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.
Stones
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.
There were three or four stones the size of boulders, probably several tons apiece. He imagined they must have come from some place deep underground, where everything was larger than life. These were rounded, with only slight depressions. A half-dozen stones one step down in size were much more angular, with many sharp edges, as if they had broken off larger stones. The scale of stones went down from there. To smaller rounded pieces that still might crush a body completely if dropped a distance. To large rocks for pounding a skull in. To fragments sharp and dangerous as ancient arrowheads. Down to water-smooth pebbles ready for a slingshot, the size of harsh thoughts worn from repetition.
Every time Carter came here, he would stare at the stones for hours, seeking some sort of summation which would keep them solid in his mind forever. But stones were hard to define. Loose estimations of size, looser descriptions of shape.
All stones, he theorized, had come down from the original stone, the huge mass that had given birth to everything by destroying itself. All glory, all life came from this unreasoning, dead stone. After thrashing about in cold silence, it had awakened from its long dream as a world, lived on by these parasitic creatures called human beings.
The history of this original stone, as with all stones, must have been a history of splittings and fallings apart: slab became boulder and boulder became stone and stone became pebbles rolled and smoothed by the outer lips of an enormous sea.
Carter played close attention to how soil filled the cracks in the stone, plants growing where once it had been impervious. This, he concluded, was how life first began in the midst of cold, hard death.
The remainders of this great original stone, the slabs and peaks of it, became the distant mountains, and were used to build the temples of human beings.
Stone constantly reminds us of our own deaths, he thought.
Watching the pebbles gathered about the bases of the larger stones, trailing off into grass and dirt, always filled Carter with a nameless anxiety. Separate from its larger pieces, stone drifts, wanders, moved by people and scattered by the wind. The center does not hold. Anywhere.
The stones were unyielding, blind, and despite their constant exposure to all weathers, always dry.
Each time he came here, he walked slowly up the hill, his chest gradually filling with stones. A fresh body in his arms. Sometimes the skin of the body would be bruised, if his knife had not been efficient enough, and he’d had to use a stone to remind the flesh of both its origins and its destiny. Sometimes he might try to press a stone into the victim’s head, pounding until the skull broke and the stone lodged there like a jewel. The pieces of skull themselves were like poor cousins to stone, a reminder of how far human beings had declined in their devolution.
Over the years his eyes had hardened, gone to stone. His tongue had the stillness of stone. But, of course, the world was stone, and more and more he felt a part of it.
He would lay the body down among the larger stones, then pick up a fist-sized piece, the size and shape of a brain. Holding the stone in his hand was like holding the world.
He thought to tell the stones about the dreams and aspirations, the life history of his latest victim, but the language of the stones had no words for such things. Instead he would stoop and fill his victim’s mouth with the pebbles he found.
The stones grew harder the longer he looked. They thrived on the intensity of his gaze. He would touch them worshipfully. Touching stone, his fingers imitated its stiffness, its need to be all in one place.
Each time he would bend down to kiss his victims, but their mouths would be filled with stone.
Sometimes, if he stared long enough, he found he could climb inside the stones, despite their increased hardness.
Inside the stones it was quiet. Inside the stones he could lie down and watch the pictures moving slowly across their inner walls.
There were always pictures of children, and lovers he would never have, and more victims he would desperately try to bring closer with his knife. Sometimes he regretted loving his victims so much that he had to kill them, although he wasn’t sure where such guilt came from.
All flesh was stone in any case, only in its initial soft phase. And everyone knew it was impossible to ki
ll a stone.
Ugly Behavior
“Sing motherfuckin’ ‘Ugly Behavior’! Sing motherfuckin’ ‘Ugly Behavior’!” The crowd was screaming it now, but JK didn’t care. Let them scream their lungs out. It was his show, and the crowd could hate him as much as he hated them, he didn’t care. He decided when he sang what, when he did what, walk off the stage or give them the sickest show they’d ever seen, the real show. He got to decide. It was the first thing in his life he could say that about.
Hard to tell how many of them were out there. The lights were up too bright. He couldn’t see much more than pieces of faces past the front row, but there was definitely some young stuff out there. Like that one, the blonde, how the fuck old was she? She looked like a baby.
When JK glanced down at his arms and legs, he thought he looked like an over-exposed black-and-white photograph. The scars on his arms were like ink lines. He danced and pranced, wishing for a strobe light.
Back behind him, Dean worked on a sloppy drum roll. His drumming got worse every week, not that it mattered much. JK had told him more than once to cut out the stupid drum rolls—they sounded like Dean was making fun of him, though JK wasn’t clear exactly how. Maybe tomorrow night he’d pull Dean off his drum kit and kick his ass. He’d fuck him up good. The crowd would love that. Jack and Lee wouldn’t interfere—it was about all they could do to hold onto their guitars.
Ugly Behavior Page 19