Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

“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.

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.