Ugly Behavior
Authors: Steve Rasnic Tem
Ugly Behavior
Steve
Rasnic
Tem
2 PM: The Real Estate Agent Arrives
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
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.
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.
