Animal Appetite

only it’s a nighttime sport, and you just see the ugly things from a distance in the headlights of your car.”
    As Steve led me to the bathtub, scrubbed my knees and elbows with soap, and made me rinse the scrapes under hot water, he accused me of maligning some of his favorite patients. “Clean, intelligent pets,” he said.
    “Cop-out pets! You ever hear of ‘a boy and his rat’? ‘A girl and her rat’?”
    “Some people don’t have time for dogs.”
    “Cats. Cats are real pets. They’re not disgusting, beady-eyed, humongous rodents. This one weighed a minimum of five pounds. Steve, that’s rinsed enough. I’m freezing. Can’t I get out of here?”
    “No, and if it weighed five pounds—”
    “Oh, it did! Professor Foley’s neighbor, Lydia, said that he told her he saw one the size of a woodchuck, and naturally, I thought that was an exaggeration. But now I realize it was probably an underestimate. I am getting out of this tub now!”
    “Whoever would’ve guessed,” he said, handing me a clean white towel, “that beneath this feminist exterior—”
    “Rats are the enemy of the human race. It’s just that women are a lot freer than men to express everyone’s true feelings on the subject.”
    Back in the kitchen, as the dogs assisted Steve by licking my injuries and running off with gauze pads, I said, “Besides, this was a sick rat. All the hair had fallen off its tail, and the bare skin was all scaly...” I shuddered at the memory.
    “Rats have hairless tails. The skin on their tails is supposed to be scaly.”
    “All the more reason to exterminate the damned things. Now I finally understand why Jack Andrews had that sodium fluoroacetate. If what you’re dealing with is rats, no measure is too strong!”
    Steve’s Fletcherizing relative must have forced him to chew his thoughts as well as his food. He ruminated for thirty seconds before he said, “The only good rat is a dead...?”
    Another half-minute passed in silence.
    “Rats are rats,” I finally said.
    “There is nothing inherently evil about rats.”
    “Rats are rats,” I repeated. “The situations are not comparable.” I now had a towel wrapped around my waist. I’d left my socks in the bathroom. My legs and feet were an unattractive shade of winter white; by comparison, the fresh bandages had a great tan. I was still wearing the T-shirt, but its sleeves were damp. I went to Steve and held his face between my gauze-encased hands. “But the feelings are.”
    He stroked my hair.
    “The feelings are comparable,” I said. “We all have it in us, don’t we?”
    And then, naturally—it happens all the time—even before the dogs had had a chance to pounce on us, Steve got called away on an emergency caused, as usual, by yet another Cambridge intellectual who hadn’t been able to endure the prospect of depriving her dog of his so-called freedom to be a dog—his natural right to savor the ultimate canine experience of being crushed by a car—and now expected Steve to repair the damage that was her own damned fault. In cynical moments, I wonder why these dog-murdering romantics bother to let their dogs run loose. It would be altogether simpler and easier if these people would just get in their cars and run over their dogs themselves. The effect would be the same, really, only the owners would have slightly more control than they do now over which body parts get destroyed and whether the dogs live or die.
    After Steve departed, I called Brat Andrews. I did not confess that I’d passed myself off at Damned Yankee Press as her cousin. I told the truth: I said that I was very sorry about Professor Foley’s death. Brat’s response was terse, but the pitch of her voice was high and she sounded sincere. “Uncle George was a good friend of Daddy’s.”
    I said that I hated to bother her right now, but that I had a few questions. I’d be as brief as possible. “Your father grew up in Haverhill,” I said. “I know this may sound off the wall, but the local heroine there is a colonial woman named Hannah Duston, and—”
    “Daddy knew all about Hannah Duston. There’s a statue of her in the middle of Haverhill. Daddy did a report about her when he was... in high school, I think. Maybe when he was younger. I remember because he used to make fun of himself for what he called it: ‘Intrepid Heroine.’ He got an A on it. I don’t think the title is so stupid, but Daddy did.”
    “There’s no chance you still happen