Ugly Behavior (8 page)

“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.

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.

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.