Ugly Behavior (26 page)

“
Here.
” Jesse grabbed my arm and turned
me around. He led me back over to his mother’s body. “You don’t have to look.
You can close your eyes. Let me just take your hand.” But I wanted to look. He
took me over to her side. There was a big blister there, full of stuff. Jesse
put my hand on it. “Feel weird, huh?” He didn’t look crazy; he looked like some
kind of young scientist or something from some dumb TV show. I nodded.
 
“Hey, look at her mouth!” I did. In her
big loose mouth I could see pieces of food that had come up. A little dark bug
crawled up out of her hair. This is what it’s like, what it’s really like, I
thought. I thought about those rock stars I used to like all made up like they
were dead, those horror movies I used to watch with Jesse, and all those stoner
kids I used to know getting high every chance they had and telling me it don’t
matter anyway and everything was just a drag with their eyes half shut and
their mouths hanging open and their skin getting whiter every day. All of them,
they don’t know shit about it, I thought. This is what it’s really like.

Jesse left me by his mom and started going to the candles one at a
time, snuffing them out. A filmy gray smoke started to fill the bedroom. I
could already smell the mix of sweet and sharp smells starting to go away, and
underneath that the other truly awful smell creeping in.

Jesse turned to me while the last few candles were still lit. That
bad smell was almost all over me now, but I just sat there, holding my breath
and waiting for it. He almost grinned but didn’t
guite
make it. “I guess you’re ready to take a hit off all this now,” he said.
 
I just stared at him. And then I let my
clean breath go.

And now Jesse says he figures it’s about time we did another one.

We took off from his house with the one bike and Jesse’s pack but
we had to walk most of the time because Jesse figured we’d better go
cross-country, over the fences and through the trees where nobody could see us.
He didn’t think they’d find the bodies anytime soon but my parents would report
me missing after awhile. It was hell getting the bike through all that stuff
but Jesse said we might need it later so we best take it. The scariest part was
when we had to cross a couple of creeks, and wading through water up over my
belt carrying that bike made me sure I was going to drown. But I thought maybe
I even deserved it for what I’d seen, what I’d done, and what I didn’t do. I
thought about what a body must look like after it drowned—I’d heard they
swole
up something awful, and I thought about Jesse showing
off my body after I’d died, letting people poke it and smell it, and then I
didn’t want to die anymore.

Once Jesse suggested that maybe we should build a raft and float
downriver like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I’d read the two books and he’d
seen one of the movies. I thought it was a great idea but then we couldn’t
figure out how to do it. Jesse bitched about how they don’t teach you important
stuff like that in school, and used to, dads taught you stuff like
raft-building but they didn’t anymore. He said his dad should have taught him
stuff like that but he was always too busy.

“Probably,” I said, watching Jesse closer all the time because he
seemed to be getting frustrated with everything.

I thought a lot about Tom and Huck that first day and how they
came back into town just in time to see their own funeral. I wondered if every
kid dreamed about doing that. I wondered if my parents found out about what I
did in Jesse’s house what they would say about me at my funeral.

We slept the first night under the trees. Or tried to. Jesse
walked around a lot in the dark and I couldn’t sleep much from watching him.
The next morning he was nervous and agitated and first thing he did he found an
old dog and beat it over the head with a hammer. I didn’t know he had the
hammer but it was in his pack and I pretty much guessed what he’d used it for
before. He didn’t even tell me he was going to do it, he just saw the dog and
as soon as he saw it he did it. We both stood there and looked at the body and
touched it and kicked it and I didn’t feel a damn thing and I don’t think Jesse
did either because he was still real nervous.

Later that morning the farmer picked us up in his truck.

“Going far?” he asked us from the window and I wanted to tell him
to keep driving mister but I didn’t. He was old and had a nice face and was
probably somebody’s father and some kid’s grandfather but I couldn’t say a
thing with Jesse standing there.

“Meadville,” Jesse said, smiling. I’d seen that
fakey
smile on Jesse’s face before, when he talked to
adults, when he talked to his own parents. “We’re
gonna
help out on my uncle’s farm.” Jesse smiled and smiled and my throat and my
chest and my head started filling up with that awful smell again. The old man
looked at me and all I could do was look at him and nod. He let Jesse into the
cab of the truck and told me I’d better ride with my bike in the back. The old
man smiled at me a real smile, like I was a good boy.

The breeze was cool in the back of the truck and the bed rocked so
on the gravelly side road we were on I started falling asleep, but every time I
was getting ready to conk out we’d hit a bump or something and my head would
snap up. But I still think I must have slept a little because somewhere in
there I started to dream. I dreamed that I was riding along in the back of a
pickup truck my grandfather was driving. He’d been singing the whole way and I’d
been enjoying his singing but then it wasn’t singing anymore it was screaming
and a monster was in the front seat with him, Death was in the front seat with
him, beating him over the head with a hammer. Then the truck jerked to a stop
and I looked through the cab window where Death was hammering the brains out of
my grandfather and coating the glass with gray and brown and red. My
grandfather scratched at the glass like I should do something but I couldn’t
because it was just a dream. Then Death turned to me and grinned while he was
still swinging the hammer and fighting with my grandfather and it was my face
grinning and speckled with brains and blood.

I turned around to try to get out of the dream, to watch the trees
whizz by while the truck was rocking me to sleep, but the land was dark and the
trees were tall bodies all swollen in their dying and their heavy heads hanging
down and their loose mouths falling open. And the wind through the trees was
the breath of the dead—that awful smell I thought we’d left back at
Jesse’s house.

Later I kissed my grandfather goodbye and helped Jesse bury him
under one of those tall trees that smelled so bad.

And now Jesse says he figures it’s about time we did another one.
He grins and says he’s lost the smell. But I can smell it all the time—I
smell, taste, and breathe that smell.

Outside Meadville, Jesse washed up and stole a shirt and pants off
a clothesline. From there we took turns walking and riding the bike to a mall
where Jesse did some panhandling. We used the money to buy shakes and burgers.
While we were eating, Jesse said that panhandling wasn’t wrong if you had to do
it to get something to eat. I couldn’t watch Jesse eat—the food kept
coming up out of his mouth. My two burgers smelled so bad I tried to hold my breath
while I ate them but that made me choke. But I still ate them. I was hungry.

We walked around the mall for a long time. Other people did the
same thing, staring, but never buying anything. It reminded me of one of those
zombie pictures. I tried not to touch anybody because they smelled so bad and
they held their mouths open so that you could see all their teeth.

Finally, Jesse picked out two girls and dragged me over to them. I
couldn’t get too close because of their smell, but the younger one seemed to
like me. She had a nice smile. I looked at Jesse’s face. He was grinning at
them and then at me. His complexion had gotten real bad since we’d started
travelling—there’d been more and more zits on his face every day. Now
they were huge. One burst open and a long skinny white worm crawled out. I
looked at the girls—they didn’t seem to notice.

“His parents are putting him up for adoption so we ran away. I’m
trying to hide him until they change their minds.” Jesse’s breath stank.

The girls looked at me. “Really?” the older one said. Her face had
tiny cracks in it. I looked down at my feet.

Both of the girls said “I’m sorry” about the same time, then they
got quiet like they were embarrassed. But I still didn’t look up. I watched
their sandaled feet and the black bugs crawling between their toes.

The older one could drive, so they hid us in the back seat of
their car and drove to the end of the drive that led to the farmhouse where
their family lived. We were supposed to go on to the barn and the girls would bring
us out some food later. We never told them about my bike and I kept thinking
about it and what people would say when they found it. Even though I never used
the bike anymore I was a little sorry about having lost it.

I also thought about those girls and how nice they were and how
the younger one seemed to like me, even though they smelled so bad. I wondered
why girls like that were always so nice to guys like us, guys with a story to
tell, and I thought about how dumb it was.

After we were in the barn for a couple of hours, the
girls—they were sisters, if I didn’t mention it before—brought us
some food. The younger one talked to me a long time while I ate but I don’t
remember anything she said. The older one talked to Jesse the same way and I
heard her say, “You’re a good person to be helping your friend like this.” She
leaned over and kissed Jesse on his cheek even though the zits were tearing his
face apart. Her shirt rode up on the side and Jesse put his dirty hand there. I
saw the blisters rise up out of her skin and break open and the smell was worse
than ever in the barn but no one else seemed to notice.

I finished eating and leaned back into the dirty straw. I liked
the younger sister but I hoped she wouldn’t kiss me the same way. I couldn’t
stand the idea of her open, loose mouth touching my skin. Underneath the straw
I saw that there were hunks of gray flesh, pieces of arms and legs and things
inside you I didn’t know the name for. But I covered them over with more straw
when nobody was looking, and I didn’t say anything.

And now Jesse says he figures it’s about time we did another one.
He thinks I’ve forgotten. But I haven’t.

I’ve been thinking about the two sisters all night and how much
they trust us and how good they’ve been to us. And I’ve been thinking how they
remind me of the
Wilks
sisters in Huckleberry Finn
and how Huck felt so ornery and low down because he was letting the duke and
king rob them of their money after the sisters had been so nice to him.
Sometimes I guess you don’t know how to behave until you’ve read it in a book
or seen it on TV.

So he gets up from his nest in the sour straw and starts toward
the barn door. And I get up out of the straw and follow. Only last night I took
the hammer, and now I beat him in the head until his head comes apart, and all
the stink comes out and covers me so bad I know I’ll never get it off. He
always said he’d fight really hard if he knew he was dying, but his body
doesn’t fight back hardly at all. Maybe he didn’t know.

I hear the noises in the farmhouse and now there are voices and
flashlights coming. I scrape my fingers through the straw to find all the
pieces of Jesse’s head to make him look a little better for these people. I lie
down in the straw beside him and close my eyes, leaving just a sliver of milky
white under each lid to show them. I drop my mouth open and stop my saliva. I
imagine the blue-green colors that will come and paint my body. I imagine the
blisters and the insects and the terrible smell my breath has become. But
mostly I try to imagine how I’m going to explain to these strangers why I’m
enjoying this.

Sometimes when he looked at his hands, he could see them
hardening, the skin flaking away, the muscles stiffening, and suddenly he was
earth again, suddenly he was stone.

Every few months when Carter first felt the weakness, he would
make a trip to the place of the stones. Here, he would stare at the rounded
boulders, the broken fragments, the huge dark slabs pushed out of the sandy
soil, until the weakness passed. The weakness, which came upon him fiercely,
usually manifested itself as an overwhelming need to die. This seemed
reasonable. The whole world was dying around him. Cities deteriorated, falling
into rubble. Streams slowed down from all the garbage they contained. People in
general seemed more sluggish than he remembered from childhood. It was as if
everything he saw was slowly solidifying, losing energy, turning to stone. As
if this were the natural state of things. And so the weakness came, a
compulsion to be turned into stone.

 
When the weakness
passed, Carter would leave the stones, go out and take someone else’s life away
from them. Freeze their existence. Turn them into stone instead.

The stones always made him feel better.

The stones lay scattered across a high hilltop five miles from the
small house where Carter grew up. He’d asked about them in town—one old
man who used to be a schoolteacher said they had been deposited there by
glacier action. But Carter could not believe the stones could be that old.