Ugly Behavior (25 page)

I hadn’t ridden my bike in over a year—I wasn’t sure I still
could. I thought sixteen-year-olds were too old to ride bikes—guys were
getting their licenses and were willing to walk or get rides with older friends
until that day happened. And I was big for my age, a lot bigger than Jesse. I
felt stupid. But I rode my bike the five miles anyway, just because Jesse told
me to.

By the time I got to his farm I was so tired and mad I just threw
the bike down in the gravel driveway. I didn’t care if I broke it—I
wasn’t going to ride it home no matter what. Jesse came to the screen door with
a smirk on his face. “Took you long enough,” he said. “I didn’t think you were
coming.”

“I’m here, all right? What’d you want to show me that was so damn
important?”

He pulled me down the hall. He was so excited and it was happening
so fast I was having a real bad feeling even before I saw them. He stopped in
front of the door to his parents’ bedroom and knocked it open with his fist.
The sound made me jump. Then when I looked inside there were his parents on the
floor, sleeping.

A short laugh came out of me like a bark. They looked silly: his
mom’s dress pulled up above her knees and his dad’s mouth hanging open like he
was drunk. They had their arms folded over their bellies. I never saw people
sleeping that way before. The sheets and blankets and pillows had been pulled
off the bed and were arranged around them and underneath them like a nest. His
mom had never been a good housekeeper—Jesse told me the place always
looked and stank like a garbage dump—but I’d never thought it was this
bad, that they had to sleep on the floor.

The room was full of all these big candles, the scented kind.
There must have been forty or fifty of them. And big melted patches where there
must have been lots more, but they’d burned down and been replaced. There was a
box full of them by the dresser, all ready to go. They also had a couple of
those weird-looking incense burners going. It made me want to laugh. There were
more different smells in that room than I’d smelled my whole life. And all of
them so sweet they made my eyes water.

But under the sweet there was something else—when a breeze
sneaked through and flickered the candles I thought I could smell it—like
when we got back from vacation that summer and the freezer broke down while we
were away. Mom made Dad move us to a motel for a while. Something like that,
but it was having a hard time digging itself out of all that sweetness.

“Candles cost a fortune,” Jesse said. “All the money in my dad’s
wallet plus the coins my mom kept in a fruit jar. She didn’t even think I knew
about that. But they look pretty neat, huh?”

I took a step into the room and looked at his dad’s mouth. Then
his mom’s mouth. They hung open like they were about to swallow a fly or sing
or something. I almost laughed again, but I couldn’t. Their mouths looked a
little like my dad’s mouth, the way he lets it hang open when he falls asleep
on the couch watching TV. But different. Their mouths were soft and loose,
their lips dark, all dry and cracked, but even though they were holding their
mouths open so long no saliva came dripping out. And there was gray and blue
under their eyes. There were dark blotches on Jesse’s mom’s face. They were so
still, like they were playing a game on me. Without even thinking about it I
pushed on his dad’s leg with my foot. It was like pushing against a board. His
dad rocked a little, but he was so tight his big arms didn’t even wiggle. Jesse
always said his old man was “too tight.” I really did start to laugh, thinking
about that, but it was like my breath exploded instead. I didn’t even know I
had been holding it. “Jesus…” I could feel my chest shake all by itself.

Jesse looked at me almost like he was surprised, like I’d done
something wrong. “I told you, didn’t I? Don’t be a baby.” He sat down on the
floor and started playing with his dad’s leg, pushing on it and trying to lift
up the knee. “Last night they both started getting stiff. It really happens,
you know? It’s not just something in the movies. You know why it happens,
John?” He looked up at me, but he was still poking the leg with his fist, like
he was trying to make his dad do something, slap him or something. Any second I
figured his dad would reach over and grab Jesse by the hair and pull him down
onto the floor beside them.

I shook my head. I was thinking no
no
no
, but I couldn’t quite get that out.

Jesse hit his dad on the thigh hard as he could. It sounded like
an overstuffed leather chair. It didn’t give at all. “Hell, I don’t know
either. Maybe it’s the body fighting off being dead, even after you’re dead,
you know? It gets all mad and stiff on you.” He laughed but it didn’t sound
much like Jesse’s laugh. “I guess it don’t know it’s dead. It don’t know shit
once the brain is dead. But if I was going to die I guess I’d fight real hard.”
Jesse looked at his mom and dad and made a twisted face like he was smelling
them for the first time. “Bunch of pussies ...”

He grabbed the arm his dad had folded against his chest and tried
to pull it away. His dad held on but then the arm bent a little. The fat
shoulders shook when Jesse let go and his dad fell back. The head hit the
pillow and left a greasy red smear.

“The old man here started loosening up top a few hours ago, in the
same order he got stiff in.” Jesse reached over and pinched his dad’s left
cheek.

“Christ, Jesse!” I ran back into the hall and fell on the floor. I
could hardly breathe. Then I started crying, really bawling, and I could
breathe again.

After awhile I could feel Jesse patting me on the back. “You never
saw dead people before, huh, Johnny?”

I just shook my head. “I’m s-sorry, Jesse. I’m s-so sorry.”

“They were old,” he said. “It’s okay. Really.”

I looked up at him. I didn’t understand. It felt like he wasn’t
even speaking English. But he just looked at me, then looked back into his
parents’ bedroom, and didn’t say anything more. Finally, I knew I had to say
something. “How did it happen?”

He looked at me like I was being the one hard to understand. “I
told you. They were old.”

I thought about the red smear his dad’s head made on the pillow,
but I couldn’t get myself to understand it. “But, Jesse… at the same time?”

He shook his head. “What’s wrong with you, John? My dad died
first. I guess that made my mom so sad she died a few minutes later. You’ve
heard of that. First one old person dies, then the person they’re married to
dies just a short time after?”

“Yeah ...”

“Their hearts just stopped beating.” I looked up at him. I could
feel my own heart vibrating in my chest, so hard it hurt my ribs. “I put them
together like that. They were my parents. I figured they’d like that.”

He had that right, I guess. After all, they were his parents.
Maybe he didn’t always get along with them, but they were his parents. He could
look at them after they were dead.

I made myself look at them. It was a lot easier the second time. A
whole lot easier. I felt a little funny about that. Even without his dad’s
blood on the pillow they were a lot different from sleeping people. There was
just no movement at all, and hardly any color but the blue, and they both
looked cool, but not a damp kind of cool because they looked so dry, and their
eyelids weren’t shut all the way, and you could see a little sliver of white
where the lids weren’t all the way closed. I made myself get as close to their
eyes as I could, maybe to make sure one final time they weren’t pretending. The
sliver of white was dull, like on a fish. Like something thick and milky had
grown over their eyes. They looked like dummies some department store had
thrown out in the garbage. There wasn’t anything alive about them at all.

“When did they die?”

Jesse was looking at them, too. Closely, like they were the strangest
things anyone had ever seen. “It’s been at least a day, I guess. Almost two.”

Jesse said we shouldn’t call the police just yet. They were his
parents, weren’t they? Didn’t he have the right to be with them for awhile? I
couldn’t argue with that. I guessed Jesse had all kinds of rights when it was
his parents. But it still felt weird, him being with their dead bodies almost
two whole days. I helped him light some more candles when he said the air
wasn’t sweet enough anymore. I felt a little better helping him do that, like
we were having a funeral for them. All those sweet-smelling candles and incense
felt real religious. Then I felt bad about thinking he was being weird earlier,
like I was being prejudiced or something. But it was there just the same. I
quit looking at his mom and dad, except when Jesse told me to. And after a
couple of hours of me just standing out in the hallway, or fussing with the
candles, trying not to look at them, Jesse started insisting.

“You
gotta
look at them, John.”

“I did. You saw me. I looked at them.”

“No, I mean really look at them. You haven’t seen everything there
is to see.”

I looked at him instead. Real hard. I could hardly believe he was
saying this. “Why? I’m sorry they’re dead. But why do I have to look at them?”

“Because I want you to.”

“Jesse…”

“... and besides, you should know about these things. Your mom and
dad don’t want you to know about things like this but I guess it’s about the
most important thing to know about there is. Everybody gets scared of dying,
and just about everybody is scared of the dead. You remember that movie Zombie
we rented? That’s what it was all about. Now we’ve got two dead bodies here.
You’re my friend, and I want to help you out. I want to share something with
you.”

“Christ, Jesse. They’re your parents.”

“What, you think I don’t know that? Who else should I learn about
this stuff from anyway? If they were still alive, they’d be supposed to teach
me. What’s wrong with it? And don’t just tell me because it’s ‘weird.’ People
say something’s weird because it makes them nervous. Just because it bothers
them they don’t want you to do it. So what do we care, anyway? Nobody else is
gonna
know about this.”

Jesse could argue better than anybody, and I never knew what to
think about anything for sure. Before I knew it he had me back in the bedroom,
leaning over the bodies. It was a little better—I guess I was getting
used to them. At least I didn’t feel ready to throw up like I did a while ago.
That surprised me. It surprised me even more when he took my hand and put it on
his mom’s—his dead mom’s—arm, and I didn’t jerk it away.

“Jesus ...” I guess I’d expected it to be still stiff, but it had
gotten soft again, as soft as anything I’d ever felt, like I could just dig my
fingers into her arm like butter. It was cool, but not what I expected. And
dry.

“See the spots?” Jesse said behind me. “Like somebody’s been
painting her. Like for one of those freak shows. Oh, she’d hate it if she knew.
She’d think she looked like a whore!”

I saw them all right. Patches of blue-green low down on his dad’s
belly. Before I could stop him he raised his mom’s skirt and showed me that the
marks on her were worse: more of the blue-green and little patches of greenish
red, all of it swimming together around her big white panties. I was
embarrassed, but I kept staring. That’s the way I’d always imagined seeing my
first panties on a woman: when she was asleep or—to tell the
truth—when she was dead. I used to dream about dead women in their
panties and bras, dead women naked with their parts hanging out, and I’d felt
ashamed about it, but here it was happening for the real and for some reason I
was having a hard time feeling too ashamed. I hadn’t done it; I hadn’t killed
her.

“Look,” he said. I followed his hand as it moved up his mother’s
belly. I tensed as he pulled her dress up further, back over her head so that I
couldn’t see her mouth anymore, her mouth hanging open like she was screaming,
but no sound coming out. “I know you always wanted to see one of these up
close. Admit it, John.” His hand rested on the right cup of her bra. Now I felt
real bad, and ashamed, like I had helped him kill her. Her white, loose skin
spilled out of the top and bottom of the cup like big gobs of dough. With a
jerk of his hand Jesse pulled his mother’s bra off. The skin was loose and it
all had swollen so much it was beginning to tear. I knew it was going to break
like an old fruit any second. “She’s gotten bigger since the thing happened,”
he said. I started to choke. “Come on, John. You always wanted to see this
stuff. You wanted to see it, and you wanted to see it dead.”

I turned away and walked back into the hall when he started to
laugh. His mom was an it now. His dad was a thing. But Jesse knew me so well.
He knew about the dreams and he knew what would get to me, what I always
thought about, even though I’d never told him. It made me wonder if all guys my
age think about being dead that way, wanting to see it and touch it, wanting
something real like that, even though it was so awful. I used to dream about
finding my own parents dead, and what they would look like, but never once did
I imagine I would do that to them. Not like Jesse. I knew now what Jesse had
done to his parents. No question about that anymore. But I was all mixed up
about what I felt about it. Because, even though it was awful, I still wanted
to look, and touch. Wasn’t that almost as bad?