Ugly Behavior

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Eventually he stopped and when there wasn’t any more movement he used the straw end of the broom to pull out Miranda’s toys from the bottom of the closet one by one until it was empty.

  He found a flap of loose wallpaper along the back wall above the yellowed baseboard. He lifted the flap up with the broom handle and discovered a four-inch hole in the plaster and lathe.

  It took Miranda a long time to go back to sleep that night. She was trying to forget something but that part of her brain expert at saving your butt wasn’t letting her forget so easily. Instead Jimmy knew that memory was getting filed back there where the rats lick the blood off the wounded dog.

  Tess kept telling him, “It’s all over now. Go to sleep, honey.” And finally he pretended he had.

  And thought about the rats he didn’t want to think about living in his house, sniffing around his kids. He wasn’t about to forget that one. He wasn’t about to forget any of it.

  He’d never thought that his momma had a dirty house, and he didn’t think the other ladies in the neighborhood thought so either, else they wouldn’t have kept coming over to the house, drinking coffee, eating little cakes his momma made and getting icing all over the Bicycle cards they played with. But this was Kentucky and it was pretty wet country up their valley down the ridge from the mines and half the rooms in that big old house they didn’t use except for storage, and fully two-thirds of all those dressers his momma kept around were full of stuff—clothing, old letters, picture albums, bedding—and were never opened. His momma never threw away anything, especially if it came down from “the family,” and she had taken charge of all of grandma’s old stuff, who had never thrown away anything in her life either.

  So it was that he found the nest of hairless little baby rats in that dresser drawer one day. He wasn’t supposed to be messing with that dresser anyway. His momma would have switched him skinny if she’d have caught him in one of her dressers.

  Back then they’d looked like nasty little miniature piglets to him, squirming and squealing for their momma’s hairy rat-tit, but not quite real-looking, more like puppets, a dirty old man hiding inside the dresser making them squirm with transparent fishing line. He’d slammed the drawer shut right away and good thing, too, because if he hadn’t then maybe that dirty old man would have reached his burnt arm out of the drawer and pulled him in. Jimmy’s momma had never told him to be scared of rats but she sure as hell had told him all about the ragged, dirty old men who stayed down by the tracks and prowled the streets at night looking for young boys to steal.

  He never told his momma about the rats either and they just seemed to grow right along with him, hiding in their secret places inside his momma’s house. Like the rats he’d heard about up in the mines that grew big as beavers because they could hide there where nobody bothered them. He’d heard that sometimes the miners would even share their lunches with them. Then the summer he was twelve the rats seemed to be everywhere, in all the closets in the house and you could hear them in the ceilings and inside the floors running back and forth between the support beams under your feet and his momma got pretty much beside herself. He’d hear her crying in her bed at night sounding like his dear sweet little Miranda now.

  He remembered feeling so bad because he was the man of the house, had been since he was a baby in fact and he knew he was supposed to do something about the rats but at twelve years old he didn’t know what.

  Then one day this big rat that should have been a raccoon or a beaver it was so big—a mine rat, he just knew it—came out from behind the refrigerator (that always felt so warm on the outside, smelling like hot insulation, perfect for a rat house) and ran around the kitchen while they were eating, its gray snake tail making all these S’s and question marks on the marbled linoleum behind it. Jimmy’s momma had screamed, “Do something!” and he had—he picked up the thick old broom and chased it, and that big hairy thing ran right up her leg and she screamed and peed all over herself and it dropped like she’d hit it and Jimmy broke the broom over it, but it started running again and he chased it down the cellar steps whacking it and whacking it with that broken piece of broom until the broom broke again over the rat’s back and still it just kept going, now making its S’s and question marks all over the dusty cellar floor so that it looked like a thousand snakes had been wrestling down there.

  Jimmy kept thinking this had to be the momma rat. In fact over the next year or so he’d prayed that what he had seen down there had been the momma, and not one of her children.

  The rat suddenly went straight up the cellar wall and into a foot-high crawlspace that spread out under the living room floor.

  “You get it, son?” His mother had called down from the kitchen door, her voice shaking like his grandma’s used to.

  He started to call back that he’d lost it, when he looked up at the crawlspace, then dragged an old chair over to the wall, and climbed up on the splintered seat for a better look.

  Back in the darkness of the crawlspace there seemed to be a solider black, and a strong wet smell, and a hard scratch against the packed earth that shook all the way back out to the opening where his two hands gripped the wall.

  The scratching deepened and ran and suddenly his face was full of the sound of it as he fell back away from the wall with the damp and heavy black screeching and clawing at his face.

  His momma called some people in and they got rid of the nests in the dressers and closets but they never did find the big dark momma he had chased into the cellar. At night he’d think about where that rat must have got to and he tried to forget what wasn’t good to forget.

  There was one more thing (isn’t there always, he thought). They’d had a dog. Not back when he’d first seen the big momma rat, but later, because his momma had felt bad about what happened and he’d always wanted a dog, so she gave it to him. Jimmy named it Spot, which was pretty dumb but “Spot” had been a name that had represented all dogs for him since he was five or six, so he named his first dog Spot even though she was a solid-color, golden spaniel.

  Just having Spot around made him feel better, although as far as he knew a dog couldn’t help you much with a rat. Maybe she should have gotten him a cat instead, but he couldn’t imagine a cat of any size dealing with that big momma rat.

  Jimmy didn’t think much about that dog anymore. Ah, Jimmy, thank you.

  They had Spot four years. Jimmy was sixteen when the rats came back, a few at a time, and quite a bit smaller than the way he remembered them, but still there seemed to be a lot more of them each week and he’d dreamed enough about what was going to happen to him and his momma when there were enough of those rats.

  Then he was down in the cellar one day when he saw this big shadow crawling around the side of the furnace and heard the scratching that was as nervous and deep as an abscess. He ran upstairs and got his dead daddy’s shotgun that his momma had kept cleaned and oiled since the day his daddy died, and took it down to the dark, damp cellar, and waited awhile until the scratching came again, and then that crawling shadow came again, and then he just took aim, and fired.

  When he went over to look at the body, already wondering how he was going to dispose of that awful thing without upsetting his momma when she got home, he found his beautiful dog instead.

  He’d started crying then, and shaking her, and ran back up the steps to get some towels (but why had she been crawling, and why hadn’t she just trotted on over to him like she’d always done?), and when he got back down to the cellar with his arms full of every sheet and towel he could get his hands on, there had been all these rats gathered around the body of his dog, licking off the blood.

  And now there were rats in his house, around his children.

  The rat catcher, Homer Smith, was broad and rounded as an old Ford. Tess called Jimmy at work to tell him that the “rat man” had finally gotten there and Jimmy took the time off to go and meet him. When Jimmy first saw him, the rat catcher was butt-wedged under the front porch, his
big black boots’ soles out like balding tires, his baggy gray pants sliding off his slug-white ass as he pushed his way farther into the opening until all of a sudden Jimmy was thinking of this huge, half-naked fellow crawling around under their house chasing rats. And he was trying not to giggle about that picture in his head when suddenly the rat catcher backed out and lifted himself and pulled his pants up all in one motion too quick to believe. Homer Smith was big and meaty and red-faced like he’d been shouting all morning, and looking into his face Jimmy knew there was nothing comical about this man at all.

  “You got rats,” Homer Smith said, like it wasn’t true until he’d said it. Jimmy nodded, watching the rat catcher’s lips pull back into a grin that split open the lower half of his bumpy brown face. But the high fatty cheeks were as smooth and unmoved as before, the eyes circled in white as if the man had spent so much time squinting that very little sun ever got to those areas. The eyes inside the circles were fixed black marbles with burning highlights. “Some call me out to look at their rats and it comes up nothing but little mousies they coulda chased away their own selves with a lighter and a can of hairspray. If they had a little hair on their chests that is.” Miranda’s “mousies” sounded lewd and obscene coming from Smith’s greasy red lips. “But rats now, they don’t burn out so good. That hair of theirs stinks to high heaven while it’s burning, but your good size mean-ass rat, he don’t mind burning so much. And you, son…” He raised his fist. “You got rats.”

  Jimmy stared at the things wriggling in the rat catcher’s fist: blind, pale and constantly moving, six, maybe eight little hairless globs of flesh, all alike, all as blank and featureless as the rat catcher’s fingers and thumb, which now wriggled with the rat babies like their own long-lost brothers and sisters. “How many?” Jimmy asked, glancing down at his feet.

  “How many what?” Smith asked, gazing at his fistful of slick wriggle. He reached over with a finger from the other hand and flicked one of the soft bellies. It had a wet, fruity sound. Jimmy could see a crease in the rat skin from the hard edge of the nail. A high-pitched squeak escaped the tiny mouth.

  Jimmy turned away, not wanting to puke on his new shoes. “How many rats? How many days to do the job? Any of that,” he said weakly.

  The rat catcher grinned again and tossed the babies to the ground where they made a sound like dishrags slapping linoleum. “Oh, you got lots, mister. Lots of rats and lots and lots of days for doing this job. You’ll be seeing lots of me the next few weeks.”

  And of course the rat catcher hadn’t lied. He arrived each morning about the time Jimmy was leaving for work, heavy gauge cages and huge wood and steel traps slung across his back and dangling from his fingers. “Poison don’t do much good with these kind o’ rats,” Smith told him. “They eat it like candy and shit it right out again. ’Bout all it does is turn their assholes blue.” Jimmy wasn’t about to ask the rat catcher how he’d come by the information.

  If he planned it right Jimmy would get home each afternoon just as Smith was loading the last sack or barrel marked “waste” up on his pickup. The idea that there were barrels of rats in his house was something Jimmy tried not to think about.

  If he planned it wrong, however, which happened a lot more often than he liked, he’d get there just as the rat catcher was filling the sacks and barrels with all the pale dead babies and greasy-haired adults he’d been piling up at one corner of the house all day. Babies were separated from the shredded rags and papers they’d been nested in, then tossed into the sacks by the handfuls, so many of them that after a while Jimmy couldn’t see them as dead animals anymore, or even as meat, more like vegetables, like bags full of radishes or spring potatoes. The adults Smith dropped into the barrels one at a time, swinging them a little by their slick pink tails and slinging them in. When the barrels were mostly empty, the sound the rats made when they hit was like mushy softballs. But as the barrels filled the rats made hardly a sound at all on that final dive: no more than a soft pat on a baby’s behind, or a sloppy kiss on the cheek.

  Jimmy had figured Smith was bound to be done after a few days. But the man became like a piece of household equipment, always there, always moving, losing his name as they started calling him by Tess’s name for him, “the rat man,” as if he looked like what he was after, when they were able to mention him at all. Because sometimes he made them too jumpy even to talk about, and the both of them would stay up nights thinking about him, even though they’d each pretend to the other that they were asleep. A week later he was still hauling the rats out of there. It seemed impossible. Jimmy started having dreams about a mine tunnel opening up under their basement, and huge, crazy-eyed mine rats pouring out.

  “I don’t like having that man around my kids,” Tess said one day.

  Jimmy looked up from his workbench, grabbing onto the edge of it to keep his hands from shaking. “What’s he done?”

  “He hasn’t done anything, exactly. It’s just the way he looks, the way he moves.”

  Jimmy thought about the rats down in their basement, the rats in their walls. “He’s doing a job, honey. When he’s done with the job he’ll get out of here and we won’t be seeing him anymore.”

  “He gives me the creeps. There’s something, I don’t know, a little strange about him.”

  Jimmy thought the rat man was a lot strange, actually, but he’d been trying not to think too much about that. “Tell you what, I’ve got some things I can do at home tomorrow. I’ll just stick around all day, see if he’s up to anything.”

  Jimmy spent the next day doing paperwork at the dining room table. Every once in a great while he’d see the rat man going out to his truck with a load of vermin, then coming back all slick smiles and head nodding at the window. Then Jimmy would hear him in the basement, so loud sometimes it was like the rat man was squeezing himself up inside the wall cavities and beating on them with a hammer.

  But once or twice he saw the rat man lingering by one of the kid’s windows, and once he was scratching at the baby’s screen making meow sounds like some great big cat, a scary, satisfied-looking expression on his face. Then the rat man looked like the derelicts his momma had always warned him about, the ones that had a “thing” for children. But still Jimmy wasn’t sure they should do anything about the rat man. Not with the kind of rat problem they had.

  When he talked to her about it that night Tess didn’t agree. “He’s weird, Jimmy. But it’s more than that. It’s the way the kids act when he’s around.”

  “And how’s that?”

  “They’re scared to death of him. Miranda sticks herself off in a corner somewhere with her dolls. Robert gets whiny and unhappy with everything, and you know that’s not like him. He just moves from one room to the next all day and he doesn’t seem to like any of his toys or anything he’s doing. But the baby, she’s the worst.”

  Jimmy started to laugh but caught himself in time, hoping Tess hadn’t seen the beginnings of a smile on his lips. Not that this was funny. Far from it. But this idea of how the baby was reacting to the rat man? They called their youngest child “the baby” instead of by her name, because she didn’t feel like a Susan yet. She didn’t feel like anything yet, really—she seemed to have no more personality than the baby rats the rat man had thrown down outside the house. Tess would have called him disgusting, saying that about his own daughter, but he knew she felt pretty much the same way. Some babies were born personalities; Susan just wasn’t one of those. This was one of those things that made mommies and daddies old before their time: waiting to see if the baby was going to grow into a person, waiting to see if the baby was going to turn out having much of a brain at all.

  So the idea of “the baby” feeling anything at all about the rat man made no sense to Jimmy. He felt a little relieved, in fact, that maybe they’d made too much out of this thing. Maybe they’d let their imaginations get away from them. Then he realized that Tess was staring at him suspiciously. “The baby?” he finally said. “What’s
wrong with the baby?”

  “Susan,” Tess replied, as if she’d been reading his mind. “Susan is too quiet. Like she’s being careful. You know the way a dog or a cat stops sometimes and gets real still because it senses something dangerous nearby? That’s Susan. She’s hardly even crying anymore. And you try to make her laugh—dance that teddy bear with the bright blue bib in front of her, or shake her rattle by her face—and she doesn’t make a sound. Like she knows the rat man’s nearby and she doesn’t want to make a noise ’cause then he’ll figure out where she is.”

  In his head Jimmy saw the rat man prowling through the dark house, his baby holding her breath, her eyes moving restlessly over the bedroom shadows. “Maybe he’ll be done soon.”

  “Christ, Jimmy, I want him out of here! And I know you do, too!”

  “What reason could I give him? We’re just talking about ‘feelings’ here. We don’t really know anything.”

  “What reasons do we need? We hired the man—we can fire him just as easy.”

  “Easy?”

  “You’re scared of him, Jimmy! I’ve never seen you so scared. But these are our kids we’re talking about!”

  “He makes me a little nervous, I admit,” he said. “What you said about Susan makes me nervous as hell. And I am thinking about the kids right now, and how I can keep things safe for them around here.”

  “So we just let him stay? We just let him sneak around our kids doing god-knows-what?”

  “We don’t know he’s doing anything except acting a little eccentric. We could fire him and the police could force him off our property, but that doesn’t help us any with what might happen later.”

  “Later,” she repeated. Jimmy couldn’t bear how scared she looked. “What are we going to do?”

  “I’m staying home again tomorrow. I’ll park the car down the steet and hide in the house. If he’s doing anything he shouldn’t, he probably figures he can avoid your one pair of eyes. But tomorrow you’ll be following your normal schedule and I’ll be your extra pair of eyes. Between the two of us we shouldn’t miss much.” Jimmy looked down at the floor, thinking of the beams and pipes and electrical conduit hidden there. He listened for the rats, but the only scratches he heard were the ones inside his head.