Tim called me into his office.
I leaned against the doorframe and opened the top of my deli coffee.
“What’s up, Tim?” I said, into my cup.
“I’m giving you Sunshine Delight tonight.”
“Can you send Junior?”
“Mr. Wong only wants you.”
“Why?”
“Because you speak English.”
“But Mr. Wong doesn’t speak English.”
Tim shrugged. “It’s what he said.”
“Junior speaks English.”
“He’s got an accent.”
“Why don’t you go? You’re Chinese.”
Tim sighed and looked at me like a boss should.
“What time?” I asked.
“10:30. First stop.”
I walked away, and Tim called out. “Hey, watch out in the kitchen, he’s got a lot of mice in there.”
“They’re rats.”
I saluted with two fingers and then stopped at the supply office to fill a black trash bag with rat poison, rat traps, Ditrac, glue boards, Gentrol, bait stations, D-foam, peanut butter, and a small bottle of hand sanitizer.
I carried the heavy bag of poisons up the steps, out the front door, and tossed them in the front seat of my car. After turning on the radio, I lit a cigarette, flipped on my headlights, and cruised down Canal bopping my head to Earth, Wind & Fire. I drove by the Manhattan Bridge where the clock overlooking Chinatown read 10:30. The local shop owners swept bloody fish guts and broken crab shells off their sidewalks.
I parked my car on Canal and Baxter and looked through the big wall window to Sunshine Delight. I could see Mr. Wong slowly stacking his chairs in his dimly lit dining-room.
I took a drag and cased the joint. Not the restaurant, but Canal Street. For five years I had parked in front of Mr. Wong’s restaurant, waiting for it to close, but here I was looking for something new to happen.
My eyes landed on an old Chinese man who was walking through a streetlight beam, towards my car. He was holding his hands behind his lower back and staring down at the cement like some heavy shit had just happened to him. He took his time to walk down the sidewalk as if he was teaching himself to walk for the very first time. I prayed for the sad old man and wished that he could do everything all over again. Whatever his life was, or whatever his life had become, I wished he could get another shot at it all.
I flung open my car door and pushed it further with my foot, hoping the door would break off forever. I got out of the car, flipped the bag of poisons over my shoulder, and hopped over a small pile of trash.
The sidewalk in front of Sunshine Delight was soaking wet from either rain, a wash down, or a murder that had just happened and needed to be hidden. The front door was locked, and Mr. Wong was nowhere to be seen. My stomach rippled with relief, and I instantly felt a sense of freedom. Maybe he had forgotten I was coming or had to reschedule.
As I stood there looking into the restaurant, I saw my entire body in the front door window. I stared at my long greasy black hair, my old, baggy clothes, and the veins on top of my coarse hands. I didn’t know if it was the window or reality, but I didn’t look like a thirty-three-year-old who was waiting to exterminate. The man staring back at me resembled a beggar who would break in and rob the place.
As I backed away from my reflection, Mr. Wong hurried out of the kitchen and yanked open the front door. “Nǐ hǎo!”
I quickly put my bicep to my face. I knew it was coming. Even with my nose pressed against my arm, I could smell it. It wasn’t like a hint of soy sauce or a measly whiff of broccoli. This was the stench of hot rat piss that slowly wrapped around my entire body and not only greeted me when I walked in, but often left with me and lingered for days.
“Too much!” Mr. Wong yelled, holding the door open for me. “Too much Laoshu!”
I nodded from behind my arm. “I hear that, man.”
He smiled, backed away, and motioned me in.
I followed him through the dining room and past a row of big, bubbly fish tanks and four-foot, half-naked Buddhas who looked like they were frozen right in the middle of a hysterical laugh. We pushed our way through the swinging kitchen doors, and Mr. Wong stopped me at a five-pound bag of peanuts.
“No good!”
“What’s no good?”
He used his right hand to chomp through the air like Pac-Man. “Too much Laoshu! Eat peanuts!”
“Damn sure did.”
I dropped my bag of poisons on the floor, while looking at the torn-up bag of peanuts surrounded by peanut shells. No peanuts, just the shells.
“Hm, wow.”
Mr. Wong shrugged.
“No, I mean, I never really thought about it before, but do rats actually crack the peanut shell to get to the peanut?”
Mr. Wong’s eyes shifted from me to the floor, to the wall, and then back to me.
“You know what I’m saying, Mr. Wong? Instead of just devouring everything in sight, the rats have manners. They carefully crack the shells, eat the peanut, and then politely set the shells aside. Man, that’s crazy. I know humans who don’t even do that.”
Right then, a tiny squeal rang out from some corner of the kitchen. We both froze. Mr. Wong’s round, pudgy body was stuck in a half-moon, sort of like a big flea. I stood straight up, and brought one finger to my lips.
I turned off the kitchen lights. It wasn’t pitch black but dark enough that I couldn’t see my shoes. We stood still and waited. I pointed my flashlight at the holes around the radiator pipes, the holes in the drop-top ceiling, and at the holes around the baseboards. I looked for a nose, a tail, a whisker.
I then roamed my flashlight beam around the crusty stove-top woks, and the soggy egg-roll-covered floor drains.
I whispered into Mr. Wong’s ear, “Looking good, Mr. Wong.”
He smiled because I was smiling.
The wall scratched and squeaked. The clawing turned into a rustling, followed by louder high-pitched squeals. I carefully slid out a glue-board from my trash bag and got into a ready position. A rat darted out of a hole in the baseboard and scurried across the floor.
Mr. Wong fell backward into a pile of empty white buckets that toppled over like bowling pins.
I whipped around. “Quiet, goddamnit!”
The rat ran back into the hole.
I jumped down on the floor and shined my light into the hole. A skinny pink tail slivered into a broken metal pipe and then vanished.
“Ah, nice work, Mr. Wong. You know…” I sat up and pulled my bag of poisons closer. “…rats have super-duper hearing. Like bionic-type shit. They can actually hear a person rubbing their two fingers together. And look at you, all rolling around on a bunch of loud, empty buckets.”
Mr. Wong nodded apologetically and offered me the remaining egg roll from a greasy stainless steel bowl.
I waved him off, sat on the floor, and pulled out my poisons.
Mr. Wong chewed on the egg roll and watched me fix the broken baseboard. First, I threw a handful of deadly tracking powder inside the hole, and then I stuffed it with steel wool, followed by fireproof foam. After that, I set down three glue-boards and one snap-trap dabbed with a tiny bit of peanut butter.
“Just so you know, Mr. Wong, these rat-traps should work, but this entire kitchen has some serious structural damage. Rats will be coming in here for days. I recommend getting a construction worker to repair everything. And I’m not talking about some cheap, rinky-dink guy like me, either. I’m talking about dudes with hard-hats, loud metal tools, and big trucks. This place is falling apart.”
When I got up and turned around, I realized that I was talking to myself. Mr. Wong was standing at the other side of his kitchen, near the entrance to his basement.
“Bes-a-ment!” He pointed down to the basement.
“Huh?”
He looked scared and worried.
“Bes-a-ment! Bes-a-ment!”
“Alright, alright, relax, Jesus.” I followed him down the wobbly wooden steps and into the dark basement. I quickly scanned the area for mice, rats, snakes, or anything else that could have triggered Mr. Wong’s hysteria. The only thing that stood out was a dead octopus sprawled out on the table with its tentacles hanging off the edges. Everything else looked the same from my last visit one month earlier; piles of broken wood pallets, leaky faucets dripping into slimy sinks, buzzing flies, and scattered white tracking powder on the floor that was now flustered with tiny rat claw prints.
“What? What are we doing down here?” I asked loudly, making sure that he picked up on my frustration.
Mr. Wong leaned against the outside of his walk-in freezer and clapped two times.
A little girl walked out from behind a stack of wooden pallets holding a notepad and one pencil. She was eleven at most and wearing a pretty white dress.
Mr. Wong pulled out a small piece of yellow paper from his back pocket and handed it to me. It said “Englis.” I flipped it over to look for more, but that was it. It just said “Englis.”
The little girl sat down next to the dead octopus and swung her feet.
I held up the paper. “What’s all this?”
“Englis!” He pointed to me, and then the girl, and then back to me, and then to the little girl.
I laughed and looked at the girl. “You want me to teach this girl English?”
Mr. Wong patted my shoulder and hurried up the steps.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up now, Mr. Wong.” I followed him half-way up the steps. “You’re joking right?”
Mr. Wong opened the door to his dining-room but blocked the space between the wall and the door. He smiled, gave me two quick thumbs up, and then slammed the door behind him.
I walked down a few steps and peeked under the wooden hand railing. “Hey.”
The little girl looked up.
“He’s joking right?”
She pointed to a dead rat stuck to a glue board. But it wasn’t just a rat, it was the cartilage of a rat: the leftover skeleton with its head glued forward and eyes wide open. The tail was still furry and pink at the end.
“Laoshu,” the girl said.
“It’s a rat.”
“Laoshu.”
“Rat.”
She cleared her throat. “Rhaxxx…”
“Perfect.” I walked up the steps. “Great, now you can tell your father I told you how to say ‘rat.’”
I tried to open the door but it was locked. “Yo,” I said through the door. “Mr. Wong?” I knocked. “Hellooo? Mr. Wong?”
The thick metal door didn’t budge, but I banged on it anyway. I pummeled it with my fists, my feet, and I even tried to knock it down with my ass. “Mr, Wong!” I knocked again. “Mr. Wong!” I ran down the stairs and pointed up to the locked door.
“Hey, little girl, you got a key?”
She looked at me and then drew on her notepad.
“Key. Can you say key?”
“Chyyy…”
“Hey! Girl. Hellooo.”
She batted a fly away from the dead octopus and then erased something on her notepad.
I tried opening the door one more time, then I searched the basement for an exit. The only other way out was a street-level window looking out onto Canal Street. I tried to open it, but the dried white paint had sealed around the wooden frame. I finally plopped down next to the little girl and laughed. “Wow. This is a joke, right? You totally speak English. Can you say that? Joke?”
“Chooch…”
“No, Joke. Say it.”
“Gaooot…”
“Wrong.”
She started to draw what looked like a sunflower. Her mouth twitched as she drew each detail.
The window looking out onto Canal started to liven with footsteps: high heels, dress shoes, combat boots, and even flip-flops. Friday night.
The little girl pointed to a pinkish paint stain on my sleeve.
I looked at it and then back at her. “What? What are you pointing at?”
She pointed at the paint again.
“This? Um, well, this is paint. Can you say paint?”
I waited.
“Peww…”
“Forget it. It’s better that you can’t say paint. Trust me. Anybody who has paint on their clothes means that they’re at the bottom of the barrel.”
I scooted forward in my chair and sat upright. “It’s from a proofing job I did at some rich person’s apartment uptown. An elegant dump if you ask me.”
The little girl giggled and swung her feet.
“Yep, mice droppings everywhere. On the floor, in the toaster, on the cutting boards, just nasty. You’d be surprised how many rich people live in squalor. After I sealed up the mice holes, the woman told me to paint over them. I told her it wasn’t my job, you know? To paint. But I did it anyway. I painted the woman’s entire wall.”
I stopped talking when I noticed a door behind a stack of milk crates way back in the darkest part of the basement. A door that probably led out to the alley. “That door open?” I asked.
The little girl nodded to the door and mumbled a few words in Chinese. I looked at her, back at the door, and then got comfortable in my chair.
“Now, I got nothing against rich people, and I didn’t even mind the painting. But, this woman made me wear booties while I was in her apartment. You know what booties are? They’re like covers for dirty shoes. And even though my shoes were clean, that woman made me wear them anyway. I don’t think she even looked at my shoes. She just shoved those booties in my face the minute she saw me.”
The little girl smiled at me, and I smiled back. “But I’ll tell you what.” I tapped the paint stain on my sleeve. “This paint? Even though I had to wear those stupid booties, I did a hell of a job on that wall. I felt good about myself, you know? Painting that woman’s wall was kind of therapeutic. I had a sense of purpose and accomplishment and all of that. It was cool to see a whole white wall turn into color.”
I leaned over the table and plucked the pencil out of the little girl’s hand. I wrote “sunflower” on her notepad and then tapped the “s” with the tip of the pencil. “Can you say this? Sunflower?”
“Saanphlar…”
“Almost.”
“Saaanflae..”
“Ah, forget it. Your dad’s crazy, you know that? Yeah right, like I’m going to teach you English. I can’t teach anything. I mean, if that is your dad. Is Mr. Wong your dad? I sure hope so. If not, this whole thing just got a hell of a lot creepier.”
I leaned back in my chair and cradled the back of my head with the palms of my hands. I looked up at the window and watched the wheels of a shopping cart roll by, followed by a pair of high-heels. “Anyway, I think it’s cool that your dad’s trying to help you and all that. I mean, I can’t teach you shit, but he’s looking out for you, you know? He likes you. Not too many dads would do that. I know my dad wouldn’t.” I shrugged. “Ah maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t, what the hell do I know? I do know that he didn’t really like me, though.”
The little girl drew a big smiley face on her notepad.
“Hell, my dad didn’t even like himself. He would always tell me how he wasted his entire life trying to be too many things, ‘too many oars in the water’ as he put it. He wanted to be a writer, a musician, a basketball star, just a million things. He would always tell me to stick to one thing because if you’re too many things, you’re nothing.”
I spit and watched the saliva slowly stretch all the way from my mouth to the ground. “Yeah, well if my dad was alive today I’d tell him that sticking with one thing won’t make you shit either, you know? Please, I’ve been doing this same crappy job for five years and look at me. I’m locked in a basement sitting next to a dead octopus.”
A fly buzzed around my face and then landed on the octopus. The little girl slid off her chair and walked up to the window.
“It doesn’t open.” I tried to scratch the dried foam off of my pant leg. “Even if it did open, it wouldn’t matter. Who cares if I’m sitting down here or standing up there on Canal? I’ll be wearing these same dirty clothes forever.”
The little girl walked across the basement and stopped one foot in front of me.
I tried even harder to peel the foam off of my pants. “Foam. Nasty, foam. Can you say that?”
She touched the pinkish stained blotch on my shirt. “Paint.”