Terminating rats for a beer, in the summertime, in south St. Louis

This is a strange story - so I'll just jump right in.

In the summer of 1971 I was 15. Four places west of our two-family flat was a four-family flat. They were called flats because the roof was basically flat, with a slight slope down from front to rear.  My folks owned the two-family flat we lived in - occupying the ground floor - while the 2nd floor was rented out. In most of the four-family flats you had 4 renters and they were often not kept in very good shape, inside or out.

Mac (probably 48 years old or so) and his family of four lived in that four-family flat four places west of our flat. (Names have been changed in this story so Mac and his family may remain anonymous.) There was Mac's wife, 11 year old daughter, 10 year old son, and the runt, Benny, 6. Benny was born with a cleft palette and Mac's family couldn't afford to get it fixed so most of the kids in the neighborhood always made fun of the way Benny talked. I didn't, because Mac and his family became friends that summer.

One evening Mac made me and another kid from the neighborhood, Johnny, an offer. He'd give us a beer or two if we would sit on his front porch after the neighborhood got quiet - around 11 PM - and shoot rats that came out of the crawl space in the four-family flat next to his. The weapon of choice was a CO2 BB pistol, nearly quiet when shot. His kids were sound asleep when all of this was going on.

Mac's family lived in the lower left apartment of this 4 family flat

So almost every evening around 11, we'd head down to Mac's for Rat Patrol. If we stayed very quiet on Mac's front porch, sure enough a little after 11, rats would start to come out from under the flat next door. Pop, pop, pop - "Got him!". Mac would laugh and his beer belly would just shake and shake. He ducked inside and got us each a beer. That first night I think we killed 3 or 4 rats. On subsequent nights the death toll would stay lower, only 1 or 2 for a while. And after a few weeks, we thought we had killed all the rats under the flat next door. Johnny only stuck around for the first few nights, then decided he'd had enough. From then on, just Mac and me on Rat Patrol.

But Mac had started something, giving each of us a beer that first evening, and the nightly beer continued for a little while. I continued going to Mac's apartment, watching TV in the living room in the dark as his kids slept. And there in the only light provided by the black and white TV, you'd see a roach scurry across the floor. Then another. and another. I got my fill of seeing roaches pretty quick and that was the end of the nightly visits to Mac's flat. How thick were the roaches? One early evening I stopped by and his wife had a pot of beans boiling on the stove. As I looked into the boiling pot, there'd be a roach float by every so often. Mac's wife fished the roach out of the pot and the family had those beans for supper that night. I never ate there, for obvious reasons, and soon stopped going there in the evening altogether.

About a year later, I heard Benny had run out in front of a car and was hit and killed. I don't know what happened with the rest of that family, but they moved somewhere else shortly after Benny's death because they couldn't pay the rent.

So it goes.