Sweeney was busy with a busted radiator on the third floor, so nobody around this time to tell him scary stories and chase him home again, and Frank walked right on past the super’s door, stood shivering in the chilly, mildewstinking air of the hallway. Sweeney laughed again and slammed his door, left Frank alone in the dark, his heart thumping loud and his head filled with visions of the voracious, giant rats that tunneled through masonry and dined on any cat unlucky enough to get in their way.Īnd that’s the way it went, week after week, month after month, until one snowblind February afternoon, too cold and wet to go outside and his mother didn’t notice when he slipped quietly downstairs with the flashlight she kept in a kitchen drawer. “You better get your skinny rump back upstairs, or they’re gonna eat you too,” and then Mr. “We had whole goddamn cat armies, but when these rats get done, ain’t never anything left but some gnawed-up bones and whiskers.” Sweeney laughed, phlegmy old man laugh, and “Oh, we had some cats, boy,” he said. “They why don’t you get a cat?” Frank asked once and Mr. Can chew straight through concrete, these rats we got.” They got eyes like acetylene blow torches and teeth like carving knives.
Boy, there’s rats under this dump big as German shepherd puppies.
Sweeney would nod his head, point towards the long hall and say “You better believe there’s rats. “Are there really rats down there?” Frank might ask and Mr. Sweeney’s open door, would shrug or mumble the most noncommittal response he could come up with. Frank would squint at the flood of light from Mr. Sweeney would ask whenever he came out and found Frank lurking in the shadows. “Does your mama know you’re always haging around down here?” Mr. Dirty, whiteyellow stain that only seemed to emphasize the gloom, drawing attention to just how very dark dark could be, and after school Frank would stand at the bottom of the stairs for an hour at a time, peering into the hall that led down to the basement. Rats might even be carrying plague, she said, but the sooty blackness at the foot of the stairs was too much temptation for any seven-year old, the long, long hallway past the door to the super’s apartment and sometimes a single naked bulb burned way down at the end of that hall. And of course he’d been told to stay out of the basement, no place for a child to play because there were rats down there, his mother said, and rats could give you tetanus and rabies. Mark’s where his parents lived after his father took a job in Manhattan and moved them from the New Jersey suburbs across the wide, gray Hudson. Frank was seven years old when he found the fields of red grass growing behind the basement wall.
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