Page 38 of Snake

This day had sucked every year of the past twenty, but today was sure to be worse than usual. His mother had struggled hard all spring and summer, and the small voice that had been whispering in the back of his head all these years was now shrieking. Every time he went over to his childhood home—and lately that was every day he possibly could—he prepared himself to find his mother’s struggle over.

She’d lost too much of her family. All she had left was him, and he was not enough. Conversely, all he had was her, and she was everything. If—when—she finally gave up he’d ...

He wouldn’t do that. He’d endure. But he’d be empty.

Emptier.

Well, for now, this day was what he had to endure, so he opened the mirror, grabbed his toothpaste, and got on with his morning routine.

He was just about finished, brushing his hair back from his face, when a scratching sound beside the sink drew his attention. Charlize, his seal point satin rat, was climbing the laundry hamper.

“Mornin’, pretty lady,” Cox cooed. He put his brush away and set his hand on the side of the sink. Charlize jumped onto the porcelain from the hamper top and stepped onto his palm. He set her on his shoulder, smiling at the pleasantly familiar grip of her tiny claws. “I’m gonna have to figure you out, Miss Houdini. That’s the third time this week.”

She answered by rising on her back feet and nibbling his beard.

Still wearing only a bath towel—he lived alone, so it didn’t matter—Cox left the bathroom carrying his toothy hitchhiker and went into his spare bedroom, which he’d converted into a paradise neither of his ratty babies was supposed to want to leave. But rats were smart, and Charlize was apparently smarter than most.

Traditional rodent cages depressed the fuck out of him, so when his neighbor had died and left a Russian blue standard rat behind and Cox had taken her in, he’d gotten rid of her tiny prison as soon as he could. Instead, he’d turned his previously empty second bedroom into a rat ‘environment,’ with areas for eating, shitting, playing, sleeping, and exploring.

He had no idea what Mr. Adderley had called his rat, but Cox had named her Cate, and he’d loved her at once. She was like a tiny dog, cuddly and loyal.

A few months ago, he’d picked up Charlize from a breeder when he’d learned that rats do better with a friend. Charlize was sweet, too, but—maybe because she was still young, the rat version of a tween—she was mischievous. She and Cate got along the way old dogs got along with puppies; Cate was patient, and Charlize tested that patience daily. But they played together and, maybe more importantly, cuddled together to sleep.

Cate was still curled up in the fluffy donut bed this morning; she lifted her head, sniffed a greeting, stretched, and gaped a yawn. Then she tucked her face under her paws and returned to her slumber. She had no interest in being an action hero. This room was paradise to her.

He set Charlize in the ‘playland’ area and turned around to study the room. “How’d you do it this time, missy?”

Around the room and across the walls, Cox had installed activities for curious rodents. There was a little ‘treehouse’ high in a corner by the window, and a twine-and-popsicle-stick bridge ran around the walls, directing to the treehouse and to various platforms and other stations as well. When he’d installed all that, he hadn’t realized how easily a rat with the will to do it could use that bridge to get to the doorknob, or that a rat could understand how a lever doorknob worked, but Charlize had schooled him. Last week, after the first time he’d found her relishing her free-range rathood, he’d taken down sections from either side of the door.

But Charlize had discovered freedom, and she’d taken it upon herself to win it daily. The second time, he’d figured out that she’d jumped to the doorknob from the nearest platform he’d left up, so he’d moved that, too. Today ...

“Well, fuck me blue. Did you do that by yourself?” He turned to Charlize, who stood on the maze house in the middle of the play area, on her back haunches, her cute little front hand-paws clutched together as if she were a good little girl saying her prayers.

He turned back to the door and studied the stack—the stack—of balsam blocks a few inches away. “How the hell’d you do that?”

He halfway expected Charlize to bat her little black eyes at him.

Picking her up and cuddling her to his chest, he said, “I’d leave the door open if I could, but you could get hurt out there. I’m too big to find all the places in this old house you could slip into. I can’t let you run loose when I’m not around. That’s why I made this room so nice.”

She twitched her whiskers at him.

He hated to do it, but he had to put some kind of lock on the outside of the door. At least a hook-and-eye. Sometimes the world was just too damn big.

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~oOo~

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About half an hour later, after he’d installed the hook-and-eye and was putting his tools away, his burner buzzed.

Angry at once, Cox sneered at the sound. All his brothers knew what today was, and that he was out of pocket for the whole day. He grabbed the phone and saw it was Mel, calling from his personal.

“What?” he barked as he answered.

“Hey, brother. Sorry to call today.”

Cox didn’t reply. He let the quiet sit there until Mel got on with whatever he needed to say.

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