Inappropriate Behavior: Stories (14 page)

Tom and Patty looked at each other, then gathered the dog between them. The dog was warm and Tom and Patty were very cold. As they hugged the dog, Patty spoke.

“Tom,” she said. “I want you to take the dog out and then come back inside. Then we're going to pack whatever we can fit in the car and we're leaving. The next time I walk out of this house, I want it to be to get in the car and for you to drive me home. I want to go home.”

“Okay,” Tom said.

“I don't care about the furniture, any of it,” she said. “They can have it all. I just want to go home.”

“Okay,” Tom said. He stood up, stiffly, and the dog started hopping around the sunporch. “Come on,” he said to the dog. He went to the stairs and put the dog's choke collar on, and slowly, quietly, they moved toward the front door.

It was a fine morning in mid-November. The grass in the front yard was heavy with dew. The parrots squawked in the catalpa tree. Tom and Patty's car was parked at the curb in front of the house. Moving out what they cared about could be accomplished in as little as an hour. The dog pulled him down the steps to the walk, and then to the sidewalk and on down Graymont. Almost immediately the dog peed and pooped, and Tom wrestled the dog back to the house. As they walked up the porch steps, a voice said, “I always wanted me a dog.”

It was the boy from downstairs. He sat on the porch, his legs out, his back against the house, wearing the same clothes he had on the night before. Tom remembered his terrible wagging finger, his terrible grin. Tom said nothing, kept walking toward his door.

“So what, you gonna act like I'm not even here, like I'm not
even talking to you?” the boy said. “How come everybody that moves into that upstairs apartment is so rude?”

Tom stopped. The dog kept jumping around, tugging at its leash, pulling Tom's arm. “Sit,” the boy said. The dog sat.

“Lay down,” the boy said. The dog lay down.

“He's a good dog,” the boy said. “I always told Momma that he was.”

“We're leaving,” Tom told the boy.

“Everybody leaves,” the boy said.

The boy looked up at Tom again, closing one eye against the brightness of the morning. He studied Tom for a moment, then laughed.

“Sheee-it,” the boy said, and spat down into the holly bush at the front of the porch. “You think I'm gone say anything 'bout
that
? Man, I been watching that girl ever since we moved down from Staunton. That's the birthplace of President Woodrow Wilson.”

The dog whined a bit but lay still on the porch.

“C'mere, pup pup,” the boy said. He put his hand out and made a kissing sound. The dog crawled over, belly never leaving the porch.

“I ain't giving that up unless I have to,” the boy said. He held both the dog's ears between his thumb and forefinger, rubbed them together. “I got the whole setup. Here in about a year or so I'm plannin' to go over there one day and put it in her, once I get a little bit bigger. You think she don't know y'all are watching her?”

“She knows?”

“Course she knows. She told me about it.” The boy dropped the dog's ears and looked up at Tom. “Listen,” he said. “Just how stupid a motherfucker are you?”

Tom said nothing. He couldn't. He was, for the first time in his life, truly considering the question.

“College, huh,” the boy said, petting the dog under his chin.
“If y'all're leaving, I'll hang on to this dog. He's a good dog. I'll train him up.”

Tom watched the dog and the boy. What choice did he have? And what difference would it make? He was sick of the dog, sick of this place. Dog and place and boy and girl and the woman downstairs and the commander and Old Hoard and the ghost and the parrots and the crappy school that had been the only one to admit him—they all deserved each other. It was really a favor, Tom thought, for the boy to take the dog and let them go on their way. And then, for just a second, he thought he had something clear in his mind.

“It was you,” Tom said. “You're the one in the picture. You broke into our house and unplugged the plugs. You turned on the lights.”

“What're you talkin' about?” the boy said, grinning that terrible grin from the night before. “Did you sleep at all last night? Look at you.”

“How many people have you run out of here just like that?” Tom said. He kneeled down to be at eye level with the boy, who looked down at the dog. “Come on, kid—you got me, just tell me the truth. It was you. You got a key somehow or you found some way to get in. The whole thing was you.”

“You're wiggy, man,” the boy said. “I was just takin' out the trash when I saw you and your old lady. Scarred me for life.”

“It was you.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” the boy said, looking up, his face blank. “Now, I think y'all were saying y'all are gone go. You want some help loading up your shit?”

“No, thank you,” Tom said. He couldn't be sure. And even if he was sure, what did that mean? Maybe it meant he wasn't
that
stupid a motherfucker, but what good did it do him?

“All right, then.” The boy stood up and unleashed the dog, who sat next to him, perfectly still. “What's his name again?” the boy said, handing Tom the leash.

Tom told him. The word barely came out.

“What the hell kinda name is that?” the boy said. “Come on, pup pup, let's take us a walk, figure out your fuckin' name.”

And the boy and the dog walked off north on Graymont. The boy started whistling a tune, high and sweet and clear. The wind was in off the coast, and Tom could still hear him whistling as they rounded the corner and disappeared into the dewy morning sunlight behind the Episcopal church on Trent.

M
AYFLIES

The mayflies are spawning this time of year, in waves off the Coosa River. There must be a million of them pressed flat against the glass walls. It's pretty gruesome to look at, but all the places that stay lit up at night have them. They only live a few hours, then they fly from the river and fling themselves into the glass and die.

I've seen thirty-seven summers in this little town, thirty-seven years of mayflies. Women in my family live a long time. I'll see many more.

Sandy tells me they only live to give other animals, fish and birds and bats, something to eat, says she learned that in biology. A flying crop, her teacher called them. Sandy's marrying the ketchup bottles. She lays two or three towels out on one of the tables, then she sets the less full bottles on top of the more full bottles and seals them together with the ketchup gunk around the lips. She always makes a big production out of it, and it slows us down, but I've quit trying to tell her that. By the time she gets that done I've pretty much finished up all the side work, and Royce is no help either.

Royce hides out in the back instead of getting out the mop and cleaning all those mayflies off the walls. He's either in the mirror looking at his arm muscles, or he's sitting and smoking cigarettes and moping around and grousing about having to do even the simplest thing. No one makes him work here.
No one put a gun to your head
. That's what Bing says. He's the owner. Bing always says that. I hear it coming every time. A customer gripes
about something—
Hey, no one put a gun to your head
. When the day girl complains about working a heavy lunch by herself—
Hey, no one put a gun to your head
. Bing wants to move to South Carolina and run a fishing rig, but he keeps coming back to the café.
Hey, no one put a gun to my head
.

I've got mustard stains on the cuticle of my right thumb. Ketchup, steak sauce, egg yolk all come out easy. But not mustard, no matter how I scrub. Royce is standing in the bathroom doorway with that chipped-tooth grin.

“I'm gonna go, Ms. Willet,” Royce says. “It's about that time.”

“You get those flies?” I say. There's a big male thumbprint on the women's bathroom mirror. I wet a brown paper towel and go to wiping on it, because I don't want to look at Royce, who thinks he's menacing me.

“No, ma'am, but there'll just be more tonight. I'll get 'em first thing.”

When you'll be late, and Bing will have done it himself by then. Oh well, you know what Bing would say.

“Something on your mind, Ms. Willet?” Royce says now, in a little voice like you'd talk to a small child. I can see him in the mirror now since he's moved in behind me in the little bathroom. He smells like chicken grease and cheap cigarettes, and I know what's coming next. I'm back bent over the sink, working on my thumb, when Royce reaches up and puts his hand on my breast. I don't move it, or stand up. He presses himself up against me now, and I stand, and his other hand comes to my other breast. I let him go on a minute. It's my fault, and no one else ever wants to touch them. But it's not happening again. Not tonight.

“Go on, Royce,” I say after a minute. “Get on about your business.”

“I'm about my business now,” he growls, trying to act all manly and evil and seductive. But he doesn't fool me. I know evil.

Four years ago my oldest boy, Ronnie, shot and killed my baby, Ford, with their father's .38. It was ruled an accident.
Ronnie's nineteen now, somewhere in Iraq with the US Marine Corps. Ford will always be nine. That is evil.

I knock his hands away and move past him out the bathroom door. Sandy's putting the caps on the last of the ketchup bottles. Royce doesn't follow me. I hear him hoot as the back door slams. Then his car starts up, and you can hear that all over town—a 1975 Dodge Charger he rebuilt from the tires up, the only thing Royce has ever worked at in his life. He makes his usual pass through the gravel parking lot, raising dust and spinning out, gunning his engine. It makes the walls shake, but no mayflies fall off. Finally, he pulls out of his spin and hits the paved road, his back wheels catching and straightening as he speeds away.

“What. A. Redneck,” Sandy says. I want to tell her she's wrong, that Royce is not a redneck. Rednecks are called rednecks because their necks are red from working in the sun all day, and Royce wouldn't know work if it knocked him for a loop. He's a twenty-four-year-old child already well past the apex of his powers, I want to say. He's trash, and his people are trash, and his momma was definitely trash, because I went to high school with that one, but she's dead now, and so I say nothing.

“You about ready?” I say. There are still things to do, but I really will do them tomorrow—I'm covering for the day girl for the third time this month, not that I'm counting.

“Well, yeah, I'm ready,” Sandy says, glad to be leaving early on a Friday night. I check the front door, then turn out all the lights as we leave through the back. There, more mayflies, in the primes of their lives, twitter and flash in the pool cast by the security light. We step quickly into the dark parking lot, but Sandy doesn't move fast enough and gets one stuck in her hair.

“Gross! Gross!” she says, swatting at it and then putting her book bag over her head as she trots toward my car. Sandy's mother drops her off in the afternoons and I give her a ride home most nights. She's on my way.

“I've never seen so many,” she says, pulling the car door shut. “Aren't there more this year?”

“I don't know,” I say. “Seems about like usual.”

“They live for three years underwater. That's the larval stage.”

We drive out along Rainbow Drive, what passes in Pine City for a main drag, and Sandy stares out the windshield at the waves of clear silver sweeping across the road.

“Then they come up out of the water,” she says. “Do you know they can't eat when they come up?”

“I didn't know that.”

“They only come up to mate,” Sandy says, then pauses, then sighs. She's a melodramatic girl who claims to have big dreams. Her senior year's coming up at County. She's set to be valedictorian. Says next it's down to Auburn for vet school. So far she hasn't let any of these boys drag her down too bad. I've worked with Sandy for two years, but I don't really know her—I don't want to. Not that she's not agreeable enough, as these little Pine City princesses go. I'm just out of the getting-to-know-people business.

“And then, after they mate, they die,” Sandy says now. “The males die right away. But the females have to go around and lay the eggs. Those are all females on the windows, all females flying around.”

She looks in the mirror on the back of the visor and gently pulls strands of her brown bangs down over her forehead. I'll drop her at her house, she'll go in and change, and then she'll be on the phone for a ride to Hardee's. The high-school kids, and the ones who didn't leave after high school, they all hang out in the parking lot there. It's what Pine City has instead of a singles bar.

When I was Sandy's age it was Runt's, downtown. Runt-burgers for a buck, cheese and tomato twenty cents extra. Buck Willet with shiny black hair, chain-smoking Camel straights with his boot on the fender of his father's Le Sabre. Pabst Blue Ribbon from across the county line in wax soda cups. My sweaty back
against green vinyl and the smell of his father's pipe mixing with Buck's Aqua Velva as he moved above me in the dimness from the streetlight at the corner of Cherry Street and Park. Then we'd go back to Runt's for more beer, and Buck would prop me there on the hood of his old man's car, like a fancy hood ornament or a trophy fish. I doubt that Buck Willet has ever in his life been more at home than he was in the parking lot of Runt's at eighteen years old. I got pregnant and married him. What does that say about me?