Inappropriate Behavior: Stories

  INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination, and any real names or locales used in the book are used fictitiously.

  © 2014, Text by Murray Farish

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.

  (800) 520-6455

  www.milkweed.org

  Published 2014 by Milkweed Editions

  Cover design by Christian Fuenfhausen

  Cover art © Shutterstock/Vlue

  14 15 16 17 185 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Bush Foundation; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Foundation; the Driscoll Foundation; the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit www.milkweed.org.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Farish, Murray, 1968–

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Inappropriate Behavior : Stories / Murray Farish. — First Edition.

  pagescm

  I. Title.

  PS3606.A6925A6 2014

  813'.6—dc23

  2013037871

  ISBN 978-1-57131-902-9 (e-book)

  Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Inappropriate Behavior was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.

  For Jack and Hunter,

  and for Teresa, till the wheels come off . . .

  CONTENTS

  The Passage

  Ready for Schmelling

  Lubbock Is Not a Place of the Spirit

  The Thing about Norfolk

  Mayflies

  I Married an Optimist

  Charlie’s Pagoda

  The Alternative History Club

  Inappropriate Behavior

  Sometimes

  you wake up and you’re living your life

  in the static between stations, between the prayer

  and the answer . . .

  —David Clewell, “We Never Close”

  INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR

  THE PASSAGE

  It was an unseasonably chilly morning in late September, 1959, when Joe Bill Kendall waved to his parents from the aft deck of the freighter Marion Lykes. They’d left Tyler at 3:00 a.m. to get him to the boat on time and to save the expense of a New Orleans hotel room, and now his parents looked, to Joe Bill, small and tired and, his mother especially, slightly worn, the way she kept waving, wiping her face, waving and wiping her face. Although he had not slept the night before, Joe Bill felt no fatigue at all, just the same excited strum in the gut he’d had for several weeks.

  After a few minutes of waving, watching his parents grow tinier and tinier—although the ship had not yet moved—he blew one last kiss good-bye and turned, took his luggage cart by the handle, and headed toward the passengers’ deck, hearing nothing but French the whole way. He passed some of the deckhands tying down loads and marking the inventory, and understood every word. He passed a pair of officers discussing their plans in Le Havre and picked up most of that as well. It was soon clear that nearly the entire crew was French.

  Joe Bill made a sudden decision not to let on that he spoke the language. It would be fun; it would make him feel like a spy on a secret mission, not just a kid going abroad for a few months of study on the cheap. At the exact right moment, he could spring it on some unsuspecting officer or deckhand, respond to some slight about Americans or some clever quip or worldly statement. They’d look at him, stunned, amazed, with a whole new respect. The man, they would think, is more than he appears.

  Joe Bill’s cabinmate was already in the room when he arrived, lugging his cart behind him through the narrow hallways of the passengers’ deck. Joe Bill was a little disappointed; he’d hoped to be the first.

  “I’m Lee,” the other man said. “I don’t mind the top bunk.” They shook hands, and Lee looked off to the side of Joe Bill, behind his back and to the left.

  He was a slight young man a few years older than Joe Bill, dark brown hair and a knobby chin, small, dark eyes beneath dark, large brows.

  “So what brings you aboard the Marion Lykes?” Joe Bill asked as Lee untied the gray denim duffel that was apparently his only piece of luggage. He took out three dark pairs of slacks, four or five white button-down shirts, a handful of underwear and undershirts, some socks. The drawer was only half full when Lee was done with the clothes. He threw the duffel, still containing some weight, onto his upper bunk.

  “I’m going to college,” Lee said, kneeling back down beside the drawer.

  “Me too,” Joe Bill said. “You going in France?”

  “No,” Lee said, not looking up at Joe Bill, still fiddling with the clothes in the drawer, lining them up straight and pressing them out flat. “Sweden.”

  “Sweden,” Joe Bill said. “How about that? Cold up there.” Lee appeared to have only the coat he still had on, a green military field jacket. “And dark six months of the year.”

  “Or Switzerland.”

  “Oh,” Joe Bill said. “So you haven’t decided?”

  “Switzerland.”

  “What school?”

  “What about you?” Lee said, looking directly at Joe Bill for the first time, then quickly looking back into his drawer. He set each ball of socks next to the other in a tight, lumpy row.

  “I’m going to study at the Institute in Tours.”

  “How old are you?” Lee asked, setting his eyes on Joe Bill again.

  “I’m seventeen,” Joe Bill said. This always made him nervous. He was old for his age, or acted older, and when people found out how old he really was, they did one of two things. They either dismissed him as a child or they went on and on about how smart he was for seventeen, how mature, which was just another way of dismissing him. He’d lied about it a couple of times, but the lies made him feel bad, like there was something wrong with him for being the age he was, like it was shameful somehow. He decided that rather than lie and be ashamed, he’d tell the truth, and when they dismissed him, he’d tell himself that they wouldn’t be able to dismiss him for long, that he was way ahead of the game. He was on his way to France, going there on his smarts.

  “Seventeen, huh?” Lee said. “I joined the Marines at seventeen.”

  “How about that?” Joe Bill said. “A vet, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Lee stood from the drawer, shut it gently and turned his back to Joe Bill. He reached into the duffel again and pulled out a couple of journals and some pencils, and as he did, a little black plastic rectangle rolled out onto the bed. Lee quickly tucked the thing back into the duffel.

  “So where were you stationed?”

  “All around,” Lee said, settin
g the books and pencils on the desk at the foot of the bunk beds. The cabin was close, and Joe Bill had to step back to let Lee in between him and the edge of the desk. But Joe Bill also realized he’d leaned in some as they’d talked, both because Lee had turned his back and because of the black plastic object Lee obviously hadn’t wanted him to see. Now as Lee stepped by, Joe Bill backed up almost out the door, nearly tripping over his three suitcases that still sat there on the cart. “California,” Lee said. “The Philippines.”

  “Wow.”

  “Japan.” Lee neatly lined up the journals atop the desk and put the pencils in the top drawer.

  “And now to Switzerland,” Joe Bill said, moving back into the cabin, putting some six or eight inches between the suitcases and his heels. “That’s fantastic, really. You on the GI Bill?”

  “Are you planning to unpack or just trip over those things the whole time?”

  Joe Bill took the three green Samsonites off the cart and into the cabin, leaving the cart outside in the hall. He strapped two of the suitcases in the rack beneath the lower bunk and set the third atop the dresser. When Joe Bill popped the locks, the first thing he saw inside was the red leather Bible. Lee saw it, too.

  “So you’re a Christian?”

  “Well, yeah,” Joe Bill said. Religion was another topic that embarrassed him. He was a Christian, he supposed, in the sense that he’d gone to the First Baptist Church of Tyler every Sunday morning and Wednesday night since he could remember, like everyone else. But he hadn’t brought the Bible on purpose, had little interest in the subject, and certainly didn’t want to discuss it here.

  His mother had worried about him going to France, a Catholic country, because she thought the people there were drunken and promiscuous. He’d gone, at her insistence, to see Reverend Dunn, who’d asked him if he thought he was strong enough to weather the storm of the Papists, if he was prepared not only to stand up for his own faith but to witness to the benighted French as well. He reminded Joe Bill of his duty to be a fisher of men. He’d written something illegible in his shaky old hand on the inside cover of Joe Bill’s Bible, and his mother had packed the Bible with his clothes.

  “Humph,” Lee said. He was sitting on the top bunk now, leaning his back against the cabin wall.

  “I mean,” Joe Bill started, stopped, said, “heck, I’m just a guy from Texas. We’re all Christians. But I’m no preacher or anything.”

  “But you believe in God.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “There’s no God.”

  “Well, you can—”

  “How can you believe in God in the light of science?” Lee said, his voice rising to a higher pitch, his palms out-turned in front of him. “Science will one day prove everything, figure out everything. God’s something people needed when they lived in the Dark Ages. Step into the light of science, pal. Science is the only god.”

  “Well, now,” Joe Bill said, “I don’t know.” He felt funny about saying all of this to someone he’d just met. But Lee was so sure of himself, somewhat hostile, and Joe Bill felt that to merely back down, or worse, to admit that he agreed with Lee, would make him seem weak, childish, like someone who didn’t know what he thought about things. “I don’t think God and science exclude each other.”

  “But if you say that, you’re still holding on to the old ways of thinking. You can’t water it down by saying it’s part God and part science or that God controls science. God doesn’t control anything. Nobody controls anything, or anyone. You still want to think that there’s someone in charge. There’s no one in charge. We’re all just alone, on our own. There’s no force but science. There’s no supreme being. There’s nothing but matter, and anyone with any intelligence can see that.”

  With that said, Lee slid off the bunk to the floor, moved quickly past Joe Bill and out of the cabin, pausing to step over the luggage cart. And thus ended the longest conversation the two men would have for some time.

  Over the next several days at sea, Joe Bill realized that Lee was avoiding him. Joe Bill had always been an early riser, but he was never awake before Lee, and when Joe Bill went out onto the deck, Lee would go back to the cabin. If Joe Bill went back to the cabin, Lee would get up from the desk, close and lock the journal he was writing in, put the pencil back precisely in the desk drawer and go back out onto the deck, casting only the quickest of glances over his shoulder at Joe Bill. At meals the ship’s four passengers shared a table—Joe Bill, Lee, and the Wades, an older couple who were on their way to visit France following Colonel Wade’s recent retirement from the Army Signal Corps. The Wades would sit next to each other on one side, Joe Bill and Lee on the other, Lee always sitting directly across from Colonel Wade and eyeing him suspiciously while they ate. The Wades got along with Joe Bill well enough, but they were always trying to engage Lee, who would answer their questions with blunt, toneless replies and never follow up with questions of his own. Mrs. Wade especially seemed fond of Lee. She’d ask him about his plans of study—“psychology or philosophy”—where he was from—“New Orleans”—if he had a wife or a girlfriend—“no”—and what he wanted to do with his life. Lee merely shrugged and continued eating.

  One night, four or five days into the passage, about the time the days became a haze of wave and fog, the four of them were sitting at dinner. Colonel and Mrs. Wade had been talking to Joe Bill about his parents back home in Tyler, and Joe Bill had been giving them the standard stories. When she turned and asked Lee about his parents, Lee just stared for a long moment at Colonel Wade, glowering more than usual. Then he shook his head, blew out a high, sharp laugh, and set his fork down next to his plate. The ocean was rough that night, and the fork rattled against the plate as Lee began to speak.

  “My father’s dead,” he said. “I’ve never seen him. My mother has to work at a drugstore to support herself. She’s old and sick and frail and has to work at a drugstore. There’s America for you. They’ll put her out on the street if she doesn’t keep the rent coming in. Put her in jail if she doesn’t pay her taxes. She’s never gotten anything for it, either. Just a sore back and wrinkled, calloused hands and off to work again at the drugstore. There’s America.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Wade said, surprised. “I didn’t mean to pry. I was just—”

  “Home of the free,” Lee said now, slapping the table and sending his fork to the floor, where it slid against the bulkhead and rattled there even louder. “Land of plenty. Hah! Land of a sickness and a cancer. A cancer called money. It eats you and eats you. And when it’s gone you’re dead. Or wish you were.”

  “See here,” the colonel said.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Wade said.

  Joe Bill said nothing. The officers at their table had stopped eating to stare at the scene. The steward had entered the room at the sound of shouting and stood at the corner of the passengers’ table saying, “Please, monsieur,” and Lee was still going on, and now he stood and the colonel stood and said, “Calm down,” but Lee was waving his hands and shouting about America and how it robbed people of their lives and their blood in order to keep the rich in fine clothes and fancy cars, and then he said, “And men like you, Colonel, your job is to keep the poor people in line. The state only gains its power through fear. Except in America, you can even convince people it’s not fear at all, but duty and honor and country and national pride that keeps them going off to the factory and the plant and the drugstore.”

  “Sit down, please,” Mrs. Wade said now, and the steward said again, “Please, monsieur. Sit, please,” and Joe Bill watched as Lee said, “Colonel, I know. I was a soldier, too, you understand.”

  “You’re some kind of damned communist,” the colonel said now, pushing his wife’s hand away as she reached for his.

  “No, I’m not,” Lee said. “Communism’s just another tool of the state. Just another illusion. I’m a Marxist-Leninist-collectivist.”

  “I knew it,” Colonel Wade said, ruddy and livid, pointing at Lee. “Wh
y don’t you just keep going? Don’t stop in Sweden or Switzerland or Denmark or wherever it is you’re going. Just keep on. You’d be happier in Russia.”

  “My mother would be better off there, that’s for sure,” Lee shouted, then pushed his way past the steward and out the door.

  “I am very sorry, gentlemen,” the steward said. “Very sorry, madame. It is the ship, certainement. It is not a luxury liner, no? Some people get upset . . . how you . . . cramped? It makes some people . . . irritable. I will try to have a talk with monsieur Lee. If necessary, we will make other dining arrangements.”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Wade said as Colonel Wade returned to his seat with a snort. “Of course, it was my fault, really,” she said. “I shouldn’t have pried. I could tell he was sensitive.”

  “He’s nuts,” said the colonel now, picking his glass of tomato juice from the holster and bringing it to his face.

  “Again, please accept the apologies of the captain and crew of the Marion Lykes.” With that the steward spun quickly away. Colonel Wade turned to Joe Bill.

  “Is he like that all the time?”

  “To tell you the truth, sir,” Joe Bill said, “he really never speaks to me. We talked some the first day, but since then he’s hardly said a word. I don’t really see him that much, actually. I have no idea where he goes. Just wanders around on the deck, I guess. He’s gone when I get up in the morning and still gone when I go to bed at night.”

  “The poor thing,” Mrs. Wade said. “I should have just let him be. I have a problem with talking too much, don’t I, Richard? I always have. I just had to pry.”

  “It’s really quite amazing,” Joe Bill said. “It’s like he vanishes or something.”

  “This is 1959,” Colonel Wade said now. “No one can still be that naive about communism. Not after Korea.”

  “A mother would have known better. I was never a mother. Female troubles.”

  “It’s not that big a ship. There are only so many places he could go.”