Ugly Behavior (16 page)

 
“Well, I’d certainly
agree with that,” Carol said from the doorway. Jefferson looked through the
yellow nimbus of Jenny’s hair into Carol’s smiling face.

“Jealous?” he asked, and made himself grin.

Carol strolled across the room toward them, the lines of her body
flowing down and curving around him as she gathered him to her. “Oh, you bet,”
she breathed into his ear, and he wanted to pull away, so tightly she pulled on
him, and so firmly her little girl still held on to his waist, a desperation
with which he was so intimately familiar.

But he did not pull back, instead squeezing her in return,
although not as tightly as he was ultimately capable of squeezing.

The day was to be spent at a roadside carnival, a place where they
could scream and fear for their lives without fully believing in that fear. It
was one of Jefferson’s favorite spots. Carol had been hesitant to go but Jenny
was eager, typically with more enthusiasm than understanding. “You’ll think
you’re going to die,” he whispered to the little girl. “But then you don’t.
It’s quite a surprise, really. I hope you won’t be disappointed.”

She nodded and watched his eyes solemnly.

The roadside carnival had been set up alongside Wildcat Wrecks,
the oldest auto salvage yard in the region. This seemed so appropriate to
Jefferson it practically took his breath away. The county commissioners had
condemned it several times but at the last minute the owners always came up
with some measure to avoid the action. Twisted wrecks and crushed cars were
stacked into occasional mountains a dozen feet high, waiting for years
sometimes until the price of scrap reached levels the owners thought
acceptable, the sides of these precipices buttressed with piles of stone and
miscellaneous rusted steel debris.

Jefferson thought of these automobiles as “people cans,” a private
little joke he had never shared with anyone. It was a wonder anyone ever
survived their trips down the highway. The rides at the carnival pretended to
be people cans as well, but he supposed they were in fact much safer.

On the roller coaster, in mock fear but in a truthfully passionate
embrace, he almost squeezed Carol to death. Jenny obviously had no idea what
was happening—she thought her mother had passed out from the thrill.

Jefferson could not believe he had lost control in public that
way—perhaps it was having both females together in combination with the
pretended danger, perhaps it was the proximity of the junk yard—he spent
the last half of the ride arousing Carol, helping her get her breath back,
apologizing sincerely (although he didn’t think she was cognizant of what he
was saying), until she was at least able to stagger from the ride with his and
Jenny’s well-meaning but ineffectual assistance. Several people tittered,
obviously thinking she’d had too much beer before the ride. Jefferson relaxed a
little—she did, indeed, appear drunk.

He found a place out of view of the crowd, behind some tents at
the back of the carnival, where he let her down into soft grass and stretched
her out. He gave Jenny a dollar and sent her off for a coke for her mom.

Jefferson slapped Carol’s face several times, vaguely excited that
he had a good excuse for it, and marveled at the alternating patterns of pallor
and redness made when he struck her soft skin.

 
Suddenly her hand
reached up and grabbed his wrist. Her head jerked up and she started choking.
“You tried to… you tried…” Her eyes popped open from the force of her choking,
and Jefferson could see the sudden shock of knowledge in them. It seemed as if
she had recognized him for the very first time.

“You…” she began again, and he threw himself on her, pressing his
right shoulder hard into her mouth so that she could not speak and wrapping his
arms, his legs around the thrashing, desperate life of her, admiring the energy
and will of her, wishing that he had some of that life and will for himself.
With alarm, he became aware that he had a growing erection prodding at her
lower belly, and anxious to stop this erection he squeezed her head more
tightly, he squeezed her neck, needing to consume her before she could consume
any part of him.

At last she sighed and rattled and he clamped his mouth over hers
to capture this final bit of her breath. And then he heard the soft crying
behind him.

He jerked around as Jenny screamed and started through the flimsy
wire fence that separated the carnival from the salvage yard. Jefferson rose to
go after her but Carol’s hand had clutched his left wrist so tightly he could
not escape her. He bent over her again and screaming smashed his right fist
into her face and arms until at last she released him. He leaped up and ran
through the fence, which scratched and clawed him and which he had to kick and
smash against until it too would release him. Now he could see Jenny some
distance away, running into the valley made between two mountains of ravaged
cars, smashed and burned containers for the soft, sickly, all-too-brittle
bodies of people.

He quickly closed the gap on the little girl but there were so
many twists and turns between the ranks of cars that she was always able to
remain just out of his reach. The longer she stayed away from his touch the
more he needed to touch her.

Although he pushed himself as hard as he could to catch her, and
the vigor of this effort engendered an anger that heightened almost with every
step, Jefferson was also rapidly considering how he might prevent himself from
killing her. Would it be possible for him to keep her rather than kill her?

If he kept her he could take her out whenever he liked and hug
her, squeeze her to his heart’s content but of course he’d have to be careful
that he didn’t do it too often and too hard, perhaps just until she passed out
or until she was so afraid she fouled herself or her skin released the toxins
preparatory to death. She was a small child, after all, and wouldn’t cost that
much to feed and surely he could keep such a small child quiet enough for his
purposes. Perhaps he could experiment with varying amounts of food and drugs in
order to find just the right level to maintain her in a pliable, maximally
squeezable, yet still living state.

He rounded the burned-out husk of an ancient
DeSoto
in time to see Jenny climbing a rust-red mountain of cars directly ahead of
him. She was screaming, she had probably been screaming for some time now, but
the junkyard was technically closed and the blended screams from the carnival
behind him effectively covered all individual sound.

Jefferson leaped to the back of the first car, reached up and
grabbed the antique door handle of another and used this to pull himself to the
hood of a woody station wagon. Jenny looked back and screamed again, her mouth
distorting as if her face were in the process of ripping open and flapping in
the breeze. She scrambled over a collapsed Buick and then to the top-most
boulder in a pile of stones supporting one side of the stack of cars. Jefferson
could see that her knees and shins were badly skinned, bright blood sheeting
down as if her small stick-like legs were being peeled. He hoped that she would
not injure herself further. Any more damage to her delicate skin and he might
not feel so compelled to hold her.

Jenny disappeared from the top of the mountain of cars.

A door panel shifted under Jefferson’s foot. A side mirror in his
hand broke off and he dropped it to the ground. Glass began to crack softly
like ice thawing as more metal moved and slipped and the contours of the rusted
mountain underwent a subtle change. He struggled slowly to the summit and
looked over. Jenny stared up at him from an empty aisle just beyond the
mountain. She turned and ran.

“Jenny!” he screamed, and reached out his hands.

The mountain trembled as the topmost stones which buttressed it
slipped from their perch and crashed onto rusted brittle hoods and quarter
panels, slamming through partial windshields and changing the perspective of the
overlapping vehicles stacked beneath Jefferson’s uneasy feet. He looked once
again at Jenny’s distant running form and thought to hug himself instead as he
fell back off the summit and was folded again and again as the mountain
unraveled and seven decades worth of cars descended with him.

For a brief sliver of time he thought how he might embrace himself
fully, his skin bonding to his own skin and the heart of him becoming so
compressed that it was hard and invulnerable to even the strongest touch, and then
all the stones and wrecks of time came down upon him and his thought was
squeezed to nothing.

“In such an intense physical act like murder,

between the victim and the murderer there is

something sensual… the death orgasm

and the sexual one.”

— Dario
Argento

Jane spent hours shaving her legs, despite the fact that the act
tangled her in anxiety. Even in her nervousness, however, the results never
failed to fascinate: the warm pink smoothness of the legs, the skin scraped so
thin one might have seen the blood pulsing just beneath the surface. Then there
were the occasional nicks: in particular the granular abrasions around the heel
and ankle, where the skin came so close to the bone it appeared painted on.
When first cut open her pale skin
pinkened
, as if
suffused with a new liveliness, then the tiny beads of blood oozed out onto the
surface, and Jane found the look and smell of them oddly comforting, like milk
for a baby, confirming for her that this life was, indeed, real. Although
beneath the surface pleasure, a profound terror lurked.

Jane had many such terrors, and her psychotherapist believed that
if she faced the smallest among them first, the grip of her more dramatic fears
might begin to loosen. She wasn’t sure about this, but would never think of
arguing with him. Besides, shaving her legs was important to her appearance.

So when she shaved with the razor she held her breath. It steadied
her hand. But there were still the inevitable slips, the skin torn, the pale
flesh of the calf washed with a translucent spread of blood. She’d gasp and run
to the mirror: staring eyes dilating rapidly in the high polish of the glass.
And each time, behind her in the clouds of steam from the shower, she could see
the knife blade easing aside the crisp plastic curtain.

Maxwell sawed carefully through the hollow handle of the cane,
inserting the narrow knife in one opening and carving out the other end to
create a close, smooth-fitting sheath for the blade. He supposed you could
purchase such a device, but he felt more comfortable making his own. He doubted
his particular version could kill, but killing wasn’t what he was after with
this instrument. It was intended merely to probe, to produce seemingly
accidental scratches, evidence of all the sharp edges a young lady might
discover in the standard urban environment.

In the park, conveniently crowded that afternoon, he created a
long vertical tear in a young woman’s calf as she passed him jogging. Because
of her exertions, the shrouding effect of oxygen depletion, he imagined it was
several seconds before she felt the pain and by then he was safely around the
bend and stepping briskly down another pathway.

In the local supermarket, obscured behind an elaborate tropical
fruit display, he was able to spear a much larger woman in her left buttock. He
left the store halfway through a long harangue as she threatened the manager
and anyone else in view with legal action. Maxwell had been pleased by the
symmetry of the blood stain flowering across the back of her dress.

In similar fashion he continued into the evening, poking,
prodding, raising the vaguest signature of blood on women of all ages. Although
his escape was uncomfortably narrow at times, he felt no real threat to himself
during these activities, for he was simply playing the flirtatious tease, the
bashful lover. He was seeing who bled and who did not, and how much. Later,
much later, and after extensive courtship, he might open their many mouths for
a bright red kiss. But such revelations had to be approached slowly. He had
always understood that women were shy creatures, reluctant to give up their
secrets, which made what they withheld all the more important. Women were men’s
complement, their supplement, their completion and their explanation. Open up a
woman and you might finally know her, and find the missing pieces of yourself.

Maxwell had left his special cane in the car during dinner at
Catalina’s, a local restaurant sporting an atypical European diner theme, when
he saw Jane enter and take a booth a few feet away. As was his habit, he looked
to her fingers first, which were a brighter pink near their ends than on the
shafts, with very little nail. He assumed she must chew on her fingers to an
obsessive degree, and later observations only confirmed this. He would often
wonder during their relationship whether her fingers bled much, and if she
sucked this blood, and whether she waited for a large amount to well up before
licking, or sucked her fingers constantly, taking the blood before it had the opportunity
to stain her pale skin.

Although there was nothing particularly dazzling about this young
woman in her twenties, she had a pleasant face, long reddish brown hair which
was immanently touchable, and people noticed her. He had no immediate explanation
for this, but patrons turned their heads when she entered, looked up at her and
smiled, and invariably she smiled back, even to the scruffiest of diners. This
was dangerous behavior on her part, he concluded after watching these exchanges
for several minutes. Obviously people could see that she was the sort of person
who would sit down next to a Charles Manson to chat if a Charles Manson were
only to smile at her with even vague politeness. She had this pitiable need to
please everyone she met. She was soft, vulnerable, a pale Riding Hood in the
woods. She was the kind who walked barefoot on a beach strewn with broken
glass, not out of bravery or even foolishness really, but simply out of a sense
that this is the way one behaves, however wrongheaded her senses might be.
Maxwell was immediately drawn to her.