Free Ugly Behavior by Steve Rasnic Tem Page A

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