Rat Island
A Short Story by Bud Smith
Rat Island
Bud Smith
When he was a little boy he chucked the frozen corpses of geese off an overpass into rush hour below and just what you’d think would happen happened.
Someone asks where did you find the geese.
He says just lying around.
How many geese?
Just two. Two different winters. Not sequential by any means.
Someone else in the trailer says when they were that age they tossed smoke bombs from the deer-trail-edge but could never see what became of the shrieking brakes and spinning-top vehicles.
Geese shakes their hand.
Sometimes when a new idiot gets dispatched here the new idiot will ask why we call him Geese and Geese reluctantly says he’s tired of this but has to tell the story.
If he doesn’t tell the story one of us will make up a story and it’ll be far stranger and Geese will become that far stranger forever.
Geese talks and talks. He says all kinds of stuff. He says, I got a smoky story for ya. He was in the middle of a dance floor and the place was full of neon smoke and he pulled two beers out of his boots. The first he chugged, the second he popped and sprayed across the adoring crowd. A cutie materialized out of the colored smoke, making sexy eyes. Follow me she mouthed and lead him out of the swirling, illuminated smoke, to the back of the club, where the smoke dissipated and Geese saw she wasn’t as sexy as he first supposed or even a cutie at all. Still he followed. She bumped open a set of double pink doors with her butt, curling her finger, pantomiming reeling him in, and when they stepped outside, five bouncers were waiting and she changed yet again and everything was revealed.
He says he was misunderstood.
He says he’d gotten so riled up he jerked off in jail and he wasn’t even in there eight hours.
The new guy is slightly cross-eyed, laughs like Krusty the Clown. Doesn’t even have a name yet, yet now he begins to speak freely, tells his own story about county lockup. That standard county-lockup-story you hear all the time, how it’s Friday night and the judge can’t see you till Monday afternoon and there is no punchline.
He’s a nice guy, we can tell, with no punchline.
We don’t pounce. We gently ask where he’s from. And he says Staten Island.
Geese asks, Did you used to party in that abandoned asylum?
Willowbrook? No. We snuck over to Leper Island where they used to send the lepers. Would commandeer my neighbor’s motor boat and have us a time.
It hangs in the air a moment, maybe we’ll call this new idiot, Leper, for the rest of his career here at the plant.
Geese intervenes, says he once stole a motorboat to take this chick out. Halfway to sea he dropped anchor and she was sucking him off and life was wonderful until she started sobbing and he asked are you all right down there and she wailed, I can’t stop thinking about my ex boyfriend! So he said all right, and whacked himself off starboard, into the foaming flotsam and steered her home.
Y’all had some fun on Leper Island?
Some spark now witnessed in the eye of the new idiot makes me realize the new idiot isn’t an idiot. He’s one of us.
He says, Leper Island was all right. Was peaceful. Not many people went there. Still superstitious. Good crabbing. There was another island you could see from Leper Island. Sometimes people who didn’t know better would mistake Rat Island for Leper Island and when they did that, they were in for trouble.
Why’s that?
You can’t even go to Rat Island.
Why’s that?
If you get too close to the rotted pier, thousands of rats leap onto your motorboat.
Thousands? Damn.
So stay away from Rat Island, I’m saying.
Later on, we get another new guy and Geese introduces Rat Island as Rat Island, says Rat Island is from from Rat Island.
My Canadian friend telephones and says, I grew up on a tundra and that’s where those fucking geese come from, where did he find them to lob off a fucking traffic bridge?
We got em.
He says he’s coming to see me, and I get so damn happy.
He takes a ten hour bus here and says, Can you believe my wife proposed we leave the city and go live in a remote town on the shores of Lake Huron, where granted, it’s beautiful, but what’s there besides beauty?
He says he asked her, What the hell am I supposed to do there? And she said well the main source of industry is the salt mine that goes under the lake. She says he can go underneath the lake and work in the salt mine.
He just keeps staring at me and I’m kinda smiling.
He says, A goddamn salt mine? Are you kidding me?
I say, I won’t be duped either, pretty soon I’m leaving my job. It gets old listening to the same nonsense all day from people who keep talking themselves into corners.
He says, I know it. You have no idea how often I have to tell Quebecois vegetarians, If anyone says the food in this province is fried in anything but pig fat, they’re fucking lying to you.
He asks how my job is really going.
I tell him about Rat Island, the person.
Oh we have a Matt the Rat at my shop.
Did Matt the Rat throw someone under the bus?
Everyone.
I explain, our Rat Island isn’t like that, he’s trustworthy. Honorable. I say, We had a Pat the Rat and also our own Matt the Rat, but Rat Island isn’t like them, he’d give you the shirt off his back. You can trust him with your darkest secret—some of my coworkers actually believe that.
I say, He’s our fat guy, but he’s barely even chubby.
I say, Rat Island does lie sometimes and speaking of throwing people under a bus, his one big lie did involve a bus. The second week I worked with him, he implied he had a hard time getting on an airplane because he has a metal plate in his head. He even knocked on the supposed metal plate with his knuckles. He said it happened because of a bus accident. He was hit by the bus, he says. But then after I knew him for two years his cousin came to work with us for a few days and we mentioned Rat Island’s metal plate in front of the cousin and in front of everyone else, I’m not even sure how it came up. And Rat Island said, I never said I had a metal plate in my head.
My friend from Canada says, Why would he lie about that? That’s fucking crazy.
I don’t know.
Do you think Rat Island is even a real place?
It doesn’t matter. At work, Rat Island is a real person.
I get that.
The night before he heads back to Canada, he goes by himself to our deli to get a sandwich, and says to the deliwoman, Can I get a sandwich?
She asks, What kind?
He says, I don’t care.
She’s staring at him blankly.
He says, I just want a sandwich.
He adds, Whatever you want to make.
Trepidatiously she points to the turkey.
He says, Whatever, really. It’s your deli, you know?
She takes the hunk of turkey out of the case and asks, How do I slice? Thick, regular, thin?
He’s getting angry now, has anyone ever asked for thickly sliced deli meat of any kind? He actually says it, Has anyone ever asked you for thickly sliced deli meat of any kind?
She slices it regular. Pauses to consider how to proceed with this unreasonable man.
He feels it coming. Are you going to ask me about the cheese? I could care less. Any you like or no cheese, it doesn’t matter to me at all.
There’s still the business of the mayonnaise or vinegar or oregano or pepper or lettuce or tomato or onion or pickle. He says, Don’t you dare ask me about mayonnaise or vinegar or oregano or pepper or any of it. Just do me one favor—no salt. I don’t want salt on this sandwich. I don’t want to know about salt. I don’t want to think about salt. I don’t want salt to exist.
Geese goes in the hospital for two weeks, for what I do not know, and nobody from work visits him except Rat Island. After that Geese dumps his long-standing carpool and only drives with Rat Island. After that they preferred to be in the same gang, would complain to the foreman if they got split up and couldn’t be welding partners. Nobody minded not having to partner up with Geese, good as Geese was at welding, because Geese could wear you down with his rapid fire talking talking talking. At first we felt bad for Rat Island having to work every day with Geese, and drive with Geese. I stopped feeling bad for Rat Island when I noticed, wherever I was, despite how loud the plant was, I could often hear Rat Island laughing at Geese’s stories through the duct work. You couldn’t help but smile when you heard Rat Island laughing like that. He’d laugh so hard he’d double over and since Rat Island was our fattest guy we all worried Rat Island was going to give himself a stroke. But of course skinny ol’ Geese had the stroke. The whole left side of his body went slack, remained useless for four months. Again, nobody from work went to see Geese in the hospital, or at home after, except for well, you-know-who.
That spring, two months after Geese’s stroke, our company got a new contract. In addition to mechanical maintenance work, we would also be doing the equipment cleaning. Jetting—which by jetting, I mean high pressure water washing. Shotgunning dirty components at twenty thousand psi, and if that didn’t work, grit your teeth and try forty thousand psi. Brace your whole body against the blast and aim the water gun at the problem, blast the sludge away. Dangerous and dirty work. The jetting, if you’re not careful, or even if you are, can and will and has, severed feet, hands, fingers. And you’re wearing a raincoat all day and still you get wet. Baking in the sun or standing wet and shivering in frigid wind. No thanks.
Predictably, none of us wanted to do the jetting.
But Rat Island stepped up and started doing it. It’s all he did after that.
Every day he went and did this filthy work. Came to the trailer soaking wet and looking drowned and it went on like that for a year. And the contract was renewed because he worked so hard and now they awarded us even more jetting which meant more guys had to do it and none of us wanted to do the jetting. So the company called the hiring hall for two more guys and one of them that showed up was this kid on heroin who kept nodding out during the training class and he was quickly dismissed and never replaced. The other one who showed was Geese.
Geese could use his left arm, kinda, now.
And Geese not only refused to do the jetting but refused to work with anybody but Rat Island but Rat Island only did the jetting and Geese wouldn’t and couldn’t do the jetting. The superintendent came down here and begged people to switch and we all said no, we had certifications and self-respect and no.
The truth was, now Geese was also slightly blind in his left eye and couldn’t balance himself anymore on that left foot, let alone weld with the left hand. He was going to be let go. But then Geese caved and started doing the jetting and because he could barely drive himself to work anymore, began riding in everyday in Rat Island’s tiny red clown car. And for a few weeks Rat Island was heard again laughing like crazy and did the work while Geese stood there dry and not even in rain gear, telling him stories.
For a month it went on like that.
Rat Island doing the work of three people while Geese stood talking at him. Whenever he wasn’t laughing, Rat Island’s face settled and the lines of his age showed and he looked so exhausted. I began to worry he was going to crash his car coming in or coming home. But he said there was no way he could doze off, the way Geese never shut up, and thank god for that.
Then it got slow and most of them all got laid off.
I don’t even remember most of those guys names anymore. Their nicknames or their real names.
Geese never came back to the business, far as I know.
Rat Island kept on going, alone.
He drove now in silence, two hands on the wheel, all those lonely miles.
I never heard Rat Island laughing like he used to.
Maybe it was just that he was getting older so the dogtiredness was compounded. I’ll know what that’s like soon.
I caught a glimpse of the old Rat Island one last time, it happened that Thanksgivingtime during one of our reliably ludicrous safety meetings, where the safety man had us gathered together in the machine shop and said, Something terrible happened yesterday.
He goes on to describe a fatality that occurred in his town, someone he says he didn’t know, but knew of, and then goes on to say he spoke to the man on four occasions.
Rat Island leans over and whispers to me, How can you speak to someone four times and claim to not know the person?
I whisper back, You can’t.
The safety man is holding a stern look on his face. He takes it personal when people die on job sites, and that’s what happened to this man in the safety man’s home town. He says, He died by falling into an open sewer pit.
The safety man lets it hang there.
Lets it sink in.
A man in the crowd says, Drowned in sewage?
I cannot hold back low laughter and I try to disguise it with a cough. Rat Island, standing next to me hears the cough-laughter and laughs too but it bursts out of him as it always does and the safety man spins his head and yells, What the fuck is so funny?
Good question.
What the fuck is so funny?
Tragedy, that’s all.
It’s been a while but he calls me from Goderich, Ontario and says the salt mine isn’t as bad as he imagined. He’s 1800 feet underground some days but once you go more than 6 feet underground you can’t tell the difference.
I say, Well, we’re all doing things we imagined we never would. Have to make the best of it.
He says it’s beautiful there and we should come visit. He has a sail boat he takes out on Lake Huron.
No you don’t. You don’t have a sailboat.
I do. I promise I do. It’s not nice. I sent you a picture.
I’d remember.
I’ll send it again. Or come see it.
I say I will, as soon as work slows down. And then I admit that I’m also doing something I said I never would but now that I am doing it it’s terrible and not so bad.
I’ve surrendered and am working permanently on the jetting crew.
You’re making jet fuel?
I say no, I’m just getting professionally wet.
You still working with that psychopath with the dead geese?
No, I’m sorry to tell you, he died three years ago.
I’m sorry to hear that.
I tell him nobody went to Geese’s funeral from our worksite, except for this one guy I don’t think I’ve mentioned to him, but of course I have, who more important to ever mention than Rat Island, the only nice person I’ve ever worked with, who said the funeral was well attended but it was the saddest funeral he’d ever been to and he’d been to hundreds of funerals. It was the saddest, he claimed, because the people there only knew the one side of Geese. Church friends and people who used to be kids he coached in little league, regular folks who’d never gotten to hear any of Geese’s unfiltered stories, and who were at the disadvantage of only knowing half the man, never even knew that the man had been called Geese for eighteen years and had gotten the nickname on his first day of working with yours truly, that I had given him that nickname in grace of a much worse one that I’d first thought up. Rat Island weeping because they’d only met the filtered version of Geese and that was heartbreaking to him. When Rat Island stood at the funeral parlor he couldn’t help but cry and everyone turned to look at him, and all they saw was a shabby suited chubby man with black grime under every finger nail, who was crying so loud they thought he’d wondered over from the mental home up the block. But then two women who hadn’t seen him in a decade realized who this was. Geese’s elderly mother and Geese’s wife came up and tried to console him and Rat Island only cried louder, gazing in their eyes, believing they’d been robbed of ever ever getting to know the full Geese.
What? He didn’t know the guy better than his own mother, his own wife.
They carpooled together, seven, eight years, no—more. You really get to know somebody in a car pool.
I ride my bike to the mine, I can’t imagine. How’d gooseman die?
Whacked off to death, I don’t know. Probably another stroke though, for real. Guy loved his strokes.
Well, again, I’m sorry to hear.
It’s okay. What are the guys you work with like?
You know what they’re like. Same everywhere.
And you just haul up salt all day?
All day long, pal. It’s happening even as we speak. You play with water and I play with sodium chloride.
I say something funny happened last summer and maybe it will lighten our defeated moods. Do you have a minute?
I’ve got a minute, yeah.
I said I’d been jetting on night shift. Nobody wants to work night shift doing the jetting, least of all, me. But there was no other choice, other than to do my job. That particular job was especially grueling and filthy and hot. We had to crawl inside an exchanger shell and jet it from inside, and the nasty water swirling all around and no matter what, you get soaked.
I say, Rat Island is on day shift and is better at staying dry than me.
Why is he better at staying dry.
He’s got more experience, positioned himself better.
Well what does he do?
I don’t know or I’d do it. I have to bring in four shirts and I just wear swimsuits and fuck it.
I say, So I come in for my second or third night shift and the microwave is on fire. The two fools on day shift are still out on the unit and the trailer is full of black smoke and I cut the power and there’s some goo all over the floor which I realize was the spinning glass disc from inside the microwave, it’d gotten so hot the glass turned into a molten glowing snake and cooked though the door and when the smoke cleared and I stopped coughing, I wondered what the ashes all over the floor were from.
It didn’t take long to find out.
This new idiot, Landry, came in, soaking wet, and he looked horrified and starts rapidly apologizing. He grabbed the microwave and burned his hand and threw it in the dumpster and the dumpster started smoking like it was going to burst into flames so I had to dump our water cooler and the water cooler from the carpenter’s trailer on the trash to get it not to blaze up.
The idiot, Landry, had meant to set the microwave for twenty minutes, he’d set it right after break when they were going back out for their last part of the day. He’d meant to set it for twenty minutes but he’d actually set it for two hundred minutes. You want to know what the idiot had put in there? His socks. He’d put his wet socks in our microwave for two hundred minutes.
No. Jesus.
I should have killed that idiot, but then Rat Island walked in and I could have killed them both. I’ve known Rat Island twenty years. Depended on him going on twenty years. Nearly twenty years have liked him. You know what the new idiot says to me? He says he’s gotten the idea to dry his socks in the microwave because Rat Island told him he’s been drying his soaking wet t-shirts, sweaty, reeking, polluted river-water, B.O. t-shirts in our microwave going on two decades.
There’s been another injury on our job site. Third one in six months and now we might lose the contract completely and then what. None of the injuries are really anyone’s fault but the safety man has us gathered in the machine shop and is screaming at us that every accident is preventable.
And we are going through the incident again.
Seeing what could have been done different.
This time? Nothing. But he can’t say it.
Last night, a young apprentice, who we have all worked with over the last few months, stayed after hours to help out on the project and got hurt.
He got hurt because a goose fell out of a pipe rack.
Everyone laughed except Rat Island.
I put my hand on his shoulder. The first and last time I will ever touch him in our careers.
I say to Rat Island, John. John, it’s all right.
Goose, they say and all laugh.
The biggest problem is that the kid who got hit by the falling goose got a scratch on his eyeball and had to go to the clinic for treatment and at the clinic they issued an antibiotic ointment which made the scratched eye an OSHA recordable.
The safety man says it’s not even remotely funny.
Goose, they say, and I already know that’s what they are going to start calling the new guy when he comes back to the plant for the rest of his career after medical clearance.
The goose had been sitting up in the pipe rack, doing what, I don’t know, and the goose had had an accident of its own, I suppose, and slipped down, and stuck the kid with its foot and then the weight of its body and then thrashing wings.
Two shifts later Socks starts calling the kid, Goose.
John says, You can’t call him that.
Why, it’s hilarious.
It’s really not.
I can’t explain anything but if I could I would say that everything degrades and we’ve already had a man named Geese and you couldn’t understand and you, Landry, were only Laundry for long enough for someone to say Socks and Socks was closer to the heart of you and we’ll never go back to Laundry least of all Landry. And could you ever guess that before your time, before you ever thought you’d stoop to working at a place like this, this lovely man once a spark in his eyes, and before he began wheezing, and became slumped and half-broken, we used to call him Rat Island.