_by_
_Winston Marks_
Erd Neff wanted as little to do with his fellow men as
possible. So he lived alone in his big cash-vault. Alone,
except for John....
* * * * *
Erd Neff dropped a thin bundle of currency into the $100 bill drawer
of the flat-top desk and kicked the drawer shut with a dusty boot.
He flicked the drip from his hooked nose, which was chronically
irritated by the wheat dust of the warehouse, then he wiped his
fingers down the leg of his soiled denims. Across the 12 X 12,
windowless room John stirred awake from the noise and began nosing in
the debris of his filthy cage.
"Time for supper, John?" Neff tugged at the twine at his belt and
examined his $3 watch. He pinched a dozen grains of wheat from a
two-pound coffee can and let them sift through the wires of the cage.
John pounced on the grain hungrily.
"Wait a minute! What do you say, dammit?" Neff's hand reached for the
marshmallow-toasting fork that hung from a hook on the wall. He
touched the points, filed needle sharp. "What do you say?" he
repeated, twanging the tines like a tuning fork.
John skittered to the far corner, tearing new holes in the old
newspaper with frantic claws. Cowering against the wires he spat
half-chewed flecks of wheat trying to say the magic words that would
spare him from the fork. "Tinkoo! Tinkoo!" he squeaked, straining to
make the two syllables distinct.
Neff hung up the fork, and John turned to lick at the old scabs
clotted from earlier jabs, taking sullen inventory to be sure there
were no new crimson leaks in his louse-infested hide. Until two months
ago, he had been just one more gregarious specimen of Mammalia
Rodentia Simplicidentata Myomorphia Muridae decumanus. Now he had
another name. Like each of his predecessors in the cage, he was a
large, brown rat called John--after Erd Neff's despised and deceased
father. Neff named all his rats John.
[Illustration]
"Well, don't get fat."