“I want to go home,” Renata said.
The rats crawled out of their holes and headed down to the docks and the wrestling ring. They hissed and snapped and fought to get ahead, and they scrambled through the crooked buildings and down into the crooked alleys and spread out onto the crooked streets of Rat Land.
Dirt-nose tunnel rats left their holes for the first time in years, joined by poor dump rats who had saved for months to buy just one ticket. Slick dandies walked with their spouses, who wore fancy trinkets and displayed their shiniest pins for the occasion.
The elder rats crawled out of their sleep holes on scrawny legs, and they all went down to the docks and the wrestling ring where the Grudge Match will soon begin.
Renata and I backed into an abandoned storefront next to a pile of crate wood. The rats were not interested in Renata and me. We were just a couple of impostors and our fancy name tags were beautiful.
I had my arms around her and she held onto me just as tight as she could.
Rat Land isn’t all that bad if you have a girl like Renata with you.
Renata trembled.
“I want to go home,” she said. “I don’t want to be here.”
“We’ll go back after we do what we came to do,” I said.
“I liked climbin’ up and gettin’ here. But now we’re here we ain’t goin’ up no more. There’s too many rats around here.”
“Listen!”
A rat orchestra started up somewhere down the alley. The rat trumpeters attempted a tune while the rat cellists searched for a note. A marching band appeared from around the corner, and Renata’s mood quickly changed.
“Look, Walt! It’s a parade, Walt! A parade!”
Rats love a parade almost as much as a wrestling match. When you combine the two it adds up to one hell of an event. The rats waited to buy premium bench-seat tickets. A heap of money will be made at the betting booths and the card tables. The Promoter was going to make a killing tonight.
From the top of a dirt mound we watched the parade go by. An orchestra of 100 instruments came down the alley. Bongo beaters marched out of sync with the horn blowers. Twenty-one hum drummers drummed and harmonized to the backbeat. An Old Guinea King rat plucked a three–string junkyard banjo. The drunken cellists tripped on their instruments and fought with the bony flutists, and the hemp rats grabbed the penny whistles and blew a note.
Next, after the orchestra, 101 high-stepping dandies marched down the alley, spinning ragged top hats on bushstick canes. And then came twenty-two tunnel rats with jingling silver bells tied to their pointed tails, followed by fifty-five tap-dancing sewer rats with crowns of red roses.
No rat in Rat Land had seen a parade like this before. Little rats and their mothers and their grandmothers came out too, and they watched with eyes wide and mouths open.
And their eyes grew bigger and their mouths opened wider when they saw what came next.
Pulled by teams of thick-necked wharf rats with ropes tied on their backs, Grudge and the Incredible Impostor arrived, each on their own rolling platform. Grudge was first, flexing his muscles and posing like he’s the the big winner.
Next, the Incredible Impostor, fan favorite. He stood on the platform with his shoulders sagging and his head down. The front wheels of the platform hit a bump. The platform shifted. He lost his balance and almost fell over. The crowd gasped, then cheered. The banner flapped in the wind.
It was an even match before the game, but the odds changed when everyone saw the sad-looking impostor. Now the bookmakers favored Grudge five to one.
But where was Renata?
“Look at these bracelets!” she said.
Renata forgot all about the rat parade when she found what she really came for. She was going through a box of colorful bracelets a little dockside vendor had opened up for her.
“Come on, Renata. We gotta tell my Uncle I’m here.”
“What’s the rat sayin’?”
“He’s says take the whole box, he’ll give you a deal. Let’s go!”
“How much?”
“Two and a half cents each for a beautiful impostor like you, he says.”
“Ask him if he’ll go down to two.”
The platform carrying Uncle Brucker passed before us. I shouted out in Rat Talk but he couldn’t hear me above the crowd. The drummers pounded on their patched-up drums. The junkyard banjo player found the string and plucked it, and the parade continued down the alley under the street banner to the wrestling ring.
Uncle Brucker was getting away.
“I came here to get my Uncle, and that’s what I’m gonna do,” I told Renata. And I left her at the trinket vendor and made my way to the wrestling ring by myself.