Ugly Behavior (13 page)

He jerked the glasses off and threw them across the room. When he
turned, he could hear the footsteps in an adjacent room. Far too many
footsteps.

At the next room he opened the heavy door (heavy as stone the door
to his home) and was greeted by a shower of children’s shoes: high-tops,
sneakers, black patent leathers, flip-flops, leather sandals, Buster Browns,
Oxfords, Minnie Mouse slippers, skates, tap shoes—as they fell from
upended shelves and splintered apple crates. He screamed a not very
sackman
-like scream as the shoes tumbled over his head and
shoulders, soles slapping a staccato as if in footless dance. Yet even as he screamed
he could still hear the high hysterical giggles of sung accompaniment gradually
fading into the rooms beyond.
   

The
sackman
kicked his way through the
knee-high piles of shoes into the disarray of the next room (crude children’s
drawings of knifings,
stranglings
, and decapitations
littering the floor like gigantic leaves), and then the next (piles of naked
dolls, dark bruises and red tears painted on their faces), and the next
(volumes of candid photographs of dead children, taken immediately before and
after their last moments in this loathsome world, ripped and torn and tossed up
into the cold drafts like confetti).

“Enough! Enough!” he cried, feeling uncomfortably like a timid
schoolmaster who’s lost control of his class. “It’s fairytale time! You like
fairytales don’t you?”

“Oh yes oh yes,” she murmured from not so far away.

He turned his head and staggered in fatigue, suddenly feeling old
again. He was alarmed to find that he could not quite catch his breath. “Just
let me… let me catch my breath… please…”

“No! I want my
storyyyyyyy
!” The little
girl appeared at the end of the hall swathed in sheets stained maroon from
dried blood (she’s been in my private bedroom!) and started running toward him.
Startled, the
sackman
lost his balance and fell to
the floor. As her laughter reached for an ever higher pitch he lifted his huge,
child-killer hands to protect his face.

She pulled a round, flat object—larger than a dinner
plate—out of the bloody sheet and threw it at him much in the manner of a
Frisbee. He recognized it as a trophy he had made for himself many years ago.
It broke into pieces on his arms, cutting and (gnawing) into his tender old
flesh. He groped for the pieces on the floor and came up with handfuls of his
children’s precious baby teeth which had been glued on to the trophy as
decoration, and finally the larger pieces—part of what had once been a
beautiful lily glued together from thousands of such teeth.

“You little bitch!” He scrambled to his feet and lunged toward her
ghostly form. She backed away and backed away, tittering and chuckling, the
snot running from her nose as she grew more hysterical. He almost had her
within his grasp when she turned and ran. He lunged again, pulled the rotting
sheet from her body, and crashed through the next door, huge splinters piercing
his face, ramming through the loose flesh on his arms, hammering through
knuckles and the webbing by each thumb, working themselves deep into his belly
as if conscious and determinedly murderous.

They were in his secret bedroom (my heart!). The little girl in
the tattered red dress jumped up and down on his bed, picking up the old
blood-stained covers and tossing them into the far corners of the room. Oh,
she’s found my secret heart!

“Can’t catch me now can’t catch me now…” she chanted breathlessly.
The
sackman
could see that she had smeared herself
with the rancid fluids of corruption from his bottle collection underneath the
bed (even he would not have done such a thing—for him it was always
enough just to know they were there beneath his reclining form). She stuck out
her tongue demonically.

He tried to get up off the floor but each movement brought the
sharp splinters deeper into his body. He knew she had done real damage to him
because he had a vague sensation of soft, secret things tearing away inside
him. But strangely enough all his rage had fled him. He felt too old for such
anger. His mission, as always, was most important now. “Child…
 
sweet child,” he implored weakly. “It is
time for your story. Surely you want your story? Hurry! While I still have the
strength…”

“I love stories,” she said quietly, but not looking at him.
Instead she looked around at his bedroom. She was the only person besides him
ever to be in his bedroom.

“All children love stories,” he replied. “Especially bedtime
stories.” But still she wouldn’t look at him, intent on the walls of his
bedroom, walls decorated with all the collages of his universe he had
constructed over the years:

Along the bottoms of the walls were countless pictures of children,
but with heads, arms, legs removed, eyes cut from their sockets, genitalia
snipped and glued to their foreheads, ears and eyes glued over small, immature
breasts, tongues affixed to the bottoms of tiny feet. The children were stacked
and piled until they made a terrible weight at the bottom of each collage,
where sometimes the paper was cut, and passages were made to other collages
which were even more crowded with segmented children. Brown and red offal and
old excrement had been smeared in and out of these segments for this was the
world, this was the everyday ground human beings walked on, slept on, rutted
and conducted their commerce on.

Arranged at eye level were various upright figures: roaches and
mayflies and lizards and centipedes and dark birds. These were built from
shapes outlined in charcoal, cut out, then arranged to construct the desired
form, or sometimes they were photographs of world leaders—Stalin, Reagan,
Thatcher, De Gaulle—with bits cut away until the hidden creature had been
uncovered. Each held a knife or an axe or a sack or a pair of scissors, for
these were the harvesters. Here and there their barbed legs or wings reached
down into the collages below to snare a child and free it from its own
corporeal filth.

But above eye level, further than a child could reach on his or
her own, was heaven, where the walls had been scrubbed until they were
practically no color at all. There the
sackman
had
pasted small bits of paper. And on each piece of paper was scribbled the final
words of a child he had personally harvested, liberated,
discorporated
,
sent back. All the no please momma stop daddy yes I’ll be good your eyes why
your hands can’t why
Why
WHYs, and prayers far more
obscure than he had ever heard.

“You’re a bad man,” the little girl said, and grinned. A stare
into the brilliance of the little girl’s grin and the
sackman
felt bathed in ice.

 
“No. No, honey. I’m
the very best of men. You’ll understand that after I’ve told you your story.”

Then he grabbed her by one scuffed tennis shoe and began pulling
her off the bed and into his bloody, splintered embrace. The little girl
squealed as if it were a game. The
sackman
began to
relax, because it was a game, the most important game she would ever play.

 
“This is a story about
a little girl in a red dress,” he whispered from bloody lips.

“And you’re making it lots more redder,” she said moistly into his
ear.

“Who never wanted to grow up,” he continued.

“I wouldn’t want to be like you!” She giggled.

“Stop interrupting,” he said firmly, and she snuggled closer to
him, soaking herself completely in the blood seeping from his enormous lap.
“Now that might sound strange to some people, not wanting to grow up, but this
little girl was very smart, you see…”

“Very smart,” she interrupted, but he ignored her.

“. . . because she’d known lots of grownups in her time, and she’d
learned what awful beasts grownups could be. They’d forgotten what it had been
like to be a child, how very hard it had been, and it was this absent
mindedness that had turned all the grownups into scaly, putrid monsters!”

“Really?” the little girl asked, wide-eyed.

“Really.”

“So what did she do?” She seemed genuinely interested. He’d never
had a child so relaxed in his arms before, despite all that had happened.
Perhaps this would be the one child who really understood. Perhaps she would go
easily, with no need for a struggle. He stretched his fingers and spread his
huge hands (watch out! watch out!). He brought his fingers closer to her neck
(when he comes), closer to her tiny, grape-shaped eyes (when the
sackman
comes).

“What did she do, you ask? Why, she visited the
sackman
, of course.”

“That was stupid!” she squealed, and rammed a long splinter of
wood up through his belly until it found the
sackman’s
chest.

As the
sackman
felt himself falling into
bits and pieces, his legs tumbling one way, his arms and belly another, he
tried to think of the word he’d want the little girl to write down for pasting
into his
sackman
heaven.

She let him pull her closer. He could see her leaning over his
lips with an anxious expression on her face, ready to hear and record. He
closed his eyes and opened his mouth, and felt her eager fingers tearing at his
tongue.

The first visits had been straightforward enough. He’d started going
there to meet women. His wife had been gone almost a year and the women at work
seemed too old for him. It had been a long time since he’d thought about how a
woman might see him, the kind of messages he sent out. Did he even send out
messages? Everyone did, according to the articles in the women’s magazines,
which had become his secret vice. After Clara left and he’d been so stupefied
by the whole thing he’d thought reading them might help him
understand—certainly she’d spent more time reading them than telling him
the truth.

“How To Tell Your Man What He’s Doing Wrong.” He wondered if she’d
read that one and if so, why she hadn’t followed its recommendations. Maybe
she’d decided he wasn’t worth the aggravation.

He didn’t go to Jack’s to meet women anymore. To see them, yes, to
smell them. To be in their presence.

“I tell you, the women go crazy there!” Mark had thought going to
Jack’s was the best thing Jim could do. If he wanted to meet women, and what
man didn’t?
 
“It’s either Jack’s, or
a church, or even better a funeral at a church. But Jack’s is where they really
let loose, where they really get crazy.” Jim didn’t actually want a crazy
woman, but maybe momentary insanity was as good an ice-breaker as any.

Dating had this vaguely disturbing terminology—breaking the
ice, sending messages. It seemed strangely science fictional, contact between
two alien species. He couldn’t imagine his parents being this way, but he
couldn’t remember much communicating taking place there, either. Maybe it had
always been this way and he’d just never noticed before. Marriage protected you
from the real terrors of relationships.

“I don’t think I’ve danced in years—how about you?”

The fellow—about his age, maybe a little older—made
this opening statement and waited for an answer. Some people might have been
tempted to make fun of him, but Jim wasn’t one of them. Something had to be
said first and perhaps this was as good a thing to say as any. The first thing
you said in any relationship had little long-lasting meaning. The first thing
you said could even be a lie. The woman’s eyes moved slightly down and up
again, almost imperceptibly, a sizing up and a conclusion. She had to determine
if this guy was at least in the ballpark and if she didn’t do it now she might
be stuck with a major incompatibility for half the evening. Not as cruel as it
sounded—she was doing both of them a favor.

At their age the standards were a bit looser, of course. At their
age even a man years out of shape might interest an ex-prom queen.

The woman smiled, always an encouraging sign. Good for you,
fellow, Jim thought. Good for you.

Mark had stopped coming to Jack’s several years ago, having found
a girlfriend and then moving to Seattle where he thought people were
friendlier. “It’s the rain and the gloom that brings people closer together.”
Mark had theories about all varieties of human behavior. Nothing strange about
that, of course. Theories were pretty much all most of us knew about being
human. Mark’s problem was that his theories were a bit further off the beam
than most, and his need too obvious, too painful to observe.

“Look at them,” Mark had said, gesturing toward the variety of
women crowding the dance floor, heads drifting up and down. “It’s just like
sex.”

Jim had understood then that Mark knew very little about sex. Not
that Jim was an expert. But during the course of his eight-year marriage to
Clara they had had three different kinds of sex, all of them authentic in their
own way.

Initially there had been the pretense of passion and exhaustion
while they attempted to understand the real passion that lay beneath: the
bellies sucked in, the dramatic breathing and groaning and sudden cries, the
collapse at the end and the various half-true declarations, and the final
separate
awarenesses
that they had not quite found
the complete release they’d always dreamed of, but they knew it was there.