, fill the water bottles and the food containers. For me, that was a very special time. We would sit there at a little card table that had chairs around it afterwards. Jacks dad and his friends played cards there at night. Jack told me his mom didn't want his dad and the loud friends gambling in the house around the family, so the garage had a room build on one side, where the card table, refrigerator and the rats were. After school on weekdays it was a place where Jack and Dave and I, and sometimes Jacks little brother could sit around and play hearts and spades. It was a great spot to spend rainy days after school. The rats would all sit there watching us while we drank sodas, ate peanuts and played cards. To me, all the rats seemed like they knew exactly what we were doing. They were good company and made little noises as they pushed the cage stuff out on the floor and got rambunctious every once in awhile. When we weren't playing cards, Jack would get out a rat or two and they would walk around on the table, going from one of us to the other. We would hand feed them and rub their ears and backs.
     The biggest rat even though he was not the oldest rat was white with one light gray spot. He had a long pink tail. Jack called him popper, because he did this thing in his cage that made the whole cage move. Jack told me his dad didn't like popper because he made too much noise when the men were there at night playing cards. He was always banging his cage and making a racket. Finally Jacks dad told him that if Jack didn't sell him to the snake guy or the pet shop, that he would have to do something. I traded Jack a handful of baseball cards for popper and smuggled him into my house in my knapsack that I carried my schoolbooks in.      I walked into the house that day, through the kitchen past three of my brothers, past the library where my mother was doing something with a few of her friends, and safely up the two flights of stairs as quick as I could to my room. Popper never made a sound.
     After I had closed the door to my room, I opened the knapsack on my bed and popper crawled out wiggling pink nose and white silver nose hairs, blinking black eyes, and dragging long pink tail behind him. Since I didn't have a cage, I was going to try the trick that Jack had suggested. Jack knew I had a shelf that was in the middle of one wall at my eye level, where all my books and some of my models were. It was in the middle of the wall with nothing connecting it to the ground or the other walls. At one end of the shelf behind a metal statue of a knight in armor, I put the tray with the wood shavings in it and at the other end of the shelf between some books set up like a fort I put a folded undershirt and poppers food and water dishes that Jack had given me. For the first time I held popper up and looked at him real close and he licked me. It was the first time I had him that close to my nose and he smelled like cigars. That was the only time he smelled like cigars though, after that, he smelled like my undershirts or like my room or his food.
     I put him in his tray with the wood shavings. After he played around a little in them, I made little scratching noises that he followed up and over and behind books and models and other favorite toys, all the way to the other end of the shelf where his food and bed were. In no time he was sniffing around crawling in and out of things and watching me when he wasn't exploring. Wherever I went he followed. Down to one end, he went down to that end. Up to the other end, he went to the other end. He was my friend. When they called me for dinner, he was sitting on my undershirt licking his feet.
     I came upstairs after dinner, and there he was asleep right where I’d left him.      I was worried about getting caught with him in my room, but as the weeks passed and nothing happened, I stopped worrying. At first I would get him down off the shelf when I came to the room. We’d play or do homework or read. He’d be right there when I was building radios or models or painting or drawing. We would listen to stations from all over the world, read books, crawl around on the floor or just stare out one of the windows. Weeks later, I got a piece of wood that went from one end of the shelf down to the floor where it met the other wall. I would take it down and leave it against the far wall when I left, and lean it against the shelf when I was there. It was the "door" to the shelf.
     All I had to do to get popper on the shelf was to make little scratching noises on it, or put some food in his dish, then just move the "door" away from the shelf. When the "door" was against the shelf while I was there, popper could come and go as he pleased, eating or napping.
     After popper had been in my room for a few months, something funny happened. Jack and Dave came up to trade some model parts and baseball cards and when they got close to say hi to popper he tried to bite them. He had turned into a one-man mouse, Jack said. Jack said it was because I was feeding him real food and cheese all the time, and letting him sleep with me.
     When they visited after that, both Jack and Dave would always check to see if he had changed, but he would always follow them back and forth, and if they even tried to reach for something on the shelf, there he was making those little noises and showing his teeth. He was a guard rat.

     As time went by I started calling him poppa rat instead of popper. The funniest thing that he ever did was on summer mornings when I would lay with my pillow on the windowsill with the window open and listen to the birds all doing their morning howdy thing. Orioles would line up on the telephone line that came to house, and on the tree branches that surrounded the house. If one of them got close enough to the window, poppa rat would make those noises like he was warning them about something. I got to the point where I could make little kissing sounds with my lips that sounded just like him. Sometimes when I slept with the window open he would wake me up talking to the orioles. Those were good times.
     Later I got an oriole ball cap from some guy who dropped it by mistake through a very narrow gap between two fences. I knew that it would make a perfect little bed if it had something soft inside it. Poppa rat could curl up in it and nap when I wasn’t around. Sure enough, he liked it fine and always was there when he napped during the day. Sometimes he would drag it around to different places on the shelf.
     My parents never found out about poppa rat. They wouldn’t even believe it now if they read this. The only one that ever met him was granpop. When he saw poppa rat the first time he laughed and laughed and told me that if "Fritz" (my dad) knew I had a rat up here, I would really be in trouble. Then he made a face and just said, "and what about your mother?" He said that if mom saw poppa rat you would be able to hear her screaming all the way to the state capitol. Poppa rat liked grand pop fine, and ran right over to him and didn’t even try to bite him. At the time I thought maybe it was because they both had white hair and black eyes.
     Poppa rat stayed with me for a long time. One day I came home from school and he was in his hat curled up and didn't come over to say hi. He wasn't warm anymore. I didn't go down to dinner that night and went out before the sun came up the next morning with a shovel and a cigar box. I put him and his hat deep in the ground under the place where I had first picked up the hat. When I was finished, I squeezed through the narrow space between the fences for the last time. I knew I would never return.

     I think of him whenever I see orioles or the baseball team from Baltimore.

     I can still hear him talking to the birds.

©2001jchrist

---

wind and roses

just one handfull
of the big V twin
sets an all American beauties growl
pounding in places
we'd just been,
and that one unexplainable two wheeled
feeling buffets in.

we ride to gather some wind.

ah, to pack some minutes with miles
and some hours with that
when you're alone grin,
becoming the wind.

on just enough seat
to saddle the heartbeat below.
with just enough twist
to touch the thrill of the edge
and rock and roll.

to almost know.

yeah, leave the dust behind
and see how far through space
a chasing second goes,
down roads like women
curves and twists and turns and whaddyaknows.

we become the wind
that others try catching
for lifetimes,
just as the gardner
when all 's said and done,
becomes the rose.

---

there is not love

in a slow and
slippery caress
with eyes that
become a horizon

in the blazes
of passion
burning flesh
to burning flesh

in slow repetitive
fluid action
waves breaking
souls shaking

in arrivals that
wash away worlds
where control is
mere concept

there is
not love
there is only
proof of love

(pinched those last four lines
from the movie
Stealing Beauty)

---

shaking it

she moves again
sings subsonic
in creasing rumbles

her coastal cliffs
slip dusty billows
turn surf raw umber

pulses miles inland
rolled hills undulate
then domino down

Lost Angel gone
her pieces flotsam
torn turbid ungowned

she came and roiled
sank in devastation
quaked and unfurled

tides of wreckage
wave to new beaches
Arizona whirls
5