Inappropriate Behavior: Stories (28 page)

Once upon a time, there was a man. He lived with his wife and his son in what he'd always been told was the greatest country in the world. God-loved and manifest. A city upon a hill. Commensurate to his capacity for wonder. The last, best hope of Earth. Then when the man reached what should have been his happiest and safest and most productive years, everything went wrong.

The man lost his job and he couldn't find another one. The wife didn't make enough money to support the family by herself. The son needed expensive doctors. The man and his family lost their home. They were very poor now, and because they were so poor it was hard to find another place to live, and it was hard to find a place for the boy to go to school. They knew that around the country, a whole lot of people had things happening to them that were even worse. But that didn't help. Their lives were panic. Everything was very bad.

Sometimes the man would say, “What happened?” Sometimes the wife would say, “What are we going to do?” Sometimes one or the other of them would say, “Things
have
to get better.” After a while, they pretty much just stared at each other across
the tiny apartment they'd moved into. Until things got better, until they figured out what to do, until something happened, there wasn't really much to say. Neither of them could remember the last time they'd really talked, held hands, touched.

Their son watched all of this, and he was a smart boy. Everyone thought he was stupid, but he wasn't. He didn't understand why everyone thought he was stupid, but it didn't matter, because he knew he wasn't. The boy watched his parents. He knew they were scared. But the boy was not scared.

The boy got Mr. Carrots when he was five and they still lived in the house. The boy liked sleeping on the couch in the new apartment. His father would sit in the chair next to the couch while the boy fell asleep. His mother hated the kitchen. “I hate this kitchen,” his mother said. There was a corner of the kitchen floor that was curled up and underneath it was dirty and gross. There was also a hole in the wall where the doorknob hit it. And he slept with Mr. Carrots on the couch.

But aside from sleeping on the couch, the boy didn't like anything about the apartment complex. There were other kids who lived there, and they were all mean to him, and he didn't have his own room. And his father wouldn't ever let him go outside and play by himself, because there were bad people in the neighborhood, “and we have to live here for a little while, so we just have to be careful.” And when the boy went outside to play, the father always came along, because the father was scared. But the boy was not scared.

One day the boy's father got a phone call. The boy was playing Mario, but it was hard to play on the new TV because the screen was smaller and Mario didn't fit all the way. Sometimes he'd disappear completely off the edge of the screen. Sometimes the boy would move Mario over to the edge of the screen and make him disappear and come back, disappear and come back, disappear and come back, disappear and come back.

So the father said to the boy, “I have to go out. Stay inside,
and do not open the door for anybody ever at all under any circumstances. Don't be scared.” The boy was not scared. The father was walking very fast, getting his clothes on and making sure things like the coffee maker were turned off. The air started making funny noises, and the boy tried a quiet spell, but it didn't work because his father was still there. The boy had never been left alone before, but he could fly and he could turn himself invisible and he could go through walls if his father wasn't there, which was something else they didn't know about him. The father took the boy to the phone and made sure the boy knew the numbers. The boy knew the numbers. He went and got Mr. Carrots and sat back down in front of the little TV. Mr. Carrots still had a bloodstain on his forehead from the time they lost the battle at the far park, but he was okay now.

Everybody thought the boy was stupid, they'd say it all the time, stupid stupid stupid. Kids said that. But he wasn't stupid, and it hurt his feelings. His parents and his teachers from when he went to school, they said, You've got to pay attention, which felt a little bit like another way to say stupid. But he was paying attention. He heard everything they said. And he didn't understand why people didn't understand that he was just happy.

“Here's a clock,” the boy's father said. He was wearing his suit and sweating, and he smelled like something gross in the backyard that the boy found when they had a backyard. It was something that had died and didn't have any skin left on it. His grandparents also had all died, and he could remember only one of them, from that time they went to the farm and he won a lot of battles there.

His father raised two fingers and said, “I'll be back in two hours. Do you know when two hours will be?” The boy nodded. He wanted to correct the way his father said the question, because it didn't make any sense, but his father said, “Don't be scared,” but the boy wasn't scared because he had a sword too, and his father said, “Don't answer the phone, stay away from
the windows, and don't open that door. Do you understand? Just stay right here with Mr. Carrots and play Mario.” The boy nodded.

When the father locked the door, the boy went to the window. As soon as the father got in his car, a monster picked up his car and threw it all the way to where the boy couldn't see. The boy got his sword and Mr. Carrots got his laser, and the boy said the spell to go through the door so they could rescue the apartment complex. Then they killed the monster. Then later they flew to a distant land on the other side of the world and found his father there, but his father didn't want to come back because he had a whole new family and a job and he was scared of coming back home. “I have to stay here,” his father said. “I'm really sorry. I love you, but I won't see you anymore.” Then Mr. Carrots said to the boy, “You have to save America! Look! It's an emergency!”

And the boy looked back at America, and there were more monsters and vampires and space aliens, and the boy and Mr. Carrots helped the army kill the monsters that were attacking America. When all the monsters were dead, they made a movie about the boy and Mr. Carrots. Then the boy became the president. He made a law that all fathers could have jobs. He gave a speech and told everyone to be nice to each other, and be friends, and help each other with things. And everybody did. When he knew it was safe, the boy sent a message to his father, and his father came home and got a job and lived in the old house with the boy's mother.

And the boy was the president for ninety-two years, and the people of America lived happily ever after.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

These stories have been published, sometimes in a different form, in the following publications: “The Passage” in
The Missouri Review
; “Ready for Schmelling” in
Phoebe
; “Lubbock Is Not a Place of the Spirit” in
Epoch
and in
The Road to Nowhere and Other New Stories from the Southwest
(University of New Mexico Press, 2013); “The Thing about Norfolk” in
The Normal School
; “I Married an Optimist” in
Low Rent
; “Charlie's Pagoda” in
Roanoke Review
; and “The Alternative History Club” in
Black Warrior Review
.

So many friends, family members, teachers, colleagues, and other writers have helped to make this book better. You know who you are, or you will know who you are next time I see you. Fair warning.

Special thanks to Daniel Slager and everyone at Milkweed Editions; to my agent, Renee Zuckerbrot and her assistant, Anne Horowitz; to Marc McKee, who they're never gonna catch, because he's fucking innocent; to Wayne Miller, who holds the naming rights for all my future work; and to the absolutely, positively indispensable Brian Barker.

And most of all, to David Clewell.

Just in case the lines in “Lubbock Is Not a Place of the Spirit” that were lifted from the 1976 film
Taxi Driver
(Martin Scorsese, director; Paul Schrader, writer) do not, to some readers, appear in
their proper light of homage, please be assured that homage was the intent.

While this story collection occasionally makes fictional use of characters who share the names and some attributes of people who once lived, any innocent bystanders to the events recorded herein have either had their names changed or are products of the author's mere imagination.

M
URRAY
F
ARISH'S
short stories have appeared in
The Missouri Review, Epoch, Roanoke Review
, and
Black Warrior Review
, among other publications. His work has been awarded the William Peden Prize, the Phoebe Fiction Prize, and the Donald Barthelme Memorial Fellowship Prize. Farish lives with his wife and two sons in St. Louis, Missouri, where he teaches writing and literature at Webster University.
Inappropriate Behavior
is his first book.

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