Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

“Oh… oh, I’m sure they do,” she said with a little wink that made Jim have to look away. “I know you have your fans, too. I’ve seen how the people look at you, especially the women.”

Jim felt his face fill with blood. He was suddenly dizzy, and squeezed the edge of the table until he heard a cracking noise. Then he jerked his hand away, trying to focus on the fact that he was in a restaurant, where ordinary, real-life people spent their time. He tried to look at her and smile, let her know that everything was okay and that he could be perfectly normal. But he couldn’t get his eyes up. He found himself staring at her plate, her hands and arms. And then he saw where her sleeve had ridden up, and all the scars it had been hiding.

“I was going to tell you about those,” she said softly. He was a little alarmed that she could tell where he was looking. “I don’t want to hide anything from you… Jim. I’d never want to keep secrets from you.”

Jim still didn’t look into her eyes. What was she talking about? He felt like some fellow in a movie—women just didn’t talk to him this way. “It’s okay…” he mumbled, not understanding, and not knowing what else to say.

“My dad was a very lonely man after my mother died. He wasn’t good with other people, never had been.” Just like me, Jim thought. The idea made him nervous. “I was pretty lonely, too, living out there with him. We didn’t have a TV, and I never understood much about things, never had friends to compare the things that were happening to me. But for all I didn’t understand, I was growing up pretty fast. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Jim?”

“No…” he said with a shock, as if the very idea of his understanding was impossible to imagine.

She leaned closer. “It was like I was his wife, Jim. We had sex.” She had no expression on her face. He couldn’t understand that. Why was she telling him things he couldn’t possibly understand? “I thought giving to him was what I was supposed to do. I just wanted to make him be okay. But he took everything.” She grabbed his wandering fingers and squeezed them together in her hand. He was surprised by how much it hurt. “Everything…”

“I… I wish that hadn’t happened. I wish I…”

“You can help me, Jim. I knew from the first time I saw you in the ring that you could help me.”

He thought she was going to drive him back to the motel where the promoter and the rest of the wrestlers were staying. She’d asked him where he was staying, and he told her, but she didn’t drive him anywhere near there. She drove him to another motel, a smaller one further out. When she pulled up in front of a room and turned off the ignition, she said to him, “You’re going to help me, Jim.”

Jim knew it wasn’t a question. And she had no right driving him out there and not telling him where they were going—he knew that much. But it didn’t make him mad. He didn’t think he could ever be mad at someone like her. Not just because he liked her. But because she scared him, too.

He followed her into the room, and when she told him to take off his clothes, he did. And when she told him to get into bed with her, he did. But when she told him to hold her, to make love to her, he hesitated.

“You told me you would help me,” she said softly. He could barely see her face in the dark of the room, but he felt her all over his skin. “You promised, Jim.”

His hands were trembling. He didn’t know what to do with them. “I’m scared,” he whispered.

“I know you are, sweetheart. But you’re going to help me. Hold me, Jim. I can’t do this unless you hold me. I’ve tried everything I can think of. I need this real bad.”

So he slipped his arms carefully around her, trembling as he touched the soft smallness of her, afraid of his own clumsy fingers, afraid of his huge hands. She was a glass doll he had to carry somewhere, and he was scared because she hadn’t told him where yet. “Tell me,” he said. “Please tell me.”

“Hold me a little tighter, Jim. I can’t feel you enough. Hold me.” And when he still hesitated she started doing things with her hands, stroking his chest, wiggling down under him to rub his groin. She was suddenly everywhere, and he had to reach to catch her, to hold her. “Tighter, Jim… tighter…”

“I want to… I can’t…”

“…tighter… what I need…”

Then it was over. Maybe it had been over for minutes and he hadn’t noticed. He couldn’t be sure. What surprised him most was that he hadn’t heard the bones breaking, or realized when she’d stopped telling him to hold her tighter. He cried for a long time, and then finally he was mad at her. Furious. She’d gotten exactly what she wanted, but did she ever think about what it would do to him?

It took a couple of weeks for him to get to her father’s junk yard. He had to take the back roads, and he hitched a ride only when he thought it was pretty safe.

Of course her father was dead. At least five years, according to the man who had taken over the place. Jim wasn’t surprised. “You sure are a big one,” the man said, and Jim just nodded. “Need a job?” And of course Jim took it. Besides the other considerations, he had to eat.

He could wrestle a whole car by himself if he took his time. And ripping things out, breaking things, that was easy enough. He liked the dance he did with a big piece of rusted steel up in his arms, raised toward the sky like a gift. The owner would laugh and shake his head and say he’d never seen anybody so strong. “You’re a regular super duper hero,” he said. “The Muscleman. The Bruiser.”

But Jim knew he was The Crusher, and always would be. When the owner went home at night, Jim stayed behind in the little falling-down shack. Then in the middle of the night he would walk and pick up the sharpest pieces of ragged steel he could find, and hold them, embrace them, crush them into his chest where they made scars that tangled and grew into the most beautiful and complex design he had ever seen.

And she would watch, and tell him, tell him how strong he was.

Monte had never been a good father, in fact he had been pretty lousy by anyone’s standards, but after he lost his job and became too ill to work and the arthritis made it so he could hardly move his legs, his daughter pretended otherwise and asked him to come live with her, her young son, and the current boyfriend. “You always took care of me,” she said. “Let me do this for you.”

That wasn’t true, not by a long shot—he’d had shit to do with her upbringing. He’d left all that to her mother and he’d been gone half the time and the half the time he was there he’d made them all miserable including himself.

But he accepted her offer. What else was he supposed to do? He didn’t know why she was lying to him, or if she was just lying to herself about him. Nor did he particularly care. He had to survive somehow. Or did he? That was one of those questions that got harder to answer every year.

His little corner of her house was a closet of a room at the back, just off the porch and the kitchen. In a fancier house it might have been called the mud room. A battery-powered radio. One box for his toiletries. One box for his miscellaneous. A mail slot of a window let some light in. It was a lot better than he deserved. He actually couldn’t remember if he’d hit her when she was a kid, but he probably had. He didn’t remember a lot from those days. She could have been a little yippy dog running around for all he could recall of her childhood.

He had a single bed, and she made him strip it and hand her the sheets for the wash. If it had been up to him he’d have let the sheets go yellow, then brown, then replace them. Monte discovered he liked the look, and the smell, of wet sheets flapping in the wind. Old age was full of surprises.