Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

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.”