Free Ugly Behavior by Steve Rasnic Tem Page B

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.
    “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