Ugly Behavior

  Ugly Behavior

  Steve Rasnic Tem

  Introduction

  2 PM: The Real Estate Agent Arrives

  Saguaro Night

  In His Image

  The Cough

  You Dreamed It

  Rat Catcher

  Blood Knot

  The Carving

  The Child Killer

  Friday Nights

  Squeezer

  Sharp Edges

  Wet Kisses in the Dark

  The Stench

  The Crusher

  Living Arrangement

  Jesse

  Stones

  Ugly Behavior

  Introduction

  I’m not particularly known as a writer of violent stories. But ugly stories, tales about the terrible things we do to ourselves and to each other, have always accounted for a portion of my work. (And of course there are those who believe all tales of crime and horror—whether supernatural or not—are by definition “ugly” and do not care to read about these things. A collection such as Ugly Behavior would not be for them.) Both for those readers who appreciate this sort of thing, and for readers who would prefer not to encounter this other mode of mine, I’ve put all these ugly stories together into one box. It’s that box under your bed, pushed all the way back against the wall, the one that takes some effort to get to, the one your momma doesn’t know about (or at least, the one you like to think she doesn’t know about).

  As ubiquitous as that age-old reader’s question, “Where do you get your ideas?” is that question specifically put to crime and horror writers, “Why do you want to write of such things?” or perhaps more to the point, “Why would you want to tell such an ugly story?”

  In my case people often say, “But you look so peaceful… you seem so optimistic.” People see this as a contradiction. In truth, I am an optimist. I believe wonderful things can come out of the most terrible events. I also believe life is hard enough for most people and we have no business making it even harder if that can be avoided. I believe we have a duty to each other to be as kind as possible. And I want my kids and grandkids to surround themselves with good and kind people.

  I also believe the world is full of predators and the vilest kinds of monsters. People are capable of the ugliest behavior. For me, to ignore these things is to ignore the deadly snake in the room. We need to know what we’re up against, so that we can really appreciate what it means to “behave honorably.”

  The other thing that sets these stories apart from the majority of my work is that no fantasy elements are involved. The terrors here are the daylight terrors of human interaction.

  At times transcendence and transgression appear to be unexpectedly close neighbors. Most of us, I think, crave some sort of transcendence. We want to move from where we are in our lives to a better place. But when we cannot achieve that, some of us will choose transgression. Of course sometimes transgressing societal norms may be the only way to achieve some kind of social evolution. But we cannot always tell the difference between that positive action and its destructive counterpart. We become so eager to escape the limits of everyday life we are just satisfied that there’s been any kind of movement at all.

  —Steve Rasnic Tem, 2010

  2 PM: The Real Estate Agent Arrives

  In the backyard, after the family moved away: blue chipped food bowl, worn-out dog collar, torn little boy shorts, Dinosaur T-shirt, rope, rusty can, child’s mask lined with sand. In the corner the faint outline of a grave, dog leash lying like half a set of parentheses. Then you remember. The family had no pets.

  Saguaro Night

  My father used to say he loved the southwest because here it’s obviously the landscape that matters and not the people. People who try to compete with their buildings, their roads, and their works are all just too pitiable, as if they were desperate for God’s attention. “In the process they came damn near to ruining this country,” he’d say. “I mean, look at Phoenix.” Never mind that I liked Phoenix; both as child and daughter my opinion on the matter didn’t count. If my brother had lived past the age of six his opinion might have had more weight, but I honestly doubt it, even though I’ve held onto the notion now and then as a convenient source of resentment.

  Once or twice a year my father would drive me up to the Grand Canyon just to put me in touch with something “beyond man’s power to alter.” To me the Canyon was just this great big hole in the ground, but I knew better than to say that to my dad. Dad said he was glad he was a painter and not an architect in the face of such awe-inspiring vistas. This landscape, he said, required an artist already in sympathy with that world where human concerns were irrelevant.

  My father was the perfect artist for that landscape. He had a “problem” with human beings, was the way he put it. Not a fear, exactly, but an obvious unease. Not exactly a hatred, or at least not a hatred he would admit to, but a profound distrust. If you look closely at his most famous painting, “Saguaro Night,” you can see signs. Row after row of blackened saguaro lean forward as if marching toward a distant wrinkle of mountains. The sky behind and above all this is deep, inky, unfathomable. The painting seems simple enough at first glance, but then you start thinking why are the cacti so black? Has there been a fire? I always thought they looked as if they were suffering. Maybe they’re not cacti after all? My father didn’t paint them realistically, exactly, but in a style he called tormented expressionism. The lines are tortured, the shapes distressed, the colors despairing. No one really “likes” the painting, although it has fetched incredible prices over the last few years. I’ve heard that the last two owners couldn’t bear to hang it in their homes. I’m told that once an old woman, a concentration camp survivor, burst into tears upon seeing it in a traveling exhibition of my father’s work.

  One cactus is not black—that small one in the background, on the edge of the right upper quadrant, a shimmering red-orange laid in with a few quick strokes, hardly formed, really. But so compelling. Some people say that’s where the other cacti are leaning toward, their cactus deity. I’m not so sure about that, but I do know that’s where the eye goes.

  So my father’s primary artistic inspiration was a distrust of human beings. Like any good daughter, I became his opposite. My weakness as an artist, and as a human being, is that I’ve trusted and loved people too much. My paintings, and my relationships, have been overwrought, sentimentalized, unrealistic affairs. Critics have pointed out superficial resemblances in our work, always to my detriment. Certainly I learned my technique from him, but I’ve always taken it too far—I lack his iron discipline. And we’re both attracted, at least initially, to drunks and addicts. But after a year or so of passionate involvement, my father always leaves his unfortunate choices behind. He was with my mother a record two years, two months. I usually stay with my lovers until they ruin me.

  And yet, strangely enough, for all this I always knew that my father both appreciated and loved me. I was always the only one.

  My father had lived by himself on a small ranch outside Tucson for over twenty years when I came to stay with him the last few years of his life. I was running from yet another bad relationship. I suppose because this one had been so particularly bad, I ran to my father. Dad’s relationships, also, had always been spectacularly bad. But he survived them, even thrived on these dramatic break-ups. He always appeared more content afterwards, and his paintings only improved. I decided this was yet another area where I could learn from his technique.

  “So this young man, do you suppose he’ll be following you here?”

  “God, I hope not.”

  “There is no god, sweetheart,” he corrected me quietly, matter-of-factly, as had always been his way. I had been watching him paint—he didn’t
mind; he said he’d just pretend I was yet another saguaro cactus—and I wondered at what he was working on. All his paintings those last few years started the same—he painted the blacks first, the endless sky, the mirroring ground. Much later more specific objects would appear, as if he’d shone a flashlight on them, or rubbed the night away just enough to reveal them. The beginning he made that day would evolve into the painting which became known as “Saguaro Night.”

  “Sometimes I forget, Daddy.” He didn’t say anything, but I could see his cheeks lifting slightly. I knew he was smiling, just a little. He was very lean, and the first signs of his illness were just beginning to show. His muscles moved with no secrecy beneath his skin.

  “When you were little you asked me to paint a picture of God for you,” he said. “I suppose if I stopped this painting right about now…” He added another brush of darkness to the canvas. “I guess I’d just about have him.”

  On impulse I hugged him from behind. I shocked myself—usually I didn’t dare touch him while he was working—but he didn’t pull away, and I didn’t feel him stiffen at all. He just kept adding more of that endless night sky to the painting.

  The summer was passing uneventfully. The days were beyond hot, and although he kept several ancient fans around, he refused to have anything to do with air conditioning. I didn’t paint anything, even though he had set aside studio space for me in an annex to his own work room. I could feel his intense disapproval, but he never said anything. I couldn’t imagine working in such heat, worse than anything I’ve ever experienced, but he was at it eight hours a day, seven days a week. After dusk he would fix us both some dinner—he never permitted me to cook—and afterwards he would sit in a rotting old chair on the edge of the desert twenty or so yards from the house, just watching the night sky that existed, I think, both outside and inside his head. He wasn’t exactly unfriendly about it—he often invited me to join him, but I always declined. This was his, and besides, there was only one chair out there.

  We never saw anyone except for a couple of old cowboys who came by now and then to do repairs to the house or the fences, and the boy from the local grocery in his battered green pickup. Each time I’d open the door to let the boy in with the supplies I’d be amazed at how wet he was, and how he seemed just a bit smaller than the last time, as if his brown skin were shrinking around him like the sheath over a fried sausage link. I stayed inside on days like that—the newspapers the grocery boy brought each time (just for me, of course), talked about windshields on parked cars exploding from the heat. I wrote lots of letters during that summer to old friends and boyfriends, but I didn’t mail any of them. The letters were all alike, and like my father’s paintings: all about the heat and the sky, and the dark that came without street lamps to lighten it.

  But sometimes I’d start writing about the dark and the sky, and something from the newspaper would slip into the letter, almost without my noticing it. I suppose that shouldn’t have been too surprising, since all there was to write about was the dark, the heat, and the sky, and whatever I read in the newspaper.

  A lot of terrible things happened that summer, according to the papers (I had no reason to doubt them, but I’d never felt so isolated from other people’s news as I did then so it was a little like reading about these events in a novel). Four girls, ten to eighteen, had been raped, strangled, and left out in the desert where the animals found them before their families did. A father had locked himself in the house with his three kids and then set fire to the place, while the mother sat wailing and screaming helplessly outside. A shoplifter had been chased from a downtown store where three cowboys caught him, beat him, then threw him out in front of a moving truck. The usual run of traffic accidents, bad enough in and of themselves, but then there was that especially hot Wednesday afternoon that a long distance truck driver “went strange” and plowed down the highway hitting everything and everyone he could. The final death toll on that one was twenty-eight, with a dozen more permanently disabled.

  My father came up behind me while I was reading the story. I looked up at him and he said, “You want to know why.”

  I nodded.

  He gazed out our back window at miles of desert with saguaro that seemed somehow too upright, and closer to the house than I remembered them. “It’s just the sky,” he said. “And the dark nights, those distant mountains, the heat. That’s always been, I think, at the heart of it.”

  Tommy showed up at the ranch around the second week of August. “Hey, Babe. It’s your sugar daddy!”

  Sadly enough, the heart does go pitter patter at times like these. I remember seeing him there in a white dress shirt and tight jeans, leaning on the door jamb with one arm, his legs crossed to show off some rich leather cowboy boots. If I were younger I’d think that pitter patter meant true love. But I’ve come to realize that, at least for me, it was just the anxiety spawned by the attraction to someone bad for you. Of course my first thought was where did this New Jersey boy get those boots? Either he conned a woman at some bar to buy them for him, payment for services rendered, or he’d just stolen them outright. My second thought was how much he looked like James Dean standing there, and of course there was nothing accidental about that. He loved the movies as much as I did, and he knew how to duplicate a pose. I’d seen him do it in front of a hundred different mirrors.

  “How’d you find me?”

  “What? No ‘Hi, how are you, it’s great to see you, I’m glad you took the time to come all this way?’ That’s hurtful.”

  “We broke up, remember?”

  “I know. It wasn’t my idea, exactly, but I was there. Doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends. You know I’ll always be there for you, babe. You’re just that important.” He stepped forward, his arms out.

  “Tommy, no.”

  “Just a hug, girl. I swear, that’s all.” So I let him hug me. I didn’t hug him back; not knowing what else to do, I patted his shoulder. “That’s nice,” he crooned. Cheesy, but I can’t swear it didn’t work.

  I know I shouldn’t have allowed the familiarity, the pretense that we’d ever been or would ever be anything approaching friends. I have no legitimate defense, but he was always one of those guys it was hard to give a final “no” to. It didn’t matter what he did, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. It’s crazy, when I think about it now, and hard to explain. It’s just that when I was with him, especially after a long absence, it was hard to believe he wasn’t exactly who he pretended to be, who I wanted him to be.

  He let go of me and walked inside before I could bring myself to say anything. I was surprised to see him, after all, but I know I shouldn’t have been. I made myself ask again, “How did you find me, Tommy?”

  “You know, this place is great,” he said, looking around, picking up things and putting them back down, touching the pictures on the walls. “Is this one of your old man’s?” he asked, running his finger down the naked image of a woman in one of my dad’s favorite oils, a present from an old friend who died when I was just a girl. It was a beautiful piece of art, and seeing Tommy’s finger on the exposed paint sent me into a panic. But before I could say anything he removed his finger, examined it as if for rubbed-off color, and said, “No, of course not. It’s too normal, right? But I can see why he likes it out here. It’s small, but it’s neat, and nobody to bother you, right? Nobody dropping by? You should have explained this place better, Babe. I always thought it was pretty lame, him living all alone out here like he was. But now I can see, I can appreciate why he’d like it so much. Hell, I’d like it here, too.”

  “Tommy, how did you find me?”

  He looked at me, wiped the smile off with the back of his hand like it was something dirty. “Now don’t be that way, Mary. I wanted to see you. I wanted to visit you. I care about you, Mary. Why don’t you understand that?”

  My alarm bells were going off, for all the good it did me now. Before when my Tommy alarms went off all I knew to do was run. But out here I d
idn’t have any place to run to. All that was left was to try to mollify him. “It’s just that we’re pretty hard to find out here,” I said. “Even when you know where you’re going. Daddy wanted it that way.”

  “Daddy.” He laughed. “I don’t hear a lot of grown women using that word, Mary. That’s a little girl’s word. I know the old guy is a very smart man and all, a genius, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Well, I just got me some real good directions. That’s all it takes, Mary, good directions. It’s not like this place is top secret or anything. You know, it’s not even that special, whatever your dad may say.”

  “You talked to my mother.” No question, there. It was the only way I could think of that would have gotten him here.

  “I told her I was trying to make things right with you again. She wanted to help out.”

  “You got her drunk, didn’t you?”

  “She’s a very friendly lady, not stuck up like the rest of the family, who seem to think they’re better than everybody else on the planet.”

  “Jesus, Tommy, you didn’t sleep with her, did you? Tell me you didn’t sleep with her!”

  Tommy kept walking around the room, looking at things, touching things, as if he was doing inventory. He wasn’t looking at me, and he was doing that thing with his mouth he always did, that thing that looked like a smile, but he always said it wasn’t a smile, it was just an expression. “You know, I don’t know what you want from me. You’ve never taken the time to really understand me.”

  “Mary, you didn’t tell me we had company.” I felt myself go rigid, holding back a wave of anxiety that threatened to overwhelm me. My father had never met any of my bad choices before. It was as if the two halves of my life were suddenly, dangerously colliding, and I was powerless to stop it.

  I thought that if I were just a healthy person, a strong and mature woman, I could say, Dad, this is Tommy. He isn’t supposed to be here. He’s followed me out here from New Jersey and if he stays in character he’s going to cause us a lot of trouble, because that’s what he does. He’s dangerous—I think you should call the local police immediately.