Alligator - Lisa Moore [40]
The earth he was lying on was packed down hard and threaded with pieces of metal and bits of fabric and plastic bags that had been churned with the gravel and ploughed under and then packed down by bulldozers and the tracks were still visible and he stood up and felt dizzy. He went back into the shack and sat down on a swivel chair, the seat of which was worn and a tuft of foam hung out, and Valentin started to cry.
He was afraid of rats. He had been in prison and he knew how to inflict pain effectively and how to endure it. The way you endure pain: you make up your mind you will endure it. He had given up smoking cigarettes in prison and he had taken part in the organization of a sex racket that he profited from, and that eventually got him out of prison altogether. He had been through all this, but he was still mortally afraid of rats. The ship he had arrived on was overrun with rats, though he had not seen them.
The Russian vessel had been seized by the Canadian government in Harbour Grace with a crew of forty-three sailors on board. The shipping company responsible for the vessel and crew had folded without a trace and the men’s wages were frozen or there were no wages and they had run out of supplies and had used up all their fuel after only a week in port.
The Catholic Church in the parish of Harbour Grace held a bingo game when it realized the predicament the sailors were in and raised $600 and the men came ashore for the evening and stood around the parish hall, looking ashamed and hungry. They cleaned out the bowls of chips and pretzels that were put out on the card tables where people were playing bridge. There were bowls of Bridge Mixture and the Ladies Auxiliary had made sandwiches and the Russians ate those too.
The cash from the bingo night was handed over to one of the Russians the next morning and Mrs. Furlong, who was the parish priest’s housekeeper, and who was a member of the town council, took the cook from the vessel to the supermarket and drove him down to the dock with the supplies.
Everyone expected the Canadian government to intervene quickly on behalf of the sailors, but by the following weekend the crew was out of food again and had no electricity and there was another bingo game and enough money was raised to provide groceries for another week.
An emergency meeting was called by the town council and Mrs. Furlong said she had heard from the gentleman who bought the groceries that the ship was overrun with rats. She said they had purchased several tins of baked beans at the supermarket, but the Russians were eating them cold, directly out of the tins.
Someone pointed out that the money from the bingo games had been previously allotted to the town library for the purchase of computers.
The minutes of the council meeting reflected all of these comments and were distributed the following morning to the council members, the media, several other members of government, and a copy was delivered to the vessel and Valentin read about the rats, which he hadn’t known about, and became terrified and knew he had to get off the ship.
He rowed into town from the ship the next day and went to the Family Restaurant at twelve and sat beside a terrarium built into the wall enclosing eight budgies, blue and yellow and lime green. The back of the cage was lined with a poster of a half-dozen kittens. The budgies mostly stayed