The Wizard And The Rat

Running from the law, he couldn’t believe it. His old man wouldn’t even tell him what he did, why he had had to load the saddle so heavy with his winter furs and canvas tent and leave in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter, with nothing more than a sneaky kiss on the forehead of his child as a goodbye.

  Maybe he’d robbed a bank, or banks, or maybe his criminal activity was worse, and there had been blood. On his way to the dark wood line he said to himself, “But I wouldn’t really care one way or the other, just so long as you told me the truth, and said goodbye like a man, instead of a thief.” He looked at his path ahead through the distortion of tears: a yawning path marked by identical snow-laden branches reaching far into the darkening forest.

  Yesterday, before his father fled and just as everything was falling apart, he’d spied on his parents. Their plank door made such a poor fit to the jamb, he could see through into the room when it was closed. His mother was washing his father’s pink and bloody knuckles while he sat on the bed and described to her the reason for barging in and bleeding on her apron.

  “There’s two, and they ain’t law-men, they’re bounty hunters. One’s old, although gigantic, but he’s reasonable. I don’t think he’s a violent man at all. Travels the land with a large staff in his hand. I say staff and not cane, because there’s no limp in him. Around his waist he carries leather pouches instead of weapons. Haven’t seen him touch a gun,” the father turned his head to the ceiling and let out a loaded breath. “The other one though,” he closed his eyes, “is a little red rat that would chew through anything if it rewarded him. It’s my good luck he’s a shrimpy thing, I was able to knock him out when the old man took his shift to sleep and it was just me and the rat.”

  “I hate the sound of both of them,” said the mother with a pinched face.“But how did they capture you? How did they know who you were?” She was dabbing the deep gash in his middle knuckle with a wet cloth.

  “They know who I used to be.”

  The boy should have found the first trap by now. But the only light left to him was the snow’s glow and his lantern that was almost obsolete without the walls of the cabin to entrap the flame. Then he considered what man would be in which trap. It would be strategic to help the old man out first. He guessed the rat would be in the first trap, so he skipped it. His father had said the old man was “reasonable”, and maybe that meant he would handle falling into a trap a little better than some. He was probably hurt, too, and would be very accepting and grateful to any hand reaching down to help.

  He squinted through the trees and saw the grey hemlock where his father had pinned a pink ribbon as a marker for the second trap. In front of the tree, rising up from the ground, was smoke. He wished the smell wasn’t so much to his liking, the aroma of wood and needles burning, for his mind was loose with fantasies of what his father might be, what he might’ve done, and he didn’t want the golden smell of a fire burning attached to this moment.

  He moved towards the edge of the disturbed hatch door and the subterranean smoke. Gone were the twigs, branches, needles, and leaves concealing the hatch, swallowed by a dark rectangle.

 And indeed he had been wrong. His father, however, had been right in describing this man as a rat. He watched water drip from the elongated face with the sparse orange chin hair onto the man’s progress of building a fire the original way- with hard earned friction. The bounty hunter’s attire was all black, and the way the man worked twisting the stick, rotating it into another stick, very narrow work done close to the body, would remind anyone of a rat at work.

 “Mister,” said the boy, “I have a rope.”

He fastened it to the hemlock and dropped it down, still in a coil. A voice from the pit got louder with each word as the rope rolled half an inch to the right and left against the holes dirt edge.

“How can a man ever repay another man for saving his life?” The red hair rose above the ground, white and small bloodless hands clung to the edge of the abyss now. He scurried on his hands and knees until he was satisfied with the distance between himself and the hole, then he stood up and checked for his metal star and the pistol holstered in his pants against his back.

  “I know what he could do,” said the boy, pointing a pistol at the man’s head. His father hadn’t left a rifle, nor had he taken every weapon in the house. “He could call off whatever business he was here on and turn around,” and he pulled back the hammer with his thumb.

 “If only I could, kid,” said the man, “but you can’t undo business that’s already been taken care of.”

  “What?”

  “I did what I was hired to,” said the rat, licking a cut on his lip.

  “So you—“

 “Dead or alive, they said.”

 That tear distortion came back, and the boy wanted nothing

more than to go back in time.

  “Okay,” said the boy, wiping his nose with his sleeve.

 “Okay what?” said the rat, flashing his sharp teeth.

 “Dead.” He fired the pistol. He missed, but it had caused the man

to scurry again, this time back into the hole. The boy pulled up the rope and closed the hatch. Hot tears stung the snow as he walked home.

  He saw the porch door was open to the house, and faint lantern light spreading out of the doorway and creating a dim glowing path in the snow. Once he got inside he could hear the sobs of his mother. She was in their small kitchen, bent over his bleeding father, holding his hand to her chest. Towering over his parents and casting a long shadow was a giant of a man. An old man, white long hair around his shoulders, streaked with blood.

“I found him bleeding out in the woods,” the old man spoke with a deep voice, deeper than any the boy had ever heard. “I carried him back here, you see. It’s why I, too, look a bloody mess. I’ve already removed the bullets. He’s going to make it.” The old man had his hand in a large leather bag that was attached to his belt. He took from it a corked green glass bottle, uncorked it, knelt to the floor, and poured whatever was in it onto the father’s wound.

  “What are you doing?!” The boy was again pointing the pistol at a man.

  “Stop!” cried the mother.

  “Yeah, stop!” echoed the boy.

  “No, my child, I mean you. Let the man work.”

  “Come see this, my son,” the father said, appearing to come back to life but with eyes still closed. He waved a hand at the wound. The boy looked down at his father and watched the bullet hole vanish.

  The old man now took a blue bottle from a different, smaller pouch. “Drink this,” he said, and cradled the father’s head in a massive palm.

  The situation provoked the mother to shoot up from her knees and hug the giant white haired stranger.

  “Okay,” he said, “it’s alright. I’ve still got to finish.” The old man clamped a set of chains around the father’s wrists. He pulled the once near-corpse to his feet, lifted him like a child, and draped him like a potato sack over his shoulder. His staff was placed against the wall by the front door. He took it and turned around to the boy and the mother. “You can come see him at the jail in Thornton county.” The old man turned to exit, and the boy, sobbing now, drew up his pistol once more. But the soft hand of his mother capped the barrel. He dropped the weapon.

 “Just know, kid, I always take them in alive.”

The giant bent through the doorway, carful not to bump the head of his human cargo, and when he shut the door, the lantern died.