Chapter Twenty Three
A few days later Torus sitting at home working on a small building project when Nevi’s voice came down the entrance tunnel.
“Hey, Torus, are you in there?” she called.
“Yeah, come on down,” he replied, distractedly. He barely looked up when she came in, followed by Chello.
“Hello,” said Chello, awkwardly.
“Hi,” said Torus, bending a piece of wire into a loop.
“We waited for you down at the alley, but you never showed up,” said Nevi.
“Yeah, I didn’t want to waste my time,” he replied. He put down the wire and picked up a piece of cardboard and started shaping it with his teeth.
“So we came up here to see if you were here,” she continued.
Torus picked a bit of cardboard out of his teeth and then continued nibbling, speaking around the edge of the piece.
“Yup, I’m here,” he said. “Sorry I don’t have anything to offer you.”
“Hey, listen,” said Chello, “about the other night – ”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Torus. He stopped nibbling and spat out another bit of soggy paper. “Pha! This stuff tastes horrible. Don’t worry about the other night,” he continued. “Everyone’s got a job to do, right?”
“Yeah, but it stinks what we’re doing now,” said Chello. “I’m going to try to get out of the Patrol in the spring. Maybe I’ll be a Scout.”
“You’re too noisy to be a Scout,” said Nevi. Then she turned to Torus and continued, “So, anyway, we came to get you because we heard there’s an apartment on the third floor that the human just moved out last night, and there’s all kinds of stuff still there. We thought maybe we’d go check it out before it gets foraged or before the other humans clean it all out.”
Torus sat back and looked at the scattered pieces of wire and cardboard and finally said, “Okay, that sounds good. Better than this, anyway.”
“What are you doing?” asked Chello.
“Nothing,” said Torus, evasively. “Trying out some flying ideas…”
He got up and the three of them turned for the tunnel.
“Are you going to keep trying that?” asked Nevi, nervously.
“Probably not,” said Torus. “Maybe only one more time, if you know what I mean.”
“Stop it!” she said.
“Yeah,” said Chello as they headed off down the tunnel. “You’d splat like an egg. No one wants to clean up a mess like that. OW!” He looked around at Nevi, rubbing his shoulder and laughing. “What was that for?”
“You just shut up,” she said.
Torus looked over at her and noticed she was wearing a cloak. “Is that the cloak your mom made again?” he asked.
“No,” she said, “this one’s mine. I made it.” She stopped and held out the hem for him to see. “Do you like it?”
“It’s nice,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s hard to see you in the dark, though.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I chose this cloth with the pattern on it.”
“I guess it makes scouting easier, right?”
“Yeah, and it makes me feel kind of cozy and safe, even when I’m out in the open.”
“Cozy?” mocked Chello. “You want to feel ‘cozy’ while you’re out scouting?”
“Everybody likes to feel cozy, you jerk,” she said amiably. “I’ll make you one, if you want.”
“Only if it can be bright red so I can strike fear into the hearts of my enemies,” he said.
“I’ll try one,” said Torus, thoughtfully. “I think I have some cloth that will work at home. Remind me later and I’ll get it and you can show me how you do it.”
They walk a while in silence, and then Chello spoke suddenly.
“I’m serious about the red,” he said. “I’ll find the cloth if you’ll make it for me.”
“Sure,” said Nevi, smiling at Torus. “We’ll make Chello the most fearsome red rat on the whole block!”
They reached the apartment and worked their way in through a gap under a cabinet in the bathroom. The room was dark, but Torus could tell it was piled with human stuff. They made their way out, through the bedroom, into the main room. Everywhere they looked they saw stacks of boxes and piles of papers, bundles of things they could barely recognize, and heaps of things they couldn’t figure out at all. They walked along a tidy path that led from room to room while the piles of collected things towered above them.
“Wow,” said Chello, under his breath. “I thought Nile was bad.”
“What did it do with all this stuff?” asked Torus. “What’s it all for?”
“Who knows,” said Chello. “Humans are weird about their stuff. They just keep getting more and more of it and they just stack it up and never do anything with it.”
“This human lived by itself,” said Nevi. “It was probably lonely. Old rats who live alone fill up their dens with stuff, too.”
“Whatever,” said Chello. “Where’s the kitchen? I’m starved.”
They followed the path through the main room to the kitchen, which was also piled with junk on every surface. It didn’t take long for Chello to find his way to a cupboard full of boxes of food. Soon the three were sitting on all sides of a freshly opened package of cookies. For Torus, it felt like the first full meal he had had in weeks. He was still eating when Chello rolled onto his back and groaned with pleasure.
“Ooooh, thank you human!” he said. Then, after a pause, “You’re sure it’s gone, right?”
“Yes,” said Nevi, nibbling the edge of her second cookie. “I saw it leave last night. It stuffed a bunch of things into a bag and a box with a handle, and then it left.”
“What were you watching it for?”
“Why do you care?” she said, “I was scouting, that’s all you need to know.”
“Okay,” said Chello, agreeably. “Whatever you say. What if it comes back?”
“I don’t think it will,” said Nevi. “It left its keys up on the counter there and it didn’t lock the door. I asked Mr. Nile about it and he said it’s never a good thing when humans leave in the middle of the night.”
“You’ve been to see him?” asked Torus. “How is he?”
Nevi shook her head.
“He’s not getting any better yet. He’s still really weak but he won’t let anyone do anything for him.”
“Crazy old rat,” said Chello, getting up with a grunt. “I’m gonna look around.” He wandered off into the main room while Torus and Nevi continued eating.
“So what happens to all this stuff?” asked Torus.
“I think the other humans will come and take it away. Maybe throw it away, or take what they can use, I guess. The same as us, more or less.” She waved her cookie around the kitchen. “And we’ll come and forage until they do, and get as much of the food as we can get away with without giving ourselves away.” She took the last bite of her cookie and said, “Are you done? We should put this back where we got it so it doesn’t look suspicious.”
“Suspicious to who?” asked Torus. “The humans or the forage leaders?”
“Exactly!” she said.
They had just finished putting the package away when Chello called to them from the other room.
“Hey, come and look at this!”
They followed his voice to the far side of the room and saw him sitting on top of a large table. They clambered up the piles of stuff until they reached him and then stood beside him gazing mystified at what they saw.
Unlike the rest of the apartment, the top of the table was mostly clear, with just a few objects placed carefully in orderly rows. Some of them were obviously tools of some kind, long, wooden sticks with tufts of bristles at the end, other wooden sticks with pointed ends or chisel-shaped tips. There were several sticks of the kind Torus had taken on the raid, but longer, and all different colors. Nearby, there were several metal tubes with pl
astic caps, like toothpaste tubes, but smaller, and in different colors like the sticks. On the other side of the table was a small wooden box full of little colored bottles, and another box with assorted strange objects in it.
In the middle of the table, rising far above the rats’ heads, was a large rectangular board, propped up on a frame, and the board was covered with streaks and splotches of color.
“Wow,” said Chello finally. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” said Nevi. “It used to sit here a lot and do stuff, but I couldn’t see what it was doing.”
“Humans are so weird,” said Chello.
Torus stared at the colored board and studied it. He had a feeling he could almost recognize it, but he couldn’t quite work it out. Then suddenly something clicked in his mind and he spoke.
“It’s a human,” he said.
“No it’s not,” said Chello. “It’s just a mess.”
“No, look,” said Torus, pointing. “There’s two eyes, and a nose, and that could be a mouth there, and these marks here show the shape of the face.”
“I don’t know…” said Nevi uncertainly.
“Definitely not,” said Chello.
“And up there, all those black marks are its fur on the top of its head, right?” Torus continued.
Nevi’s eyes lit up.
“Oh, I see!” she said suddenly. “It is a human!” She turned to Chello. “You see it, don’t you?”
“I…guess so,” he said, looking at the board perplexed. “It doesn’t look much like any human I’ve ever seen, though.”
“Maybe that’s how they see themselves,” Nevi suggested. “I mean, they talk strangely, maybe they see strangely, too…”
“Strange is right,” said Chello, tearing his eyes away from the picture and moving across the table. Torus followed him and started rummaging through the box of mixed up pieces of metal. Most of them were things he couldn’t identify, and he started taking them out one at a time, examining them.
“It looks kind of like the human that left last night,” said Nevi suddenly from where she sat still gazing at the picture.
“All humans look alike,” said Chello without looking up from the little red tube he was holding.
“No, I think it is,” she replied. “I mean, it doesn’t look exactly like it, but somehow it looks the same.” She paused, thoughtfully. “It looks sad.”
“So you’re telling me that this human took all this colored stuff and made a messed up picture of itself to watch over all its stuff when it left?” Chello asked skeptically.
“Sure, why not?” said Nevi, sullenly.
“I think humans are crazy,” he said, coming back to sit beside her. “Or you are,” he added. “Or both.”
“Hey, look at this,” Torus called. He held up a slender, tubular metal handle with a sharp triangular blade fixed to one end.
Chello sauntered over and examined it. It was very light and the edge of the blade glinted in the dim light.
“That’s wicked sharp,” he said, admiringly.
“Yeah,” said Torus. “I bet it could cut cardboard and stuff way better than my teeth.”
Chello nodded slowly, squinting at the sharp tip of the blade. “You could also poke pigeons with it, I’ll bet.” He handed it back to Torus, who hefted it in his paws.
“It feels more like a tool to me than a weapon,” he said. “But I guess you’re right…”
“If you don’t want it, I’ll take it,” Chello offered.
“No, I think I’ll keep it,” said Torus. “I’m not sure you can be trusted with so much sharpness.”
“Hey, we should get going,” said Nevi. “The forage will start soon and I’m pretty sure they’ll be coming here.”
“What makes you so sure?” asked Chello. “Why can’t we keep this place secret?”
“Because I’m not the only Scout in the building,” she replied impatiently. “Come on.”
She descended from the table and headed down the path back to the bathroom, followed by Torus carrying his new tool awkwardly. At the far side of the room, she called up to Chello, who was still sitting on the table, looking thoughtfully at the tube of red paint in his hands.
“Chello, come on,” she called. “What are you thinking?”
“I think I’m going to keep this,” he said, shuffling casually to the edge of the table and starting the climb down.
“Keep that?” she said. “What for?”
“It’s red,” he said, as if it was obvious. “I like red.”
Nevi and Torus exchanged a puzzled glance as he passed them and headed through the apartment to the tunnel to leave.
* * *