Ugly Behavior

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  The rat man came out exactly at nine in the A. M. like always. You could set your clock by him. He started unloading all his equipment, including the sacks and the metal barrel he threw the adult rats in. Jimmy crouched low by the master bedroom window, watching for anything and everything the rat man did. The first sign of weirdness, he thought, and he’d be hauling his kids’ asses out of there. Tess went to work in the kitchen; they agreed it’d be best to pretend she was having a normal day.

  The rat man disappeared around the corner of the house with the big metal barrel. Jimmy was thinking about shifting to another room when he came back, holding four stiff rats by the tails, their black coats grayed with dust. No way he could’ve caught and killed them that quick, he thought. The rats appeared to have been dead a good day at least. Jimmy watched as the rat man waddled up to the corner where the house turned into an “L,” the corner with the window to the baby’s room. He watched as the rat man dangled the stiff rats against the rusting screen, clucking and cooing, rubbing his fingers up and down the smooth, hairless tails, talking to Jimmy’s baby through the screen and smiling like he didn’t realize where he was, like he was off in another place entirely.

  Off where dogs bleed in the dark and the rats gather round to lick the blood.

  All day long Jimmy watched as the rat man sneaked dead adult rats and hairless baby rats out of his rusted green pickup and planted them in the crawl spaces under the house only to haul them out again and replace them in the barrel and the sacks. The same ones, over and over. Jimmy wondered how many rats they’d actually had in the first place. A dozen? Six? Four? Just the one, trapped back under Miranda’s bedroom, and coming into the rat man’s hand easier than a hungry kitten?

  Now and then the rat man would come out with something wrapped in a towel or a rag, cradling it carefully in his arms like it was his own baby. Jimmy couldn’t quite credit the gentleness he was seeing in the rat man; he looked silly, really. Jimmy wondered why the rat man would want some of the rats bundled up.

  Right after the rat man left for the day Jimmy told the whole story to Tess. “I wasn’t about to confront him on it here,” he said.

  “Well, if he’s just a con artist then we can call the police.”

  “He’s a helluva lot more than that—I think we’ve both figured that one. That little office he has in town is closed and there’s no home phone number listed. So I’m going to have to go out to his place tonight. I’m going to tell him not to come around here anymore.”

  “What if he says no?”

  “He’s not allowed to say no, honey. I’m not going to let him.”

  “What if I say no, Jimmy?” Her voice shook.

  “I don’t think you’re going to say no. I think you’re going to be thinking about the kids, and that crazy man dangling rats in front of their faces like they were baby toys.” He stroked her shoulder. After a few seconds she looked away. And Jimmy grabbed his coat and went out to the car.

  The rat man lived out past the empty industrial parks on the north end of the city. Here the municipal services weren’t so good, the streets full of ragged holes like they’d just run short of asphalt, the signs faded, with a permanent, pasted-on look to the trash layering the ditch lines.

  It wasn’t hard finding the right house. “The rat catcher man? He lives down the end of that street don’t-cha-know.” The old man was eager to tell him even more information about the rat man, but these were stories Jimmy didn’t want to hear.

  The rat man’s house didn’t look much different from any other house in that neighborhood. It was a smallish box, covered with that aluminum siding you’re supposed to be able to wash off with a hose. A small porch contained a broken porch swing. There were green curtains in the window. A brown Christmas wreath hung on the front door even though it was April. Two trash cans at the curb overflowed with paper and rotten food. And the foot-high brown grass moved back and forth like a nervous shag carpet.

  What was different about the rat man’s yard was all the tires that had been piled there, stacked into wobbly-looking towers eight or nine feet tall, bunches of them sitting upright like a giant black snake run through a slicer, tangled together in some parts of the yard like a slinky run through the washer. Some of the tires were full of dirt and had weeds growing out of them. Some of the tires looked warped and burnt like they’d had to be scraped off somebody’s car after some fiery journey.

  But it was the nervous grass that kept pulling at Jimmy’s gaze. It wiggled and shook like the ground underneath it was getting ready to turn somersaults.

  When Jimmy moved through it on the way to the rat man’s door, it scratched at the sides of his boots. When Jimmy climbed the porch steps it slicked long, trembling fingers up around his ankles, making slow S-curves and question marks that set him shivering almost—it was crazy—with delight.

  When Jimmy actually got to the door he could hear the layers of scratch and whisper building behind him, but he didn’t turn around. The scratching got louder and Jimmy found himself angry. He started to knock on the rat man’s door but once he got his hand curled into a fist he just held it there, looked at it and made the fist so tight the fingers went white. The scratching was in his ears and in his scalp now, and suddenly he was in a rage at the rat man and couldn’t get that picture out of his head: the rat man dangling those dead monster babies in front of Jimmy’s baby’s window.

  He held back his fist before he punched through the rotting door and instead moved to the dingy yellow window at the back of the rat man’s porch. He let go of the fist and used the open hand to shield his eyes from the late afternoon glare when he pressed his face against the glass.

  He saw the rat man’s back bobbing up and down like a greasy old sack moving restlessly with its full complement of dying rat babies. The walls of the room were lined with a hodge-podge of shelving: gray planks and old wooden doors cut into strips and other salvage rigged in rows and the shelves full of glass jars like his grandmother’s root cellar packed with a season’s worth of canning.

  Jimmy couldn’t tell what was in those jars. It looked like yellow onions, potatoes maybe.

  The rat man was taking something out of a sack. He moved, and Jimmy could see a small table, and little bundles of rags on it. The rat man picked up the bundles gently and filled his arms with them. Then he headed toward a dark brown, greasy-looking door at the back of the room.

  Jimmy stepped off the porch and moved toward the side of the house. The rat man’s grass seemed to move with him, pushing against his shoes and rippling as he passed. He looked down and now and then saw a gray or black hump rise briefly over the grass tops before sinking down inside again.

  The first window on that side was dark and even with his face pushed up into the dirty screen he could see nothing. A tall dresser or something had been pushed up against the window on the other side.

  The second window glowed with a dim yellow light. Jimmy moved toward it, through grass alive with clumps and masses that rubbed against his boots, crawled over his ankles, and scratched at his pant legs.

  A heavy curtain had been pulled across the window, but it gapped enough in the middle to give Jimmy a peep-hole. Inside, the rat man was unwrapping the bundles. Around the room were more shelves, but here they had been filled with children’s toys: dolls, teddy bears, stuffed monkeys and rabbits, tops and cars and jack-in-the-boxes and every kind of wind-up or pull-toy Jimmy had ever seen. Some of them looked shiny brand-new as if they’d just come out of the box. Others looked as old as Jimmy and older, the painted wood or metal dark brown or gray with layers of oily-looking dust.

  The rat man put his new toys up on the shelf: a Miss Raggedy Ella doll, Tiny Tears, Homer Hippo, GI Joe, a plastic Sherman tank, a baby rattle, and a teddy bear with a bright blue bib. Toys that belonged to Jimmy’s kids. And then the rat man picked up the last, slightly larger bundle, and placed it in a pink bassinet in the middle of the room, where he unwrapped it and rearranged the faded blankets.r />
  Suddenly Jimmy felt the rats clawing at his ankles, crawling up his legs.

  He turned so quickly—thinking he’d run to the porch and break through the door—that he stumbled and fell on his knees. Instantly he had rats crawling up on his back, raking at his legs, several hanging by their claws and teeth from the loose front of his shirt. He stood and brushed them off him, finally grabbing one that just wouldn’t let go with his hands around its belly and squeezing until it screamed and dropped.

  All around him the towered and twisting mass of tires was alive with dark rats, scrambling over each other as they climbed and tumbled through the insides and over the outsides of the black casings. He didn’t make it to the porch without losing a few hunks of skin here and there. The rats gathered round to lick the blood.…

  The rat man’s door disintegrated the second time Jimmy plowed into it with his shoulder, but not without a couple of hard splinters lodging painfully into the top of his arm. He stumbled into the front room and crashed into the far wall where the shelves of old wood began pulling away from the wall, dumping row after row of Mason jars onto the floor.

  His feet slid on the spilled gunk. He could feel soft lumps smashing under the soles of his shoes. He staggered and grabbed the edge of a shelf, bringing down more of the jars. He started moving toward the greasy brown door at the back of the room as if in slow-motion, looking down at his shoes and moving carefully so that he wouldn’t slash himself on the broken glass, but all the time screaming, yelling at himself to get his ass in gear and get to that bedroom at the back of the rat man’s house.

  He saw, but didn’t think about, the bodies of the hundreds of hairless little rat babies bursting open under his shoes and smearing across every inch of the wooden floor.

  He felt himself sliding, beginning to fall, as he jerked the door open and headed down a pitch black hallway toward a dim yellow rectangle of light at the other end. He pushed at the invisible walls of the hallway to keep himself upright and raced toward that rectangle, the walls going away around him as in a dream.

  He wasn’t aware of pushing open the door to the back room. It just seemed to dissolve at the touch of his hands.

  Homer Smith, the rat man, was bent over the pink bassinet, cooing and making little wet laughing sounds. Later Jimmy would wonder why it was the rat man hadn’t paid any attention to the ruckus in the front part of his house.

  Homer looked up, his hands still inside the bassinet, as Jimmy hit him across the face as hard as he could. He fell to his knees with a noise like thunder, then looked up at Jimmy, then looked around at all his toys, smiled a little, like he wanted Jimmy to play with him. Off where the dog bled in the dark.… Jimmy kicked him in the ribs this time, with boots still smeared and sticky.

  Homer doubled over without a sound, then he looked up at Jimmy again, and his face was as soft and unfocused as a baby’s.

  Jimmy thought about his baby in the bassinet, but couldn’t quite bring himself to look yet. He glanced around the room instead and saw the broom propped in one corner. He stepped over to it, still aware that Homer wasn’t moving, picked it up and brought it down across Homer’s left cheekbone. The straw-end snapped off like a dry, dusty flower head and Jimmy used the broken handle to whip Homer’s face until it was a bloody, frothy pudding, Homer’s head snapping back and forth with each blow but still Homer stayed upright, leaning forward on his knees. Jimmy couldn’t believe it, and it scared him something terrible.

  He kept thinking about the baby, but couldn’t keep his eyes off the baby catcher, the baby snatcher. Finally he took the ragged, broken end of the broom handle and held it a couple of feet from Homer’s throat. Jimmy could feel the weight of the pink bassinet behind him, and the thing wrapped up inside it, not moving, not crying, keeping still as if watching to see what would happen, but Jimmy knew it wasn’t just keeping still. It was dead. Susan was dead. He hadn’t checked on her before he came out here after the rat man and he should have known, watching the rat man carrying all those swaddled objects out of his house like that. He should have known.

  At last Homer Smith raised his bloody head and stared at the sharp stick Jimmy had poised at his throat and seeing what Jimmy was ready to do Homer began to cry a wet, blood-filled cry, like a baby, just like a baby Jimmy thought, and it reminded him of lots of things, not all of it bad, as he drove the sharp end of that stick as hard as he could into the soft skin of Homer’s throat.

  The dying took a few minutes, Homer trying to pull the stick out but not being able to. Jimmy threw up over by the bassinet until he had nothing left to heave. Finally he got to his feet again and stood over his baby, hesitated, then slowly unwrapped the blanket from around her.

  And found two dead black rats there, curled around each other like Siamese twins. Homer had dressed each in baby doll clothes.

  Jimmy felt the scratching up in his scalp, long and hard like fingernails clawing through a wooden door, long before he actually heard it. And then the sound of hundreds of pale tongues, lapping.

  He turned and looked off where the dog bled in the dark at Homer Smith’s body, and the hundreds of rats gathered round to lick the blood.

  Blood Knot

  “Just a damn knot. You can’t untie it; you can’t burn it off. Older you get the tighter it gets. Might as well accept it, ’cause that’s the way it is. What else you going to do? Kill everybody in the family? Jesus Christ, it’s a goddamned blood knot.”

  I heard my daddy say this when I was thirteen, fourteen, something like that. We were at our last family reunion: daddy, me and sis, and daddy’s fourth wife, June. “Junebug,” he called her—I guess because she was so much younger than him.

  Flashforward ten years later and there daddy is in a hospital bed coughing his lungs out. He pulls me closer—I was in my army fatigues—and with breath that smelled like shit he tells me, “I married my June bug ’cause she was so young I knew the rest of the family wouldn’t approve and they’d have nothing to do with her. Had me a ready-made excuse to stay away from the rest of them, give myself some breathin’ room. With your family, well, you’re who you are but then you’re not who you are, you know what I mean? Because you can’t move. You can’t change. Too bad she was so damn dumb.”

  I thought he was a fool. He had everything I’d ever wanted: kids, and a house, and more than one wife who’d loved him more than he’d deserved, surely more than was good for her. By then I’d found out that I had no talent for girlfriends, not even bad ones. They never lasted long enough to get bad. They never lasted long enough to be a pleasant memory after they were over. I was too reckless, or I wasn’t reckless enough. I was too kind, or I wasn’t kind enough. Something. Whatever it was that brought out the skittishness, the scared dog look, in those women, I had. In plentiful supply. I asked, even begged sometimes, for answers, and it was always something like, “maybe it’s the way you talk,” or “maybe it’s all that stuff you think about.” And that was if I really made them give me an answer. But they didn’t know. I didn’t know, and they didn’t know. Hell, I thought being a little weird attracted some women. But not in my case.

  “Some things are fated. Maybe you’ve got bad fate, or something, Harold.” That was Linda, the night before she left me. She held me, and she let me cry in her bed, and she listened while I spilled my guts about needing a family of my own, someone I could love like I was supposed to, and she was good, so good she brushed away my embarrassment when she brushed away my tears, and the next day she left me. Fate, I guess.

  Well, fuck her. She was good to me that night, but fuck her.

  I’m not sure, but I think Daddy killed June one night, shortly after I’d turned eighteen. I don’t know—we just never saw her around again. There’d been a lot of noise, a lot of drinking. I’m sorry to say that at the time I felt a big load had been taken off, because of the way she looked at me, the funny way she made me feel. Daddy always said she never really was part of the family. She kept herself apart and, after all, s
he wasn’t blood. And she was young, too young to understand him, or us, or much of anything about living I guess. Maybe that was why I could feel about her the way I did—my own stepmother after all. She wasn’t blood, and like he’d always told me himself, blood is everything.

  I don’t know what Daddy would have made of my three daughters. I don’t want to know. If he had lived I wouldn’t have let him anywhere near them—even if somebody’d pulled off his arms and snipped off his balls. I had that dream once, where somebody cut him up like that. He didn’t even scream. In fact he thanked the man, the man in the shadows holding the razor. He smiled and said “Thank you very much—I sure needed that,” even as the blood spurted from his crotch like some kind of orgasm that had been going on too long. I don’t know if it was a nightmare or not.

  “It don’t matter if you like your family or not. You’re tied to ’em; might as well accept that. It’s in the blood.”

  So yeah, it finally happened. I met my own June, only her name was Julie, and she was quite a bit younger, and not very smart. I oughta be embarrassed saying that I guess. But I’m not. I did love her, still do, I’m sure. A person doesn’t have to be smart, or the right age, for you to love them.

  I’m never going to know I guess if she really loved me, or if it was just because she was younger, and not knowing what love is really, and then the girls came along, and so like any good mother—and I’ll always swear that she was a good mother—she stuck with the father of those children, however strange his thinking, and said that she loved him with all of her heart. And maybe she did. Maybe she did. I’ve never really understood women. Not my wife. And not my daughters.