Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

“Oh, but I think you do. I know you do. It’s time all right.” Then he gets up from his nest in the sour straw and starts toward the barn door. And even though I haven’t forgotten how they look, and how we do it, how he does it—how could anybody forget something like that?—I get up out of the straw and follow.

When Jesse called me up that day I didn’t take him all that seriously. Jesse was always calling me up and saying crazy things.

“Come on over,” he said. “I gotta show you something.”

I laughed at him. “You’re in enough trouble,” I said. “Your parents grounded you, remember? Two weeks at least, you told me.”

“My parents are dead,” he said, in his serious voice. But I had heard his serious voice a thousand times, and I knew what it meant.

I laughed. “Sure, Jesse. Deader than a flat frog on the highway, right?”

“No, deader than your dick, dickhead.” He was always saying that. I laughed again. “Come on over. I swear it’ll be okay.”

“Okay. My mom has to go to the store. She can drop me off and pick me up later.”

“No. Don’t come with your mom. Take your bike.”

“Christ, Jesse. It’s five miles!”

“You’ve done it before. Take your bike or don’t come at all.”

“Okay. Be there when I get there.” He made me mad all the time. All he had to do was tell me to do something and I’d do it. When I first knew him I did things he said because I felt sorry for him. His big brother had died when a tractor rolled over on him. I wasn’t there but people said it was pretty awful. I heard my dad tell my mom that there must have been a dozen men around but none of them could do a thing. Jesse’s brother had been awake the whole time, begging them to get the tractor off, that he could feel his heart getting ready to stop, that he knew it was going to stop any second. Dad said the blood was seeping out from under the tractor, all around his body, and Jesse’s brother was looking at it like he just couldn’t believe it. And Jesse was there watching the whole thing, Dad said. They couldn’t get him to go away.

It gave me the creeps, what Jesse’s brother had said. ’Cause I’ve always been afraid my heart was just going to stop some day, for no good reason. And to feel your heart getting ready to stop, that would be horrible.

Because of all that I felt real bad for Jesse, so for awhile there he would ask me to do something, anything, and I’d do it for him. I’d steal somebody’s lunch or pull down a little kid’s pants or walk across the creek on a little skinny board, all kinds of stupid crap. But after awhile I just did it because he said. He didn’t make you want to feel bad for him. I wasn’t even sure that he cared that his brother was dead. Once I asked him if he still felt bad about it and he just said that his brother picked on him all the time. That’s all he would say about it. Jesse was always weird like that.

I hadn’t ridden my bike in over a year—I wasn’t sure I still could. I thought sixteen-year-olds were too old to ride bikes—guys were getting their licenses and were willing to walk or get rides with older friends until that day happened. And I was big for my age, a lot bigger than Jesse. I felt stupid. But I rode my bike the five miles anyway, just because Jesse told me to.

By the time I got to his farm I was so tired and mad I just threw the bike down in the gravel driveway. I didn’t care if I broke it—I wasn’t going to ride it home no matter what. Jesse came to the screen door with a smirk on his face. “Took you long enough,” he said. “I didn’t think you were coming.”

“I’m here, all right? What’d you want to show me that was so damn important?”

He pulled me down the hall. He was so excited and it was happening so fast I was having a real bad feeling even before I saw them. He stopped in front of the door to his parents’ bedroom and knocked it open with his fist. The sound made me jump. Then when I looked inside there were his parents on the floor, sleeping.

A short laugh came out of me like a bark. They looked silly: his mom’s dress pulled up above her knees and his dad’s mouth hanging open like he was drunk. They had their arms folded over their bellies. I never saw people sleeping that way before. The sheets and blankets and pillows had been pulled off the bed and were arranged around them and underneath them like a nest. His mom had never been a good housekeeper—Jesse told me the place always looked and stank like a garbage dump—but I’d never thought it was this bad, that they had to sleep on the floor.

The room was full of all these big candles, the scented kind. There must have been forty or fifty of them. And big melted patches where there must have been lots more, but they’d burned down and been replaced. There was a box full of them by the dresser, all ready to go. They also had a couple of those weird-looking incense burners going. It made me want to laugh. There were more different smells in that room than I’d smelled my whole life. And all of them so sweet they made my eyes water.

But under the sweet there was something else—when a breeze sneaked through and flickered the candles I thought I could smell it—like when we got back from vacation that summer and the freezer broke down while we were away. Mom made Dad move us to a motel for a while. Something like that, but it was having a hard time digging itself out of all that sweetness.

“Candles cost a fortune,” Jesse said. “All the money in my dad’s wallet plus the coins my mom kept in a fruit jar. She didn’t even think I knew about that. But they look pretty neat, huh?”

I took a step into the room and looked at his dad’s mouth. Then his mom’s mouth. They hung open like they were about to swallow a fly or sing or something. I almost laughed again, but I couldn’t. Their mouths looked a little like my dad’s mouth, the way he lets it hang open when he falls asleep on the couch watching TV. But different. Their mouths were soft and loose, their lips dark, all dry and cracked, but even though they were holding their mouths open so long no saliva came dripping out. And there was gray and blue under their eyes. There were dark blotches on Jesse’s mom’s face. They were so still, like they were playing a game on me. Without even thinking about it I pushed on his dad’s leg with my foot. It was like pushing against a board. His dad rocked a little, but he was so tight his big arms didn’t even wiggle. Jesse always said his old man was “too tight.” I really did start to laugh, thinking about that, but it was like my breath exploded instead. I didn’t even know I had been holding it. “Jesus…” I could feel my chest shake all by itself.

Jesse looked at me almost like he was surprised, like I’d done something wrong. “I told you, didn’t I? Don’t be a baby.” He sat down on the floor and started playing with his dad’s leg, pushing on it and trying to lift up the knee. “Last night they both started getting stiff. It really happens, you know? It’s not just something in the movies. You know why it happens, John?” He looked up at me, but he was still poking the leg with his fist, like he was trying to make his dad do something, slap him or something. Any second I figured his dad would reach over and grab Jesse by the hair and pull him down onto the floor beside them.

I shook my head. I was thinking no no no, but I couldn’t quite get that out.

Jesse hit his dad on the thigh hard as he could. It sounded like an overstuffed leather chair. It didn’t give at all. “Hell, I don’t know either. Maybe it’s the body fighting off being dead, even after you’re dead, you know? It gets all mad and stiff on you.” He laughed but it didn’t sound much like Jesse’s laugh. “I guess it don’t know it’s dead. It don’t know shit once the brain is dead. But if I was going to die I guess I’d fight real hard.” Jesse looked at his mom and dad and made a twisted face like he was smelling them for the first time. “Bunch of pussies…”