Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

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.

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.

“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.