Free Ugly Behavior by Steve Rasnic Tem

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