Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

She had come to him out of another downpour, pushing a grocery cart overloaded with plastic garbage bags and paper sacks. Pushing it for all she was worth so that she barely avoided running him down as she turned into the empty lot. At first Riley couldn’t imagine what shelter could be found there, the lot was empty as far as he could see. Then he detected a bulge in a layer of trash near the center of the lot, a rise like a pitcher’s mound. He watched her from behind some bushes as she unloaded the cart and stowed it in a shadowed corner of the lot. With her new things—indistinguishable, he thought, from the trash littering the ground—she approached the small mound.

With her rotting tennis shoes she scraped at the trash until a square of board appeared. She set down her new things and lifted the square from one edge as if it were a basement hatch.

Then, to his amazement, she walked down into the ground, pulling the board and trash back above her to hide the entrance.

Riley watched the bag lady for several days. He always kept his distance, not just to prevent exposure but because her stench was worse each day. Even though it continued to rain so hard and long the streets were flooding, the rain did not lessen her smell. Finally, when he thought she could be no riper, he watched her descend into her underground lair once again, then went over to her board and lifted it. There was no chamber here, just a shallow trench filled with trash. The bag lady lay on her back at its center, as if sleeping in her own future grave.

It’s about time, I have been waiting so long. The words bubbled off her filthy lips, each one an exhalation of foulness.

Without thinking, he lay upon her, and after a time could not distinguish the stink of her body from the stink of her clothes or from the garbage she had made her bed with. As he wept his hands caressed and squeezed.

Over the next few months, Riley returned to the lot, lifted up the board, and checked on the progress of the body’s decomposition. The weather continued uncharacteristically wet. Her clothes and eccentric bedding became exotic vegetables in a rancid soup that filled the trench. The stench became unbearable at times, and yet no neighbors complained, the police were not called, the body remained where he had left it.

City dwellers were used to bad smells; this was nothing unusual for them.

Riley could not say when he stopped bathing, but if you’d asked him why he might have told you it was so that he could better fit in.

After a time, he might say, you cannot tell if the stench is yours or if it comes from everyone else.

When they finally arrested Riley it was not for murder, or for any of a number of other violent acts he had committed over the last several years. They arrested Riley for an egregious number of sanitation violations, for a mound of rotting legal orders he had ignored, then dragged into his apartment to add to the malodorous nest that had become his home.

The police were alarmed when copious amounts of blood were found streaked through this nest, but later it was discovered that the blood was Riley’s own. His arms, legs, and torso were seriously scarred with many poorly-healed wounds. “Fresh blood has this clean, coppery smell,” he would later tell a doctor at the hospital. “You know, when it first hits the air. You can’t smell anything else, at least for a few seconds.”

“And what is it you’re afraid of smelling, Mr. Riley?” the clever young doctor inquired.

“Why, it’s the cooking, the cleaning, the smell of fear. The freshly-shampooed baby’s head, the honey in the lover’s kiss, the aroma, the perfume, the reek. It is the sour bouquet of the body as the organs begin to fail. It is the sadness of when we know what is to come, what is waiting for us when our last foul breath has spread through the room.

“Can’t you smell it, doctor? It is the stench.”

He’d never had any luck with soft things. Even when he was a kid, his hands had been so big they’d just mashed things up, no matter how hard he tried to hold them steady, no matter how hard he tried to hold them in the same gentle way he loved them. The harder he tried the worse it was. The harder he tried the more things he broke.

Even words. He tried to hold them gently in his mouth but they always spilled out broken.

“Damn damn damn…” That was the way he’d told Alice how much he loved her. “Damn damn damn,” with tears in his eyes. Alice just looked at him as if he were somebody who was always going around breaking things. And, of course, that was true. That was what he was.

But that wasn’t everything he was.

He got into the business because of his arm wrestling. At every bar in the northwest that had such a contest, he’d show up to arm wrestle. That was his specialty, his only talent. He had a grip that made flesh shrink and bones fold, and nobody wanted to hold hands with him.

He’d never held Alice’s hand. He’d been too afraid. She’d had a hand like a little bird and he’d broken more than a few birds when he was a kid. And hamsters. And kittens. And he’d loved them all. So he wasn’t about to hold Alice’s hand, whom he loved most of all.

Of course, he won every arm wrestling competition he entered. That was how he first came to the attention of the promoter. He’d broken some fellow’s arm up above Portland, and it made the local papers. The fellow hadn’t pressed charges or anything like that—in fact he’d told the reporters how much he admired the strength, the skill it took.

But he knew there wasn’t any skill involved. Mashing things. Crushing things. He would have stopped it if he could. But he just didn’t have the control.

“James,” she whispered. “James don’t go.” It was Alice’s voice, all right, and Alice was the only one called him James. To everybody else he was Jim, or Big Jim, when they used his name at all. To most people, he guessed, he didn’t even have a name.

Except she’d never told him not to go. Nothing like that. That was just something his heart told him. What she’d really said, he’d crushed out of his mind forever.

“A guy like you, you can make some money.” That was all that wrestling promoter said, really, pretty much said the same thing over and over. Just used different words for it. The promoter kept trying to build up his ego, not knowing that that didn’t matter much to him. But he needed to make a living, so he signed, and that made the promoter very happy.

They billed him as “The Crusher,” a name he didn’t care for, but he also didn’t care enough to get the promoter to change it. Before every match he’d crush something for the audience: a few oil cans, a steel trashcan, sometimes cantaloupes or melons that made a satisfying mess. He hated to admit to feeling the satisfaction, but it was there.

And now entering the ring, The Crusher! A thunder of boos, with scattered cheers, the cheers increasing with each bout. That’s what he liked best about professional wrestling: the frame of cheers and boos, the dancing around that went in between. If only those cheers and boos would follow him out of the ring, rise up like music at important points in the rest of his life, he’d feel a lot more comfortable about moving around with other people. Not happy exactly—happy was a word they used in bad movies and stupid TV shows. He’d figured that much out at least. But comfortable, the way most people are comfortable walking around being the way people are supposed to be. He’d never had that, but he’d like to.

And now entering the ring… He pushed down on the bottom rope and stepped through. Then he walked around the ring a couple of times, reaching out his hands to slap his opponent’s hands, pulling back quickly as if he was touching fire. Pretty much every match started that way because that was the way the promoter wanted it. Slap and dance, circle and tease, then the first hard embrace: his opponent pressing his body full into him, and the Crusher thinking it was like some play, or some movie, and that gave him the butterflies so bad he could hardly breathe.