Ugly Behavior

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  But oh, I’ve loved my daughters. All three of them, precious as tears. Only a couple of years apart—Julie for some crazy reason thought I wanted a son so she insisted we keep trying, but I was overjoyed, I felt blessed, to have daughters—but my oldest Marcie was small for her age, and my youngest Ann was taller than average, and middle daughter Billie was just like the middle bear, just right, so the three of them together were taken all the time for triplets. We were always told how adorable they were, how beautiful. People were just naturally attracted to them. And the boys? Boys are always just naturally drawn to something a little different. I know.

  Things were pretty much okay until the girls got to be teenagers. Don’t tell me about that being a hard time of life, I know that’s a hard time of life but knowing that still doesn’t help a father much. The girls started wanting dates and it was okay with their mother because Julie just didn’t know no better I guess. They were too damned young and I said so but of course they went and done it anyway and after awhile I just got tired of watching them and chasing after them and let them just go right ahead and date too young and ruin their lives—what was I supposed to do?

  Oh, I still loved them you can count on that but I have to say I was mad at them most of the time.

  But my girls sure looked beautiful in those date dresses of theirs—so beautiful I couldn’t stand to look at them when they were all dolled up.

  They tell you on Oprah and Donahue and every other damn program what to do with your kids but they don’t tell you a damn thing that helps. They act like kids and their families are separate people that have to negotiate every damn thing. They just don’t understand it that a family’s got to be all tied up in knots you can’t get loose of no matter how hard you try. Cut those knots apart and somebody’s bound to wind up bleeding to death on the floor.

  I don’t know if my girls knew I still loved them. I couldn’t be sure cause I stopped telling them I loved them once the oldest got to be thirteen. That might not have been the right thing to do but I just didn’t feel right, telling a young fresh-faced beauty of thirteen that I loved her. Perverts do that, not a good family man. Not a father.

  Besides they shoulda known. They shoulda always known. We were blood weren’t we, all tied together?

  The girls all started their periods early. Hell, the youngest—my baby Ann—was nine, and you know that can’t be right. My wife handled all that stuff of course but she still talked to me about it—I don’t know why women like to talk about such things. She told me the baby was young to be having her period but that was becoming more and more common these days, but as far as I was concerned that was hardly any kind of recommendation. Not much right about these days what with baby girls having periods and watching actual live sex acts on the TV when their daddies ain’t around. And their mothers making it a secret, too. Mothers and daughters, they always have these secrets that no man alive can understand.

  What was I supposed to do about any of it? What could I do?

  People expect the man to change the world but the world is a damned hard thing to change—it just rolls on pretty much the way it wants to until it runs right over you.

  Sometimes all the females in the house had their periods at the same time and the blood stank up everything and I’d wake up in the middle of the night and sometimes Julie wouldn’t be in the bed and then she’d come back and say why she’d just been down the hall in the bathroom but the bathroom was near where the girls slept and I’d think every time, I’d sit there in the dark and think, what if Julie and my girls are down the hall drinking some man’s blood?

  Now, I know that ain’t true and it’s a pretty crazy way to think but I wasn’t always sure at the time. My girls’ breasts were getting bigger every day and it seemed to me they weren’t eating enough at meals to be puttin’ on that kind of weight.

  Then one day I thought I had it figured out—they were bleeding out and they were getting breasts and hair in return, breasts and hair so they could fuck as many guys as they could before they got too old to enjoy it.

  And of course what they were bleeding out was the family blood, dumping it like it was something dirty and all used up and something they didn’t need anymore.

  They were fools, of course. Like you could untie the knot by disrespecting it that way. What right did they have anyway? I was tied to them so hard I wasn’t ever going to get loose so why should they get their freedom? What had they ever done to earn it? Here I was having done everything for Julie and the girls and I was going to be tied to it forever. I wasn’t ever going to be rid of the taste of their blood, their dirt, their flesh. I was going to die choking on it.

  I can’t even say I didn’t like the taste of that knot. That salty, ocean taste like it was everything we’d ever come from for thousands of years. I can’t say I didn’t like it—maybe you have something shoved in your face long enough you hate it for awhile but maybe there comes a point—years maybe—where it’s been shoved there so often you just start liking it again. You feed on it and after awhile maybe that’s all you live for practically.

  That was me and my wife and my girls. Our blood knot. I loved them and I hated them and then I loved them so much I couldn’t be without them, couldn’t let them out of my sight. It was like I had the taste of them in my mouth all the time and I was liking that taste more and more, and I just couldn’t live without it, no way.

  If they’d stayed home more often things probably would’ve turned out okay. Maybe I would get tired of them, tired of the taste and smell of them, and I’d get tired of it all like I did when they first wanted to date and then I’d just let them do what they damn well pleased. Julie could have made them stay home if she’d had the mind, but I married her too young and she was just too damned dumb. A good mother in every other way but too dumb for my girls I’m sorry to say.

  I loved my girls, I loved them dear. I started trying to tell them that so maybe they’d stay at home but it didn’t work.

  My youngest, my baby Ann, she even laughed at me and what’s a man supposed to do with that? I would’ve hit her real hard right then and there but at that point I still couldn’t hit my baby girl. The other two, but not her.

  I should’ve had boys, should’ve made Julie give me boys but I never could’ve loved boys that way. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, or a bad thing.

  Let me explain something: I know I wasn’t always the best father and husband. If I had been I wouldn’t have let things get so far. A good father and husband keeps a lid on things, keeps things from going so far. Keeping things from going so far—with his kids, his wife, with the neighbors—that’s the main thing a father’s supposed to be doing. And I know I failed at that one.

  Things collect, and they don’t go away. Things get together, you get too many of them, and then things go too far.

  Knots get untied. Blood gets spilled on the old, dry wooden floors and the floor soaks it up so fast you can’t believe it, lots faster than you can clean it up and pretty soon the whole floor is stained red and everything you look at looks red.

  I think they all four must have been having their period. They weren’t complaining about it but the whole house smelled like it and I tasted it in every meal for two days and I breathed that blood in every time I opened my mouth and all my clothes smelled like it and even the newspaper and two nights running my dreams were so red I couldn’t make out a thing in them.

  Marcie had come back from one of her “dates.” Fuck fests more like it but a father can’t say that in front of his daughters and still be a good father. I just smiled at her and asked, “Have a nice time?” And she just stared at me looking scared. There was no point in that—I loved her—didn’t she know that?

  Then I saw that my baby Ann was with her.

  “What the fuck!” I yelled and immediately felt bad, saying the F word in front of my girls but it was already out there and I couldn’t get it back inside.

  “Had me my first date, Daddy!” Ann piped u
p with her little dollie’s voice. “Mom said it was okay with her. Me and Marcie, we doubled.”

  I couldn’t say a damn thing, just stared at the two of them all made up like models, or whores. They’d put me down in a box, and I couldn’t see a way to climb my way out. I turned around and went into the bedroom and closed the door, sat down to think. Once you got a family, you don’t get too much time to think.

  I felt all loose with myself. I felt untied. The women in a family, they have a way of doing that to their men.

  Being in a family is like being in a dream. You don’t know if it’s a good dream, or a bad dream. You don’t know if you’re up or down. Everything moves sideways, until before you know it you’re back where you started again, like you hadn’t moved anywhere at all. That’s where I was, moving sideways so fast but not going nowhere.

  My girls, they started the untying. It wasn’t me that did that part. My beautiful, beautiful girls. I just finished what they started.

  But when you start untying that blood knot, it’s more blood than anyone could imagine. It goes back forever, that blood. You taste it and you breathe it and it stains the floor and it stains the walls and it stains the skin until you’re some kind of cartoon running around stabbing and chopping and tasting.

  My babies’ breasts like apples, like sweet onions, like tomatoes.

  Once they were all in the blood it was like they were being born again, crying out “I love you daddy,” and I could kiss them and there was not a damn thing wrong with any of it, cause daddies are supposed to love their babies.

  Because they’re your blood, you see. And you’re tied to them forever.

  The Carving

  She’d told her friends how they’d met, how after a week’s courtship they’d married.

  True in part but there’d been no courtship. She’d fallen for this man, for the strength and sureness of his hands, and she’d asked him to marry her. And because he was the man he was, needing an ordered place where art might happen, he’d said yes. Two years later the baby was born, and she’d set out to make this strange artist love his only child.

  Out on the deck his exacting hands sent into wood chisels as sharp as dread. Flakes rose into bright air and fluttered the long descent to the rocks below. He did not mark the wood, did not reduce it with machinery before his preliminary cuts. Outlines, he said, were no use for freeing the true shapes within.

  Their boy always played near his father’s working, even when the man’s careless indifference brought him pain. For the boy knew that the carver could not keep his hands off the thing he had made, the thing he had freed from unfeeling matter, and in this way the boy got his hugs and impromptu dances and a quick toss in the air that made him believe in wings.

  A steady thok as steel parted wood a hundred years old. She imagined their son sitting patiently, watching those steady hands, waiting for his toss.

  Her friends said he was too self-absorbed, that life with such a man would leave her empty and desperate for talk. But she knew what her son knew: there could be no greater love than that which the artist bore for the thing he had freed from the world.

  Such unshakable focus, she thought, opening the door that led out onto the deck and her husband’s working. The steady rhythm of hammer and hand uplifted her in just the hearing, so that she, too, felt winged and freed from a mundane world. She looked for her son, expecting him there waiting for his little toss, but her son was not there.

  Her husband sat hunched over his work. For a moment she was furious about his lack of care. Where was their son? Then following the flight of chips, white and red and trailing, over the railing’s edge and down onto the rocks, she saw the fallen form, the exquisite work so carelessly tossed aside, the delicate shape spread and broken, their son.

  She turned to the master carver, her mouth working at an uncontrolled sentence. And saw him with the hammer, the bloody chisel, the glistening hand slowly freed, dropping away from the ragged wrist.

  This man, her husband, looked up, eyes dark knots in the rough bole of face. “I could not hold him,” he gasped. “Wind or his own imagination. Once loose, I could not keep him here.”

  And then he looked away, back straining into the work of removing the tool that had failed him.

  The Child Killer

  All the mommas cry when the sackman comes.

  It was the neighborhood fairytale, the nursery rhyme, the cautionary fable meant to scare the children just enough that they wouldn’t stray too far, talk to strangers, or cross the wrong borders. He’d been hearing the stories for forty years, from the beginning of it all. And at one time the image of the large man (but not tall, not fat) with the huge, sure hands, walking the night streets with the voluminous gray sack across his back—a sack that sighed and cried, wriggled and shook as if there were small animals inside—had an almost romantic appeal. He felt flattered, and in fact the image hadn’t been that far from the truth.

  All the mommas cry when the sackman comes around. Back in the beginning, people minded their own business. Sackman. Like some sort of superhero. Now if people saw you with a sack like that they’d call the police. Even as all the mommas used the sackman to scare their kiddies out of misbehavior.

  Now his hands shook, the way the children shook while he told them their special, their final, bedtime stories.

  When he’d started it had been back after the war, and a sack wasn’t all that unusual to see. Sometimes a sack was all a man had to carry what was important to him. And surely children were the most important things of all. Children were a comfort. Children were our future.

  And he was the man whose task it was to murder the future.

  Better get in before the sackman comes. Don’t touch that if you don’t want the sackman comin’ round here! Better be good tonight or the old sackman may just up and take you for his dinner!

  Back then, as now, what was important was the children he found. And no matter how good parents were, a few children confounded the purpose of these scary old cautionary tales. A few children were even more daring and reckless upon hearing of the sackman’s activities. A few children were seemingly eager to fill his sack.

  These were not bad children. The sackman had a hard time thinking of any of them as bad. Most often he thought it was, in fact, the best children who came into his sack, the ones with their heads all full of fairytales and visions of the future.

  The sackman would send them all back to heaven if he could. This was impossible, of course, especially at his present age. Even if he recruited and shared his mission with thousands of like minded others, and surely they were out there, others cognizant of the need for such drastic measures, he couldn’t send them all back. He knew it was impossible because they all needed a song or a story to send them on their way, much as small children about to fall into dreamland need a story to send them on their way, and he knew he would never be able to trust anyone else with such a grave responsibility.

  The little girl with the red dress was once again in his park. She always wore the red dress and he had come to assume that she must have little else to wear. The dress had torn lace in the back and had faded almost to pink in the seat area. She always came to the park unsupervised. Sometimes her face was dirty, or bruised. He wondered, in part because of these things, if she understood yet that adults were monsters.

  He would be very surprised if she had such an understanding. One of the stellar charms of children was that they could be so trusting. This quality never failed to move him. They could be lied to, cheated, and abused by half the adults of their acquaintance, and still the little angels continued to put their trust in these grown-up monsters.

  “Where’s your mother, dear?” he asked her again. She looked up at him solemnly, but said nothing. He patted her shoulder. He noticed with some inner disturbance that his hand trembled again. “Ah, at least someone has taught you not to speak to strangers. That’s an important thing to remember, dear.” He looked around and saw that no one e
lse was around. He looked back down at her. “But I’m no stranger. You see, I’m just the grandfather you’ve never met, the kindly old man you’ve always dreamed about.” Her eyes grew wider. “I can see that dream in your eyes right now, dear. I can see every little thing you’re thinking. I know about little girls and little boys, you see.”

  Then he took her hand and she held on tightly, letting him know once and for all time that she was at last ready to go with him. They left the park hand-in-hand, in no particular hurry. He had been wearing makeup on all his trips to this park in another town, and he had been watching the child for weeks. Her calmness, her peace with him would allay all suspicions. Anyone who did see them together would assume he was an older relative taking the child to the park. If they wondered about anything it would be why the old man didn’t buy the child a new dress. Obviously no one cared about this child. No one but the sackman.

  She slid easily into the front passenger seat of his ancient, dark blue Buick. She was too short to see over the dashboard, but appeared fascinated by the old gauges beneath their highly-polished glass. He made sure she buckled the seat belt he had installed. His hands shook again (small animals in his sack) when the car wouldn’t start, then calmed when the engine coughed into rough activity. He smiled down at the little girl. It warmed his old heart when she smiled back.

  The drive back to his own home town was a long one, but the little girl sat through the trip patiently. At least someone had taught her manners. Now and then she would comment politely on the beauty of the drive. He had not lived in the actual town itself for many years, preferring the relative obscurity and safety of the mountains and lakes beyond. The old Buick struggled its way up the steep incline of the initial part of the drive, then relaxed as the highway leveled a few miles from his home. He had no idea how much longer the Buick could manage these trips. He supposed that once it failed his career as the sackman would be finished.