The Rat on Fire (2 page)

“Which, of course,” Roscommon said, “he did. And therefore I am plaguing you.”

“Oh,” Sweeney said.

“Yeah,” Roscommon said, “that’s nowhere near as goddamned funny, is it? Uh-uh. Now it’s serious. Now
you’re
looking around for the Preparation H. I got bad news for you—there isn’t any. You are going to catch all the firebugs and make everybody safe in their beds, so that the AG can go out and tell everybody that him and Terry Mooney’ve ended the terrible menace of people setting fires and doing other evil things.”

“Right,” Carbone said. He got up. “Well, how long we got? I mean, I realize it’d probably be nice if we had the whole thing wrapped up by lunchtime tomorrow, but it’s prolly going to take at least until maybe three-thirty or so.”

“Siddown,” Roscommon said.

“John,” Carbone said, “we got fire marshals for that kind of shit.”

“This is true,” Roscommon said. “And if you know any fire marshals … You know any fire marshals?”

“One or two,” Carbone said.

“One or two,” Roscommon said. “Now, Corporal, thinking back over what you know about the one or two fire marshals that you know, do you think maybe there might be an explanation for
why
we got this kind of shit?”

“Yup,” Carbone said.

“Sure,” Roscommon said. “You’re just as smart as Mooney. They can’t fool you, neither. But they sure can fool the fire marshals, and they do. They fool them all the time. The fire marshals are fire marshals because they couldn’t find their way out of a phone booth if they had a map and a guide and one of those big dogs with a harness on it, and some desk sergeant got a look at them one night and said to himself, ‘This guy is so fuckin’ stupid he couldn’t fall out of a tree and land on the ground, and I think I will get him out the barracks before he tries to brush his teeth with his revolver and blows somebody else’s head off.’ ”

“Jesus Christ, John,” Sweeney said, “I don’t know anything about fires. Don doesn’t know anything about fires. Hell, I’m not even sure Don knows anything about getting his pants on, and if he does know anything, it’s what I told him.”

“Sure,” Carbone said, “you’re the guy that told me to pull them on over my head.”

“You’re not investigating fires,” Roscommon said.

“You got to excuse me,” Sweeney said, “I had the distinct impression I been sittin’ here about three weeks listening to you yell about this Mooney kid and the fires and the AG and a whole bunch of other shit, and now I got it wrong?”

“You are not investigating fires,” Roscommon said. “Now, all right? Terry Mooney does not know this, or much of anything else, and I do not tell Terry Mooney much of anything because the first time he finds something else out, he thinks it is a good idea to run around all over town shooting his mouth off about this great thing he just learned that everybody else in town knew for years but nobody could
ever prove. What you are investigating is not fires, but fire
marshals
and people who take money for setting fires and then give some of that there money to fire marshals so that the fire marshals will not be too critical when they come around and look at someplace that was torched. This means that you are investigating Billy Malatesta, who is a fire marshal, and a scumbag loser name of Proctor that I put away once and I will put away again as soon as I get a halfway decent chance, and that will get Mooney and the AG off of my back. What do you guys know about trucks?”

T
HE FAT MAN WORE
a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up over the elbows and the fabric straining over the biceps. The top three buttons were undone, showing the neck of the sleeveless tee-shirt. He wore brown suit pants with a pleated front and his black hair was sparse. He said, “The principal thing that there is about this, that is bothering me basically, is the fuckin’ niggers.”

The other man was about forty. He was in reasonably good shape. He wore a lightweight blue madras sport coat and a light blue tie embroidered with white birds. His shirt was light blue and so were his slacks. He had gray-black curly hair, cut short. He said, “I don’t see what’s botherin’ you. What’s to bother? You got to get them out of there. There isn’t one goddamned other thing that you can do about it, because there isn’t anything that anybody else could do about it. Until you get those niggers out of there, nobody can do anything. You leave the boogies in, they are in and that is all there is to it. There’s no way anybody can do a fucking thing for you if those niggers’re still in it and something happens. The fuckin’
Globe
’d go nuts if there was niggers in there and something happened. It’d be worse’n if the Cardinal was in there and something happened, for Christ sake. I told you that before and I’m telling you that now, and anybody who tells you different’s just blowing smoke up your ass and gonna get you in a whole mess of shit that you’ll never get out of. That’s the way it is.”

They sat in a booth at the Scandinavian Pastry Shop on Old Colony Boulevard in Dorchester. The fluorescent lights reflected on the fat man’s sweaty scalp and the white Formica tabletop. Large moths bumped the plate-glass window from the outside and the air conditioning droned on with the
kind of noise that a motor makes when it is running short of oil and some system attached to it is making unusually heavy demands. “Twenny years ago,” the fat man said, “twenny years ago, nobody would’ve given a shit.” The fat man’s name was Leo Proctor.

“Twenty years ago,” the other man said, “there probably weren’t any coons in there. Just nice, respectable, middle-aged white people that paid their fuckin’ rent on time and didn’t put coal inna bathtub or rip out the plumbin’ or bypass the gas meter and break all the windows. That was a long time ago. Twenty years ago, there wouldn’t be this problem you got.”

Two truckers sat in green cotton uniforms at the counter. They had large sweat stains at their armpits and the belt area of their backs. “I meet this guy,” Mickey said, “the diner out at Nine and Twenty?”

“The fuck’re you doin’ there?” Don said. “You got time enough, fuck around on those roads? The hell you didn’t take the Pike?”

“Jesus Christ,” Mickey said, “will you lemme fuckin’
talk
for once? You always have to go around interrupting me all the time, you asshole? I’m tryin’ to tell you something.”

“So,” Don said, “tell me something. I’m listening. I’ll listen to any asshole. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna pay attention, but I’ll listen.”

“I had trouble with the unit,” Mickey said. “I got off at Auburn, see if maybe there was someone could do somethin’, maybe fix it so I could drive it home and get Carl to work on it inna morning. So, and there’s nobody around. I said, ‘Some kind of all-night service you got here, Charlie,’ and by then I lost an hour already so I figure I might as well get a bowl of soup for myself. And I go down the diner and there’s this guy in there. I never saw this guy before in my life. And all of a sudden he’s gonna have this conversation with me. I’m tryin’ drink my coffee, and this guy I never saw before in my
life says to me, ‘Come on, we’ll go see Auburn Alice, the Long-haul Lady. So, only a couple miles. I ain’t got my rocks off since Buffalo.’

“So I looked at him. I says, ‘You crazy? I gotta loada frozen chickens in there and a compressor goin’ nuts and it’s gotta be seventy-five degrees out there, which means that goddamned thing’s gonna break down on me any minute, and you’re tellin’ me I oughta stop for nookie? I do that and that damned thing’s gonna quit on me while I’m in there and I’ll get to Hyde Park with that truck smellin’ worse’n Alice after a hard night. That bastard down there, the night checker, he didn’t shit in years, he’s gonna take one whiff and tell me, “Rotten. Keep ’em.” Which is gonna leave me with a busted rig and no dough and a mad wife which I already had and didn’t want, and a three-ton loada spoiled chickens. Which I don’t think my kids’re gonna want to eat, and which
I
certainly don’t want and right now I haven’t got, like I do have the wife.’ So I says to him, ‘No, there’s enough rotten shit in my life as it is.’ ”

“Well,” Malatesta said, “inna first place, you gotta keep in mind that if you got yourself mixed up with Fein you are already obviously not very smart and you probably need as many guys as you can find, if you got any plans involve staying out of jail, on account of if you’re listening to Fein, if you are in a position which has got you listening to him, then you obviously do not know how things are yourself, on your own, and you need somebody to tell you. I was you, I would not want to listen to Fein either, because I have got good reason to know that Fein is an asshole, is what Fein is, and the only reason nobody has put him away for a long time yet’s because he’s just cute enough to find a bigger asshole’n himself to do the things he ought to’ve gone to jail for himself. Which in this case is you.”

“I don’t have no choice,” Proctor said. He rubbed his hand over his face. “I did that stupid thing.… The last stupid
thing I did recently was when Clinker Carroll got outta Walpole there and they had this homecoming thing for him the Saturday night before Memorial Day up there in that joint in Swampscott, you know?”

“Clinker didn’t last long, I’ll say that for him,” Malatesta said. “How long was he on the street, he got hooked again? A week? Less’n that.”

“About a week,” Proctor said. “Week or ten days. He has the usual problem which a guy has when he gets out, which is he gets all itchy with all the catchin’ up he’s gotta do. You come out of one of those places, they oughta give you a new car, good-lookin’ broad, ten grand walkin’ around, save a hell of a lot of chasin’ guys around that just came out. But, he’s out on bail now. Which is another thing of course.

“Anyway,” Proctor said, “like a fuckin’ asshole I go to Clinker’s party. And like the horse’s hang-down that I am, I get myself shitfaced. And I agree, I’m gonna take this guy home that I don’t even know his
name
, even, that lives in Framingham. And naturally, we get inna car onna Mass Pike and he’s drunker’n a goat himself, and we’re doing sixty-five, seventy. I’m all over the road and it’s a perfect night for that, of course, because there ain’t no more cops out that weekend’n there are at your average riot down the prison, and what does this asshole that I don’t even know, that I’m being nice enough, I’m drivin’ him home? What does
he
want to do? He wants to fight.

“I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it,” the fat man said. “As drunk as I was, and I was pretty drunk, I could not fuckin’ believe it. Just a little piece of shit, this guy, and he didn’t have no knife or anything, and I says to him, I am tryin’ talk him out of it, I couldn’t believe it. I’m all over the road. By now I’m doin’ at least eighty. Everything I see in front of me, there’s two of them. Every car’s got at least four taillights and ones that come with four’ve got eight, maybe sixteen, and I went through two tollbooths without, I didn’t hit nothin’, and
I’m trying to
reason
with this crazy drunken cocksucker. ‘Will you for the luvva Christ and his goddamned Blessed Mother calm down before you get us both in the slammer and dead at the same time?’ And he won’t, naturally, so we get out there in Weston and there’s nothin’ around but weeds and water and he hits me onna head. Right onna fuckin’ head, and I’m doin’ eighty and I already got enough things on my mind with seeing double and everything, and he clocks me one.”

“Auburn Alice,” Don said. “She the one that advertises, Channel 19?”

“I guess so,” Mickey said. “I never turn the damned CB on anymore. Too many assholes ratchet-mouthin’ shit at each other. I never heard of her. I had six thousand pounds of chicken in there I was worried about, and that was more’n enough for me. I dunno who she is.”

“That’s the one,” Don said. “That woman’s got diseases they never even heard of in Vietnam. She’s infected guys from Seattle, and guys from Monterey’ve given her new stuff to give to guys from Louisville. You oughta thank the Lord you had them goddamned chickens. You didn’t, you’d have something now they couldn’t cure unless they used a blowtorch on you.”

“What’d he hit you with?” Malatesta said.

“His fist,” Proctor said. “He didn’t have no gun or anything, thank God. And, it didn’t really hurt me much. He’s just a little guy. And he was also drunk. His aim wasn’t too good, even if he was strong. But it surprised me, you know? I was having trouble understanding things. The guy shocked the shit out of me. I didn’t expect it. I thought he was just screamin’ and hollerin’ and acting like a goddamned asshole and I was yelling at him and thinking I was either gonna calm the guy down before I got him home or else when I got him home and that car was stopped I would get out with him and cold-cock him into the rosebushes or something,
and he got quiet. Then he comes barrel-assin’ out of nowhere and belts me.

“So,” Proctor said, “naturally I do the reasonable thing and pull over the side of the road and stop the car and take the keys and get out and open his door and drag him out, beat the livin’ shit out of him and throw him inna goddamned lake, right? Wrong. I take my hands off the wheel and grab the little cocksucker. I am gonna beat the piss out of him. I don’t have to take this kind of shit from some little pisspot like that, that I am doing a favor for that is Clinker’s friend anyway and I don’t even know him. But I forget, of course, that I am right then doing eighty miles an hour in a car that I am the guy that’s supposed to be steering it, and I will tell you this: I am very glad this is the Mass Pike in Weston around three inna morning when there is much of nothing around on either side of me and it’s not like I’m down on Gallivan Boulevard there on a weekday afternoon doing the same thing when some big fat nun starts marching a whole buncha second-graders across the street so they can sing at Benediction, all right? Because I got him all right and belted him right into Labor Day, but at the same time I sort of went off the road some. Into this little pond they got there.”