Fear the Reaper

Fear the Reaper

It was just part of the job.

I mean, Hell, our lead adjuster Big Tom (five foot one, one hundred seventeen pounds), said one angry white-trash family threw a plastic bag full of maggots at his head the first day he worked there.

Carlos, who looked like Ron Jeremy with Michael Jackson disease, said a woman who burned down her own barn snuck up behind him and tried to strangle him with chicken guts.

It was part of the ritual.

Some jobs, they steal your chair.

You work in insurance, you risk your life.

So when Ted the Hillbilly started working with us 10 months ago, the clock started on one of us thoroughly fucking with him. He was the new man, so he deserved it. It helped that he stuttered and drove a raper van with a Blue Oyster Cult mural on the doors. His nickname was Deliverance.

John the IT guy called him soooeeey!

Ted tried hard to be liked. He brought everyone coffee every morning. He was puh-puh-puh polite. But he also liked to sleep on the grass in the courtyard like a dog. We decided that was the time.

“I want to go stomp on his head,” John said.

We were watching him one morning from the back door of the break room. Stanley the office manager, fresh from rejecting a claim about an infant mauled by a neighbor dog, walked up and lit a cigarette.

“Run him over with the lawnmower,” Stanley suggested.

Paul and Bill, two other adjusters, joined us at the door. I pointed at Bill’s red eyes.

“How did the liver cancer claim go?" You feel bad? You look like you’ve been crying.”

“Fuck no, son.” Bill coughed and scratched his ear. “We had pictures of the mother of six drinking at a bar. We shut that shit down tight and quick. Doctor Death Drugs bought us drinks all night long.”

Paul bummed a cigarette from Stanley. “What’s this?”

John pointed at Ted curled up in the grass.

“Take a block of concrete and drop it on his face,” Paul said.

“Carry him out front and throw him in the street,” Bill said.

“Those are all good ideas,” I replied.

But I had a plan. When I dumped the garbage that morning I remembered seeing some dead rats in the dumpster. I pulled on a couple of latex gloves, sprinted across the parking lot and came back with two brown rats covered with blood and cigarette ash. I carried them out to the yard and laid them down right by Ted’s face. Everyone agreed it was the least violent thing we could do.

We gathered at the back door and waited.

“What do you think they smell like?” Tom said.

“Your ass,” Bill said.

“No, they probably smell like my dog’s ass. My dog loves rat meat,” Paul said.

“Should we get Tonya? We don’t want her to miss out on the fun,” Stanley suggested.

“Nah, she’s Mormon.” Stanley laughed.

Then one of the rats moved and we all froze.

“Should we wake him up?” I asked.

Everyone agreed it would be much funnier if the rat did something to his saggy, pale, pock-marked face.

“This is the greatest thing we’ve ever done,” Paul whispered.

The rat climbed on Ted’s shoulder and walked across his back to his head. It clawed at his hair for a while and then climbed up on his head and shit a little chocolate pellet into his ear.

“I would kill the Pope for a camera,” Bill said.

“What happened?” Tom shouted. “I can’t see!”

“The fucking rat shit in his fucking ear!” Bobby shouted.

We all agreed this was the funniest thing we’d ever seen. Then the rat yawned and bit down on Ted’s pimply red neck.

“Oh shit,” I said.

“The fucking rat bit him!” Bobby shouted.

Ted swatted at it like it was a fly. It hopped off his head and ran across the courtyard and dove under a bush. Then he sat up and dug the pellet out of his ear and smelled it.

“He could get sick, real sick,” Bill said.

“He could get the fucking bubonic plague,” Stanley said.

Ted stood up and flicked the rat shit across the yard. He saw us watching him.

“What ur-ur-ur yall doin?”

“You shouldn’t sleep in the yard,” Bill said.

“Go wash your hands, John boy,” Stanley said.

We followed him to the toilets and Paul pointed out the blood stain on his collar from the rat bite.

Tom went up front to meet a family, the mother of a brother-sister junkie team that died together around the corner from a catholic hospital.

Paul went outside to smoke.

Stanley poured himself a cup of cold coffee and sat down in the break room.

Bill went out to his car to sleep off his hangover.

I stood there and watched the door.

“You feeling guilty?” John asked me.

Before I could answer, Ted came out of the toilets blubbering and wiping snot off his face. He held a paper towel to the back of his neck.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“Sumpin bit me,” he wailed.

“Why are you crying?”

“Muh sister called. She sayed muh dawg died. My Shooter, my Shooter’s dead.”

He put his knotted, liver-spotted hands in his green, suit-coat pockets and bowed his head. His bony shoulders started to tremble and he choked out these little squeaking sobs.

John asked me if he said his shitter was dead?

“My own shitter hasn’t worked in days, Ted, don’t sweat it.”

I took a step forward to give him a pat on the back, because my first reaction was to pretend to give a shit. That’s what we were trained to do. Then I remembered what Stanley said about the plague.

“Sorry to hear that, Ted,” I called out as I walked away.

I walked out to the parking lot and could see Bill’s feet propped up on his dashboard. Paul smoked a pack of cigarettes, boom-boom-boom on a chain. Tom came outside for a smoke and kicked the shit out of a flower bed. I thought about Ted and imagined him covered with bubonic plague sores.

I should’ve known that rat was alive.

Why didn’t I know the rat was alive?