Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

But not this time. He didn’t think his lack of sleep had anything to do with her. Not this time. What he forgot this time, he knew, came from somewhere deeper than that, from somewhere further back, off where the dog bled in the dark and the rats gathered round to lick the blood.

“Ah, Jimmy, thank you….” he said, but quietly, not wanting Tess to hear. Off where the dog bled in the dark….

Maybe he felt the scratching before he actually heard it. Later he’d wonder about that. He felt it up in his scalp, long and hard like fingernails scratching through a wooden door, the fingers bleeding from the effort and the mind spinning dizzy from the pain. Jimmy raised his head and looked toward the bedroom door—they always kept it open halfway and the hall light on because Miranda was just down the hall and at five years old she still hated the dark, almost as bad as Jimmy used to hate the dark. Almost as bad as he hated it now. They kept the door open because Jimmy wanted to be sure and hear her when she screamed, which she still did about once every two weeks. He didn’t want to lose any time getting into his little girl’s room.

Tess was always telling him that he coddled the kids. That was a funny word—he didn’t think he’d ever heard anyone else use it besides his grandma, back when he was a kid. And maybe Tess was right. He’d never been able to talk much about what it is you do with kids—being a dad to them, disciplining them, that kind of thing—not the way Tess could. Sometimes she gave him these books to read, books on parenting by experts. He never got much out of them.

All Jimmy knew was to pay attention to them, love and protect them. And tell them when they did wrong, though after a while you couldn’t stop them from doing wrong, just slow them down a little. Just doing that much wasn’t easy, not like it sounded. The kids would find out soon enough that the world was worse than they’d ever imagined, and maybe they’d hate him a little at first because of that. But all he could do was try to keep them alive and teach them a few things that would help them keep themselves alive. And maybe someday they’d figure out he’d loved them and that he’d meant the best for them, even with all the mistakes he’d made. He figured love was mostly mistakes that turned out okay. And maybe he’d get lucky. Maybe he wouldn’t be dead when that someday came around.

A small black dog, maybe a cat, came racing by the open door, in and out of the little bit of light like a shadow pulled by a rubber band. On its way to Miranda’s room, looked like. But they didn’t own a dog, not since they put old Wooly to sleep. And their cat was white as a clean pillowcase.

Kids scream for all kinds of reasons. But even for the silly ones Jimmy had never been able to stand it. When Miranda’s scream tore so raggedly out of the dark, he was up and heading out the door without even pulling down the covers. Tess made a little gasp of surprise behind him as the headboard rocked back and banged the wall. The whole house was shaking with his legs pounding down the hallway and Miranda screaming.

As soon as he reached his little girl’s door he caught the sharp smell of pee, and when he slammed the light switch on he fully expected to find the rat up on the bed with her, marking her with his teeth and claws and marking the bed with his pee just to let Jimmy know whose was whose. But there was just Miranda huddled by herself, her face red as a beet (how do little kids make their faces go that color?), and the damp a gray flower opening up all around her tiny behind.

“Daddy! A big mousy! Big mousy!” she screamed, words he would have expected from her two years ago but not now (Dad! I’m a big girl now!), pointing a whole pudgy and shaking fist toward her open closet door. Jimmy ran back into the hallway and Miranda started screaming again; he could hear the baby squalling in the back room and Tess and Robert were out in the hall, Tess shouting What’s wrong!, but Jimmy could hardly hear her over Miranda’s Daddy!. He waved a hand at Tess trying to get her to stay back, jerked open the hall closet door and grabbed the heavy broom, and ran back into his daughter’s room.

Where he slammed her closet door as far back as it would go and held the broom up, waiting.

Miranda’s screams had choked off into hard, snotty breathing. He could feel Tess and Robert behind him at the door, Tess no doubt holding Robert’s jaw in that way she had when she wanted him to know he shouldn’t talk just now. Daddy’s real busy.

Suddenly there was movement at the bottom of the closet: Miss Raggedy Ella fell over and Jimmy could see that half her face had been torn away into clouds of cotton and he just started waling away with the broom on Miss Ella and Barbie and Tiny Tears and Homer Hippo and the whole happy-go-lucky bunch until they were all dancing up and down and laughing with those big wide permanent grins painted on their faces (except for Miss Ella, who now had no mouth to speak of) and screaming just like Miranda did. “Daddy, stop! You’re hurting them!”

“It’s a rat! A rat, goddamit it!” He didn’t know who he was yelling at; he just didn’t know how they could be bothering him when there were rats in the house.

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.