Louie and Mike were discussing a rat that had been making itself at home in Louie's apartment for the past few days. Mike, Eric, and I trooped around behind the barn. There was a big Hav-a-Hart trap there, which Mike said he'd baited with some old tuna. Sure enough, there was squeaking emanating from inside the trap. Bingo!
Unfortunately, as I was leaning around to get a better look at the rat, Mike came up behind me to do the same. Somehow he managed to twist his back, which went into a spasm, and the next thing I knew Mike was lying flat on his back in the brush, groaning like he was about to die. Eric grabbed both his arms and with some effort was able to pull him into a sitting position and finally back onto his feet. Mike, being diabetic, has lost a few toes and most of the sole of one foot, and he stumps along like the old sea dog he is, so you can imagine how he looked standing there shaking on his pins, wincing, and muttering "godDAMN...shit....growl....my fucking back! can't believe it!" and so on.
The next order of business was the disposal of Mr. Rat. Mike had originally intended to release him behind the Vanderbilt Museum the next day, but that didn't seem like a good idea. The prisoner was galloping around hysterically inside the trap, squeaking piteously. Occasionally he would get his head stuck between the bars of the trap, and panicking, would be unable to get it out again, so the squeaking would increase exponentially. Clearly something had to be done immediately before the rat broke its neck. We offered to put the trap in the trunk of our car and drive down to Crab Meadow Beach and turn the prisoner loose. Mike appreciated the offer, as he still had some things to do in the house. He gave us ten bucks and told Eric to stop off afterward and pick up some beer for himself. Opening the door of a storage area in the barn, he took out a somewhat depleted bottle of vodka that had been hidden inside, and waved it at us. "I've got some Scotch in the house," he said. "And wine."
Crab Meadow Beach was only a mile or so away, and as we pulled into the parking lot it was almost dark...a dim, misty twilight. We drove to the farthest edge of the parking lot, near the piping plover sanctuary, and opened the trunk. Mr. Rat was still racing around the trap. Eric lifted the trap out, set it down in the sand near a large mound of seagrass, and opened the door. The prisoner shot out like a bullet, leaped more than a foot into the air, hit the ground running, and vanished instantly under the seagrass mound. "He'll have a great winter," I said. "He'll find his way into the storeroom at the La Casa restaurant and get fat on all the bags of flour, sugar, and pasta."
We picked up some Negra Modelos at the local beer distributor and headed back to Mike's. By then Mike had made himself comfortable in the kitchen.
Mike's house was built around 1740. The British burned it in the 1770's, and it was rebuilt in 1780. Some additions and modifications were made in the 1870's. To me, the 18th-century parts of the house seemed newer and more alive, somehow, than the 19th-century ones. The original summer kitchen, with its cooking fireplace and hardware for turning spits and suspending cooking pots over the fire, was one of my favorite hangouts when we were staying there. The dining room, with its 18th-century fireplace and 19th-century iron stove, seemed very removed in time from the present, and the upstairs bedrooms were definitely Victorian: small, stuffy, and closed off...but as I sat in the summer kitchen with its thick, dense beams and worn stone hearth, I sometimes thought I could hear the voices of women in mob caps, gossiping as they turned the roast on the spit, and the laughter of men in knee breeches, sitting on rough-hewn benches quaffing home brew from copper tankards, and discussing the progress of the revolution.
We shared various libations with Mike, and swapped tall tales. Mike, of course, was the master of the notorious cruiser Magdalena back in the days when boys were men and men were generally drunk. His infirmities have kept him on shore more than he would like in the past couple of years; but he still vows that he'll have his latest boat in the water next spring. We talked about Mike's parents; how his father had died cursing Phil Donahue, and how for the open-casket funeral, Mike's mother had laid out the distinctly Republican paterfamilias in a Jimmy Carter joke tie showing the peanut farming president with his tongue sticking out. Mike's mother passed away this June, and now, as Mike wryly observed, "Where there's a will there's a family." Somehow the subject got on to Piss Clam Charlie's funeral in Northport...how Charlie's clammer friends had placed a keg on top of the coffin, and the wake had roared on into the wee small hours as everyone shared stories about the old salt. And of course Denny "The Rat" Teele, one of the more colorful Northport Village oldtimers, about whom stories abound. Like the time Mike ran into Denny walking along Main Street at midday, lugging a huge mast which it turned out he had stolen from somebody's sailboat.
And then, inevitably, stories about the Magdalena days...Eric, then universally known as "the Skinny Kid," asleep in his boxer shorts on the roof of the cabin as the stately vessel chugged into Northport harbor, much to the amusement of the folks ashore. Or the future software mogul who as a pimply adolescent had invited himself on board, and forever disgraced himself by getting drunk and seasick for the first time and losing his lunch over the side. "Chum for the fish," Mike had told him. Or Mike's adventures with the Eaton's Neck police...the Harbor Police...the Northport Police...the Coast Guard...
Or the time when he was living on one of his boats, and had awakened one morning, hung over and bleary, to find the cat sleeping on his chest. Mike is pretty blind without his glasses. He had reached down sleepily and stroked the cat...only to realize that it didn't quite feel like a cat...he unglued his eyelids, peered down, and saw that he was petting a huge water rat.
"Well," said Mike finally, "I guess I ought to get going...have to get a pizza and take it to Arleen at the Board of Elections." We helped him clean up and get rid of any evidence that we'd been there for the past two and a half hours. Arleen, unfortunately, holds grudges for years. We were still on her shit list. We didn't want Mike to get into any trouble.
And so, reminding Mike that we had recently received a bottle of Haig & Haig Scotch as an early Christmas present, we bid him good night.
I'm sure we'll see him soon.
