Free The Rat on Fire by George V. Higgins

and my mother and her husband, Jack, who died two days ago. I don’t know these people. I met Jack and Ellen once or twice, I guess. He used to run a liquor store in Newton. Nice guy, but he’s dead. Dead two days, right? So what? What is that to me? I say, ‘Died two days ago? They should probably bury him.’ She says, this is my mother, she says, ‘They did bury him. They haven’t got enough men for Kaddish. You got to come over. They are two short and you have to come over and bring somebody else.’
    “I told her,” Fein said. “I said, ‘It is Sunday night. I don’t know where anybody is. I will come over myself, but I can’t find anybody else at this hour on a Sunday night. Are all the men dead who live in Brook House?’ She tells me, ‘Jerry, it is Sunday night. How the hell you expect me to find somebody who is a man here on a Sunday night?’ I tell her, ‘I cannot find another guy this late this fast on Sunday night.’
    “You know what happens?” Fein said. “I will tell you what happens. I make Tommy Gallagher into a Jew. I say to Tommy, ‘All right, you mick asshole, you are going to get into my car and we are going over to Brookline and you are going to put on a little hat and you are going to be a Jew for one night for a change.’ And he says to me, ‘I can’t do that. I don’t even go to church anymore. My own church. I went there last Christmas and they dumped the regular Gospel and read about the prodigal son, they saw me. How the hellcan I be a Jew, I’m not even a good Catholic?’ I tell him, ‘Get in the car.’ He gets in the car and we go and Tommy does better with the chanting than I do. ‘All that altar boy training,’ he says.
    “Now,” Fein said, “the hell you think that is, huh, they got to haul in the goyim for a quorum, they can sit Shiva in Brookline, huh? I will tell you what it is. It is rats.
Rats
, Leo. Big fat fuckin’ rats that run around all the time looking like the Pittsburgh Steelers, they’re so big. Rats in the basement. Rats in the yard. Rats in the garage and rats in the rubbish in the side yard. Big, fat, fuckin’
rats
.
    “Rats,” Fein said, “rats was among the things that when my father died, I said to my mother, ‘You got to, you have got to move out of this fuckin’ neighborhood.’ I did not say
fuckin’
, because I didn’t need to and besides if I did need to, the minute I said that she would not have heard nothing else. And I said to her, ‘What you have here is this: you have people here who do not take care of the things they own and they are always throwing away food that they buy on the money I give them with the taxes I pay, and they attract rats. If I was a rat, I would also come around here for a while and sit down and have a nice lunch for myself every day. Looks like pretty good food to me. You got the chicken wings and the hambones and they throw out the vegetables and stuff and it isn’t bad. See? So, you got to get out of here. Because the niggers’re in and the rats’re on the way and the first kind of animals aren’t leaving and the second kind’s gonna come in larger numbers. If I make myself clear. And they’re gonna breed when they get here, because there is only one thing that a rat likes better’n a free lunch and that is making more rats. So you got to get out.’
    “Well,” Fein said, “you would’ve thought I went and told her, ‘Cut your foot off.’ She came out of the box like something that’d been penned up for a helluva long time, and she tells me she will not do it. That this is her home. That isn’t itenough, she lost her husband when he died too young. That I am no good as a son and not much better as a human being, and I also have other character defects and deficiencies. I thought I was getting indicted for something. I was sitting there waiting for
my
lawyer to come in, and I didn’t even have a lawyer at the time. I wasn’t even indicted. And she finally stops for breath and I tell