Ugly Behavior

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Sometimes a rib would end up getting cracked, and that always made him feel really bad. Then the next time in the ring he’d be too easy, and it wouldn’t be convincing, and the promoter would get mad, and then the time after that he’d squeeze harder, and it would be too hard and the guy would get hurt, and then Jim, aka The Crusher, would be miserable again.

  He first started seeing the girl in the crowd up in Washington State. She was thin and pale, with hair so blonde it looked white under the lights. She was there at every match, and once he almost killed a fellow because he caught on to how intensely she was staring at him, and he found himself staring back, rock still with his arms around this guy, and before he knew it a couple of his wrestling buddies were there in the ring with him, trying to pry his arms from around the man’s gut.

  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.
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  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.

  Living Arrangement

  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.

  She didn’t expect anything from him, or at least that’s what she said. He got a small social security check every month which he just signed over to her, leaving it under the peanut butter jar in the pantry. They never talked about it, but those checks got cashed.

  He had no use for spending money. He used to drink. About fifteen years ago he stopped, and he couldn’t have told you why. One day he just woke up and decided he didn’t care to anymore. It might not be permanent—he reserved the right to start up again at any time. Maybe if this living with family thing didn’t work out. And he’d been a smoker until recently, quitting cold turkey when he moved in with her. He actually liked the discomfort the craving for it gave him. It kept him focused.

  For entertainment he read old paperbacks people threw away; he didn’t care which ones. He never turned on the TV. Almost everything on it seemed stupid to him, including the news. When the boy turned on the cartoons and Monte was in the living room, he either left the room or made himself fall asleep. Falling asleep was easy—it was the waking up that was hard.

  His daughter had had a lot of boyfriends. He made himself not think about that too much. He was no one to judge, but she had a history of making bad choices. Maybe she learned that from him. It made life pretty hard sometimes. And possibly dangerous. None of his business, but she had a kid to think of.

  Pete, the current boyfriend, wasn’t there much, either working late, or out hitting the bars, doing the kind of things guys of that age and type usually do. Guys like Pete didn’t have much going for them. Monte had been a guy like Pete, pretty much. Monte guessed if he were healthier, he’d still be a guy like Pete. Monte guessed it was a good thing Pete was gone so much. He also guessed Pete was cheating on her. Something about the way Pete was when he came in late, the way he kissed her. And the way Pete talked about how much he’d had to do that day—just a little too eager. Monte recognized that particular performance. Shit, he practically invented it. Most men were terrible liars, transparent as hell. The only way a woman could buy such crap was because she wanted to. He figured his daught
er was just desperate for the company. If she truly believed Pete’s garbage, well then, she was worse off than Monte thought.

  Monte could also see that Pete had a dangerous side. He just didn’t know how dangerous. He watched the two of them together, even when they probably thought he was sleeping. They had arguments, some of them bad. Hearing his daughter cursing and shouting at her man made Monte angry, but he wasn’t sure why. It was none of his business. And Pete sure deserved it. But she was aggravating Pete. Things were okay for now—there was a balance going on, but that could end any time. Monte had seen some bad things. But maybe this would be okay.

  If they got too loud, Monte would just turn up his radio. Everybody had a messy life. She didn’t need Monte to defend her—she knew what she was getting into. He’d never met her boy’s father, but he didn’t need to. Monte reckoned he was the same kind of guy as Pete. One thing Monte knew about women—they stuck with what they knew.

  The boy, his grandson, was a quiet boy, and a good boy. Seven years old. A great age, from the little Monte could remember. Monte had had a dog when he was about that age. Monte tried not to say too much to the boy because he was afraid he’d fuck him up. He didn’t want to tell the boy it was all downhill from here—maybe it would turn out different for him. Monte didn’t believe it would, but sometimes things surprised him.

  “Take off those jeans and let me mend them,” she said to the boy and the boy did as she asked without saying a word. The three of them were in the living room, Monte pretending to read the paper but he was actually more interested in his daughter’s and the boy’s conversation. The truth was there was never much interesting in the paper, just people behaving badly and he knew all he wanted to know about that.