The Cities: Rats' Alley

I think we are in rats' alley Where the dead men lost their bones. . .

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Texarkana (pop. 60,000) is a Texas farm town that sprawls across the Arkansas border and serves assorted crooks as a distribution center for stolen cars and appliances. Now the city boasts a new source of notoriety: 17 of Texarkana's 24 sq. mi., including some of the better sections, are infested with sleek, fat rats. According to U.S. Interior Department investigators, the town harbors about 900,000 of the rodents—30 times the national...