When the Rio Grande is flowing, the starry skies are bright,
She walks along the river in the quiet summer night:
She thinks if I remember, when we parted long ago,
I promised to come back again, and not to leave her so.
—FROM “THE YELLOW ROSE OF TEXAS”
paranoid—New Latin, from Greek, madness, from paranous “demented,” from para- + nous, “mind.”
Rats are taking over the garage. There’s nothing to be done.
Boot-size rodents sprint straight up the walls and then tiptoe along the roof beams. In the wall or the attic, they sound like the Sunday newspaper being crumpled and lit aflame, but out in the open they are silent, a crawling mannequin’s hand. When I go into the pass-out heat of the garage—the loaded-down laundry basket held in front of me, banging through the kitchen door—I feel them up in the rafters, lording over me, disease eyed. My flesh shivers.
The neighbors up and down the street all seem to have dogs, and all those dogs are barking.
Inside the garage I look up and see the one that always seems to be there. Big, slumped lazily as if on a throne, fearless, smiling down at me. In January I will be thirty-three. Soon I will be a father, to a biracial son due also in January. I was born in Iowa, he will be born in Texas. My wife says something must be done about the rats and I know, but nothing I do succeeds. I look up and see shapes moving in the dimness and know that I am the master of nothing, the king of weakness.
A rat king is a group of rats whose tails have knotted together. In January 2005 an Estonian farmer named Rein Kıiv found one. After Rein’s son killed the sixteen rats, the two men realized they’d been fused together by frozen sand. Imagine a Ferris wheel constructed from rats. Imagine the carny at its controls. And imagine, beneath the wheeling assemblage and the grandstand, smaller rats, nubs of stale popcorn and chunks of taffy in their sharp-toothed mouths. Inside these rats there is even farther down: garbage and blood and guts. My attic churns with the noise the rats make. I imagine rat kings in our walls, in the crawl space beneath the floorboards.
In January 1971, Black Sabbath’s second album, Paranoid, was released in the United States. Two of the band’s biggest hits are on the record: “War Pigs” and “Iron Man.” An anti-Vietnam song, “War Pigs” was the band’s choice for album title, but Vertigo Records thought it too provocative. Rolling Stone has often called Black Sabbath “the heavy-metal kings of the 1970s.” I have bought T-shirts, seen posters that said as much: “Kings of Heavy Metal.” In high school we’d go “gravel-jamming” on Iowa’s back roads—we’d get lit up and drive around listening to Black Sabbath or Blizzard of Ozz, lost, playing the Lizard King for hour after hour. The future’s uncertain and the end is always near / Let it roll, baby, roll.
Yes, I will turn thirty-three this winter. I cannot stop thinking about the rats, the horde of them, unyielding. Their crackling keeps me and my wife sleepless. In 2010 I am at war with the rats, while on the other side of the world the United States is also at war, sanctioning torture. I dream of being handcuffed nude to a chair, a barking dog set upon me. Soon, I will be a father. So soon, I will be. So soon, I will be a father.
Elvis Presley, the King, or the King of Rock and Roll, died thirty-three years ago. He was also born in January. As were Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan and advocate of torture Dick Cheney. When I think of Elvis, I think of the movie Viva Las Vegas and pills and sweaty muttonchops. Nolan Ryan was almost bald when he put Robin Ventura in a headlock and punched his head, over and over again, after Ventura charged the mound in a game between the Texas Rangers and the Chicago White Sox. Dick Cheney was thirty-seven when he had his first heart attack.
Four years away: from heart attacks, from saying You bet to torture, from saying Go for it, do what needs to be done, do whatever it takes for them to tell us what we want to hear.
Counting each bone in my coccyx, I have thirty-three vertebrae in my spine—a spine that was slightly curved in my youth. A spine that ladders up to a brain that has been observed, kicked, kissed, cut into, swollen, photographed, punched, fallen upon, head-butted, dashboard smashed, beaned by a curveball, split apart, x-rayed, beaned by a fastball, held, injected with dye, concussed, massaged, and prayed over.
Thirty-three is also the atomic number for arsenic. In a study published in Epidemiology in 2003, a group of seven scientists found that pregnant women who are exposed to arsenic through drinking water will have children with lower birth weights. Arsenic’s effect on pregnant women is similar to that of tobacco smoke and benzene. Lewisite is an organoarsenic compound named after the American chemist Winford L. Lewis. “A dark, oily liquid producing an irritant gas,” lewisite was developed by the US Army as a chemical warfare agent in the early twentieth century. It causes blisters similar to those of mustard gas, but is more effective because it seeps into the skin. It is sometimes odorless and can appear amber if it’s impure. In “Why Not Gas Warfare?” a 1939 op-ed piece in support of the use of chemical weapons, Lewis argued that “the advantage in this mode of warfare goes to that country which is more highly developed in chemical industries.”
The crows swoop and dip, dark commas tornadic in the drafts between bluffs. It is 2004 and I am visiting friends in the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. I’m years away from being able to care about anything or anyone more than myself. I’ve been lying down on this rock for only ten minutes and already the thirty-three vertebrae in my spine, all of my back, are numb. A pickup chugs off in the distance, out along the horizon, maybe in Arizona. A dog barks. A door slams. Earlier I’d gone to the abandoned uranium mines, to see deep into the ground where, for a long time, many Navajo worked without much protection. On the reservation there’s generation after generation of sickness and death and very little help. But the rez dogs wouldn’t let me get a close look. They chased me up to this rock formation and frenzied while I clambered up.
Each dog is mangy, covered with open sores. After chasing me they jawed and snapped at each other, and then, as if they heard some crash in the distance, stopped. They drifted off into the culvert, a spread of trash-strewn snow: torn garbage bags; an old Clorox jug, like an enormous busted tooth; two pieces of a sink; some PVC piping. Now a dog with a pulpy bloom of fresh blood where one of its ears used to be noses into a bag and a black flash streaks out. While the three dogs chase the rat, I watch two other rats inch out of the white plastic. And then they’re muzzle and jaw down in the weeds and gone, invisible in the ditch’s dried grass. I hold my stocking cap to keep the wind from stealing it. The same wind that had hundreds of US flags straightened out above the cemetery yesterday, as if they’d been pinned to the air. One of my gloves is already gone, sinking into the icy slush in the ditch far below. The dogs are back. One has the rat hanging limply from its mouth.
If you walk into a garage in which rats have chewed open your lewisite reserves, and the gas is drifting down on you like a comforter, this is what you should expect: “large, painful, fluid-filled blisters, especially on the extremities, back, and scrotum . . . swelling, inflammation, and destruction of the lining of the airways . . . pulmonary swelling, diarrhea, restlessness, weakness, below-normal temperature, and low blood pressure.” In the 1940s the United States was making lewisite in Pine Bluff, Huntsville, and the Rocky Mountains. At decade’s end production was halted and the United States dumped over twenty thousand tons of lewisite into the oceans: “One of the 1948 dumping operations was referred to as Operation Geranium because lewisite has a geranium-like odor.” In 1991 an Iraqi prisoner of war reported that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled lewisite munitions.
On May 13, 2004, Steve King, an Iowa congressman, compared the torture at Abu Ghraib to fraternity hazing. In the same press release he references prostitute Heidi Fleiss, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and Iowa senator Tom Harkin, and says, “charred,” “dangling,” and “ballpark.” King attends St. Martin’s Church in Odebolt, Iowa. This is just over an hour from where I was born.
On the gorgeous, sun-dappled day I decide all the rats must be killed—no matter what trap or poison it requires—a bird flies into my open garage. It swoops down again and again to peck me on the back and neck. I run from the garage but the bird stays, flies up into the dark, and roosts in the eaves. I leave the garage light off and a door open when I go, hoping the bird will know to fly out into the pink Texas twilight. At dusk, when the bird sees me looking through the garage window, it yells, “Cracker Jacks.” My wife says it is a mockingbird. I say I know; the fucker is making fun of me. Tomorrow the garage will be oven hot. If it doesn’t fly off tonight, it will die. Or the rats might get it.
All night I walk around the house. I flip the garage light on and peer up into shadowed beams. The bird is gone. In January I will be thirty-three. I see the rats scurrying through the dark. In January I will be a father. I am as naked as the day I was born, a bag over my head, handcuffed to a chair, and there is a dog snarling atop me. In the morning I will have to sweep up whatever the rats have left of the mutilated bird.
The summer after my freshman year of college—the summer of 1997—I had an internship at a television station in northern Iowa. Each morning I’d blearily drive to work. Check in. Get an assignment. Check out a video camera. All day I’d drive a TV station car, most often a falling-apart white station wagon, to sporting events across the state. I’d shoot video until I had a few highlights—home runs, a triple in the gap, double play, backward K’s—and then it was off to the next town. The next game. At night, bone-sore from driving all day, I could hardly stand.
That summer I read only Nabokov and often, instead of going straight on, I’d hang a right after leaving town and drive aimlessly down a gravel road. I’d pick a spot where the corn was taller than the roof of my station wagon and then lie back on the hood, smoking cigarettes and reading.
All summer it was Cedar Rapids, Garner, Hampton, Odebolt, Webster City, and Aplington. It was also the summer that I began brushing my teeth on long, solitary drives. The radio up—probably Black Sabbath or Ozzy Osbourne again—and the windows open to the humid choke of the corn and soybean fields. I’d brush them again and again. The toothbrush’s white whiskers going pink with blood.
Martin de Porres was the first black saint in the Americas. The Saint of the Broom was famous for his work with the poor. Levitation and the ability to appear in two separate places at the same time were among his miracles. November 11 is the feast day of Martin of Tours, who, before being baptized as an adult and becoming a monk, was a Roman soldier. In Estonia the day marks the beginning of winter and the end of the Soul’s Visiting Time. Collectio orientalium canonum, seu Capitula Martini was Saint Martin of Braga’s collection of eighty-four canons.
“The Fox and the Cat,” one of the Grimms’ fairy tales, begins with the cat admiring Mr. Fox for how well regarded he is in the world. “Good-day, my dear Mr. Fox,” she says. “How is it going? How are you?” The fox looks the cat up and down. He takes a long time to decide whether or not to even speak to her before calling her a “wretched beard-cleaner” and a “speckled fool.” The fox thinks the cat is stupid for understanding only one way to escape. The fox brags about knowing hundreds, about his “sackful of cunning.” “I feel sorry for you,” Mr. Fox says to the cat. “Come with me and I will teach you how one escapes from the dogs.” But when the hounds come, the cat uses that trick and leaps into a tree’s safety. She yells at the fox, telling him to open his sack. But the fox is already being torn apart.
Outside in the Texas dark, the dogs are barking. All the beasts are coming. All the beasts—the cat, the fox, the dogs, and the people—are torturing one another. In the garage there are hundreds of rats. I see them in double, two by two, a parade of them. I look at the cat, ask why she doesn’t do shit, and she looks away from me, disgusted. I will be a father soon. I will be thirty-three. Somehow I am still alive. The rats blur straight up the walls.
Rat kings are sometimes bound together not by frozen sand, but by a glue of blood. A glue of blood. When I close my eyes and am lucky enough to sleep, I see the first of the rats that were snapped almost in half by the traps set in the garage. Roiling with maggots, their flesh churns, seeming still alive, and the garage is so hot the stench—the unbearable death scent—seems lacquered on. The rats that aren’t cracked instantly dead wriggle, pry themselves from the traps, and then drag their bodies across the concrete, leaving a wake of dark syrup. A glue of blood. Maggots, “no one gets to heaven / Without going through you first.”
So here I am, barely able to go on in Texas, a state where fifty years ago I couldn’t be married to my wife because of miscegenation laws. Soon I will be thirty-three—I will be father to my son, something so recently illegal. The state flower is the bluebonnet and for the few short weeks it blooms during the spring, Texas is dazzling. Then there is drought. Halliburton. Lockheed Martin. The mockingbird, which comes to my home to die, is the state bird. The Gulf of Mexico is our lowest elevation; it’s where they dump what they want to hide or ignore, without a worry for what it kills. This is where everything spills. We are the buckle of the Bible Belt and everything is bigger here. Magnolias. Church steeples. BBQ ribs. There’s been so much drilling for natural gas that there’s benzene in the air, and Texas has the largest uninsured population in the nation. All the fracking might be causing the dozens of earthquakes occurring in the region each week. The Texas Troubles—a panic about the potential insurrection of slaves—presaged the Civil War. Someday my child will have to confront that backwardness because it’s still swaggering around. The racism that grins through every hello and sharpens every minute with hints of violence. Echoes of the voices that put a “WANTED” photo of JFK on flyers distributed in Dallas the day before he was killed.
There are the rats, always arriving, no matter how many are snapped to mush. The dogs are howling. Torture, torture, torture. I am sleepless and the king of failings.
But I am also right here, half-awake in this Texas of Blind Lemon Jefferson. The Texas of Janis Joplin and Buddy Holly and the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson. The live oaks are bursting and emerald and throw shade over the backyard and each afternoon a child bikes down my street and each afternoon that child waves and I’m going to become an ordained minister on the Internet and someday soon I’ll become a father and all of this is so much I often feel like I’m diving into the swallowing sun—for it is again and always and somehow, through all our revolting failures, our endless cruelties, still amazingly beautiful—listening to “War Pigs” on my headphones, my back unfeeling as I work in the oven-like garage, out here killing, ending the endless rat after rat.