While Roy’s mother was in the land of 10,000 lakes, there was a sanitation workers strike in Chicago. Garbage piled up in the streets and alleys. Now the weather was very warm and humid and the city started to stink. Big Cicero, the hunchback with a twisted nose who once wrestled Killer Kowalski at Marigold Arena and now worked at the newsstand on the corner near the house, said to Roy’s grandmother, “May they rot in hell, them garbagemen. They get a king’s ransom as it is just for throwin’ bags. Cops oughta kneecap ’em, put ’em on the rails. The mayor’ll call in the troops soon it don’t end, you’ll see.” Roy’s grandmother said, “Don’t have a heart attack, Cicero.” “Already had one,” he said.
One afternoon Roy looked out a window at the rear of the house and saw rats running through the backyard. A few of them were sitting in and climbing over the red firetruck his grandmother had bought for him to pedal around the yard and on the sidewalk in front of her house. “Nanny, look!” Roy shouted. “Rats are in our yard!”
“His grandmother came into the room and looked out the window. The rats were climbing up the wall. She grabbed a broom, leaned out the window with it and began knocking the rats off the yellow bricks. They fell down onto the cement but quickly recovered and headed back up the side of the house. Roy’s grandmother dropped the broom into the yard and slammed the window shut. Rats ran up the windows. Roy thought that they must have tiny suction cups attached to their feet to be able to hold on to the glass. He could hear the rats scampering across the gravel on the roof. A flamethrower would stop them, Roy thought. If the mayor really did call in the army, like Big Cicero said he might, they could use flamethrowers to fry the rats. Roy closed his eyes and saw hundreds of blackened rodents sizzling on the sidewalks.
By the time Roy’s mother returned, the garbage strike was over. Roy told her about the rats sitting in his firetruck and climbing up the wall and his grandmother swatting them with a broom. “Not all the rats are in Chicago, Roy,” she said. “They got ’em in Minnesota, too.”
“And in Venezuela,” Roy started to say, but he didn’t.
