Inappropriate Behavior: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

work, on his pillow in whatever company house or roadside motel he slept in as he followed the dry holes and gushers of the west Texas oil industry, it was there. It’s been with him every day since and will be forever, and it’s the one question he has an answer for: What did you do about it, Joe Bill? And the answer is, nothing.
    Joe Bill never has told his whole story. He’s slept and eaten and lived and loved with all his shaky knowledge and his shadowy questions in his own mind alone, all of this set against the one true fact he knows: that he’s failed, somehow. Failed Lee and America and himself and his children. He’s failed in part because it’s too difficult to keep it all straight in his head. All the information is confusing and confounding. There’s simply too much of it, with the books and the commission reports and the evidence and the documents. He’s failed in part because time has passed, and now the whole thing was a long time ago, and no one’s asking anymore. Mostly he’s failed because he knows the stories about the million-to-one accidents and sudden diseases and visits from strange men in the middle of the night. Every so often, he’ll go through a stretch of time, moving fromplace to place, when he feels he’s being followed, watched. His heart jumps every time the phone rings. He knows people are not who they seem, are more than they appear. He’s failed because he was, and is, afraid.
    But one day he did tell a writer the story of his last night with Lee.
    They were to dock in Le Havre the next morning, and Joe Bill was trying to iron his shirts. He wasn’t good at it—his mother had always taken care of that. And after watching him struggle with the task for a while, Lee stood up from the desk where he was now openly practicing his Russian and took the iron from Joe Bill. After a moment or two, he said, “I’m going to spend a couple days in France, and I need to know how to say something.”
    Joe Bill figured he’d tell Lee how to ask for the bathroom or the restaurant, figured he’d also tell him that most people in France spoke English, especially the service workers, but Lee said to him, as he pulled a sleeve taut and moved the iron across it, “Tell me how to say, ‘I don’t understand.’”
    â€œI don’t understand?”
    â€œYeah,” Lee said.
    â€œYou want to know how to say, ‘I don’t understand’?”
    â€œWould you just tell me?” Lee said as he folded Joe Bill’s shirt and set it neatly in the open suitcase, before taking up another and stretching it across the board.
    â€œâ€˜I don’t understand’ is ‘ Je ne comprend pas ,’” Joe Bill said.
    â€œJuh nuh comprenduh pas?”
    â€œJe ne comprend pas.”
    â€œJe ne comprend pas?”
    â€œJe ne comprend pas.”

R EADY FOR S CHMELLING
    My name is Perkins, and my story begins on a Monday. Just as I was about to leave my desk after another day at the international corporation where I am employed, I happened to glance out the window to see a man crawling across the parking lot. I watched him as he crawled—hands and knees, attaché handle in his teeth—from the front steps of the building all the way to the third row of cars, a good sixty yards or so, just like a baby in a blue business suit. When he got to his dark green Ford Taurus, the midlevel company car, he stood, took his attaché from his mouth, dusted himself off, got in and drove away in what I have to assume was the normal mode—seated, strapped in, ten-and-two—for a man of his age and station.
    I had long ago quit wondering, or at least asking, about most of what went on at the IC. I started there three years ago—just after Marcie and I got married, just before my father died—and I had seen more than enough corporate and individual doltishness, weirdness, and outright