Great Rat

A white rat lived with us for a while. Our lease was up and our dog had died, so we decided to leave Lexington. We stopped in to look in at a pet shop on our way out of town, and I bought a baby rat. We spent that summer traveling in the van. When we stopped at motels we would sneak him in and out wrapped in a shirt or towel.

When fall came we rented a house on Long Island. One day I saw Ratty closing a door by running back and forth and leaning against it. I told him I thought it was a good way to close a door, and he stopped and fixed his eye on me. His mind was fast. So he looked at me for a second and made some fast calculations and then he walked slowly along the door without taking his eye off of me, to let me know that he understood what I had said. I'm slow, but I knew what he was doing, so I waited a few minutes and then I asked him to close the door again, and he ran right over and did it.

When he was a baby we would tell him not to bite people. That was the extent of his formal training, and he learned it well. If we would try to thwart him when he was doing something particularly interesting to him, his only and very effective defense was to squeak loudly and hop in place. One evening Will was sprawled on a couch on the front porch with a beer and a magazine, and Ratty and I were in the kitchen at the back of the house. Will yelled out something or other to me. I can't remember what it was, but I didn't like it. The only answer I could think of that wouldn't lead to an argument was "Ratty, go bite Will." Damned if that little thing didn't run along the baseboards and jump down the step onto the porch and draw blood on his big toe. Will didn't appreciate it.

The house had a heat register that was an iron grate flush with the floor. I was afraid he would fall into it, so I would pick him up when he went near it, and tell him to stay away from it. I guess he thought that was great, because every time I'd say "Stay away from there", no matter where he was, He'd run up to the edge of the register and look down into it.

He died when he was about two years old. I had a dream a few months after that. In this dream my ex-father-in-law, a doctor, was watching, amazed, as Ratty did some stuff to show him what he knew. The doctor used his best deep voice to call his wife: "Millie, Millie, come here and see what this rat can do." Ratty froze, looked him in the eye, and said "Of course I can, I'm a scientific rat."

He was as sharp as a tack.