Ugly Behavior (10 page)

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.

“Some things are fated. Maybe you’ve got bad fate, or something,
Harold.” That was Linda, the night before she left me. She held me, and she let
me cry in her bed, and she listened while I spilled my guts about needing a
family of my own, someone I could love like I was supposed to, and she was
good, so good she brushed away my embarrassment when she brushed away my tears,
and the next day she left me. Fate, I guess.

 
Well, fuck her. She
was good to me that night, but fuck her.

I’m not sure, but I think Daddy killed June one night, shortly
after I’d turned eighteen. I don’t know—we just never saw her around
again. There’d been a lot of noise, a lot of drinking. I’m sorry to say that at
the time I felt a big load had been taken off, because of the way she looked at
me, the funny way she made me feel. Daddy always said she never really was part
of the family. She kept herself apart and, after all, she wasn’t blood. And she
was young, too young to understand him, or us, or much of anything about living
I guess. Maybe that was why I could feel about her the way I did—my own
stepmother after all. She wasn’t blood, and like he’d always told me himself,
blood is everything.

I don’t know what Daddy would have made of my three daughters. I
don’t want to know. If he had lived I wouldn’t have let him anywhere near
them—even if
somebody’d
pulled off his arms and
snipped off his balls. I had that dream once, where somebody cut him up like
that. He didn’t even scream. In fact he thanked the man, the man in the shadows
holding the razor. He smiled and said “Thank you very much—I sure needed
that,” even as the blood spurted from his crotch like some kind of orgasm that
had been going on too long. I don’t know if it was a nightmare or not.

“It don’t matter if you like your family or not. You’re tied to ’
em
; might as well accept that. It’s in the blood.”

So yeah, it finally happened. I met my own June, only her name was
Julie, and she was quite a bit younger, and not very smart. I
oughta
be embarrassed saying that I guess. But I’m not. I
did love her, still do, I’m sure. A person doesn’t have to be smart, or the
right age, for you to love them.

I’m never going to know I guess if she really loved me, or if it
was just because she was younger, and not knowing what love is really, and then
the girls came along, and so like any good mother—and I’ll always swear
that she was a good mother—she stuck with the father of those children, however
strange his thinking, and said that she loved him with all of her heart. And
maybe she did. Maybe she did. I’ve never really understood women. Not my wife.
And not my daughters.

But oh, I’ve loved my daughters. All three of them, precious as
tears. Only a couple of years apart—Julie for some crazy reason thought I
wanted a son so she insisted we keep trying, but I was overjoyed, I felt
blessed, to have daughters—but my oldest Marcie was small for her age,
and my youngest Ann was taller than average, and middle daughter Billie was
just like the middle bear, just right, so the three of them together were taken
all the time for triplets. We were always told how adorable they were, how
beautiful. People were just naturally attracted to them. And the boys? Boys are
always just naturally drawn to something a little different. I know.

Things were pretty much okay until the girls got to be teenagers.
Don’t tell me about that being a hard time of life, I know that’s a hard time
of life but knowing that still doesn’t help a father much. The girls started
wanting dates and it was okay with their mother because Julie just didn’t know
no better I guess. They were too damned young and I said so but of course they
went and done it anyway and after awhile I just got tired of watching them and
chasing after them and let them just go right ahead and date too young and ruin
their lives—what was I supposed to do?

Oh, I still loved them you can count on that but I have to say I
was mad at them most of the time.

But my girls sure looked beautiful in those date dresses of
theirs—so beautiful I couldn’t stand to look at them when they were all
dolled up.

They tell you on Oprah and Donahue and every other damn program
what to do with your kids but they don’t tell you a damn thing that helps. They
act like kids and their families are separate people that have to negotiate
every damn thing. They just don’t understand it that a family’s got to be all
tied up in knots you can’t get loose of no matter how hard you try. Cut those
knots apart and somebody’s bound to wind up bleeding to death on the floor.

I don’t know if my girls knew I still loved them. I couldn’t be
sure cause I stopped telling them I loved them once the oldest got to be
thirteen. That might not have been the right thing to do but I just didn’t feel
right, telling a young fresh-faced beauty of thirteen that I loved her.
Perverts do that, not a good family man. Not a father.

Besides they
shoulda
known. They
shoulda
always known. We were blood weren’t we, all tied
together?

The girls all started their periods early. Hell, the
youngest—my baby Ann—was nine, and you know that can’t be right. My
wife handled all that stuff of course but she still talked to me about
it—I don’t know why women like to talk about such things. She told me the
baby was young to be having her period but that was becoming more and more common
these days, but as far as I was concerned that was hardly any kind of
recommendation. Not much right about these days what with baby girls having
periods and watching actual live sex acts on the TV when their daddies
ain’t
around. And their mothers making it a secret, too.
Mothers and daughters, they always have these secrets that no man alive can
understand.