Short Fiction: Potholes
Roman Djinowski loved his job. Road repair had ground to a near-halt during the worst years of the war, but now people were beginning to relearn their taste for freedom and mobility, and he was part of that. After a long day, he would look at the maps and see the roads as broken threads, and trace the ones his crew had repaved, imagining the whole state sewn up again.
It wasn’t perfect, of course. There was the human factor — his guys (there were no women on the crew, most of them not yet being back from the army) were a good bunch, but he had his share of troublemakers and yahoos who only showed up for the check. The idiosyncrasies of his higher-ups. The weather, which could make the site a swampy hell or bring work to a dead stop on the whim of a stray cold front.
And there were inexplicable frustrations like this.
The potholes they’d filled yesterday had returned, blemishing the shiny black surface of the new asphalt. Djinowski stared into the largest of them. It was a real axle-breaker, in the middle of the lane — made the road pretty much unusable. The bottom was covered by water.
“Well, fuck me.” He kicked a pebble into the hole. It disappeared with a plop.
After four hours of work (and plenty of grumbling and pointless speculation from the crew) the potholes were once again covered with steaming asphalt. Djinowski looked across it with pride. This neighborhood had been especially neglected, for all the usual reasons, and to see a stretch of inky new pavement here was a sure sign that things were changing for the better.
“I’m glad that we didn’t bother to grade that,” said Davis, scuffing the toe of his boot at one of the freshly re-opened holes. They were about half-full of water now, though it hadn’t rained.
“Let’s just go on with the next section… what are you doing, Martinez?”
Martinez glanced up from the pothole he’d been studying belly-down on the pavement. “Just checking something, sir.”
“What, exactly?”
“Whether these were dug out or collapsed, that sort of thing.”
“And?” Djinowski bit back a sarcastic remark about Sherlock Homes — he should have thought to look himself.
Martinez clambered to his feet. “Well, they were dug out. Someone carried the dirt away.”
“Vandalism?”
“Looks like.”
“I’ll stop by the office tonight and tell them we need security.”
“Yeah, like rental cops will help,” said Bubeck. “Just let me sit up tonight, and tell these fuckers what I think of them.”
Djinowski silenced Bubeck with a glare. “If management doesn’t solve the problem, then we’ll take care of it. But there’s no point losing sleep if they’ll pay some other poor bastards to.”
He hadn’t counted on the indifference of management when he said it. But when it became necessary he found himself there with Martinez and Bubeck and Davis, all equipped with flashlights and thermoses of revolting coffee. It was three in the morning, and their cohesion was going to hell.
“I wish I had my binoculars with me,” Martinez said.
“What,” Bubeck snapped, “we won’t see a gang of rats with picks and shovels crossing the road?”
“Rattus. Not rats,” Djinowski corrected him through clenched teeth.
“It could be kids from the East Side,” Martinez said. “Trying to wreck the neighborhood.”
“The more holes they put in things, the more the rats like it,” Bubeck muttered.
“Bubeck, stuff it. Martinez, don’t answer the silly bastard. My god, you’d think I was being paid to be a babysitter.”
Bubeck, mercifully, shut up. Djinowski wondered when he was going to hit on the right way to handle the man. He didn’t think he was making anybody be overly correct. He’d been dubious about the Rattus himself when they moved down the hill into town from the university. But that wasn’t the point. The point was getting the roads paved, which was hard enough without Bubeck antagonizing people.
“What’s that?” Davis pointed. The asphalt was slumping like an unstable sand dune.
By the time they reached the spot, a depression the size of a basketball had appeared. Then the asphalt broke around the edges and disappeared into the filthy water below. The pothole was open again.
“Oh yeah, sabotage,” Bubeck said, rounding on Martinez. “You’ve had us out here all freaking night!”
“You volunteered,” Djinowski said, stepping between the two.
Bubeck shrugged and they trudged towards their vehicles. Davis muttered something hopeful about getting some sleep.
Martinez looked down at the pothole. “It was different yesterday,” he said.
The next day Bubeck and Martinez called in sick. The rest of the crew repaired the holes a little sloppily, and Djinowski didn’t make them do it over.
To top it off, that evening when he stopped by the office he found a snidely-worded memo telling him to write off that stretch of road and move on. Not for a few weeks while they called in a team of experts to take a look at the problem, had some meetings. That he could understand. But they wanted him to just leave it.
He couldn’t not look at the potholes the next day.
He even got a stick and probed the deepest one. The water was murky, and a layer of silty muck had trapped some kind of loose object. He coaxed it up to the surface. Though it was slimed with rotted leaves and mud, there was no mistaking it for anything but a rodent skull.
He pulled an old drive-thru napkin from his pocket and picked it up. Management couldn’t ignore a Rattus skull at a worksite — they were meant, by law, to treat it the same as a human skull. Assuming it was a Rattus skull. Djinowski had taken a biology course while working on his associate’s degree, long ago, but it wasn’t helping him now.
He carried the skull in its napkin back to his truck and set it carefully in the cup holder.
Djinowski sat up late trying to identify the skull online, with no luck. Some of the pictures labeled Rattus looked right, and then he compared it to other pictures and it looked like a feral capybara or god-knows-what. He slept badly, and woke up anxious and annoyed.
The receptionist at the office took the memo but refused to touch the skull. Djinowski left wishing he had thought to attach a photograph, at least. Words alone didn’t do justice to the still slightly damp, smelly, greenish object that stared at him from the cup holder. Shutting the door of the truck on it and turning away to get to work on a fresh, desperately needy stretch of road was the most satisfying part of his day.
But when he walked back to worry around the edge of the holes, the skull tormented him. It was too small to be a Rattus skull, and he was making a fool of himself. But all skulls looked smaller when you stripped away the flesh.
Martinez was staring at the holes too. The man looked so tired that Djinowski considered telling him to go home before he caused an accident, but they were behind schedule now.
He brought the skull into his apartment that night, though it made him nervous. If it was a Rattus skull, he shouldn’t leave it in his truck; in fact, he probably needed to call someone and see that it got a decent burial. He had no idea who you called for that. Probably someone at the office knew, since you still heard about the occasional new road cutting through a forgotten graveyard.
He put it off. It would be awkward to explain, and he found that he no longer enjoyed being in the office any more than necessary. His eyes would inevitably be drawn down the lines to the one spot on the map where he knew the web was broken.
Soon he could no longer see the potholes from the site. He tried not to walk back and look. If the men saw him doing that, it might wreck their recovering harmony — Bubeck had returned to his pre-incident level of muttering and fight-picking, Davis had stopped looking baffled and jumpy, and Martinez, though he seemed distracted, was working hard. Djinowski didn’t want to disturb them any more than he wanted to disturb freshly-laid asphalt, until peace had set and hardened into routine again.
Still, he put the skull in his truck every morning and brought it into his apartment every night.
Inevitably it was spotted. By Martinez, who had looked into the truck in search of a wrench while Djinowski was busy at the other end of the site. He couldn’t be angry - he’d told the whole crew to feel free to help themselves to tools in his truck. He’d thought it would build rapport.
Well, they had some rapport now, he and Martinez, sipping diner coffee and staring nervously at each other.
“I should just throw it back,” he said, quietly enough that he hoped the people in the next booth couldn’t hear. “For all I know it’s a capybara.”
“It’s not a capybara,” Martinez said. “But I do think you should put it back.”
He sounded too sure, and it put Djinowski off his coffee.
“I can’t really explain,” Martinez added. “You should see for yourself.”
“See what for myself? I already spent the night out there. Didn’t see shit.”
“Well, it’s not every night. Anyway, that night they burrowed from beneath because they knew we were there.”
“Burrowed? So it was Rattus? Have you told anyone at the office yet?”
“I didn’t think they would help. It’s a delicate situation.”
“They can handle delicate situations. If it’s just some dumb kids they won’t be too hard on them.”
“It’s not dumb kids. Just come with me tonight and see for yourself, and if you still think it ought to be reported, well… you’re the boss, boss.”
This didn’t reassure Djinowski as much as Martinez seemed to think it would.
Dark had fallen by the time they reached the site. This time they stood well back from the road, and Djinowski could barely make out the potholes. Martinez had a battered pair of military-surplus binoculars around his neck.
“I feel like I’m spying,” Martinez said. “But on the other hand, I can’t just waltz into the middle of their business like a tourist, can I?”
“I suppose not,” said Djinowski, who still wasn’t entirely clear on what he was supposed to be looking for.
He stared into the night for a long time. Then the night moved.
At first he thought he was imagining it. Easy enough to do when your eyes had nothing to focus on but shadows and vague forms. But the things he thought he saw solidified into things he did see, a dozen of them. Their faces were hidden by hoods, but their stature and the scurrying way that they moved said Rattus. They carried a large bundle between them.
They headed for the potholes without an upward glance, but just to be safe he ducked lower into the scrubby bushes that lined the road. As they got nearer, he could hear them chanting quietly in their high, hesitant voices.
They formed a circle around the largest pothole. The Rattus carrying the bundle knelt and held it on their shoulders; the figure that had been the leader of the group began to unwrap layer after layer of dark cloth, all the while keeping up his chant. The words were heavily accented, and as usual with the Rattus half of them were probably above the range of human hearing anyway. He couldn’t make anything out; he strained until his ears were bewildered with the sounds of a neighborhood whose residents were still, by ancient impulse, partly nocturnal.
Martinez handed him the binoculars without a word.
The Rattus’s paws — no, hands — were still unfolding the cloth. The bundle was not wrapped in a single layer, he saw now, but in multiple strips of dark cloth.
Then there was a flash of something much lighter, and the figure held up what was distinctly a clean white limb-bone before his face. His incisors showed for a moment, then he passed it on. The assembled Rattus passed it from hand to hand, murmuring, and gradually he understood what he saw. Each took a single perfunctory gnaw.
By the time the bone reached the last small, stooped figure in the circle, it was half gone. This last one stepped forward once she had taken her bite, and carefully lowered the bone into the pothole.
The ritual was repeated with each of the bones as it was drawn from the bundle. Djinowski made out ribs, vertebrae, more long bones. And finally, the skull, unsmeared by mud but familiar enough. They didn’t gnaw that. Just passed it from hand to hand, stroking it, still chanting. The little Rattus on the end kissed the skull before she committed it to the waters of the pothole.
Then they slipped away. Martinez stood up, and Djinowski followed gingerly, stretching tensed muscles. They were silent all the way back to the truck.
“I suppose it breaks some health code or something,” Martinez said finally, “but I’m not going to be the one who reports it.”
Djinowski looked back at the broken place in the road. It still didn’t sit right. “I suppose to them, the war seemed longer. Because their lives are shorter. They must have got used to doing it that way for generations.”
Martinez said, “There’s a natural spring there. I checked a map.”
Djinowski opened the truck door and pulled out the skull.
Martinez went on. “I was in England a couple years back, during the first armistice. They had a church there with a well in the middle. The guide said that the Druids worshipped a spring, so the Christians built their church right over it. So that people could keep coming back to the same place, but as Christians.”
Djinowski nodded. His tired brain was about sick of dancing with the subject.
“We can’t ask the office to put a church with a well in it in the middle of the street. It wouldn’t be much good as a street then.”
“Well, no, I didn’t think…”
“And the Rattus wouldn’t thank us if we did. It would just make the Jehovah’s Witnesses pester them more.”
“It’s your decision.”
“But a culvert, on the other hand, doesn’t really draw attention to anything.” He knelt, and let the skull slip back into the hole.
“I think that I can persuade the office we need a culvert, with all the water down here.”
Carrie Laben is a Brooklyn, NY writer who crashed into prominence with her story “Something in the Mermaid Way” published March 07 in Clarkesworld Magazine. Visit Carrie at her LJ blog at http://teratologist.livejournal.com.
“Potholes” placed second in our 2006 Halloween short fiction contest.
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