Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

Monte looked at his daughter again, thinking Okay, you wanted me to do this. See what happened? But he couldn’t tell at all what she was thinking, which was really no surprise. He wondered if he’d gone too far, but the boy didn’t look scared. The boy seemed very interested.

“That was when I knew I had to do something. I had to do something to protect myself. Of course, killing is a bad thing, an evil thing. It’s something a person should only do when they have to, to protect themselves or the ones they…they love.”

Monte stopped, trying to think out the rest of the story. He knew his daughter was watching him closely, but he avoided eye contact.

“But it’s okay to kill an evil giant, isn’t it? If I remember right, that’s what Jack did in his story. Well, in my story I knew I had to do pretty much the same thing. I was small for my age. A lot like you, Brian. I was a tough little beggar, but I wouldn’t say I was strong. There’s a difference. No, I wasn’t what you would call strong.

“But you don’t have to be strong to kill a giant, Brian. You don’t even have to be big. You just have to be. Persistent, that’s the word for what you have to be. That means you have to keep trying. You keep at it and you keep at it until finally that job is done.

“So I was persistent, Brian. That giant drank a lot. I think a lot of giants drink a lot. Giants just have giant appetites, I guess. And one night that giant drank so much he fell fast asleep. And then I saw my chance. I went into the kitchen. I was still in my pajamas. I went into the kitchen and I opened the drawer and I found a giant knife. A giant knife for a giant.” Monte tried to laugh but it sounded fake. It sounded high and strangled and not like his regular laugh at all. “And I took that giant knife and I carried it into the giant’s bedroom. The giant snored like most giants, so loud it made the walls and floors and my own chest shake. It even made my hands shake.

“Then I climbed up on the giant’s bed with the knife and I just kept at it. I kept at it and I kept at it until that giant was dead. End of story.”

Monte glanced down at the boy and saw that he was asleep on the floor. And he didn’t look worried. If anything it appeared he had a little smile on his face. Monte’s daughter went over and picked up the boy and carried him into his bedroom.

When his daughter got back she said, “That was quite a story, Dad.”

“I think you must have heard some of that story before. Maybe from your mother.”

“Maybe,” she replied. “Why did you tell him that story, anyway?” She averted her gaze.

Can’t look me in the eye, Monte thought. “Don’t do that, honey,” he said.

She appeared surprised. Monte tried to remember if he’d ever called her “honey” before. He didn’t think so. He figured that’s what surprised her.

“What are you talking about?”

“I think you know that’s my only story, the only one I have to tell. I think you knew it was my only story when you asked me to tell him one. I think the question should be why you wanted me to tell him that story.”

Pete got home during the middle of the night. Monte didn’t know what time—he had no watch or clock of any kind. He just woke up to a bunch of stomping, and cursing, and things getting knocked around, breaking.

He had to use the bathroom badly, but he didn’t want to walk out there in the middle of all that. It wasn’t like he could do it quickly and sneak back into bed. Everything took him a long time to do. He just hoped he wouldn’t pee the bed again, or soak these old man pajamas that did a pretty good job of keeping him warm. The last time his daughter didn’t say a word—just took the wet sheets out of his hands and went to wash them. It shamed him something terrible, but she could have made it worse and didn’t.

But the yelling and the throwing went on another half-hour or more, and Monte was fit to burst. His daughter was crying and he could ignore that, or almost, but he couldn’t ignore his bladder. He crawled out of bed as quick as he could, but already he could feel himself leaking a little. So he redoubled his efforts to hold it in, shuffling down the hall toward the bathroom all bent over like he was a hundred years old.

Monte didn’t intend to look at anything, just make a bee-line for that bathroom, that is, if the bee was old and arthritic and the slowest bee that still lived. But he was a little confused by the hall, and the shadows, and all the noise. So he found himself peeking into doorways as he passed, trying to remember where the bathroom was, and that’s when he saw Pete standing in the living room, his daughter lying on the floor with her mouth bleeding, and little Brian standing on the other side of the room, wedged into the corner, crying, a big red mark tearing down one side of his face.

“Well, if it ain’t the man of leisure!” Pete called drunkenly. “You best get on with what you were doing, old man!”

Monte’s groin buzzed with the pain. But he stopped, thinking about it. Was he just going to go on down to the bathroom and pee? And then what? What could he say when he got back? Or would he just hide out in the bathroom until it was all over? Hell of a thing. He gazed at Brian, who had his hands up over his face now, but still watching with one shocked white eye. Right then the only sound in the room was his daughter’s torn breathing.

Monte shuffled a couple of feet into the room, still bent over. To his alarm, he began to cry from the pain.

“Hey, old man, what did I tell you? I pay for the roof over your head—you realize that, don’t you? I pay for both of them, too. Why do you think she’s here? Because I pay! She’s a whore and he’s just a bastard!”

Monte, still bent over, spit on the floor. “You’re not even worth their shit,” he said.

Monte didn’t see it coming, but he felt the thunder of it. Suddenly he was on the floor, his side and his back on fire from a series of Pete’s clumsy but enraged blows. He thought he could feel the blood pooling out under him, then realized he’d pissed himself. He turned his head to the side to avoid the spreading wet stink, which allowed him to watch Pete take a swift kick into his daughter’s side as he passed her, on his way to grabbing Brian—hysterical now—by the arm and jerking him into the bedroom. Monte lay perfectly still as the piss spread to his cheek, watching through the open bedroom door as Pete stripped the boy naked and beat on him with a belt. There might have been worse, but he couldn’t see it all, so he tried not to think that far. He closed his eyes.

The odd thing was, in the past Monte might have fantasized what he was going to do to Pete later, if he could have. At least he would be figuring out who he could call, who might do the job for next to no money. Monte didn’t know men like that anymore, but he knew there were always men like that.

But those fantasies were bullshit. He’d never find anybody. Nobody was going to do anything like that for him anymore. Nobody was taking him seriously about a damn thing.

So he thought about things he could do. And Monte thought maybe he could kill the boy. Monte was old and weak but he could still probably kill a seven year old boy. If he was determined enough. If it would save that boy some of the pains seven-year-olds had no business to know but that Monte knew all about.

Monte woke up the next morning in his bed, naked, feeling like he’d fallen down a rocky mountainside. When he moved he felt a sharp pain near his left shoulder blade, but he discovered that if he held his body a certain way, keeping that shoulder slightly back behind the rest of him, he could sit up and swing his legs around without too much pain. He had a vague memory of picking himself up, like picking up an armful of broken branches, and wandering down the hall, finding his room, fumbling with the light switch, stripping out of his stinking pajamas and boxers, leaving them on the floor just inside the door, as far away from the bed as he could think of. Crawling under the blankets so carefully, thinking that something was going to tear open if he wasn’t as careful as he could possibly be.