Rat Man cook good. Today’s menu: hot charred rodent meat, skinned and gutted with precision and love. Fat Norwegian rats, their necks snapped in Cheez Whiz smeared Victor traps. Rat Man is the super of an infested building in Wallingford. Killing rats is his business and business, in the moldy Seattle house carved up into nine dingy apartments that is his fiefdom, is good. Good and getting better as the insulation decays and the siding cracks and shrinks creating more openings for the rodents to sneak in, to nest, eat, fuck, thrive—guess who’s moving in? Who’s coming to carry the plague to dinner? Pissing in the walls, gnawing into your peanut butter jars and cereal boxes and leaving turds the size of rifle bullets stuck to the top of the fridge. They trail shits and grit and viruses across bookshelves and bedspreads, kick up hantavirus dust and leave leptospirosis prints in the flour. Wallingford, Fremont, Ballard—the neighborhoods north of the cut are ratified, rat-inclusive, rat equitable.
Rat Man has a job to do and a hunger to sate. He’s taken a liking to rat flesh. Hankers after the worm-tailed creatures, his mouth welling with saliva. Stews em with paprika and onions and tomatoes into a rat goulash. Blends em in the Cuisinart he inherited from Gramma Esther when he suffocated her in her nursing home so the greedy State couldn’t suck up her six grand in savings. Bam! Essence of Rat. The Joy of Rat Cooking. Molto Rat-io. Rat Man, the Ravenous, the kiddos on the block call him, heckle and praise. Researchers majoring in the Exterminating Arts are writing theses about him, his motives and methods, his childhood traumas (no, dad, I don’t want to take potshots with the .22 at the squirrels on the powerline for fun but if you insist; yes, mom, I loved your tacos but what happened to my pet gerbil Paco, have you seen the little fella?). What is his place in the collective unconscious? Where does he stand in the pantheon of archetypes? Will anyone ever fully unravel his—or any—mystery?
Last summer he took his delicacies on the road, a band of gypsies down the highway with a cart full of rat dogs and a homemade sign that announced in green sharpie letters: Halal, Kosher, Nutritious, Delicious, American. He set up beneath the Space Needle, on the beach in West Seattle, and in the rusting industrial ruins of Gasworks Park. The wieners practically sold themselves to hordes of hungry patriots, like hot rat cakes, mm, mm, good, queues of the rat-starved clamoring for more, thank you, come again, I’ll be in Greenlake next week, boy howdy, get em while they’re hot, ketchup’ll cost you an extra 50 cents, inflation is hitting the rat supply, what can I tell you, China, microchips, those OPEC cunts, am I right?
Now he’s set on smoking the rats for that succulent down-home wildfire flavor. He installed a giant electric smoker in the shed out back for the occasion. Caught an especially large batch in his own chicken wire contraption, rodents fattened on the spoiled burger meat in the dumpster behind the Dick’s across the street. The rats of wrath have grown full and heavy and the people are hungry. Rat Man answers the call, hollers out “dinner is served.”
No mere ratcatcher and cooker is he. The Rat Man is an activist, a moderate messiah, the golden ratty mean, a compromiser, a deal-maker of woeful countenance. While the liberals are foisting seitan and lab-grown meat and insects (with a side of all-you-can-eat moralizing) off on the populace and the conservatives only peddle Texas beef and evangelical chicken sandwiches that you can’t eat on Sunday because God loves his chicken sandwiches but also needs his rest (the commie), the Rat Man has a bipartisan solution: rats. For the poor and the rich, the young and the old, the emaciated and the obese, for one, for all. E pluribus rats, unum full stomach.
He’s making history on a gray Seattle winter today. Plugs in the smoker, check. Strips naked (for he always cooks naked as God made him), check. Says his prayers to the trinity of rat-linked Gods and saints, Apollo, Gertrude, and Arimanius, triple check. But just as he turns to load the first cage of rodents into the smoker—alive, of course, for he’s found through torturous trial and grotesquely hilarious error that the more painful the death throes, the more tender the meat—he hears a gunshot. The Powers that Be have come for him and his vision of rat meat for all. The Big Beef Lobby’s preferred sniper. The bullet shatters the glass of the single window in the shed, sears through his left shoulder, and explodes the lock on the rats’ cage. The rats pour over him in droves, swarming and calling to their rat brethren in urgent shrieks. Rats across the city hurry to take part in the fall of their sworn enemy like tourists leaving Berlin with chunks of its fallen wall.
The Rat Man refuses to grant the rodents the satisfaction of hearing him scream. He falls backwards into the smoker as the rats close and lock the door behind him. The hinge of fate swings against him with a deafening squeak.
Seattle’s rat population booms. Impossible Burger’s share prices rise to record highs. Big Beef’s board of executives cracks open their finest champagnes. Sally Struthers sings the national anthem at the Super Bowl. Ambassadors at the UN feast on free-range crickets and fair-trade cockroaches. Does anyone mark the Rat Man’s passing? For a week a sweet stench hangs over Wallingford causing residents to salivate, their stomachs growling with a sad, insatiable hunger which is the highest and only form of tribute a Rat Man could ever hope for.
— Jon Doughboy is a brain decomposing in literature’s vat. Get a ladle full of his latest story @doughboywrites