The Night Wally Shot a Rat in the Kitchen
  By James Bradley

I don’t think I ever told you about the time Wally shot a rat in the kitchen. Wally, me, and a guy named Kurt were living in a three-bedroom house on Delridge Way in Seattle. One corner of the house was jammed into the side of a steep hill; the basement door was on the ground and there were staircases up to the front and side doors. All around the back two sides of the house, the hill rose like a wall, thickly covered with trees and brush and grasses that no one ever bothered to trim.

Across the road was a huge Bethlehem Steel plant. There were parking lots between the road and the plant so there was some distance to separate us from the roaring of the trucks and the rumbling of the machinery. At night, when the huge doors were open, you could see the big ingots glowing a dull red inside the slate gray, metal-sided plant.

The three of us rented that house for $125 a month. Not $125 apiece either. This was in 1969 before Seattle caught on as a great place to live and we split the rent three ways and paid $42 a month each. I had the upstairs bedroom and Wally and Kurt took the two downstairs. The kitchen and living room were just one long room, floored with white tiles, that Wally divided by laying down a carpet from the rec room of the house he was moving out of. When I asked if Sandy, his soon-to-be ex-wife, would mind if he took it, he said, “She can mind or she can not mind; whatever suits her pleasure.” Apparently, she didn’t mind because she never sent her brothers to re-steal the carpet.

We were all curious about marijuana, none of us having ever smoked it, but I guess Wally and Kurt spent more time trying to find a dealer than I did. I didn’t really care that much and didn’t bother to make the effort. In those days you could walk down University Avenue in the U district and, every few feet, you’d pass a hippie quietly saying, “Graaaaaass?” or “Haaaaaash?” drawing it out like that because they were probably stoned out of their minds. But we didn’t want to buy from someone none of us knew.

Eventually, Kurt met a guy at the Blue Moon tavern that he figured he could trust. The guy’s name was Dave and he made things that were like artistic. He’d find pieces of driftwood, sand them down, maybe stain them, polish them up, and attach something white that looked and felt like plaster of Paris—a blob of it here or there shaped like a person’s head or an animal or flower or some abstract thing. We all made appreciative sounds when he showed us some of them. Eventually, Kurt’s girlfriend, Nancy, would get religion and become Kurt’s ex-girlfriend and convert Dave and become his girlfriend and Dave wouldn’t sell dope or make artistic thingies anymore. But that’s another story.

Anyway, before all that happened Dave got us good dope and one Friday night Wally and I were alone in the house with no work the next day and we decided to smoke some dope and see what it was like. It didn’t smell at all like tobacco and it tasted harsh. But we passed the joint back and forth like you were supposed to do and held the smoke in our lungs for as long as we could and, before we knew it, we were grinning like a couple of idiots.

“No hangovers,” Wally said slurring his words a little. Then he said, “Low calorie.” I grinned at him. “You know,” he said after a while. “I think I can see things better.” He was referring to the claims that marijuana heightened the smoker’s perceptions. I took a pack of matches out and set it up on the arm of my easy chair. The matchbook had advertising printed on it. “Can you read that?” I asked him.

He gave it a try, first just looking at it and then squinting. “No,” he finally said.

“An illusion,” I said.

“What.”

“The heightened perception thing.”

“Oh. Yeah. Just illusion.”

“But colors look neat.”

“Yeah. And sounds sound neat.”

“Yeah.”

Eventually, we’d get introduced to what were called “head games,” “head” being shorthand for a pothead, a smoker of dope. In one game, one or two people would lie down at the foot of a staircase with the tops of their heads toward the flight of steps so they could look up and see up to the top of the stairs. Then someone at the top would drop ping-pong balls—a whole bunch of ping-pong balls that would bounce happily down the staircase toward the heads giggling at them from below. The odd perspective plus the dope made the white balls look animate, alive almost, and, when the ping pong balls were painted with Day-Glo colors and all the lights were turned off except for a black light, the effect was groovy.

Another one was corn starch. You’d mix corn starch with water in a bowl until you got just the right consistency. When you put your open hand in the bowl and squeezed it hard, the mixture would resist the pressure and you could pull out a chunk of it. Then, when you relaxed your hand, the resistance would also relax and the corn starch would turn back to a thick liquid that would ooze between your fingers causing you to say such things as “Wow” and “Far out.”

But that first Friday night, we were still innocent and perfectly content to stare out the windows at Beth Steel’s glowing red ingots, listen to records, and converse about neat colors and sounds. After a while, a record stopped and I didn’t start another one right away. I heard some kind of scritching noise coming from the kitchen. I sat there quietly for awhile staring into the light reflecting off the white kitchen floor. Then I heard it again, a little louder and more definite this time. “Hey,” I said. “Did you hear that?” I looked over at Wally who was staring wide-eyed at the wall over my head.

“I’m glad you heard it, too,” he said.

We waited for a while and there it went again. “Under the sink,” Wally whispered.

We got up and started walking to the kitchen sink on our tip-toes, one slow step at a time so as not to frighten away whatever was doing the scritching. I caught sight of our reflections in the window over the sink and, pointing them out to Wally, started to giggle. We continued toward the sink, tiptoeing and giggling.

The sink and surrounding cabinets were like most of those kinds of arrangements in those days. Banks of four drawers each flanked the sink and the area under the sink was enclosed by two doors with light springs in the hinges. If you opened them more than 90o, they’d stay open, less than that and they’d slam shut.

We reached out and each grabbed a door. “One...two...three.” We jerked the doors open and the garbage bag we kept there started rocking back and forth. Then a rat leapt out of the bag and into the bank of drawers to the right. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” I hollered. “A rat! A goddamn rat, goddamn it!”

Wally reached up to one of the cabinets and grabbed a loaf of bread. Taking one piece of bread he went out the side door and down the porch steps to the cellar door. “What the hell you doing?” I called down to him. He unlocked the door and went inside without answering. Wally was an amateur photographer and he had a darkroom down there as well as assorted junk but I couldn’t figure what any of that had to do with a rat in the kitchen. I looked around to see if the goddamn rat had emerged from his hiding place. He hadn’t. I heard the cellar door slam and Wally came back up. That piece of bread was now blotched with an ugly orange-yellow stain. Wally opened the door under the sink and tossed the bread into the garbage bag. “I poured stop bath on it,” he said. “Stop bath is poison.”

Stop bath is a chemical you use in developing photographs. The thing about stop bath is, it stinks something awful. It’s got a sharp, acrid odor worse than vinegar. It’s one of those smelly, ugly colored liquids that gives chemicals a bad name. There’s not a rat in its right mind that would go near a piece of bread soaked in stop bath. Wally and I went back in the living room and the rat snuck out of his hiding place soon after.

“Goddamn it!” I hollered, stomping my feet. The rat stopped in the middle of the kitchen, sitting up on its haunches like a prairie dog. I hollered and stomped the floor and the rat turned and ran back under the drawers. The drawers and cabinets had that space under them so olives and raisins and little foods like that will have a place to roll and hide when you drop them while making lunch. The rat went into that space and under the bank of drawers. He was quiet for awhile.

I put on a record and Wally went into his room. About the third cut on the record that damn rat was out again. This time he streaked across the kitchen and onto the previously sacrosanct carpet. He circled the record player twice while I bellowed at him and then he headed back across the kitchen.

“Don’t chase him!” called Wally from his room. “Don’t scare him!”

The rat got his head under the drawers and stopped with his butt in plain visibility. It was probably the smell of the stop bath that kept him from going any farther and he probably thought that because he couldn’t see anything, we couldn’t see him. “Goddamn rat’s as dumb as an ostrich,” I mumbled.

Wally came out of his bedroom with a pistol in his hand. It was a .22 caliber, western-style revolver that Wally kept as a target pistol. At least that’s what he said. Taking pot shots at a rat was OK with me but I prayed that we’d never have a burglar.

He laid the barrel on his left wrist and sighted on the rat. He sighted for a long time. I was wondering when the hell he was going to shoot the damn thing when he squeezed the trigger, the gun went bap! like a .22 will, and the rat disappeared. Vanished with the sound of the shot.

Wally was sure he’d gotten the rat. I wasn’t. So Wally was the one to pull the drawer out. There underneath where the drawer had been lay the rat with a little red dot on his back and one on his belly. Wally picked it up by the tail, took it out on the back porch and lobbed it into the thick brush where Mother Nature’s disposal service could go to work under cover of leaves and bushes.

Wally said later that he knew he was going to hit the rat. He didn’t hope it, he knew it. I was just glad to get rid of the damn thing.