Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

“His parents are putting him up for adoption so we ran away. I’m trying to hide him until they change their minds.” Jesse’s breath stank.

The girls looked at me. “Really?” the older one said. Her face had tiny cracks in it. I looked down at my feet.

Both of the girls said “I’m sorry” about the same time, then they got quiet like they were embarrassed. But I still didn’t look up. I watched their sandaled feet and the black bugs crawling between their toes.

The older one could drive, so they hid us in the back seat of their car and drove to the end of the drive that led to the farmhouse where their family lived. We were supposed to go on to the barn and the girls would bring us out some food later. We never told them about my bike and I kept thinking about it and what people would say when they found it. Even though I never used the bike anymore I was a little sorry about having lost it.

I also thought about those girls and how nice they were and how the younger one seemed to like me, even though they smelled so bad. I wondered why girls like that were always so nice to guys like us, guys with a story to tell, and I thought about how dumb it was.

After we were in the barn for a couple of hours, the girls—they were sisters, if I didn’t mention it before—brought us some food. The younger one talked to me a long time while I ate but I don’t remember anything she said. The older one talked to Jesse the same way and I heard her say, “You’re a good person to be helping your friend like this.” She leaned over and kissed Jesse on his cheek even though the zits were tearing his face apart. Her shirt rode up on the side and Jesse put his dirty hand there. I saw the blisters rise up out of her skin and break open and the smell was worse than ever in the barn but no one else seemed to notice.

I finished eating and leaned back into the dirty straw. I liked the younger sister but I hoped she wouldn’t kiss me the same way. I couldn’t stand the idea of her open, loose mouth touching my skin. Underneath the straw I saw that there were hunks of gray flesh, pieces of arms and legs and things inside you I didn’t know the name for. But I covered them over with more straw when nobody was looking, and I didn’t say anything.

And now Jesse says he figures it’s about time we did another one. He thinks I’ve forgotten. But I haven’t.

I’ve been thinking about the two sisters all night and how much they trust us and how good they’ve been to us. And I’ve been thinking how they remind me of the Wilks sisters in Huckleberry Finn and how Huck felt so ornery and low down because he was letting the duke and king rob them of their money after the sisters had been so nice to him. Sometimes I guess you don’t know how to behave until you’ve read it in a book or seen it on TV.

So he gets up from his nest in the sour straw and starts toward the barn door. And I get up out of the straw and follow. Only last night I took the hammer, and now I beat him in the head until his head comes apart, and all the stink comes out and covers me so bad I know I’ll never get it off. He always said he’d fight really hard if he knew he was dying, but his body doesn’t fight back hardly at all. Maybe he didn’t know.

I hear the noises in the farmhouse and now there are voices and flashlights coming. I scrape my fingers through the straw to find all the pieces of Jesse’s head to make him look a little better for these people. I lie down in the straw beside him and close my eyes, leaving just a sliver of milky white under each lid to show them. I drop my mouth open and stop my saliva. I imagine the blue-green colors that will come and paint my body. I imagine the blisters and the insects and the terrible smell my breath has become. But mostly I try to imagine how I’m going to explain to these strangers why I’m enjoying this.

Sometimes when he looked at his hands, he could see them hardening, the skin flaking away, the muscles stiffening, and suddenly he was earth again, suddenly he was stone.

Every few months when Carter first felt the weakness, he would make a trip to the place of the stones. Here, he would stare at the rounded boulders, the broken fragments, the huge dark slabs pushed out of the sandy soil, until the weakness passed. The weakness, which came upon him fiercely, usually manifested itself as an overwhelming need to die. This seemed reasonable. The whole world was dying around him. Cities deteriorated, falling into rubble. Streams slowed down from all the garbage they contained. People in general seemed more sluggish than he remembered from childhood. It was as if everything he saw was slowly solidifying, losing energy, turning to stone. As if this were the natural state of things. And so the weakness came, a compulsion to be turned into stone.

When the weakness passed, Carter would leave the stones, go out and take someone else’s life away from them. Freeze their existence. Turn them into stone instead.

The stones always made him feel better.

The stones lay scattered across a high hilltop five miles from the small house where Carter grew up. He’d asked about them in town—one old man who used to be a schoolteacher said they had been deposited there by glacier action. But Carter could not believe the stones could be that old.

There were three or four stones the size of boulders, probably several tons apiece. He imagined they must have come from some place deep underground, where everything was larger than life. These were rounded, with only slight depressions. A half-dozen stones one step down in size were much more angular, with many sharp edges, as if they had broken off larger stones. The scale of stones went down from there. To smaller rounded pieces that still might crush a body completely if dropped a distance. To large rocks for pounding a skull in. To fragments sharp and dangerous as ancient arrowheads. Down to water-smooth pebbles ready for a slingshot, the size of harsh thoughts worn from repetition.

Every time Carter came here, he would stare at the stones for hours, seeking some sort of summation which would keep them solid in his mind forever. But stones were hard to define. Loose estimations of size, looser descriptions of shape.

All stones, he theorized, had come down from the original stone, the huge mass that had given birth to everything by destroying itself. All glory, all life came from this unreasoning, dead stone. After thrashing about in cold silence, it had awakened from its long dream as a world, lived on by these parasitic creatures called human beings.

The history of this original stone, as with all stones, must have been a history of splittings and fallings apart: slab became boulder and boulder became stone and stone became pebbles rolled and smoothed by the outer lips of an enormous sea.

Carter played close attention to how soil filled the cracks in the stone, plants growing where once it had been impervious. This, he concluded, was how life first began in the midst of cold, hard death.

The remainders of this great original stone, the slabs and peaks of it, became the distant mountains, and were used to build the temples of human beings.

Stone constantly reminds us of our own deaths, he thought.

Watching the pebbles gathered about the bases of the larger stones, trailing off into grass and dirt, always filled Carter with a nameless anxiety. Separate from its larger pieces, stone drifts, wanders, moved by people and scattered by the wind. The center does not hold. Anywhere.

The stones were unyielding, blind, and despite their constant exposure to all weathers, always dry.

Each time he came here, he walked slowly up the hill, his chest gradually filling with stones. A fresh body in his arms. Sometimes the skin of the body would be bruised, if his knife had not been efficient enough, and he’d had to use a stone to remind the flesh of both its origins and its destiny. Sometimes he might try to press a stone into the victim’s head, pounding until the skull broke and the stone lodged there like a jewel. The pieces of skull themselves were like poor cousins to stone, a reminder of how far human beings had declined in their devolution.