Ugly Behavior (22 page)

He didn’t wrestle for awhile after that, didn’t even show up to
watch. He’d take these long walks in the woods and he’d be so full of aches
he’d think he’d pulled every muscle in his body. But he hadn’t pulled a thing,
and no amount of heat or ointment was going to fix him. Sometimes he’d find a
good-sized tree and wrap his arms around that, squeeze and crush and pretend he
was pulling the thing out of the ground roots and all, and then sometimes the
aching would go away.

The girl showed up again at a match in northern California. She
looked the same but more so, her eyes noticeably red even from the ring, as if
she’d been doing nothing but crying since the last time he saw her. That wasn’t
likely, he thought, but the fantasy made him smile a little. He never thought
of himself as having fans.

She was at every match in San Francisco, and he saw her at all the
cities and towns all the way down the coast. That first night in San Diego she
was waiting for him outside when he left the dressing room.

“Mr. Crusher,” she said, shyly, like a schoolgirl. It made him
laugh, and then he saw this uncertain look cross her face and he felt bad.

“Jim. It’s my real name.”

“Sure.” She had inched closer, but he edged away. For some reason
he was scared of this small and lovely person.
 

“I saw you wrestle tonight,” she said.

And dozens of times before, he thought, but said nothing.

“You’re very… strong,” she said. “It’s like you could break
anything… that bothered you.”

“Some things you can’t break.”

“It’s like you could just crush it out of existence,” she said, as
if she hadn’t heard him, and looking into her eyes he could tell she hadn’t.
“You’re strong enough… you could just make it not be.”

He was embarrassed now. And he wanted her to stop saying what she
was saying. “Do you want me to sign a picture or something?” he asked and
immediately felt himself redden. Now she would think he was some sort of
arrogant would-be celebrity. Some of the guys did think of themselves as
celebrities, but Jim didn’t.

“If you want. But I would really like to take you out to dinner,
if that’s okay with you.”

“I…” Jim couldn’t figure out what to do with his hands. Finally he
let them grip and wrestle each other. “I usually…”

“I don’t know anyone here,” she said. “And I really find it
depressing to eat by myself.”

Jim surprised himself by agreeing, even though the very idea
terrified him. But telling this woman no, after the things she had just said to
him, would have mortified him even more.

They took her car. Jim didn’t drive—steering wheels had
never felt right in his hands.

It wasn’t until they got to the restaurant that Jim wondered how
he was going to eat in front of this sweet young thing. He always ate alone,
and almost never in restaurants. Sometimes when the bus stopped and the other
wrestlers all went in to eat, together around some long table, Jim would order
something to go, then eat it on the bus. Sometimes he would stare out the bus
window, and into the restaurant where the others were, and pretend he was
eating with them.

It was his hands, of course, that made him unsuitable for public
dining. There was no way those massive hands and forearms could hold a fork
delicately, or use a knife without bumping into the person next to him or
sending his own food flying across the table. And those thick, long fingers of
his were always getting in the way. They were like wandering roots, and he had
no control over them. Sometimes he wouldn’t watch them for awhile, then glance
down and they’d be wriggling in secret, anxious to touch and break something.

So he struggled through the meal and actually ate very little,
dropping some of it on the floor, some into his lap. Finally so hungry he could
have cried, he picked up a pork chop and stuffed the meaty side into his mouth,
using the bone as a handle. He closed his eyes while he did this, not wanting
to see her look at him. But she never said anything about it, or seemed to
notice. Mostly, she talked about herself.

“My dad has this junk car lot outside Eugene,” she went on.
“Andy’s, but that’s not his name. I don’t know who Andy is, or even if there
ever was one. The place is full of rusted hulks, mostly, but he refuses to
clean up the place or haul anything out of there. He always says he’s going to
fix them up, even the ones so rusted through they don’t have floors anymore,
and the seats are full of wild flowers. He lives there full-time in this shack.
We moved out there when I was twelve, after my mom died.”

Jim put the piece of pork chop down, edged the plate away as if he
could pretend he’d never seen it before. “I’m… sorry,” he said, and immediately
felt stupid, clumsy. She’d been twelve. It was a long time ago. It was probably
dumb for him to say “sorry” now.

But she didn’t seem to have heard him. “I used to watch him move
pieces of cars and trucks around. He was big, like you. And he didn’t say much,
like you. Like most of the wrestlers I’ve met, I guess.” He looked at her then,
and when she saw that she acted suddenly nervous. “Well, I know you’ve seen me
around the circuit. I go to lots of matches, especially when I see certain
wrestlers and what they can do, well, I guess I follow them around to see what
more they can do.”

Jim had no idea what she was talking about. He really wished he
could eat some more, just to have something to do with his mouth and hands. He
tried folding his hands together on the table, but didn’t know quite what to do
with his overstuffed fingers. “Some of the wrestlers… they have lots of fans,”
he said awkwardly.

“Oh… oh, I’m sure they do,” she said with a little wink that made
Jim have to look away. “I know you have your fans, too. I’ve seen how the
people look at you, especially the women.”

 
Jim felt his face fill
with blood. He was suddenly dizzy, and squeezed the edge of the table until he
heard a cracking noise. Then he jerked his hand away, trying to focus on the
fact that he was in a restaurant, where ordinary, real-life people spent their
time. He tried to look at her and smile, let her know that everything was okay
and that he could be perfectly normal. But he couldn’t get his eyes up. He
found himself staring at her plate, her hands and arms. And then he saw where
her sleeve had ridden up, and all the scars it had been hiding.

“I was going to tell you about those,” she said softly. He was a
little alarmed that she could tell where he was looking. “I don’t want to hide
anything from you… Jim. I’d never want to keep secrets from you.”

Jim still didn’t look into her eyes. What was she talking about?
He felt like some fellow in a movie—women just didn’t talk to him this
way. “It’s okay…” he mumbled, not understanding, and not knowing what else to
say.

“My dad was a very lonely man after my mother died. He wasn’t good
with other people, never had been.” Just like me, Jim thought. The idea made
him nervous. “I was pretty lonely, too, living out there with him. We didn’t
have a TV, and I never understood much about things, never had friends to
compare the things that were happening to me. But for all I didn’t understand,
I was growing up pretty fast. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Jim?”

“No…” he said with a shock, as if the very idea of his
understanding was impossible to imagine.

She leaned closer. “It was like I was his wife, Jim. We had sex.”
She had no expression on her face. He couldn’t understand that. Why was she
telling him things he couldn’t possibly understand? “I thought giving to him
was what I was supposed to do. I just wanted to make him be okay. But he took
everything.” She grabbed his wandering fingers and squeezed them together in her
hand. He was surprised by how much it hurt. “Everything…”

“I… I wish that hadn’t happened. I wish I…”

“You can help me, Jim. I knew from the first time I saw you in the
ring that you could help me.”

He thought she was going to drive him back to the motel where the
promoter and the rest of the wrestlers were staying. She’d asked him where he
was staying, and he told her, but she didn’t drive him anywhere near there. She
drove him to another motel, a smaller one further out. When she pulled up in
front of a room and turned off the ignition, she said to him, “You’re going to
help me, Jim.”

Jim knew it wasn’t a question. And she had no right driving him
out there and not telling him where they were going—he knew that much.
But it didn’t make him mad. He didn’t think he could ever be mad at someone
like her. Not just because he liked her. But because she scared him, too.

He followed her into the room, and when she told him to take off
his clothes, he did. And when she told him to get into bed with her, he did. But
when she told him to hold her, to make love to her, he hesitated.

“You told me you would help me,” she said softly. He could barely
see her face in the dark of the room, but he felt her all over his skin. “You
promised, Jim.”

His hands were trembling. He didn’t know what to do with them.
“I’m scared,” he whispered.

“I know you are, sweetheart. But you’re going to help me. Hold me,
Jim. I can’t do this unless you hold me. I’ve tried everything I can think of.
I need this real bad.”

So he slipped his arms carefully around her, trembling as he
touched the soft smallness of her, afraid of his own clumsy fingers, afraid of
his huge hands. She was a glass doll he had to carry somewhere, and he was
scared because she hadn’t told him where yet. “Tell me,” he said. “Please tell
me.”

“Hold me a little tighter, Jim. I can’t feel you enough. Hold me.”
And when he still hesitated she started doing things with her hands, stroking
his chest, wiggling down under him to rub his groin. She was suddenly
everywhere, and he had to reach to catch her, to hold her. “Tighter, Jim… tighter…”

“I want to… I can’t…”

“… tighter… what I need…”

Then it was over. Maybe it had been over for minutes and he hadn’t
noticed. He couldn’t be sure. What surprised him most was that he hadn’t heard
the bones breaking, or realized when she’d stopped telling him to hold her
tighter. He cried for a long time, and then finally he was mad at her. Furious.
She’d gotten exactly what she wanted, but did she ever think about what it
would do to him?

It took a couple of weeks for him to get to her father’s junk
yard. He had to take the back roads, and he hitched a ride only when he thought
it was pretty safe.

Of course her father was dead. At least five years, according to
the man who had taken over the place. Jim wasn’t surprised. “You sure are a big
one,” the man said, and Jim just nodded. “Need a job?” And of course Jim took
it. Besides the other considerations, he had to eat.

He could wrestle a whole car by himself if he took his time. And
ripping things out, breaking things, that was easy enough. He liked the dance
he did with a big piece of rusted steel up in his arms, raised toward the sky
like a gift. The owner would laugh and shake his head and say he’d never seen
anybody so strong. “You’re a regular super duper hero,” he said. “The
Muscleman. The Bruiser.”

But Jim knew he was The Crusher, and always would be. When the
owner went home at night, Jim stayed behind in the little falling-down shack.
Then in the middle of the night he would walk and pick up the sharpest pieces
of ragged steel he could find, and hold them, embrace them, crush them into his
chest where they made scars that tangled and grew into the most beautiful and
complex design he had ever seen.

And she would watch, and tell him, tell him how strong he was.

Monte had never been a good father, in fact he had been pretty
lousy by anyone’s standards, but after he lost his job and became too ill to
work and the arthritis made it so he could hardly move his legs, his daughter
pretended otherwise and asked him to come live with her, her young son, and the
current boyfriend. “You always took care of me,” she said. “Let me do this for
you.”

That wasn’t true, not by a long shot—he’d had shit to do
with her upbringing. He’d left all that to her mother and he’d been gone half
the time and the half the time he was there he’d made them all miserable
including himself.

But he accepted her offer. What else was he supposed to do? He
didn’t know why she was lying to him, or if she was just lying to herself about
him. Nor did he particularly care. He had to survive somehow. Or did he? That
was one of those questions that got harder to answer every year.

His little corner of her house was a closet of a room at the back,
just off the porch and the kitchen. In a fancier house it might have been
called the mud room. A battery-powered radio. One box for his toiletries. One
box for his miscellaneous. A mail slot of a window let some light in. It was a
lot better than he deserved. He actually couldn’t remember if he’d hit her when
she was a kid, but he probably had. He didn’t remember a lot from those days.
She could have been a little yippy dog running around for all he could recall
of her childhood.

He had a single bed, and she made him strip it and hand her the
sheets for the wash. If it had been up to him he’d have let the sheets go
yellow, then brown, then replace them. Monte discovered he liked the look, and
the smell, of wet sheets flapping in the wind. Old age was full of surprises.