Inappropriate Behavior: Stories (2 page)

“I mean,” Joe Bill started, stopped, said, “heck, I'm just a guy from Texas. We're all Christians. But I'm no preacher or anything.”

“But you believe in God.”

“Yeah, but—”

“There's no God.”

“Well, you can—”

“How can you believe in God in the light of science?” Lee said, his voice rising to a higher pitch, his palms out-turned in front of him. “Science will one day prove everything, figure out everything. God's something people needed when they lived in the Dark Ages. Step into the light of science, pal. Science is the only god.”

“Well, now,” Joe Bill said, “I don't know.” He felt funny about saying all of this to someone he'd just met. But Lee was so sure of himself, somewhat hostile, and Joe Bill felt that to merely back down, or worse, to admit that he agreed with Lee, would make him seem weak, childish, like someone who didn't know what he thought about things. “I don't think God and science exclude each other.”

“But if you say that, you're still holding on to the old ways of thinking. You can't water it down by saying it's part God and part science or that God controls science. God doesn't control anything. Nobody controls anything, or anyone. You still want to think that there's someone in charge. There's no one in charge. We're all just alone, on our own. There's no force but science. There's no supreme being. There's nothing but matter, and anyone with any intelligence can see that.”

With that said, Lee slid off the bunk to the floor, moved quickly past Joe Bill and out of the cabin, pausing to step over the luggage cart. And thus ended the longest conversation the two men would have for some time.

Over the next several days at sea, Joe Bill realized that Lee was avoiding him. Joe Bill had always been an early riser, but he was never awake before Lee, and when Joe Bill went out onto the deck, Lee would go back to the cabin. If Joe Bill went back to the cabin, Lee would get up from the desk, close and lock the journal he was writing in, put the pencil back precisely in the
desk drawer and go back out onto the deck, casting only the quickest of glances over his shoulder at Joe Bill. At meals the ship's four passengers shared a table—Joe Bill, Lee, and the Wades, an older couple who were on their way to visit France following Colonel Wade's recent retirement from the Army Signal Corps. The Wades would sit next to each other on one side, Joe Bill and Lee on the other, Lee always sitting directly across from Colonel Wade and eyeing him suspiciously while they ate. The Wades got along with Joe Bill well enough, but they were always trying to engage Lee, who would answer their questions with blunt, toneless replies and never follow up with questions of his own. Mrs. Wade especially seemed fond of Lee. She'd ask him about his plans of study—“psychology or philosophy”—where he was from—“New Orleans”—if he had a wife or a girlfriend—“no”—and what he wanted to do with his life. Lee merely shrugged and continued eating.

One night, four or five days into the passage, about the time the days became a haze of wave and fog, the four of them were sitting at dinner. Colonel and Mrs. Wade had been talking to Joe Bill about his parents back home in Tyler, and Joe Bill had been giving them the standard stories. When she turned and asked Lee about his parents, Lee just stared for a long moment at Colonel Wade, glowering more than usual. Then he shook his head, blew out a high, sharp laugh, and set his fork down next to his plate. The ocean was rough that night, and the fork rattled against the plate as Lee began to speak.

“My father's dead,” he said. “I've never seen him. My mother has to work at a drugstore to support herself. She's old and sick and frail and has to work at a drugstore. There's America for you. They'll put her out on the street if she doesn't keep the rent coming in. Put her in jail if she doesn't pay her taxes. She's never gotten anything for it, either. Just a sore back and wrinkled, calloused hands and off to work again at the drugstore. There's America.”

“I'm sorry,” Mrs. Wade said, surprised. “I didn't mean to pry. I was just—”

“Home of the free,” Lee said now, slapping the table and sending his fork to the floor, where it slid against the bulkhead and rattled there even louder. “Land of plenty. Hah! Land of a sickness and a cancer. A cancer called money. It eats you and eats you. And when it's gone you're dead. Or wish you were.”

“See here,” the colonel said.

“I'm so sorry,” Mrs. Wade said.

Joe Bill said nothing. The officers at their table had stopped eating to stare at the scene. The steward had entered the room at the sound of shouting and stood at the corner of the passengers' table saying, “Please,
monsieur,
” and Lee was still going on, and now he stood and the colonel stood and said, “Calm down,” but Lee was waving his hands and shouting about America and how it robbed people of their lives and their blood in order to keep the rich in fine clothes and fancy cars, and then he said, “And men like you, Colonel, your job is to keep the poor people in line. The state only gains its power through fear. Except in America, you can even convince people it's not fear at all, but duty and honor and country and national pride that keeps them going off to the factory and the plant and the drugstore.”

“Sit down, please,” Mrs. Wade said now, and the steward said again, “Please,
monsieur
. Sit, please,” and Joe Bill watched as Lee said, “Colonel, I know. I was a soldier, too, you understand.”

“You're some kind of damned communist,” the colonel said now, pushing his wife's hand away as she reached for his.

“No, I'm not,” Lee said. “Communism's just another tool of the state. Just another illusion. I'm a Marxist-Leninist-collectivist.”

“I
knew
it,” Colonel Wade said, ruddy and livid, pointing at Lee. “Why don't you just keep going? Don't stop in Sweden or Switzerland or Denmark or wherever it is you're going. Just keep on. You'd be happier in Russia.”

“My mother would be better off there, that's for sure,” Lee shouted, then pushed his way past the steward and out the door.

“I am very sorry, gentlemen,” the steward said. “Very sorry,
madame
. It is the ship,
certainement
. It is not a luxury liner, no? Some people get upset . . . how you . . . cramped? It makes some people . . . irritable. I will try to have a talk with
monsieur
Lee. If necessary, we will make other dining arrangements.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Wade said as Colonel Wade returned to his seat with a snort. “Of course, it was my fault, really,” she said. “I shouldn't have pried. I could tell he was sensitive.”

“He's nuts,” said the colonel now, picking his glass of tomato juice from the holster and bringing it to his face.

“Again, please accept the apologies of the captain and crew of the
Marion Lykes.
” With that the steward spun quickly away. Colonel Wade turned to Joe Bill.

“Is he like that all the time?”

“To tell you the truth, sir,” Joe Bill said, “he really never speaks to me. We talked some the first day, but since then he's hardly said a word. I don't really see him that much, actually. I have no idea where he goes. Just wanders around on the deck, I guess. He's gone when I get up in the morning and still gone when I go to bed at night.”

“The poor thing,” Mrs. Wade said. “I should have just let him be. I have a problem with talking too much, don't I, Richard? I always have. I just had to pry.”

“It's really quite amazing,” Joe Bill said. “It's like he vanishes or something.”

“This is
1959,
” Colonel Wade said now. “No one can still be that naive about communism. Not after Korea.”

“A mother would have known better. I was never a mother. Female troubles.”

“It's not that big a ship. There are only so many places he could go.”

“Not after
Stalin.
”

And the three of them went on like that for the rest of the
meal, each in their own conversations, their own attitudes of sympathy, mystery, and disbelief, until the steward came again to clear the table, and Joe Bill and the Wades said goodnight.

And now another week, or four days, or ten days, had passed. The sky in the daytime was the color of smooth lead, and at night no stars came out and the dark was low and cloying, like the sky had dropped down to meet the water and seal the
Marion Lykes
inside, holding it in place somewhere far away from the port of New Orleans or the port of Le Havre, and there it would stay until the waters dried up and the sky squeezed the earth into nothingness, until all that was left was matter, and then not even that.

If only he'd spoken his French earlier, he would have someone to talk to, the deckhands or the officers. Joe Bill imagined them up late with a drink in the mess discussing Baudelaire or de Gaulle as the mooring chains clanged against the bulwarks and the ship gently pitched through the night toward France.

His spy game had been a bad idea. That was clear. But it was also clear that to suddenly start speaking French now would seem rude at best, make him look like he really
had
been spying on them, and they would certainly distance themselves from him even more. By keeping his secret, at least he could still listen.

On one of these starless, heavy nights, Joe Bill went out on the deck for a smoke, hoping to eavesdrop on the deckhands while they worked. It was starting already, his mother would say if she saw him flicking four, five, six matches before he could get one to light, the collar of his overcoat turned up against the ocean chill and scratching against the stubble he hadn't shaved in a couple of days. Hasn't even got to France yet and already he's smoking. And the truth was, he didn't even like it, didn't even know how to smoke, but he was so lonely and bored that
so many times smoking a cigarette was the only thing to do. He'd bought his first pack of Chesterfields—the only American brand on sale in the ship's mess—sometime shortly after the blowup between Lee and Colonel Wade at dinner, the last meal Lee had shared with them. And now Joe Bill was already up to a pack a day because he didn't feel like he could just go stand outside and
not
smoke, and he was going outside all the time. It was a shame, Joe Bill thought, puffing his Chesterfield, that he and Lee hadn't hit it off. They could have been pals—nothing like the hothouse of a freighter cabin to form fast friendships. They could have visited each other this fall—Lee could have come to Tours and Joe Bill could have gone to Switzerland (or Sweden or Finland). It was a shame, but it was unlikely to change now.

It was after dinner, and the Wades were on deck as well, but across the ship, at the bow, and just as Joe Bill started over to talk with them, they briskly turned to go back inside, Mrs. Wade tucked under her husband's arm against the cold. Joe Bill waved, but the Wades didn't see him, and again he felt the kind of utter loneliness we can only feel when there are other people around to amplify that loneliness. The Wades, the deckhands, the officers, they all had each other, and Lee, well, Lee seemed to want nothing more in life but to be alone, and thus wasn't really lonely.

Joe Bill was pacing now, counting his slick-shoed steps like a man in prison. The urge to fling himself into the water actually entered his heart, only failing when the urge reached his mind. It wasn't death he wanted, just a new medium, a new color besides the gray steel of the boat, the grayer steel of the sky. He began to rehearse the letter he would write to his parents as summer neared and it came time to return home, the letter that would beg, cajole, demand the terrible expense of airfare. And as he crushed out one cigarette and reached for another, he heard two of the deckhands speaking in French about the “young American.”

He couldn't tell where their voices were coming from at first,
but soon he realized he'd made his wandering way down by the cargo stacks. Among the boxes strapped and tarped there, the men must have made some space for themselves to be alone, away from the captain or the mate or the steward.

“He was in the engine room, drawing something in his book,” one man said, and Joe Bill realized it was not him they were discussing, but Lee.

“He is a strange one.”

“Then Thierry found him in our cabin.”

“I'll kill him.”