Mike Nelson's Death Rat! by Michael J. Nelson Read Free Book Online Page B

said, and pretended to think. “Well, anyway,” he finished,waving at the air. Phil, he knew, wouldn’t understand Death Rat, wouldn’t know the costs. He glanced at Phil’s yellowing T-shirt with its cryptic slogan, BREAK IT IF YOU GOT IT , and decided Death Rat was too good for Phil.
    He did not want to answer his roommate’s questions, so, to preserve secrecy, Ponty shifted his base of research to a public library in Pelican Falls, a suburb of Minneapolis just fifteen minutes away by bus. The Pelican Falls public library remained largely unvisited at most times, and Ponty was free to use its resources without having to answer to anyone. Ponty enjoyed research, and for this project he was committed and excited by the material even more than he had been for Everett M. Dirksen: The Other McKinley , a topic that had energized him greatly.
    For three weeks his days consisted of waking, showering, eating Fam-a-lee Brand bagged cereal with his roommates, and catching the 8:42 bus to Pelican Falls, where he would spend the morning researching. Here Ponty was fully in his element, impressing the librarian, a fastidious man in his early thirties, with his extensive knowledge of the Dewey decimal system.
    When he had completed his research, he returned his base of operations to his room, because for his actual writing, Ponty needed even more solitude than could be provided by the oft-empty Pelican Falls branch. On a warm, windy day in early July, Ponty sat down with nearly one hundred pages of handwritten notes by his side and began work on the manuscript.
    Though he was on fire to complete it, progress went more slowly than he thought it might. Sags, who Ponty knew was within his right to do so, would come in and out of the room dozens of times a day. That was not so much a distraction as was his absurdly exaggerated “sneaking” demeanor. He producedthe same amount of noise no matter what he did, but his tiptoeing with hands at his side like an actor at a children’s theater disturbed Ponty more than anything. He would have preferred the earsplitting levels of old Ted Nugent albums to Sags’s histrionics.
    â€œTry the attic,” Scotty had suggested when Ponty had laid out his problem before him.
    â€œThere’s an attic?” Ponty asked. He’d never been good with houses. He didn’t get them. The reason he’d never bought a house was that a drain trap in the extra bathroom of a place he was renting had once corroded through when his landlord was away. This alone had put him off houses forever.
    When Scotty suggested the attic, Ponty had imagined a quaint, dusty, and spacious room littered charmingly with old oak-based dressmaking forms, steamer trunks, and yellowing silk lampshades. The attic in which he set up his writing space was more like a medium-size closet with a peaked ceiling. It smelled like discarded sneaker inserts, and it was hellaciously hot. Ponty brought a thermometer up with him, and one day when the temperature outside reached 95 degrees, it was 126 in the attic. The next morning, for the first time in his life, he made a trip to the Tom Thumb convenience store and invested in a “sports drink,” figuring that if he ever needed to replace his electrolytes, now was the time. It tasted like Kool-Aid made with melted plastic instead of water.
    He devoted himself to his book throughout the days and into the evenings, often shirtless, a fact that was as upsetting to himself as it was to anyone who happened to see him in such a state. Access to his space was available only through a ladder that went up into the ceiling of Beater’s room, so he would have topeek through the trapdoor to see if the coast was clear and then maneuver his sweaty body down the ladder, refill his thermos with water, perhaps grab a box of one of the many varieties of snack crackers from their cupboard, and return to his labor. He wrote in longhand on yellow legal pads,