Ugly Behavior (9 page)

“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.”

“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.

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.