Inappropriate Behavior: Stories (12 page)

It's three months after the election, and I'm in Colorado now, staying, for the time being, with the people who claim to be my parents. I have decided that there's very little virtue in not accepting them as such—what good would it do? These two people have actually been very nice to me, for most all of my life.

I've gotten letters from Lubbock. The prosecutor there has decided not to bring charges against me for assaulting the Dry Lady. When the police went to interview her, they found that the Dry Lady had turned her entire house into a shrine for the candidate. There were bumper stickers and posters and signs and hundreds of little candles lit all through the house. The DA told all of this to my father—she said she was trying to light a candle for every person who had voted for the candidate on Election Day. You could feel the heat from the front yard, and she was, the DA said, about a half-dozen votes away from burning the whole neighborhood down. He said she was actually employed by the campaign in some obscure way, that they
were investigating her for vote fraud, and that bringing charges against me would only muddy the waters. He told my father that the Dry Lady was obviously unstable. I didn't bother to disagree, but I knew exactly how she felt.

My father wrote a large check for a scholarship to help campus security guards take evening classes at Texas Tech, and a smaller one to replace the front-door glass and some plaster at Knapp Hall.

Clive has also written, and his letter was very nice. Although he said he sold most of my things, he is keeping my Gibson guitar and my songs for Jodie, which were returned by the police. I'll just hang onto them for you, he said in his letter, and you can get them when you come back to school. Then, in a PS, he said—Maybe I'll just hold onto them for when you're famous someday. Ha-ha, Clive wrote.

Which is fine, because I won't ever be going back to Lubbock again. Dr. Croon at Clear Branch has agreed with my assessment that Lubbock is not a place of the spirit, and he's also pretty much convinced old nutso me that there's no sense in writing any more songs to Jodie, or to anyone else, for that matter. I don't really know how to play the guitar, for one thing.

I haven't heard from Allison, but Dr. Croon says I'm better off without her. Dr. Croon says hard work is its own reward, and he provided me with a job with the grounds department at Clear Branch and a prescription for stool softener, and more than anything, this has had a healthful effect on my day-to-day outlook.
Salutary
is a word I would like to use to describe it.

The other day I got a letter from the candidate!

I'd written him a while back, before I checked out of Clear Branch, and I told him how very sorry I was that he'd lost. If my terrible behavior cost you even one vote, I will not be able to forgive myself, I wrote him. I thank you from the bottom of my heart, I wrote him, for the kindness and the chance to serve on your campaign. It was, I told him, the proudest work I'd ever done in my life. I hope, I wrote, that I didn't let you down. The
fear that I had failed him, I said, has been the one regret I had been unable to shake since coming to this place.

The other day I got his reply. Dr. Croon delivered it to me, his breath huffing in white puffs to the north parking lot, where I was shoveling snow. I opened the letter there and read two sentences, two sentences I've read again and again, for every nuance and intonation in them.

Cheer up, Weird John
, the candidate wrote.
There's always another campaign
.

T
HE
T
HING ABOUT
N
ORFOLK

The woman downstairs couldn't stand Tom and Patty's dog. This was in Norfolk, Virginia, where Tom had gone for graduate school, and they lived in a Cape Cod–style duplex on Graymont Avenue. Tom and Patty had the upstairs, the woman and her twelve-year-old son lived downstairs.

When Tom took out the dog in the mornings, the boy from downstairs would come out and pat the dog and chase it around for a moment. He was a nice boy with a cringingly thick hillbilly accent. He'd ask questions about the dog, what they fed him, what breed he was, how big he was when they first got him, questions that seemed to occur to the boy haphazardly. There was no father involved, and Tom felt sorry for the boy. Even if his mother was rude and the boy's questions were strange, Tom tried to be nice to him.

“I like this dog,” the boy said one morning. “I always wanted me a dog.”

“Maybe your mother would get you one,” Tom said, “if you promised to take good care of it.”

“Well, I don't think right now's the time to ask Momma 'bout a dog,” the boy said. “And she sure don't like this one.”

“Sorry,” Tom said. “We're working on it.”

The problem with the dog: Tom and Patty would admit,
did
admit, that the dog was not well trained. They often joked that they probably shouldn't have kids if they couldn't properly raise a dog. They'd tried obedience school, they'd put in the work, but the dog—part Border collie or part beagle, part boxer or
pit bull—the dog was a nervous dog, high-strung, constantly on alert. There was no controlling it. The main problem was the way the dog would launch himself down the stairs at the first notice of sound or movement on the porch or in the front yard. The stairs leading to Tom and Patty's floor of the house ran down the west wall of the downstairs living room, and Tom and Patty were sure, admittedly, that it was terribly disconcerting to be watching television or reading a book or doing any other normal living room–related things, thinking everything was quiet and peaceful, and then a squirrel or a mailman or a gentle breeze against a windowpane would transport the dog into a conniption of mad, yawping barks. You'd hear the dog tear across the hardwood floors to the stairs, his toenails scratching vainly for purchase before, likely as not, he'd go into this thumping hip-slide—you could hear his legs wheeling, spinning—before he would project himself down the ten or twelve stairs and land, head against door, with a crash that sometimes, the woman downstairs claimed in her notes, dislodged knickknacks from the shelves, and sometimes, she claimed, loosened pictures from the walls.

Is there anything you can do about your dog?
the first note read.

The dog was up and down the stairs a dozen times tonight
, another note read, one night when Tom and Patty had gone to a movie.
You have no idea how aggravating it is
.

Don't you care about being good neighbors?
another note read.
We don't make noise, we lived here for three years and we never had trouble like this. I'm calling Mr. Hoard
.

Also, the duplex was haunted. When Tom visited Norfolk and picked out the duplex, he took a number of photographs to bring back to St. Louis to show Patty. There's one he took from the sidewalk, focused on the lovely second-floor sunporch that fronted the house, and there in the corner window, obscured by the sun, is a ghosty, featureless little boy in some sort of gauzy garment, like an old-fashioned sleeping gown, his hand raised
as if waving, or as if he's about to put it to his brow to shield his eyes from the sun. What was strangest about the photograph was that Tom and Patty didn't notice the boy in the photo until after they'd moved in. They were putting together some pictures of the place to send to her parents, and there was the little boy.

“It sure looks like a little boy,” Tom said.

“It
is
weird,” Patty agreed.

Tom called the landlord, a polite if efficiently businesslike fellow named Mr. Hoard, and asked him if anyone had ever told him about seeing ghosts in the duplex. Mr. Hoard told Tom that there were stories. The house had been built in 1917, along with all the other ones on the street, to billet doctors working at the naval hospital during World War I. A doctor in one of the houses, apparently unable to mentally compartmentalize the carnage he witnessed at work, went crazy and killed his whole family with his service revolver. But Mr. Hoard said no one was sure which house the murders had occurred in, and anyway, he had never had any tenants report any problems. He then told Tom that the neighbors had complained about the dog again. “We're working on it,” Tom said.

Strange things did happen—for example, Tom and Patty would frequently find that plugs had been unplugged during the night. You'd go into the kitchen in the morning and the coffeemaker was unplugged. You'd turn on the TV and have to get up to plug it in. Once, Patty looked for weeks for a favorite pair of shoes before finding them sitting on the front porch, where she had definitely not left them. One time the milk disappeared from the refrigerator.

It was a full gallon, they'd bought it at the store only the day before. When it was obviously not in the fridge, Tom and Patty searched. They checked the car to see if they'd forgotten it in the trunk. It was not left on the porch or steps. They searched every room, thinking they'd distractedly set it down somewhere. But Patty clearly remembered putting it in the fridge.

“I moved those olives and the orange juice and I put it right there,” she said. There was a milk-gallon-shaped space on the refrigerator shelf.

“It
is
weird,” Tom said.

“It is
really
weird,” Patty said.

Also, there was the family next door. Like the woman downstairs—who did some sort of work on the base—and like most people in Norfolk, the people next door were Navy people. The husband was an officer who'd leave every morning in his uniform. They had a daughter, fifteen or sixteen, who consistently, constantly, repeatedly showered with the blinds open in the bathroom whose window faced the eastern side of Tom and Patty's duplex. From Tom and Patty's kitchen window, they could get a teenage nudie show nearly every night. She would undress and get in the shower and get out and dry off, all with the window open. But some nights she would use the window itself as a kind of full-length mirror, checking out her various parts and angles. One night, about ten days after they moved in, the girl kept looking at herself in the window over her shoulder, reaching back and flicking the cheeks of her ass, checking its tautness. Fifteen minutes this went on.

“Old Hoard should market this,” Tom said. “Forget selling people on the sunporch and the cozy backyard.”

“You should stop looking,” Patty said.

“I've got a fifteen-year-old ass in my face while I'm doing the dishes,” Tom said. “You want me to stop looking how?”

“I don't know,” Patty said.

“You want me to call a plumber, move the sink to the other side of the room?” Tom said. “You want me to go over there and have a stern talk with her?”

Because this was the thing about Norfolk—the way everyone kept to themselves, or the way they kept away from the non-Navy people like Tom and Patty. Tom and Patty loved the neighborhood—old trees and old houses and canals and history just blocks from their front door. There was an old church with
a British cannonball lodged in its seaward wall. After growing up in St. Louis, they loved being so near the ocean. There were wild, squawking parrots that roosted in a catalpa tree just a few houses down, there were good seafood restaurants, and Virginia Beach was a half-hour drive. In the mornings, you could smell the sea. It should have been a great place to live, but the grad school wasn't so hot, and Patty was social, and liked people and getting to know people, but everyone in Norfolk ignored them, which made her hate the place. On nights when they should have been out, Patty spent most of the time on her phone, or on Facebook, talking to friends from home about how much she hated Norfolk.

“Everyone treats me like I'm some sort of child,” she said one night. “I'm twenty-six years old. I have two college degrees.”

“Is it possible,” she said one Saturday after a trip to the store, “that this has been genetically ingrained in these people somehow? Loose lips sink ships?”

“You should have seen me, Tom,” she said one morning after walking the dog. “This random woman comes up, she looks like a normal fiftyish woman, and I say
good morning
and I say
I'm sorry about the dog jumping up
, and I can tell the whole way she's not going to respond. I say
nice weather
and I say
getting cooler
and the next thing you know I'm following this woman up the block, screaming at her,
Good morning! Good morning!
She actually put her hands over her ears and ran away.”

The next-door neighbors, for example, hadn't said a dozen words to either of them as the weeks went by that they'd lived there, so it wasn't like Tom or Patty could go next door and . . . how would they even
approach
such a subject? Hi, Commander, Mrs. Waller, how are you? We're your new next-door neighbors. We brought over a Bundt cake, and do you know for the last month we've been watching your daughter naked through her bathroom window? It was sad even for Tom, who really didn't know until he moved to Norfolk that he did need friends. He'd always had his books and his work, but even in his program at
school he'd made no friends—it was sad, but true, that the nicest anyone in Norfolk had been to him was the boy downstairs, who more and more was out front in the mornings, waiting for Tom to come down with the dog.

“There's old pup pup,” the boy would say every morning.

“There he is,” Tom would say, and the two of them would have an amiable conversation like any two other men in America, except that one of the men was twelve and kept asking peculiar questions about the dog. Tom wondered if maybe the boy had one of those autisms that render you incapable of normal social interaction.