Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

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.