Ugly Behavior

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  His grandfather claimed that food had turned on him years back, barely able to nourish him and unpleasant in both taste and digestion. He’d spent long hours each day locked in the bathroom, and walking around the house smelled like a leaky oil furnace ready to explode.

  Riley had left his grandparents at a relatively young age, unwilling to wait with them to some inevitable and unpleasant conclusion. He’d felt compelled to travel to the city in order to secure employment, even though it was the most unsanitary place he could imagine. Here you were forced to walk closely with other people, breathing the air directly from their mouths, rubbing against their sweat and touching what tens of thousands had touched before. Whenever possible he bundled up well, covering as much skin as he could, wearing gloves when he thought he could without drawing too much attention. For the last thing he wanted to do was to draw attention to himself.

  “A quarter, please, sir? All I need is a quarter.”

  At first he couldn’t find the source of the request and wondered if he’d imagined it or caught a stray fragment of conversation from some passing car. Then he saw the rag-wrapped figure, so close to him he should have not only seen but smelled it.

  A woman. There were no obvious signs of femininity, only a patch of unwashed face peering from the rags, but somehow unmistakably a woman. “What was that?” He was too off-balance to think of stepping away.

  “A quarter, a dime, whatever you can spare?” A rank scum on corn-colored teeth. Riley could not imagine what she could have eaten to create such a stench. Her eyes were lightly shielded by the worn cloth covering her head. Riley thought of untouchables, lepers, blind beggars in some Asian slum.

  “You’ll just… you’ll just drink it away!” he stammered, then stepped back, shocked by his own boldness. He’d always followed a simple policy regarding the city’s homeless population: for him they would not exist. He wouldn’t talk to them; he wouldn’t even see them.

  The beggar’s grin cast a yellow glow over the lower part of her face. She couldn’t have looked more frightening if she’d transformed into some sort of animal. And the stench, like half a dozen things dying in her mouth. “A simple coin, sir? It’s all I ask. Little trouble for you, yet such great benefits will it bring to me.”

  For pity’s sake. He almost laughed at the ridiculousness of her statement: what good would a quarter or a dime do her? She couldn’t even buy a candy bar for that.

  But still he found himself reaching into his pocket, pulling out what jingled there: a quarter, two quarters, a dime and a few pennies. He shoved them into her outstretched palm and turned to escape. But she grabbed his wrist, her hand a claw-like thing malformed by layers of callous and stain, and to his amazement pulled him to her, and pulled him into the alley behind, where in the darkness she surrounded him with her rank lips and sour laughter and reeking thighs, and took him out of his own head for an unknown period of time.

  And when he struggled his way back, she lay dead at his feet, rags torn away and bits of cloth scattered like flesh after a predator’s feast, and he saw how lovely she had been under her rags, and wondered how she could have influenced him to do such a terrible thing.

  He could not think of such things for long; there was too much to do. He picked up her body—acutely aware that her smell had subsided, that in death she smelled rather pleasantly—and struggled with it into the darkest recess of the alley, where torn boxes and cloth all the colors of mud and a range of garbage resided, where some awful creature might have made its nest, and laid her there, and covered her with what was available, even though it repulsed him to have his hands in such filth.

  He made his way out of there as quickly as he could and did not look back.

  The smell of fingers was the absolute worst, because they were what touched the world most often and delved into the quiet, hidden places of your body. Sometimes he saw people sniffing their fingers upon exiting public restrooms. Some of them actually appeared to take satisfaction in what they were smelling.

  He supposed feet were second, encased in their cloth tubing all day, falling asleep and dreaming of better places to go.

  For the next few days, Riley treated his memory of the incident with the same distance and detachment he applied to all things of these odiferous streets. In a place the size of this city, events were occurring at all times, stories were being made, individual dramas were playing and replaying at a bewildering rate. Life in the city was like television: you turned it on and left it on for hours at a time, while you ate, while you talked on the phone, while you made love. You paid no more attention to one program than any other. It was all background noise.

  Once, while waiting for a bus near the spot of the incident with the beggar, he had a stray thought that at least with her gone there might be one less foul smell to contend with. Testing his theory, he sniffed. In fact the city appeared to smell worse than ever.

  Living in the city, Riley had found it necessary to shower two and three times daily simply to wash away the grime before it interacted with everyday bodily secretions to create a smell. He tried out various kinds of body scrapers, every variety of loofa. Sometimes his skin bled. It was amazing how deep the filth could go. Even after hours of scraping, he could rub his thumb across the back of his heel and a little pellet of skin and dirt and smell would appear like some sort of spontaneous egg. An egg of smell, smell made solid.

  Sometimes he was so aware of the smells that he forgot to speak, and people thought him rude. But when the smells were at their strongest there was no need for words.

  Riley traveled from restaurant to restaurant for his meals, tried not to repeat himself. He distrusted them all but figured he was less likely to receive a fatal dose of food poisoning if he avoided repeat dining. He liked to travel by alley, which he supposed was actually the dirtiest route a person could take, but gave him a chance to check out the dumpster of the restaurant he intended to eat in before entering the door. That way if he found some insurmountable violation of cleanliness—say the carcass of a cancerous cow—he could simply avoid that particular restaurant.

  He met her that way on his way to lunch. He had been peering inside the dumpster just as she was climbing out: wrapped in rags so greasy they stuck to her body like diseased patches of skin. She was a young thing, not much out of her teens. He could see as much from her eyes and mouth: they took him all in hungrily, quickly.

  Do me for a dime? She said it so softly she must have been in his head, sneaky about it so that he didn’t notice her climb in.

  It was a miserable hot day. They were tarring the roof next door and the workers had left their tar machine, their kettle of tar or whatever it was called, cooking in the alley a few dozen feet from the back entrance of the restaurant and this dumpster she’d peeled out of like a nymph from a bloom. She’d pulled him to a wall halfway between, like halfway between the moon and the sun, and she’d leaned against the bricks and opened herself up from the middle and pushed him inside. And he had to admit it was cool there and surprisingly soft but then the stench of her rolled itself out and climbed onto his face and would not let go. He’d cried and then he’d slapped and then folded her as if he could seal her in an envelope and mail her away. By the time he was done with her all he could really do was slip her into that vat of tar.

  She had that unmistakable aroma of fried food. Fried food was the worst for you, he supposed, the worst smell because it was that burning animal fat smell. And he thought about fast food chicken and the awful smell of it and recognized this for the proof of what a foul group we are, just rancid animal fat and not really much more than that.

  In some ways the smell of hair was the strangest, so dependent on the particular hair care products the person used. He imagined sometimes that this was the smell of raw thought, bits of it trapped in the hair fibers as the rest made its way up toward heaven.

  The back of the neck was another foul-smelling region, the place where the collar rubs, a drainage basin for the hair h
anging above. You could scrub there all you wanted and it would never be clean.

  You rub and rub all day at your skin to remove the soiled skin and the sour-smelling sweat. You mine the stench. You can’t help yourself.

  One day the rain came and it was glorious in its unexpectedness. For a time at least the stench got washed out of the air. Riley could not quite describe what was left behind, what that quality was, but it was an absence of human animal scent, a kind of vague metallic scent, and for him it was glorious. Even his own poor skin smelled like the rain.

  Such a reprieve cannot last forever, of course, and soon enough returned the smells of the machinery human beings shared the city with: the aromas and diesel, poorly processed exhausts and spontaneous mechanical belchings.

  Then the people: their badly washed bodies and foods only partially digested. Their cigarette smoke and the sour taste of their breath wrapped around a pattern of daily insults.

  Then another sudden downpour, and everything seemed blessedly right again.

  But eventually the good effects of that rain passed as well, and a foul smell began to issue from the narrow strips of land between the tall buildings: the city mud.

  She had come to him out of another downpour, pushing a grocery cart overloaded with plastic garbage bags and paper sacks. Pushing it for all she was worth so that she barely avoided running him down as she turned into the empty lot. At first Riley couldn’t imagine what shelter could be found there, the lot was empty as far as he could see. Then he detected a bulge in a layer of trash near the center of the lot, a rise like a pitcher’s mound. He watched her from behind some bushes as she unloaded the cart and stowed it in a shadowed corner of the lot. With her new things—indistinguishable, he thought, from the trash littering the ground—she approached the small mound.

  With her rotting tennis shoes she scraped at the trash until a square of board appeared. She set down her new things and lifted the square from one edge as if it were a basement hatch.

  Then, to his amazement, she walked down into the ground, pulling the board and trash back above her to hide the entrance.

  Riley watched the bag lady for several days. He always kept his distance, not just to prevent exposure but because her stench was worse each day. Even though it continued to rain so hard and long the streets were flooding, the rain did not lessen her smell. Finally, when he thought she could be no riper, he watched her descend into her underground lair once again, then went over to her board and lifted it. There was no chamber here, just a shallow trench filled with trash. The bag lady lay on her back at its center, as if sleeping in her own future grave.

  It’s about time, I have been waiting so long. The words bubbled off her filthy lips, each one an exhalation of foulness.

  Without thinking, he lay upon her, and after a time could not distinguish the stink of her body from the stink of her clothes or from the garbage she had made her bed with. As he wept his hands caressed and squeezed.

  Over the next few months, Riley returned to the lot, lifted up the board, and checked on the progress of the body’s decomposition. The weather continued uncharacteristically wet. Her clothes and eccentric bedding became exotic vegetables in a rancid soup that filled the trench. The stench became unbearable at times, and yet no neighbors complained, the police were not called, the body remained where he had left it.

  City dwellers were used to bad smells; this was nothing unusual for them.

  Riley could not say when he stopped bathing, but if you’d asked him why he might have told you it was so that he could better fit in.

  After a time, he might say, you cannot tell if the stench is yours or if it comes from everyone else.

  When they finally arrested Riley it was not for murder, or for any of a number of other violent acts he had committed over the last several years. They arrested Riley for an egregious number of sanitation violations, for a mound of rotting legal orders he had ignored, then dragged into his apartment to add to the malodorous nest that had become his home.

  The police were alarmed when copious amounts of blood were found streaked through this nest, but later it was discovered that the blood was Riley’s own. His arms, legs, and torso were seriously scarred with many poorly-healed wounds. “Fresh blood has this clean, coppery smell,” he would later tell a doctor at the hospital. “You know, when it first hits the air. You can’t smell anything else, at least for a few seconds.”

  “And what is it you’re afraid of smelling, Mr. Riley?” the clever young doctor inquired.

  “Why, it’s the cooking, the cleaning, the smell of fear. The freshly-shampooed baby’s head, the honey in the lover’s kiss, the aroma, the perfume, the reek. It is the sour bouquet of the body as the organs begin to fail. It is the sadness of when we know what is to come, what is waiting for us when our last foul breath has spread through the room.

  “Can’t you smell it, doctor? It is the stench.”

  The Crusher

  He’d never had any luck with soft things. Even when he was a kid, his hands had been so big they’d just mashed things up, no matter how hard he tried to hold them steady, no matter how hard he tried to hold them in the same gentle way he loved them. The harder he tried the worse it was. The harder he tried the more things he broke.

  Even words. He tried to hold them gently in his mouth but they always spilled out broken.

  “Damn damn damn…” That was the way he’d told Alice how much he loved her. “Damn damn damn,” with tears in his eyes. Alice just looked at him as if he were somebody who was always going around breaking things. And, of course, that was true. That was what he was.

  But that wasn’t everything he was.

  He got into the business because of his arm wrestling. At every bar in the northwest that had such a contest, he’d show up to arm wrestle. That was his specialty, his only talent. He had a grip that made flesh shrink and bones fold, and nobody wanted to hold hands with him.

  He’d never held Alice’s hand. He’d been too afraid. She’d had a hand like a little bird and he’d broken more than a few birds when he was a kid. And hamsters. And kittens. And he’d loved them all. So he wasn’t about to hold Alice’s hand, whom he loved most of all.

  Of course, he won every arm wrestling competition he entered. That was how he first came to the attention of the promoter. He’d broken some fellow’s arm up above Portland, and it made the local papers. The fellow hadn’t pressed charges or anything like that—in fact he’d told the reporters how much he admired the strength, the skill it took.

  But he knew there wasn’t any skill involved. Mashing things. Crushing things. He would have stopped it if he could. But he just didn’t have the control.

  “James,” she whispered. “James don’t go.” It was Alice’s voice, all right, and Alice was the only one called him James. To everybody else he was Jim, or Big Jim, when they used his name at all. To most people, he guessed, he didn’t even have a name.

  Except she’d never told him not to go. Nothing like that. That was just something his heart told him. What she’d really said, he’d crushed out of his mind forever.

  “A guy like you, you can make some money.” That was all that wrestling promoter said, really, pretty much said the same thing over and over. Just used different words for it. The promoter kept trying to build up his ego, not knowing that that didn’t matter much to him. But he needed to make a living, so he signed, and that made the promoter very happy.

  They billed him as “The Crusher,” a name he didn’t care for, but he also didn’t care enough to get the promoter to change it. Before every match he’d crush something for the audience: a few oil cans, a steel trashcan, sometimes cantaloupes or melons that made a satisfying mess. He hated to admit to feeling the satisfaction, but it was there.

  And now entering the ring, The Crusher! A thunder of boos, with scattered cheers, the cheers increasing with each bout. That’s what he liked best about professional wrestling: the frame of cheers and boos, the dancing around t
hat went in between. If only those cheers and boos would follow him out of the ring, rise up like music at important points in the rest of his life, he’d feel a lot more comfortable about moving around with other people. Not happy exactly—happy was a word they used in bad movies and stupid TV shows. He’d figured that much out at least. But comfortable, the way most people are comfortable walking around being the way people are supposed to be. He’d never had that, but he’d like to.

  And now entering the ring… He pushed down on the bottom rope and stepped through. Then he walked around the ring a couple of times, reaching out his hands to slap his opponent’s hands, pulling back quickly as if he was touching fire. Pretty much every match started that way because that was the way the promoter wanted it. Slap and dance, circle and tease, then the first hard embrace: his opponent pressing his body full into him, and the Crusher thinking it was like some play, or some movie, and that gave him the butterflies so bad he could hardly breathe.

  Then his opponent would get away, or, rather, The Crusher would release him, and there would be more dancing, and making faces, and doing these things with the eyes, kind of like two little boys in a playground, which is what the crowd really wanted to see, two little boys in a playground, even though they might not know it. The crowds didn’t want to see somebody really get hurt, even though that was the way it might look sometimes. But Jim could see right through that, and it kind of made him feel good about people. Although that never lasted too long.

  So he tried to give the crowd what they really wanted. The dance and the tease, the tickle, and several hard embraces with dances in between. Then finally The Crusher, both his name and what he did at the same time. “Crush-er! Crush-er!” the crowd would shout, and they were calling out his name, but they were also telling him what to do, telling him how to end it. And he always obliged. He wrapped his arms around his partner and crushed, but he always held himself back a little. These were big guys up against him, but he still had to hold himself back. Lots of times they would pass out, and he’d step back a little, holding on to them with one hand so they wouldn’t hit the canvas too hard.