Ugly Behavior (11 page)

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 up 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.

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.

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.