The Mouse and His Child Read online

  “Be tramps,” he said, and turned and walked away with the dog at his heels.

  THE MOUSE FATHER walked forward onto the bridge, pushing the child backward before him until his motor ran down and he could move no farther. Trains rumbled and shrieked on the tracks below. Cars and trucks shook the bridge as they roared past and vanished in the distance while father and son stood trembling.

  The afternoon wore on toward evening, and the broken glass and mica of the roadside glittered in the last, low sunlight of the day. The snowy fields glowed briefly and went dark. At the dump the trash fires smoldered, red and smoky in the dusk. The bridge lights went on, and beyond their unearthly blue glare the highway lamps spaced out the twilight to the dark horizon. A gibbous moon stared crookedly down from the cold sky until it was blotted out by clouds. Far away the clock on the town hall tolled the hours, and the mouse and his child waited in silence until they heard the twelve faint strokes of midnight.

  “You see now where your crying has brought us,” said the father.

  “I’m sorry, Papa,” said the child. “I didn’t mean to cry. I couldn’t help it.”

  The father looked thoughtfully into the night beyond the bridge, where red taillights diminished and white headlights continually approached. The wind was rising, and in the silences between the traffic, the girders of the bridge creaked with the cold. “How strange it is to walk straight ahead!” he said.

  “I walked backward,” said the child, “but I liked it better than dancing in a circle. What shall we do now?”

  “Who knows?” said the father. “There seems to be a good deal more to the world than the Christmas tree and the attic and the trash can. Anything at all might happen, I suppose.”

  “But it won’t,” said a soft voice close by. “Not this evening, my lads.”

  A large rat crept out of the shadows of the girders into the light of the overhead lamps, and stood up suddenly on his hind legs before the mouse and his child. He wore a greasy scrap of silk paisley tied with a dirty string in the manner of a dressing gown, and he smelled of darkness, of stale and moldy things, and garbage. He was there all at once and with a look of tenure, as if he had been waiting always just beyond their field of vision, and once let in would never go away. In the eerie blue glare he peered beadily at father and son, and his eyes, as passing headlights came and went, flashed blank and red like two round tiny ruby mirrors. His whiskers quivered as his face came closer; he bared his yellow teeth and smiled, and a paw shot out to strike the mouse and his child a rattling blow that knocked them flat.

  “Time to be moving along now,” said the rat. He set them on their feet, wound up the father, and guided them across the bridge and up the road toward the dump. As they walked below the highway lamps their shadows swung behind them, then before, then disappeared in darkness till the next dim circled light was reached.

  “Where are you taking us?” asked the father.

  “To a ball,” said the rat. “To a jolly, jolly ball at the royal palace, where we shall all drink champagne and dance until dawn. How’ll that be?” He laughed softly. His voice, half pleasant, half repellent, was oddly mild and persuasive.

  “Are we really going to a palace?” asked the child.

  “I don’t think so,” said the father. “He’s teasing us.”

  “Yes,” said the rat, “I’m a dreadful tease — famous for my sense of humor. And here we are home again, safe and sound.”

  They were off the highway now, and at the dump. Stumbling over snow-covered rubbish, they followed a path through a city of rats and other vermin, where little refuse fires tended by the inhabitants threw dancing shadows on the dirty snow. Tunnels and alleyways led through the trash to dark and filthy dwellings. Skulking figures watched them pass, and loud rat voices all around them quarreled, cursed, and sang. The pathway widened as they went, and little hole-and-corner stalls with rat proprietors appeared.

  “Orange peels — imported and domestic! Fancy molds — green, white, and black!” cried a wizened little vendor with matted fur. “Bacon grease, guaranteed two months old — some with egg scraps —going fast!” He beckoned to the dressing-gowned rat. “How about some caviar, Manny?” he said. “Hard as a rock. Not less than six weeks old. Very nice.”

  Manny Rat fingered the caviar and handed it back. “Haven’t you got any of that imported treacle brittle?” he said. “The kind that comes wrapped in red foil?”

  “Next trip my buyer makes,” said the other. He winked at Manny Rat, then continued his chant. “Orange peels! Bacon grease! Scented soaps! Library paste!”

  As the mouse and his child stumbled on they heard thin and ragged voices singing:

  Who’s that passing in the night?

  Foragers for Manny Rat!

  We grab first and we hold tight —

  Foragers for Manny Rat!

  The voices trailed off wearily in groans and curses.

  “Come on,” snarled someone, “keep it moving, you!”

  “My spring’s gone,” came the tinny reply. “See for yourself — one end of it’s sticking out of my chest. I’m done!”

  “No such luck,” said another tin voice as the unseen group passed out of earshot.

  Manny Rat snickered, and pushed the mouse and his child along through an evil-smelling huddle of gambling dens, gaming booths, dance halls and taverns, all crudely built of scraps of wood and cardboard boxes. The bonfires in the alleyways threw moving shadows of the revelers large on walls of open stalls; the dance halls thumped and whistled savagely with tin-can drums, reed pipes, and matchbox banjos, while the dim light of candles through the doors and windows sent bobbing rat shapes dancing blackly on the snow. Farther off above the general din there rose the cracked voice of a windup carousel that played a waltz with many missing notes. Beyond the rubbish mountains and the trash fires wailed a passing freight, its wheels faintly clacking on the distant rails.

  “Hurry, hurry! Step right up!” shouted a red-and-black sexton beetle at the entrance of an orange-crate theater. The guttering flames of birthday-candle stubs behind him threw his frisking shadow on the snow ahead. The beetle wore a cape made from the fur of a woolly bear caterpillar, but he shivered nonetheless.

  “A scientific exhibit!” he announced to passersby. “An education for the whole family!” He drew aside a ragged curtain to disclose, lit by the fitful candles, a headless pink celluloid hula doll wearing the faded remnants of a cellophane grass skirt. Two cricket musicians, barely kept from freezing by a nest of dead grass in a glass jar, huddled together, too cold to chirp.

  “I don’t like this place, Papa,” whimpered the mouse child.

  “Hush,” said the father. “Crying won’t help.”

  “Observe her curious motion as she sways this way and that!” urged the beetle. He wound the key in the headless doll’s back, and she jiggled listlessly while the candle flames sank in the wind. “Let’s go, boys!” he said, and kicked the cricket jar. The crickets chirped once and lapsed into silence. The beetle let the curtain fall. “There’s more inside!” he yelled. “Step up and see the show!”

  “How much have you taken in this evening?” asked Manny Rat.

  “Very slow tonight,” said the sexton beetle. He showed him the small end of a salami and a dead sparrow half buried in the snow.

  “We haven’t been burying anything on the sly, have we?” said Manny Rat, taking the salami. “We make sure Manny always gets his cut?”

  “It’s been a slow winter,” said the beetle. “I’m doing the best I can. Honest.”

  Manny Rat wound up the mouse father, and they left the midway and started up a slope on which the father and the child fell many times. “Almost there, chaps,” he said. “Then you can rest your clockwork for a bit before you resume your duties.”

  The slope leveled off. They walked through a rusty bedspring, around the skeleton of a baby carriage, and found themselves in a long, narrow space where empty beer cans, standing like elms at the entrance
to a manor, made an avenue that led to the gutted and screenless cabinet of a long-dead television set, the residence of Manny Rat.

  The mouse and his child, unwound, came to a stop, while their captor sat down on the edge of the hole where the television screen had been and ate his salami. As he looked up into the night, the massed clouds lifted to reveal the sky. The moon had set; the stars were sharp and clear. Low above the horizon wheeled Orion the Hunter, and near the luminous scattering of the Milky Way, in the Great Dog constellation, blazed Sirius, the brightest star of all. Manny Rat liked dark nights best; he grimaced at the stars and turned away.

  Standing as he was on uneven ground, the child was tilted at such an angle that he too saw the Dog Star, beyond his father’s shoulder. He had never looked up at the sky before; indeed, he had as yet seen little of the earth, and even that little was more frightening than he had imagined. At first the icy glitter of the far-off star was terrifying to him; he sensed a distance so vast as to reduce him to nothing. But as he looked and looked upon that steady burning he was comforted a little; if he was nothing, he thought, so also was this rat and all the dump. His father’s hands were firm upon his, and he resolved to see what next the great world offered.

  “What are you going to do with us?” the father asked Manny Rat. “Why have you brought us here?”

  Manny Rat ignored the question, and looked back over the trodden snow toward the far end of the beer-can avenue. The mouse and his child heard the singing again, and in the dim starlight they saw, dark against the snow, an ugly young rat tough driving a group of battered windup toys ahead of him. There were more than a dozen of them, all staggering under the weight of the bags they carried on their backs. They had been salvaged from the dump by Manny Rat and Ralphie, his assistant and rat-of-all-work, and whatever mobility they possessed was due to the mechanical skill of the two rats. Once they had been kicking donkeys, dancing bears, tumbling clowns, roaring lions, baaing goats — all manner of specialties were represented in the group — but few of them by now had all their faculties, and most of them had lost a limb or two along with fur and clothing, eyes and ears. All their trades and tricks were gone; the best that they could do was plod ahead when wound, and that not very well. They tottered up the avenue, led by a moldy goat, both lame and blind, who with the others feebly sang:

  Who’s that passing in the night?

  Foragers for Manny Rat!

  Make your move and take your bite

  After us, or stand and fight

  Manny Rat!

  The song faltered into silence as the foragers came to a stop at various points between the beer cans, those whose springs were not completely unwound being knocked down by Ralphie. The mouse and his child stared at the other toys, and the standing members of the group stared back in silence.

  “Where’d they come from?” asked Ralphie, as he shuffled up to report to his master.

  “I found them wandering on the road,” said Manny Rat, “where they’d evidently straggled away from your squad. Aren’t these a couple of your new recruits?”

  “I don’t think I ever seen them two before,” said Ralphie. “But all them windups look alike to me anyhow. I never know whether I got the whole squad unless I count.” He leered at the mouse and his child. “Wandering on the road, hey? Maybe their motor’s too strong. Maybe I should work them over a little.”

  “Never mind them for now,” said Manny Rat. “I should very much like to know who it was I heard complaining a little while ago. Something about a broken spring, I believe.”

  “Him,” said Ralphie, pointing to a one-eyed, three-legged donkey. “He got a lot to say.”

  “It’s nothing,” said the frightened donkey as he heard Manny Rat approach his blind side. “I’ve got plenty of work left in me. I was just feeling a little low — you know how it is.”

  “You’re not well,” said Manny Rat. “I can see that easily. What you need is a long rest.” He picked up a heavy rock, lifted it high, and brought it down on the donkey’s back, splitting him open like a walnut. “Put his works in the spare-parts can,” said Manny Rat to Ralphie.

  The young rat deftly removed the donkey’s motor-and-leg assembly and dropped it into an empty tin can that stood near the mouse and his child. BONZO DOG FOOD, said the white letters on the orange label, and below the name was a picture of a little black-and-white spotted dog, walking on his hind legs and wearing a chef’s cap and an apron. The dog carried a tray on which there was another can of BONZO DOG FOOD, on the label of which another little black-and-white spotted dog, exactly the same but much smaller, was walking on his hind legs and carrying a tray on which there was another can of BONZO DOG FOOD, on the label of which another little black-and-white spotted dog, exactly the same but much smaller, was walking on his hind legs and carrying a tray on which there was another can of BONZO DOG FOOD, and so on until the dogs became too small for the eye to follow. The father stared at the can as the parts fell in with a melancholy clink; the child’s back was to it.

  “What about the rest of our gallant foragers?” said Manny Rat. “Is anyone else not feeling well tonight?” No one answered. Some standing, some lying in the snow, they waited in silence, their rusty metal and mildewed plush glinting with frost.

  Manny Rat turned to the mouse father. “I can see by the way you stare that you have not been here before,” he said. “Let me welcome you, then, to the dump, and to our happy band.” He came closer and bared his slanting yellow teeth. “Notice my teeth, if you will,” he said. “Pretty, aren’t they? They’re the longest, strongest, sharpest teeth in the dump.” He swept his paw around the dark horizon. “All this will belong to Manny Rat one day,” he said. “I’ll be the boss of the whole place. Is that so or isn’t it, Ralphie!” He leaped suddenly at the young rat.

  “You’re the boss, Boss,” said Ralphie, stepping back quickly. “Don’t get excited.”

  Smiling and rubbing his paws together, Manny Rat walked over to the silent squad of toys. “What have we tonight?” he said.

  Ralphie emptied the bags, heaping on the snow bread crusts, apple cores, partly eaten pork chops, two or three unfinished lollipops, a rotten egg, half a can of anchovies, two marbles, a piece of red glass, and other choice gleanings of the local garbage cans. “That’s it,” he said. “And I seen another busted windup we could fix. It was over by that smashed-up folding table, toward the road.”

  “Any treacle brittle?” said Manny Rat.

  “The last I heard of was the other day,” said Ralphie. “A couple of fellows pulled off a job at a grocery store. But after they got the treacle brittle they put it in the vault over at the Meadow Mutual Hoard and Trust Company.”

  “Then don’t hang around here, for heaven’s sake,” said Manny Rat. “Get over there and get it for me.”

  “How?” said Ralphie. “I don’t even know where the vault is.”

  “Listen carefully and remember what I tell you,” said Manny Rat. “First you go into the bank and tell them you’re thinking of renting a safe-deposit hole. Then they’ll show you the vault.”

  “They’ll show me the vault,” repeated Ralphie.

  “Then you say, ‘Thank you,’ ” Manny Rat continued, “and you go outside and dig a tunnel into the vault. The ground there is sandy, and it’s easy digging, but you must be very careful not to come out where the guard is.”

  “Where the guard is,” said Ralphie. “I got it.”

  “Then you get the treacle brittle and bring it back here,” said Manny Rat. “What could be simpler? There may be more than you can carry,” he said, licking his lips. “Take a windup with you. Hurry now, while the bank’s still open — they close at dawn.”

  The mouse father heard, and he knew that here, for the moment at least, was a way forward and out of the dump. He could not look beyond that, and did not attempt to. Take us, he thought. Take us.

  “These two look like good carriers,” said Ralphie. He hung a paper bag from the joined hands of the mo
use and his child, and wound up the father. “Let’s go,” he said, and started them moving across the dirty snow that gleamed pale in the starlit beer-can avenue.

  “We have seen murder committed tonight,” said the father to his son, “and now we are to be thieves. But we must keep moving forward.”

  “Let’s knock off the chatter,” said Ralphie. “I got a lot to think about.” He began to mutter to himself, rehearsing the words he would say at the bank, while he pushed the mouse and his child ahead of him into a black, malodorous tunnel that wound down through the trash piles and out beyond the rubbish mountains to the far edge of the dump.

  The narrow passage dipped and twisted and climbed, and the mouse and his child, constantly falling and being set on their feet again by Ralphie, trudged on until they emerged into the open night on a steep, snow-covered tin-can slope above the red glare of the trash fires. A pall of smoke drifted over a narrow path across the slope, and here they heard someone approaching and the chanting of a deep and melancholy voice.

  “ARE YOUR EYES LOSING THEIR REDNESS?” boomed the voice. “HAS THE SNAP GONE OUT OF YOUR TAIL? NATURE’S REMEDIES AND RESTORATIVES SOLD HERE. LOVE POTIONS AND MAGIC CHARMS.”

  “Him and his magic charms!” said Ralphie. “If the boss didn’t think it’d bring bad luck, I’d charm him!”

  “DREAMS INTERPRETED,” continued the chant. “FORTUNES TOLD. TERRITORIES SURVEYED. WEDDINGS PERFORMED. MODERATE FEES.” Black against the luminous smoke, an odd and slowly hopping shape appeared. Passing alternately through darkness and light as the flames below it rose and fell, it came steadily up the path, and drawing closer, revealed itself to be a large bullfrog who wore an old and tattered woolen glove against the winter cold. His bulging eyes looked out from the opening in which a hand would ordinarily be inserted, his limbs stuck out through four frayed holes, and the empty woolen fingers and thumb dragged behind him. A coin swung from a string around his neck; a little bag of travel provisions hung at his side; a matchbox was slung on his back, and it rattled with his stock of herbs, medicinal sundries, charms, and amulets as he hopped through the winter, alone of his kind while all the world of frogs slept safely in the mud.