rat

the coney island bound f train stop by our house is a pretty desolate place around 6:30am. even the manhattan bound platform across a pair of unused tracks only has a handful of folks at a time. the platform, the undergroundness of it, the brokendownness, feels heavier than it should on dark mornings. the man at the far end of the platform who moves his arms in slow, complex symbols every morning while staring into the tunnel does not add anything useful.

so this morning i walk through london-jack-the-the-ripper predawn fog with hissing needle rain, down a flight of steps to the first level which smells homeless, through the turnstile. a good morning is a morning when there's no angry man standing alone on this level by the turnstile, glaring at you. nobody lying on the pavement at the bottom of the stairs. i shove myself through the turnstile and down a second set of stairs to the platform. good morning so far.

the platform is long, the length of seven or eight subway cars. i tend to walk myself halfway down, past one set of stairs and then another, to the middle. this is what people do. they have their spots to stand, their cars to wait for. so this morning i step down off the last step onto the cement of the platform and a small something, a leaf, a scrap of candy bar wrapper, hurries across the cement thirty feet down the platform. and it stops. i stop. it looks at me. i look at it.

it is not paper or a leaf. and my brain says the cute word. the sweet, little word. mouse. but my eyes are seeing something quite a bit larger. rat. ratratrat. showdown. we are alone on the early morning platform facing each other. now, the funny thing is i'm not at all afraid of rats. rats in their proper place -for instance the environs of the new york city subway- are where they're supposed to be. and i am bigger. i am faster. i am tactically more sophisticated. so i walk toward my part of the platform the way all new yorkers walk anywhere, purposefully, determined, obliterating all other things.

but the very large soft brown rat has been spending some serious time watching new yorkers go about their business because he sets his cowboy hat (metaphorically speaking, of course) low over his eyes, points his tail out, rudderlike, and uses all four cowboy booted feet to stomp himself right in my direction. showdown, indeed. and i have taken only a few steps when he is right up there beside me, a few feet away. shiny eyes. beady eyes looking at mine.

he turns that soft brown rat body toward me. i think about my shoes and how they are sturdy enough to kick him if he tries to climb up my leg but he doesn't even try. he keeps turning all the way around. i take a step down the platform and his pointy nose moves the same direction. i watch him. he watches me, nose full of whiskers twitching. i take another step. he takes fifteen or twenty. it turns out i am not what you'd call faster than a rat. and we walk down the platform, one car length, two car lengths, three car lengths, together. side by side. we are halfway down the platform and i stop. this is my spot. and he stops, pretends to be looking for something he dropped on the ground. he does not look at me at all. he noses around the last staircase, the one ten feet away. a man walks past me from the other end of the platform, walks past the rat. he stops, smiles at the furry thing, smiles at me, walks on.