The Rat

Non-Fiction

I. September, 2014. Coventry, CT

It’s been ten minutes now, I think. I check my phone: no, fifteen. Glancing right, I watch the traffic on Main Street through the plate glass window. Cars and pick-ups constantly roll up and down the hill. People screech their tires, blare their horns, but no one pulls into the Citgo lot. It’s the only gas station in this part of town and usually business is booming, but the pumps are lonely today. 

Fadia, the Slavic assistant manager, counts cigarettes behind the counter. She’s forty-something, not that old, but she hasn’t aged well. Her hair used to be black, I can still see a few colored roots, but her head is mostly gray and white now. I watch Fadia for a moment as she goes down the rack, marking her clipboard, and I can’t help but think she’s at death’s door. Rail-thin, the veins on her arms and hands pop from underneath the skin. Her eyes are sunk in while her face appears wrinkled and dried from years of working three jobs. Appears I’ll be working for Skeletor. 

“Hey, Fadia,” I call out, “Is Judy ready yet?”

Fadia turns around and blinks. “Huh?” She croaks in her high-pitched, sandpaper voice.

“I said--”

“I know what you said.” 

A beat skips. “Uh, what?”

“I mean what are you doing here?” Fadia asks, talking slowly. With her thick gypsy accent and the cadence of her voice, she’s impossible to understand unless she talks slow. “Who are you?”

“I’m Nick. Nick LaPointe. Your, uh, your boss was supposed to interview me for a job like…” I check my phone again. “Twenty minutes ago now.” She still didn’t get it. “We talked on the phone today, you and I?” Nope. “When I came in, you told me to stand right here to wait for Judy.”

“Oh! Okay. Wait right - Oh, hold on, hun.” A lady walks in just then and approaches the counter. I check out the window and four cars have pulled in suddenly. While Fadia’s dealing with the lady, I start exploring. Walking out from behind the off-brand candy aisle, I head towards the manager’s office in the corner of the store. 

The door’s wide open; it’s a small space. There’s a desk with an old Dell computer. A single midget-sized file cabinet. Papers spread haphazardly across the desk. I don’t see Judy, so I walk a bit closer, thinking maybe she’s chilling around the corner. A few more people come into the Citgo station as business finally picks up. Fadia’s too busy helping all of them, so I stick my head in through the office door and look around. 

I don’t know what I was expecting. Some more file cabinets maybe, a break room, something office-y. Instead I turn left and the area immediately transitions into a stock room/cooler. Turning right, it’s piles of old newspapers, cleaning supplies, and an occupied bathroom. Now that’s gotta be disappointing for management, they don’t even get a real office. I mean sure, there’s a wall-mounted TV above the computer with a camera feed on display, splitting the whole store layout into five angles, but aside from that there’s nothing that screams “professional” here. It’s just a small hallway with a desk.

There’s a loud flush from the bathroom, so I back out of the office and chill by the Slushpuppy machine. A moment later, Judy the Citgo manager comes waddling onto the floor. 

Judy is middle aged and morbidly obese. She’s not so far gone that she needs to ride a scooter everywhere, but she has too many rolls on her. Deep, cavernous rolls: rolls that reek from all the sweat collecting underneath, and the dirt, and the bacteria, years of it left to simply be. I can taste the smell. Imagine you’re nose to nose with a dead body that’s been rotting in the sun for a week – that scent carries.

A few customers wrinkle their noses and one guy almost gags - seriously - but Fadia doesn’t skip a beat. Must be used to it by now. Judy points at me. “Are you Nick?”

“Yep.”

Judy smiles. Her lumpy jowls lift and sag like a bulldog’s. Her canines poke out from under her lips and her nose flares wide. Her eyes are a dark brown, almost black. She looks like an extra from the set of Troll 2. “Nice to meet you.” Judy waddles closer and meets me by the Slushpuppy.

Giving her my best smile, I reach out to Judy and shake her hand. Judy ignores the gesture and goes right for the Slushpuppy, grabbing a large cup and filling it under the blue raspberry nozzle. She chugs the cup of blue sugar, burps and covers her mouth. “Excuse me.” Now Judy shakes my hand. 

So, standing in the middle of the store, her holding a pen and a clipboard up, we finally start the interview. Judy asks me a few standard questions: 

“Do you go to school?”

“Not right now,” I said. “I’m taking a semester off.”

“Oh, why’s that?”

“Uh.” I tap my foot. “Just figuring out some stuff I guess. Trying to see if school is really for me, y’know?”

“I see. So what’s your major?”

“English. I’m trying to be a writer.”

Judy lights up. “How fun, I was too. I actually wrote a book of poems way back when.”

What’d you call it, Sonnets for Diabetics?

“Really?” I ask. “Did you ever get published?”

Judy looks back down at the checklist and coughs. She scribbles another note and looks back at me, smiling again. 

II. October 31st, 2014

Been a month since I got the job at Citgo. It’s not much to write home about. It sucks, but that’s working at a gas station for you. There’s nothing to it, I stand behind a counter for eight hours a day, four days a week, nine dollars an hour. I count change and ring people up on the world’s only remaining dial-up cash register. The inside of the Citgo is like any other Citgo, it’s a dirty convenience store. The white tiled floors are dirty and scuffed, peeling in the corners. The lotto machine on the counter blinks an evil red eye from 6am to 12am, every day. I spend most of my time on the job people-watching. I watch them come and go, they pump gas, buy milk, scratch lotto tickets. Mostly, I watch them fiend on coffee. We actually serve great, almost Starbucks quality joe, and only for a dollar per cup. But I swear, there’s meth in it. Coffee sales here are neck and neck with gas. The amount of traffic to and from the coffee station has stripped that part of the floor black. 

The people-watching makes the time go a little faster, but this Halloween, things are pretty quiet. I check the clock and it’s ten at night, six hours into my shift. So far I’ve only had a few customers. First Halloween I had to work through and it’s not even worth it.  

I grab a stool and sit down with the new issue of USA Today. I’m really not supposed to be sitting or reading on the job, and it doesn’t help that there’s a camera pointing directly at me, but fuck it. 

My coworker, Burke, steps in from the cold. I know him from highschool, he was in the grade below me, we were in chorus together. I hated him then and I hate him now. Doesn’t help that he has such a punchable face. Pimply, pale, resting scowl, mouth-breather. I wouldn’t care but his work ethic matches his looks. He’s always late to work and when he’s here, he does nothing. Burke just sits in the corner and grunts.

Burke walks behind the counter and sees me sitting. “You know you’re not supposed-”

“I know, I know.” I stand up and crack my neck. “Can you man the register for me? I gotta use the restroom.” 

“Whatever. Be quick, I wanna smoke.”

“I thought you just did?”

“I smoked a cigarette, but I still gotta get high.” 

Yeah, whatever. So I go to the bathroom. It’s a cramped space lit by a single lightbulb on the end of a dangling chain. It smells like rotten fish in here - always like fish. There’s a hole in the corner wall, where rusty grime covered pipes hang exposed to the world. The smell is definitely coming from there, like a rat crawled inside and died. This place is full of vermin. You never see them, but they’re there. They nibble on the candy wrappers and leave feces for us to clean. 

I’m on the toilet, iPhone in hand and scrolling through my newsfeed on Facebook. There’s pictures of my friends in town, from back in college. Happy faces, people climbing mountains, getting married, landing internships and dream jobs and all that jazz. I can’t look at that shit. 

For some reason, Judy likes to hang up pictures of herself on the bathroom wall from when she was younger. They’re old Polaroids, wrinkled in the corners and tinted yellow from age, but you can still see Judy, my fat boss, in all her former glory. She used to look alright back then. She must’ve been, what, twenty years old or something? 

The picture I’m looking at shows Judy sitting under a palm tree on a beach somewhere. She’s wearing a spring dress and holding an open leather bound book in her lap. There’s a pen in her hand and if I squint I can see her handwriting scribbled across the pages. Young Judy’s still on the heavy side, not fat, but not skinny either. She had a warm smile that didn’t scare people. 

I flush the toilet and as I pull up my pants, I look in the mirror. What do I see:

I see a twenty year old who still looks fourteen. He’s got a smooth face, a baby face. His hair is long and combed over with hair gel. There’s lines on his forehead now, they didn’t use to be there. 

Is that stubble I see? I rub the fuzz on my cheeks. Baby got beard. I touch my back pocket, feeling the small black book I keep there in case I think of something to write - a poem, a line from a story, anything. It’s empty. Always empty. Young Judy’s written more than me, look where she ended? I step back and lift up my shirt. Hello, belly. Hello, pale skin. No fat, no gut. Not yet. I remember seeing pictures of my dad when he was my age, looks just like me. Same hair, same face. We both even used to have a gap between our two front teeth, until I got braces. His parents couldn’t afford the dental care. Dad was so skinny, skinnier than me. Now he’s got a huge gut hanging off of him. He does karate, he’s a black belt and works out four days a week, but that gut still smiles at him in the mirror every single day.

“C’mon.” I say aloud. “I’m not getting fat.” 

I leave the bathroom and return to the front of the store, but Burke’s gone. I head behind the counter and see a note by the register. It reads: “Went out for a smoke.”

III. December 12th, 2014

The weather starts as an ugly gray sky this morning, then those smoky clouds sprinkle snow as I pull into Citgo’s parking lot. It falls fast and melts as soon as it hits. It’s fairly warm out, in the forties, but it’s supposed to drop to twenty. Forecast says snow, hail, rain, and sleet are expected in waves all day and night. Luckily, I’m stuck in doors, but sadly, I’m stuck indoors at work. Alone in the gas station, no traffic, zero customers. Bore-ing. The only movement is the occasional patter of a hailstone against the window. 

Second shift is normally so steady, but the crazy weather is keeping everybody home I guess. The shift crawls. Minutes go by like hours and hours like days. I look at the clock: quarter past eleven. Fadia’s coming in at midnight to relieve me. Not long now, but I’m dying here. I pray for something, anything to happen. Then sadly, my prayers are answered with a blast from the past. 

He’s another kid I went to highschool with. His name is Vinny, but I call him MP, short for Micro Penis. That was his nickname back then. No one said it to his face, so he blissfully went through all four years of school without knowing. 

Why “MP?” Well, in 8th grade he was dating this really pretty girl I was friends with. It was her first time having sex and when they finally got around to doing the deed, my friend yanks down MP’s pants and lo and behold, a pulsing Tic Tac. She didn’t say anything, but the whole experience was just awful for her. She later told me and a mutual friend that it was so small that it kept falling out, and after he finished up and left, she stayed up the whole night crying.

Anyway, MP comes in and I’ve always hated him too, more than Burke. He’s got this arrogance about him. Always turns his nose up at people, brags to strangers about girls he’s slept with. Every time he walks into Citgo, he tells me about his life. Like right now. “I don’t go to schools,” he says. “I live in New York and come down to Coventry every so often to visit friends and humble myself. It’s nice looking back when you’re so big, y’know? Yeah, I’m a photographer, I take pictures for a modeling agency in Manhattan. Great place to pick up chicks. I met Morgan Freeman once.”

“Yeah, okay. Are you gonna buy anything?”

MP has an arm around this real pretty, Puerto Rican girl. She laughs, “Stop bragging, Vinny!” She breaks off. “I’m just gonna walk around.” He kisses her and smacks her ass as she walks away.

“Get some chunky monkey for me, baby.” He lays down a twenty and a ten. “Twenty on pump one, and the ten is for the ice cream. Keep the change,” he says with a wink.

“Sure thing.”

While I’m ringing him up, MP asks, “So, wait, do you go to school at all?”

“Technically. I’m taking the semester off.”

“Oh, word. How much is tuition?”

“Thirty-thousand a year,” I say.

“Word. Yo, check this out.” MP takes out two Benjamins from his back pocket. He points at the girl he’s with. “See her? Two hundred dollars just to snap a few pics of her half-naked. One afternoon, barely four hours of work, two hundred dollars. You fuckin’ believe that?”

“I don’t, actually.”

“Well, you better.” He steps back and crosses his arms. “What’re you going to school for?”

“English. I’m trying to be a writer.”

“Word, word. Any money in that?”

 “If you’re good enough, yeah.”

MP’s model approaches the counter with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. I ring her up with the ten on the counter. The girl says, “I’m gonna wait in the car,” and leaves. MP watches her ass as she goes. When the door closes, MP looks at me and grins.

“I’ll tell you what. How about, say, two years from now we’ll see who’s doing better? I won’t go to school, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing and you keep doing what you’re doing. By the way, I change my mind. I want my change back.”

“Alright.” I open the register and reach inside for my meager tip. My collar feels hot all of a sudden.

MP goes on, “Like, check this out. All my friends are at college and they’re in debt up to their necks. Who knows if they’ll do anything? Right? I’m not in school and I’m making fucking dollars and cents, man. Look at that ass! Look at it! I don’t care what school you go to, you gotta think outside the box for that ass. You know?”

“Alright.” I rip a dollar bill by accident. I stick it back in the drawer and pull out another one.

“So, why don’t we just see who gets farther in two years, huh-?”

“ALRIGHT!”

MP staggers back. I hand him his change and wave him on. MP leaves and I grab a stool and sit for the rest of my shift.

The rest of the shift passes at a petty pace until at last, Fadia arrives. I clock out, grab my coat, and leave the store, waving bye to Fadia on my way out. She wishes me a good night and I just keep walking without saying a word. It’s freezing out and it’s snowing hard. The driver’s side door on my brother’s car sticks when I try to open it. 

My brother, Sean, is unemployed and at the time I don’t have my own car, so he lets me drive it to work. The thing is, it’s a total junker. When it’s thirty or below, the door always sticks. The heater works only when it’s in the mood. There’s a few small holes rusted through the metal and because me and my family don’t have the money, we have to cover them with gaffer tape. 

I climb inside and start the engine. The car sputters to life and I pull out of the lot and start driving home, cold and angry. The wipers are barely working and they don’t clean all the snow off the windshield. The high beams are broken. I’ve got no visibility, so I have to drive at ten miles an hour, uphill. Fucking MP. You know what kinda car he was driving? Fucking 2014 Mazda. I don’t think he bought it, though. Mommy and daddy got it for him.

I bet it has heat, though. High beams, working wipers. And a model in the passenger seat, her hand firmly on his crotch, feeling around for a cock that isn’t there. God dammit. I don’t know why I’m so angry. It’s not like MP’s gonna be impressing anybody. Still, the fucking nerve on him. He’s got a model in his car and I got a rat. 

Wait. Oh fuck.

I pull over to the side of the road and look to my right. Would you believe it, one of the rats from Citgo is just chilling on the passenger seat, looking right at me. Strangely, it doesn’t move when I grab the ice scraper for the windshield, it doesn’t move when I get out. It quivers when I open the passenger door, but it doesn’t move. It tries to run when I snatch it by the tail and I throw it on the ground. But after I beat it to death with the ice scraper, all it does is twitch. 

I keep hitting it, hitting it, and before I know it I’m shouting at it. I’m just shouting like an idiot on the side of the road with my front doors open, the weak headlights reflecting off the falling snow. Even when there’s nothing left of the rat but pieces of fur and guts, I’m still hitting the gooey mess and yelling until the scraper breaks in half. 

Looking at the broken shaft, I shake my head and toss it in some bushes. I slam the passenger door and walk around to the driver’s side and climb in. I don’t leave right away, though. I sit there, my hands wrapped around the steering wheel, looking forward into nothing.

I look in the rear view mirror. Hey there, baby face. “You’re such a fucking idiot,” I say aloud. Buckling my seatbelt, I shift back into drive and continue on home. There, I make a vow. No more shit-jobs. Time to do right. Time to go back to school. The next day, I put in my two weeks’ notice at the gas station.