Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

And yet for all his understanding, Jefferson was completely seduced by this little girl.

“Buy me a doll, please, Uncle Jeff?”

He wanted to ask her what she wanted it for, perhaps for companionship—she looked so much the doll herself, but he knew better than to say something others might think strange. “Your momma’s going to think I spoil you.” He made himself grin.

“Oh, spoil me, spoil me!” She laughed and gave him a hug.

“So you want a hug, huh?” he said into her blonde curls smelling of soap.

She pushed away and looked at him solemnly. Then nodded slowly, her eyes fixed on his.

He bent over and wrapped himself around her. But formally, with little pressure. It wasn’t a real hug at all, the way he defined the word, but it appeared to satisfy her. She laid her small, all-too-crushable skull on his shoulder.

“Hugs are nice,” she said softly.

“Hugs are all that really mean anything,” he said. “Don’t ever forget that.”

“Well, I’d certainly agree with that,” Carol said from the doorway. Jefferson looked through the yellow nimbus of Jenny’s hair into Carol’s smiling face.

“Jealous?” he asked, and made himself grin.

Carol strolled across the room toward them, the lines of her body flowing down and curving around him as she gathered him to her. “Oh, you bet,” she breathed into his ear, and he wanted to pull away, so tightly she pulled on him, and so firmly her little girl still held on to his waist, a desperation with which he was so intimately familiar.

But he did not pull back, instead squeezing her in return, although not as tightly as he was ultimately capable of squeezing.

The day was to be spent at a roadside carnival, a place where they could scream and fear for their lives without fully believing in that fear. It was one of Jefferson’s favorite spots. Carol had been hesitant to go but Jenny was eager, typically with more enthusiasm than understanding. “You’ll think you’re going to die,” he whispered to the little girl. “But then you don’t. It’s quite a surprise, really. I hope you won’t be disappointed.”

She nodded and watched his eyes solemnly.

The roadside carnival had been set up alongside Wildcat Wrecks, the oldest auto salvage yard in the region. This seemed so appropriate to Jefferson it practically took his breath away. The county commissioners had condemned it several times but at the last minute the owners always came up with some measure to avoid the action. Twisted wrecks and crushed cars were stacked into occasional mountains a dozen feet high, waiting for years sometimes until the price of scrap reached levels the owners thought acceptable, the sides of these precipices buttressed with piles of stone and miscellaneous rusted steel debris.

Jefferson thought of these automobiles as “people cans,” a private little joke he had never shared with anyone. It was a wonder anyone ever survived their trips down the highway. The rides at the carnival pretended to be people cans as well, but he supposed they were in fact much safer.

On the roller coaster, in mock fear but in a truthfully passionate embrace, he almost squeezed Carol to death. Jenny obviously had no idea what was happening—she thought her mother had passed out from the thrill.

Jefferson could not believe he had lost control in public that way—perhaps it was having both females together in combination with the pretended danger, perhaps it was the proximity of the junk yard—he spent the last half of the ride arousing Carol, helping her get her breath back, apologizing sincerely (although he didn’t think she was cognizant of what he was saying), until she was at least able to stagger from the ride with his and Jenny’s well-meaning but ineffectual assistance. Several people tittered, obviously thinking she’d had too much beer before the ride. Jefferson relaxed a little—she did, indeed, appear drunk.

He found a place out of view of the crowd, behind some tents at the back of the carnival, where he let her down into soft grass and stretched her out. He gave Jenny a dollar and sent her off for a coke for her mom.

Jefferson slapped Carol’s face several times, vaguely excited that he had a good excuse for it, and marveled at the alternating patterns of pallor and redness made when he struck her soft skin.

Suddenly her hand reached up and grabbed his wrist. Her head jerked up and she started choking. “You tried to… you tried…” Her eyes popped open from the force of her choking, and Jefferson could see the sudden shock of knowledge in them. It seemed as if she had recognized him for the very first time.

“You…” she began again, and he threw himself on her, pressing his right shoulder hard into her mouth so that she could not speak and wrapping his arms, his legs around the thrashing, desperate life of her, admiring the energy and will of her, wishing that he had some of that life and will for himself. With alarm, he became aware that he had a growing erection prodding at her lower belly, and anxious to stop this erection he squeezed her head more tightly, he squeezed her neck, needing to consume her before she could consume any part of him.

At last she sighed and rattled and he clamped his mouth over hers to capture this final bit of her breath. And then he heard the soft crying behind him.

He jerked around as Jenny screamed and started through the flimsy wire fence that separated the carnival from the salvage yard. Jefferson rose to go after her but Carol’s hand had clutched his left wrist so tightly he could not escape her. He bent over her again and screaming smashed his right fist into her face and arms until at last she released him. He leaped up and ran through the fence, which scratched and clawed him and which he had to kick and smash against until it too would release him. Now he could see Jenny some distance away, running into the valley made between two mountains of ravaged cars, smashed and burned containers for the soft, sickly, all-too-brittle bodies of people.

He quickly closed the gap on the little girl but there were so many twists and turns between the ranks of cars that she was always able to remain just out of his reach. The longer she stayed away from his touch the more he needed to touch her.

Although he pushed himself as hard as he could to catch her, and the vigor of this effort engendered an anger that heightened almost with every step, Jefferson was also rapidly considering how he might prevent himself from killing her. Would it be possible for him to keep her rather than kill her?

If he kept her he could take her out whenever he liked and hug her, squeeze her to his heart’s content but of course he’d have to be careful that he didn’t do it too often and too hard, perhaps just until she passed out or until she was so afraid she fouled herself or her skin released the toxins preparatory to death. She was a small child, after all, and wouldn’t cost that much to feed and surely he could keep such a small child quiet enough for his purposes. Perhaps he could experiment with varying amounts of food and drugs in order to find just the right level to maintain her in a pliable, maximally squeezable, yet still living state.

He rounded the burned-out husk of an ancient DeSoto in time to see Jenny climbing a rust-red mountain of cars directly ahead of him. She was screaming, she had probably been screaming for some time now, but the junkyard was technically closed and the blended screams from the carnival behind him effectively covered all individual sound.

Jefferson leaped to the back of the first car, reached up and grabbed the antique door handle of another and used this to pull himself to the hood of a woody station wagon. Jenny looked back and screamed again, her mouth distorting as if her face were in the process of ripping open and flapping in the breeze. She scrambled over a collapsed Buick and then to the top-most boulder in a pile of stones supporting one side of the stack of cars. Jefferson could see that her knees and shins were badly skinned, bright blood sheeting down as if her small stick-like legs were being peeled. He hoped that she would not injure herself further. Any more damage to her delicate skin and he might not feel so compelled to hold her.