Ugly Behavior (21 page)

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 hanging 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.”

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 that 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.

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.