For Morris Heisel, that Sunday was a day of miracles.
The Atlanta Braves, his favorite baseball team, swept a double-header from the high and mighty Cincinnati Reds by scores of 7-1 and 8-0. Lydia, who boasted smugly of always taking care of herself and whose favorite saying was “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” slipped on her friend Janet’s wet kitchen floor and sprained her hip. She was at home in bed. It wasn’t serious, not at all, and thank God (what God) for that, but it meant she wouldn’t be able to visit him for at least two days, maybe as long as four.
Four days without Lydia! Four days that he wouldn’t have to hear about how she had warned him that the stepladder was wobbly and how he was up too high on it in the bargain. Four days when he wouldn’t have to listen to her tell him how she’d always said the Rogans’ pup was going to cause them grief, always chasing Lover Boy that way. Four days without Lydia asking him if he wasn’t glad now that she had kept after him about sending in that insurance application, for if she had not, they would surely be on their way to the poorhouse now. Four days without having Lydia tell him that many people lived perfectly normal lives—almost, anyway—paralyzed from the waist down; why, every museum and gallery in the city had wheelchair ramps as well as stairs, and there were even special busses. After the observation, Lydia would smile bravely and then inevitably burst into tears.
Morris drifted off into a contented late afternoon nap.
When he woke up it was half-past five in the afternoon. His roommate was asleep. He still hadn’t placed Denker, but all the same he felt sure that he had known the man at some time or other. He had begun to ask Denker about himself once or twice, but then something kept him from making more than the most banal conversation with the man—the weather, the last earthquake, the next earthquake, and yeah, the Guide says Myron Floren is going to come back for a special guest appearance this weekend on the Welk show.
Morris told himself he was holding back because it gave him a mental game to play, and when you were in a bodycast from your shoulders to your hips, mental games can come in handy. If you had a little mental contest going on, you didn’t have to spend quite so much time wondering how it was going to be, pissing through a catheter for the rest of your life.
If he came right out and asked Denker, the mental game would probably come to a swift and unsatisfying conclusion. They would narrow their pasts down to some common experience—a train trip, a boat ride, possibly even the camp. Denker might have been in Patin; there had been plenty of German Jews there.
On the other hand, one of the nurses had told him Denker would probably be going home in a week or two. If Morris couldn’t figure it out by then, he would mentally declare the game lost and ask the man straight out: Say, I’ve had the feeling I know you—
But there was more to it than just that, he admitted to himself. There was something in his feelings, a nasty sort of undertow, that made him think of that story “The Monkey’s Paw,” where every wish had been granted as the result of some evil turn of fate. The old couple who came into possession of the paw wished for a hundred dollars and received it as a gift of condolence when their only son was killed in a nasty mill accident. Then the mother had wished for the son to return to them. They had heard footsteps dragging up their walk shortly afterward; then pounding on the door. The mother, mad with joy, had gone rushing down the stairs to let in her only child. The father, mad with fear, scrabbled through the darkness for the dried paw, found it at last, and wished his son dead again. The mother threw the door open a moment later and found nothing on the stoop but an eddy of night wind.
In some way Morris felt that perhaps he did know where he and Denker had been acquainted, but that his knowledge was like the son of the old couple in the story—returned from the grave, but not as he was in his mother’s memory; returned, instead, horribly crushed and mangled from his fall into the gnashing, whirling machinery. He felt that his knowledge of Denker might be a subconscious thing, pounding on the door between that area of his mind and that of rational understanding and recognition, demanding admittance . . . and that another part of him was searching frantically for the monkey’s paw, or its psychological equivalent; for the talisman that would wish away the knowledge forever.
Now he looked at Denker, frowning.
Denker, Denker, Where have I known you, Denker? Was it Patin? Is that why I don’t want to know? But surely, two survivors of a common horror do not have to be afraid of each other. Unless, of course . . .
He frowned. He felt very close to it, suddenly, but his feet were tingling, breaking his concentration, annoying him. They were tingling in just the way a limb tingles when you’ve slept on it and it’s returning to normal circulation. If it wasn’t for the damned body-cast, he could sit up and rub his feet until that tingle went away. He could—
Morris’s eyes widened.
For a long time he lay perfectly still, Lydia forgotten, Denker forgotten, Patin forgotten, everything forgotten except that tingly feeling in his feet. Yes, both feet, but it was stronger in the right one. When you felt that tingle, you said My foot went to sleep.
But what you really meant, of course, was My foot is waking up.
Morris fumbled for a call-button. He pressed it again and again until the nurse came.
• • •
The nurse tried to dismiss it—she had had hopeful patients before. His doctor wasn’t in the building, and the nurse didn’t want to call him at home. Dr. Kemmelman had a vast reputation for evil temper . . . especially when he was called at home. Morris wouldn’t let her dismiss it. He was a mild man, but now he was prepared to make more than a fuss; he was prepared to make an uproar if that’s what it took. The Braves had taken two. Lydia had sprained her hip. But good things came in threes, everyone knew that.
At last the nurse came back with an intern, a young man named Dr. Timpnell whose hair looked as if it had been cut by a Lawn Boy with very dull blades. Dr. Timpnell pulled a Swiss Army knife from the pocket of his white pants, folded out the Phillips screwdriver attachment, and ran it from the toes of Morris’s right foot down to the heel. The foot did not curl, but his toes twitched—it was an obvious twitch, too definite to miss. Morris burst into tears.
Timpnell, looking rather dazed, sat beside him on the bed and patted his hand.
“This sort of thing happens from time to time,” he said (possibly from his wealth of practical experience, which stretched back perhaps as far as six months). “No doctor predicts it, but it does happen. And apparently it’s happened to you.”
Morris nodded through his tears.
“Obviously, you’re not totally paralyzed.” Timpnell was still patting his hand. “But I wouldn’t try to predict if your recovery will be slight, partial, or total. I doubt if Dr. Kemmelman will, either. I suspect you’ll have to undergo a lot of physical therapy, and not all of it will be pleasant. But it will be more pleasant than . . . you know.”
“Yes,” Morris said through his tears. “I know. Thank God!” He remembered telling Lydia there was no God and felt his face fill up with hot blood.
“I’ll see that Dr. Kemmelman is informed,” Timpnell said, giving Morris’s hand a final pat and rising.
“Could you call my wife?” Morris asked. Because, doom-crying and hand-wringing aside, he felt something for her. Maybe it was even love, an emotion which seemed to have little to do with sometimes feeling like you could wring a person’s neck.
“Yes, I’ll see that it’s done. Nurse, would you—?”
“Of course, doctor,” the nurse said, and Timpnell could barely stifle his grin.
“Thank you,” Morris said, wiping his eyes with a Kleenex from the box on the nightstand. “Thank you very much.”
Timpnell went out. At some point during the discussion, Mr. Denker had awakened. Morris considered apologizing for all the noise, or perhaps for his tears, and then decided no apology was necessary.
“You are to be congratulated, I take it,” Mr. Denker said.
“We’ll see,” Morris said, but like Timpnell, he was barely able to stifle his grin. “We’ll see.”
“Things have a way of working out,” Denker replied vaguely, and then turned on the TV with the remote control device. It was now quarter to six, and they watched the last of Hee Haw. It was followed by the evening news. Unemployment was worse. Inflation was not so bad. Billy Carter was thinking about going into the beer business. A new Gallup poll showed that, if the election were to be held right then, there were four Republican candidates who could beat Billy’s brother Jimmy. And there had been racial incidents following the murder of a black child in Miami. “A night of violence,” the newscaster called it. Closer to home, an unidentified man had been found in an orchard near Highway 46, stabbed and bludgeoned.
Lydia called just before six-thirty. Dr. Kemmelman had called her and, based on the young intern’s report, he had been cautiously optimistic. Lydia was cautiously joyous. She vowed to come in the following day even if it killed her. Morris told her he loved her. Tonight he loved everyone—Lydia, Dr. Timpnell with his Lawn Boy haircut, Mr. Denker, even the young girl who brought in the supper trays as Morris hung up.
Supper was hamburgers, mashed potatoes, a carrots-and-peas combination, and small dishes of ice cream for dessert. The candy striper who served it was Felice, a shy blonde girl of perhaps twenty. She had her own good news—her boyfriend had landed a job as a computer programmer with IBM and had formally asked her to marry him.
Mr. Denker, who exuded a certain courtly charm that all the young ladies responded to, expressed great pleasure. “Really, how wonderful. You must sit down and tell us all about it. Tell us everything. Omit nothing.”
Felice blushed and smiled and said she couldn’t do that. “We’ve still got the rest of the B Wing to do and C Wing after that. And look, here it is six-thirty!”
“Then tomorrow night, for sure. We insist . . . don’t we, Mr. Heisel?”
“Yes, indeed,” Morris murmured, but his mind was a million miles away.
(you must sit down and tell us all about it)
Words spoken in that exact-same bantering tone. He had heard them before; of that there could be no doubt. But had Denker been the one to speak them? Had he?
(tell us everything)
The voice of an urbane man. A cultured man. But there was a threat in the voice. A steel hand in a velvet glove. Yes.
Where?
(tell us everything, omit nothing.)
(? PATIN ?)
Morris Heisel looked at his supper. Mr. Denker had already fallen to with a will. The encounter with Felice had left him in the best of spirits—the way he had been after the young boy with the blonde hair came to visit him.
“A nice girl,” Denker said, his words muffled by a mouthful of carrots and peas.
“Oh yes—
(you must sit down)
—Felice, you mean. She’s
(and tell us all about it.)
very sweet.”
(tell us everything, omit nothing.)
He looked down at his own supper, suddenly remembering how it got to be in the camps after awhile. At first you would have killed for a scrap of meat, no matter how maggoty or green with decay. But after awhile, that crazy hunger went away and your belly lay inside your middle like a small gray rock. You felt you would never be hungry again.
Until someone showed you food.
(“tell us everything, my friend, omit nothing, you must sit down and tell us AAALLLLL about it.”)
The main course on Morris’s plastic hospital tray was hamburger. Why should it suddenly make him think of lamb? Not mutton, not chops—mutton was often stringy, chops often tough, and a person whose teeth had rotted out like old stumps would perhaps not be overly tempted by mutton or a chop. No, what he thought of now was a savory lamb stew, gravy-rich and full of vegetables. Soft tasty vegetables. Why think of lamp stew? Why, unless—
The door banged open. It was Lydia, her face rosy with smiles. An aluminum crutch was propped in her armpit and she was walking like Marshal Dillon’s friend Chester. “Morris!” she trilled. Trailing her and looking just as tremulously happy was Emma Rogan from next door.
Mr. Denker, startled, dropped his fork. He cursed softly under his breath and picked it up off the floor with a wince.
“It’s so WONDERFUL!” Lydia was almost baying with excitement. “I called Emma and asked her if we could come tonight instead of tomorrow, I had the crutch already, and I said, ‘Em,’ I said, ‘if I can’t bear this agony for Morris, what kind of wife am I to him?’ Those were my very words, weren’t they, Emma?”
Emma Rogan, perhaps remembering that her collie pup had caused at least some of the problem, nodded eagerly.
“So I called the hospital,” Lydia said, shrugging her coat off and settling in for a good long visit, “and they said it was past visiting hours but in my case they would make an exception, except we couldn’t stay too long because we might bother Mr. Denker. We aren’t bothering you, are we, Mr. Denker?”
“No, dear lady,” Mr. Denker said resignedly.
“Sit down, Emma, take Mr. Denker’s chair, he’s not using it. Here, Morris, stop with the ice cream, you’re slobbering it all over yourself, just like a baby. Never mind, we’ll have you up and around in no time. I’ll feed it to you. Goo-goo, ga-ga. Open wide . . . over the teeth, over the gums . . . look out, stomach, here it comes! . . . No, don’t say a word, Mommy knows best. Would you look at him, Emma, he hardly has any hair left and I don’t wonder, thinking he might never walk again. It’s God’s mercy. I told him that stepladder was wobbly. I said, ‘Morris,’ I said, ‘come down off there before—’ ”
She fed him ice cream and chattered for the next hour and by the time she left, hobbling ostentatiously on the crutch while Emma held her other arm, thoughts of lamb stew and voices echoing up through the years were the last things in Morris Heisel’s mind. He was exhausted. To say it had been a busy day was putting it mildly. Morris fell deeply asleep.
• • •
He awoke sometime between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. with a scream locked behind his lips.
Now he knew. He knew exactly where and exactly when he had been acquainted with the man in the other bed. Except his name had not been Denker then. Oh no, not at all.
He had awakened from the most terrible nightmare of his whole life. Someone had given him and Lydia a monkey’s paw, and they had wished for money. Then, somehow, a Western Union boy in a Hitler Youth uniform had been in the room with them. He handed Morris a telegram which read: REGRET TO INFORM YOU BOTH DAUGHTERS DEAD STOP PATIN CONCENTRATION CAMP STOP GREATEST REGRETS AT THIS FINAL SOLUTION STOP COMMANDANT’S LETTER FOLLOWS STOP WILL TELL YOU EVERYTHING AND OMIT NOTHING STOP PLEASE ACCEPT OUR CHECK FOR 100 REICHMARKS ON DEPOSIT YOUR BANK TOMORROW STOP SIGNED ADOLF HITLER CHANCELLOR.
A great wail from Lydia, and although she had never even seen Morris’s daughters, she held the monkey’s paw high and wished for them to be returned to life. The room went dark. And suddenly, from outside, came the sound of dragging, lurching footfalls.
Morris was down on his hands and knees in a darkness that suddenly stank of smoke and gas and death. He was searching for the paw. One wish left. If he could find the paw he could wish this dreadful dream away. He would spare himself the sight of his daughters, thin as scarecrows, their eyes deep wounded holes, their numbers burning on the scant flesh of their arms.
Hammering on the door.
In the nightmare, his search for the paw became ever more frenzied, but it bore no fruit. It seemed to go on for years. And then, behind him, the door crashed open. No, he thought. I won’t look. I’ll close my eyes. Rip them from my head if I have to, but I won’t look.
But he did look. He had to look. In the dream it was as if huge hands had grasped his head and wrenched it around.
It was not his daughters standing in the doorway; it was Denker. A much younger Denker, a Denker who wore a Nazi SS uniform, the cap with its death’s-head insignia cocked rakishly to one side. His buttons gleamed heartlessly, his boots were polished to a killing gloss.
Clasped in his arms was a huge and slowly bubbling pot of lamb stew.
And the dream-Denker, smiling his dark, suave smile, said: You must sit down and tell us all about it—as one friend to another, hein? We have heard that gold has been hidden. That tobacco has been hoarded. That it was not food-poisoning with Schneibel at all but powdered glass in his supper two nights ago. You must not insult our intelligence by pretending you know nothing. You knew EVERYTHING. So tell it all. Omit nothing.
And in the dark, smelling the maddening aroma of the stew, he told them everything. His stomach, which had been a small gray rock, was now a ravening tiger. Words spilled helplessly from his lips. They spewed from him in the senseless sermon of a lunatic, truth and falsehood all mixed together.
Brodin has his mother’s wedding ring taped below his scrotum!
(“you must sit down”)
Laslo and Herman Dorksy have talked about rushing guard tower number three!
(“and tell us everything!”)
Rachel Tannenbaum’s husband has tobacco, he gave the guard who comes on after Zeickert, the one they call Booger-Eater because he is always picking his nose and then putting his fingers in his mouth. Tannenbaum, some of it to Booger-Eater so he wouldn’t take his wife’s pearl earrings!
(“oh that makes no sense no sense at all you’ve mixed up two different stories I think but that’s all right quite all right we’d rather have you mix up two stories than omit one completely you must omit NOTHING!”)
There is a man who has been calling out his dead son’s name in order to get double rations!
(“tell us his name”)
I don’t know it but I can point him out to you please yes I can show him to you I will I will I will I
(“tell us everything you know”)
will I will I will I will I will I will I will I
Until he swam up into consciousness with a scream in his throat like fire.
Trembling uncontrollably, he looked at the sleeping form in the other bed. He found himself staring particularly at the wrinkled, caved-in mouth. Old tiger with no teeth. Ancient and vicious rogue elephant with one tusk gone and the other rotted loose in its socket. Senile monster.
“Oh my God,” Morris Heisel whispered. His voice was high and faint, inaudible to anyone but himself. Tears trickled down his cheeks toward his ears. “Oh dear God, the man who murdered my wife and my daughters is sleeping in the same room with me, my God, oh dear dear God, he is here with me now in this room.”
The tears began to flow faster now—tears of rage and horror, hot, scalding.
He trembled and waited for morning, and morning did not come for an age.
The next day, Monday, Todd was up at six o’clock in the morning and poking listlessly at a scrambled egg he had fixed for himself when his father came down still dressed in his monogrammed bathrobe and slippers.
“Mumph,” he said to Todd, going past him to the refrigerator for orange juice.
Todd grunted back without looking up from his book, one of the 87th Squad mysteries. He had been lucky enough to land a summer job with a landscaping outfit that operated out of Pasadena. That would have been much too far to commute ordinarily, even if one of his parents had been willing to loan him a car for the summer (neither was), but his father was working on-site not far from there, and he was able to drop Todd off at a bus stop on his way and pick him up at the same place on his way back. Todd was less than wild about the arrangement; he didn’t like riding home from work with his father and absolutely detested riding to work with him in the morning. It was in the mornings that he felt the most naked, when the wall between what he was and what he might be seemed the thinnest. It was worse after a night of bad dreams, but even if no dreams had come in the night, it was bad. One morning he realized with a fright so suddenly it was almost terror that he had been seriously considering reaching across his father’s briefcase, grabbing the wheel of the Porsche, and sending them corkscrewing into the two express lanes, cutting a swath of destruction through the morning commuters.
“You want another egg, Todd-O?”
“No thanks, Dad.” Dick Bowden ate them fried. How could anyone stand to eat a fried egg? On the grill of the Jenn-Air for two minutes, then over easy. What you got on your plate at the end looked like a giant dead eye with a cataract over it, an eye that would bleed orange when you poked it with your fork.
He pushed his scrambled egg away. He had barely touched it.
Outside, the morning paper slapped the step.
His father finished cooking, turned off the grill, and came to the table. “Not hungry this morning, Todd-O?”
You call me that one more time and I’m going to stick my knife right up your fucking nose . . . Dad-O.
“Not much appetite, I guess.”
Dick grinned affectionately at his son; there was still a tiny dab of shaving cream on the boy’s right ear. “Betty Trask stole your appetite. That’s my guess.”
“Yeah, maybe that’s it.” He offered a wan smile that vanished as soon as his father went down the stairs from the breakfast nook to get the paper. Would it wake you up if I told you what a cunt she is, Dad-O? How about if I said, “Oh, by the way, did you know your good friend Ray Trask’s daughter is one of the biggest sluts in Santo Donato? She’d kiss her own twat if she was double-jointed, Dad-O. That’s how much she thinks of it. Just a stinking little slut. Two lines of coke and she’s yours for the night. And if you don’t happen to have any coke, she’s still yours for the night. She’d fuck a dog if she couldn’t get a man.” Think that’d wake you up, Dad-O? Get you a flying start on the day?
He pushed the thoughts back away viciously, knowing they wouldn’t stay gone.
His father came back with the paper. Todd glimpsed the headline: SPACE SHUTTLE WON’T FLY, EXPERT SAYS.
Dick sat down. “Betty’s a fine-looking girl,” he said. “She reminds me of your mother when I first met her.”
“Is that so?”
“Pretty . . . young . . . fresh . . .” Dick Bowden’s eyes had gone vague. Now they came back, focusing almost anxiously on his son. “Not that your mother isn’t still a fine-looking woman. But at that age a girl has a certain . . . glow, I guess you’d say. It’s there for awhile, and then it’s gone.” He shrugged and opened the paper. “C’est la vie, I guess.”
She’s a bitch in heat. Maybe that’s what makes her glow.
“You’re treating her right, aren’t you, Todd-O?” His father was making his usual rapid trip through the paper toward the sports pages. “Not getting too fresh?”
“Everything’s cool, Dad.”
(if he doesn’t stop pretty soon I’ll I’ll do something, scream, throw his coffee in his face, something.)
“Ray thinks you’re a fine boy,” Dick said absently. He had at last reached the sports. He became absorbed. There was blessed silence at the breakfast table.
Betty Trask had been all over him the very first time they went out. He had taken her to the local lovers’ lane after the movie because he knew it would be expected of them; they could swap spits for half an hour or so and have all the right things to tell their respective friends the next day. She could roll her eyes and tell how she had fought off his advances—boys were so tiresome, really, and she never fucked on the first date, she wasn’t that kind of girl. Her friends would agree and then all of them would troop into the girls’ room and do whatever it was they did in there—put on fresh makeup, smoke Tampax, whatever.
And for a guy . . . well, you had to make out. You had to get at least to second base and try for third. Because there were reputations and reputations. Todd couldn’t have cared less about having a stud reputation; he only wanted a reputation for being normal. And if you didn’t at least try, word got around. People started to wonder if you were all right.
So he took them up on Jane’s Hill, kissed them, felt their tits, went a little further than that if they would allow it. And that was it. The girl would stop him, he would put up a little good-natured argument, and then take her home. No worries about what might be said in the girls’ room the next day. No worries that anyone was going to think Todd Bowden was anything but normal. Except—
Except Betty Trask was the kind of girl who fucked on the first date. On every date. And in between dates.
The first time had been a month or so before the goddam Nazi’s heart attack, and Todd thought he had done pretty well for a virgin . . . perhaps for the same reason a young pitcher will do well if he’s tapped to throw the biggest game of the year with no forewarning. There had been no time to worry, to get all strung up about it.
Always before, Todd had been able to sense when a girl had made up her mind that on the next date she would just allow herself to be carried away. He was aware that he was personable and that both his looks and his prospects were good. The kind of boy their cunty mothers regarded as “a good catch.” And when he sensed that physical capitulation about to happen, he would start dating some other girl. And whatever it said about his personality, Todd was able to admit to himself that if he ever started dating a truly frigid girl, he would probably be happy to date her for years to come. Maybe even marry her.
But the first time with Betty had gone fairly well—she was no virgin, even if he was. She had to help him get his cock into her, but she seemed to take that as a matter of course. And halfway through the act itself she had gurgled up from the blanket they were lying on: “I just love to fuck!” It was the tone of voice another girl might have used to express her love for strawberry whirl ice cream.
Later encounters—there had been five of them (five and a half, he supposed, if you wanted to count last night)—hadn’t been so good. They had, in fact, gotten worse at what seemed an exponential rate . . . although he didn’t believe even now that Betty had been aware of that (at least not until last night). In fact, quite the opposite. Betty apparently believed she had found the battering-ram of her dreams.
Todd hadn’t felt any of the things he was supposed to feel at a time like that. Kissing her lips was like kissing warm but uncooked liver. Having her tongue in his mouth only made him wonder what kind of germs she was carrying, and sometimes he thought he could smell her fillings—an unpleasant metallic odor, like chrome. Her breasts were bags of meat. No more.
Todd had done it twice more with her before Dussander’s heart attack. Each time he had more trouble getting erect. In both cases he had finally succeeded by using a fantasy. She was stripped naked in front of all their friends. Crying. Todd was forcing her to walk up and down before them while he cried out: Show your tits! Let them see your snatch, you cheap slut! Spread your cheeks! That’s right, bend over and SPREAD them!
Betty’s appreciation was not at all surprising. He was a good lover, not in spite of his problems but because of them. Getting hard was only the first step. Once you achieved erection, you had to have an orgasm. The fourth time they had done it—this was three days after Dussander’s heart attack—he had pounded away at her for over ten minutes. Betty Trask thought she had died and gone to heaven; she had three orgasms and was trying for a fourth when Todd recalled an old fantasy . . . what was, in fact, the First Fantasy. The girl on the table, clamped and helpless. The huge dildo. The rubber squeeze-bulb. Only now, desperate and sweaty and almost insane with his desire to come and get this horror over with, the face of the girl on the table became Betty’s face. That brought on a joyless, rubbery spasm that he supposed was, technically, at least, an orgasm. A moment later Betty was whispering in his ear, her breath warm and redolent of Juicy Fruit gum: “Lover, you do me any old time. Just call me.”
Todd had nearly groaned aloud.
The nub of his dilemma was this: Wouldn’t his reputation suffer if he broke off with a girl who obviously wanted to put out for him? Wouldn’t people wonder why? Part of him said they would not. He remembered walking down the hall behind two senior boys during his freshman year and hearing one of them tell the other he had broken off with his girlfriend. The other wanted to know why. “Fucked ’er out,” the first said, and both of them bellowed goatish laughter.
If someone asks me why I dropped her, I’ll just say I fucked her out. But what if she says we only did it five times? Is that enough? What? . . . How much? . . . How many? . . . Who’ll talk? . . . What’ll they say?
So his mind ran on, as restless as a hungry rat in an insoluble maze. He was vaguely aware that he was turning a minor problem into a big problem, and that this very inability to solve the problem had something to say about how shaky he had gotten. But knowing it brought him no fresh ability to change his behavior, and he sank into a black depression.
College. College was the answer. College offered an excuse to break with Betty that no one could question. But September seemed so far away.
The fifth time it had taken him almost twenty minutes to get hard, but Betty had proclaimed the experience well worth the wait. And then, last night, he hadn’t been able to perform at all.
“What are you, anyway?” Betty had asked petulantly. After twenty minutes of manipulating his lax penis, she was dishevelled and out of patience. “Are you one of those AC/DC guys?”
He very nearly strangled her on the spot. And if he’d had his .30-.30—
“Well, I’ll be a son of a gun! Congratulations, son!”
“Huh?” He looked up and out of his black study.
“You made the Southern Cal High School All-Stars!” His father was grinning with pride and pleasure.
“Is that so?” For a moment he hardly knew what his father was talking about; he had to grope for the meaning of the words. “Say, yeah, Coach Haines mentioned something to me about that at the end of the year. Said he was putting me and Billy DeLyons up. I never expected anything to happen.”
“Well Jesus, you don’t seem very excited about it!”
“I’m still trying
(who gives a ripe fuck?)
to get used to the idea.” With a huge effort, he managed a grin. “Can I see the article?”
His father handed the paper across the table to Todd and got to his feet. “I’m going to wake Monica up. She’s got to see this before we leave.”
No, God—I can’t face both of them this morning.
“Aw, don’t do that. You know she won’t be able to get back to sleep if you wake her up. We’ll leave it for her on the table.”
“Yes, I suppose we could do that. You’re a damned thoughtful boy, Todd.” He clapped Todd on the back, and Todd squeezed his eyes closed. At the same time he shrugged his shoulders in an aw-shucks gesture that made his father laugh. Todd opened his eyes again and looked at the paper.
4 BOYS NAMED TO SOUTHERN CAL ALL-STARS, the headline read. Beneath were pictures of them in their uniforms—the catcher and left-fielder from Fairview High, the harp southpaw from Mountford, and Todd to the far right, grinning openly out at the world from beneath the bill of his baseball cap. He read the story and saw that Billy DeLyons had made the second squad. That, at least, was something to feel happy about. DeLyons could claim he was a Methodist until his tongue fell out, if it made him feel good, but he wasn’t fooling Todd. He knew perfectly well what Billy DeLyons was. Maybe he ought to introduce him to Betty Trask, she was another sheeny. He had wondered about that for a long time, and last night he had decided for sure. The Trasks were passing for white. One look at her nose and that olive complexion—her old man’s was even worse—and you knew. That was probably why he hadn’t been able to get it up. It was simple: his cock had known the difference before his brain. Who did they think they were kidding, calling themselves Trask?
“Congratulations again, son.”
He looked up and first saw his father’s hand stuck out, then his father’s foolishly grinning face.
Your buddy Trask is a yid! he heard himself yelling into his father’s face. That’s why I was impotent with his slut of a daughter last night! That’s the reason! Then, on the heels of that, the cold voice that sometimes came at moments like this rose up from deep inside him, shutting off the rising flood of irrationality, as if
(GET HOLD OF YOURSELF RIGHT NOW)
behind steel gates.
He took his father’s hand and shook it. Smiled guilelessly into his father’s proud face. Said: “Jeez, thanks, Dad.”
They left that page of the newspaper folded back and a note for Monica, which Dick insisted Todd write and sign Your All-Star Son, Todd.