‘Wow,’ she said, very softly.
‘You know what he said to me? My old man? That he’d always been afraid of getting old — of being scared and hurting and all by himself. Of having to go into the hospital and not being able to make ends meet anymore. Of dying. He said that after the stroke he wasn’t scared anymore. He said he thought he could die well. 'You mean die happy, pop?' I asked him. 'No,' he said. 'I don’t think anyone dies happy, Dickie.' He always called me Dickie, still does, and that’s another thing I guess I’ll never be able to like. He said he didn’t think anyone died happy, but you could die well. That impressed me.’
He was silent for a long, thoughtful time.
'The last five or six years I’ve been able to get some perspective on my old man. Maybe because he’s down there in Sandoro and out of my hair. I started thinking that maybe the Left Hand Book wasn’t such a bad idea. That was when I started to worry about Todd. I kept wanting to tell him about there was mavbe something more to life than me being able to take all of you to Hawaii for a month or being able to buy Todd pants that don’t smell like the mothballs they used to put in the Goodwill box. I could never figure out how to tell him those things. But I think maybe he knows. And it takes a load off my mind.’
‘Reading to Mr Denker, you mean?’
‘Yes. He’s not getting anything for that. Denker can’t pay him. Here’s this old guy, thousands of miles from any friends or relatives that might still be living, here’s this guy that’s everything my father was afraid of. And there’s Todd.’
‘I never thought of it just like that.’
‘Have you noticed the way Todd gets when you talk to him about that old man?’
‘He gets very quiet.’
‘Sure. He gets tongue-tied and embarrassed, like he was doing something nasty. Just like my pop used to when someone tried to thank him for laying some credit on them. We’re Todd’s right hand, that’s all. You and me and all the rest — the house, the ski-trips to Tahoe, the Thunderbird in the garage, his colour TV. All his right hand. And he doesn’t want us to see what his left hand is up to.’
‘You don’t think he’s seeing too much of Denker, then?’
‘Honey, look at his grades! If they were falling off, I’d be the first one to say hey, enough is enough, already, don’t go overboard. His grades are the first place trouble would show up. And how have they been?’
‘As good as ever, after that first slip.’
‘So what are we talking about? Listen, I’ve got a conference at nine, babe. If I don’t get some sleep, I’m going to be sloppy.’
‘Sure, go to sleep,’ she said indulgently, and as he turned over, she kissed him lightly on one shoulderblade. ‘I love you.’
‘Love you too,’ he said comfortably, and closed his eyes. ‘Everything’s fine, Monica. You worry too much.’
‘I know I do. Goodnight.’
They slept.
‘Stop looking out the window,’ Dussander said. ‘There is nothing out there to interest you.’
Todd looked at him sullenly. His history text was open on the table, showing a colour plate of Teddy Roosevelt cresting San Juan Hill. Helpless Cubans were falling away from the hooves of Teddy’s horses. Teddy was grinning a wide American grin, the grin of a man who knew that God was in His heaven and everything was bully. Todd Bowden was not grinning.
‘You like being a slave-driver, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘I like being a free man,’ Dussander said. ‘Study.’
‘Suck my cock.’
‘As a boy,’ Dussander said, ‘I would have had my mouth washed out with lye soap for saying such a thing.’
Times change.’
‘Do they?’ Dussander sipped his bourbon. ‘Study.’
Todd stared at Dussander. ‘You’re nothing but a goddamned rummy. You know that?’
‘Study.’
‘Shut up!’ Todd slammed his book shut It made a riflecrack sound in Dussander’s kitchen. ‘I can never catch up, anyway. Not in time for the test There’s fifty pages of this shit left, all the way up to World War I. I’ll make a crib in Study Hall 2 tomorrow.’
Harshly, Dussander said: ‘You will do no such thing!’
‘Why not? Who’s going to stop me? You?’
‘Boy, you are still having a hard time comprehending the stakes we play for. Do you think I enjoy keeping your snivelling brat nose in your books?’ His voice rose, whipsawing, demanding, commanding. ‘Do you think I enjoy listening to your tantrums, your kindergarten swears? 'Suck my cock',’ Dussander mimicked savagely in a high, falsetto voice that made Todd flush darkly. ‘'Suck my cock, so what, who cares, I’ll do it tomorrow, suck my cock'!'
‘Well, you like it!’ Todd shouted back. ‘Yeah, you like it! The only time you don’t feel like a zombie is when you’re on my back! So give me a fucking break!’
‘If you are caught with one of these cribbing papers, what do you think will happen? Who will be told first?’
Todd looked at his hands with their ragged, bitten fingernails and said nothing.
‘Who?’
‘Jesus, you know. Rubber Ed. Then my folks, I guess.’
Dussander nodded. ‘Me, I guess that too. Study. Put your cribbing paper in your head, where it belongs.’
‘I hate you,’ Todd said dully. ‘I really do.’ But he opened his book again and Teddy Roosevelt grinned up at him, Teddy galloping into the twentieth century with his sabre in his hand, Cubans falling back in disarray before him -possibly before the force of his fierce American grin.
Dussander began to rock again. He held his teacup of bourbon in his hands. 'That’s a good boy,’ he said, almost tenderly.
Todd had his first wet-dream on the last night of April, and awoke to the sound of rain whispering secretly through the leaves and branches of the tree outside his window.
In the dream, he had been in one of the Patin laboratories. He was standing at the end of a long, low table. A lush young girl of amazing beauty had been secured to this table with clamps. Dussander was assisting him. Dussander wore a white butcher’s apron and nothing else. When he pivoted to turn on the monitoring equipment, Todd could see Dussander’s scrawny buttocks grinding at each other like misshapen white stones.
He handed something to Todd, something he recognized immediately, although he had never actually seen one. It was a dildo. The tip of it was polished metal, winking in the light of the overhead fluorescents like heartless chrome. The dildo was hollow. Snaking out of it was a black electrical cord that ended in a red rubber bulb.
‘Go ahead,’ Dussander said. ‘The Fuehrer says it’s all right. He says it’s your reward for studying.’
Todd looked down at himself and saw that he was naked. His small penis was fully erect, jutting plumply up at an angle from the thin peachdown of his pubic hair. He slipped the dildo on. The fit was tight but there was some sort of lubricant in there. The friction was pleasant. No; it was more than pleasant. It was delightful.
He looked down at the girl and felt a strange shift in his thoughts… as if they had slipped into a perfect groove. Suddenly all things seemed right. Doors had been opened. He would go through them. He took the red bulb in his left hand, put his knees on the table, and paused for just a moment, gauging the angle while his Norseman’s prick made his own angle up and out from his slight boy’s body.
Dimly, far off, he could hear Dussander reciting: Test run eighty-four. Electricity, sexual stimulus, metabolism. Based on the Thyssen theories of negative reinforcement. Subject is a young Jewish girl, approximately sixteen years of age, no scars, no identifying marks, no known disabilities—’
She cried out when the tip of the dildo touched her. Todd found the cry pleasant, as he did her fruitless struggles to free herself, or, lacking that, to at least bring her legs together.
This is what they can’t show in those magazines about the war, he thought, but it’s there, just the same.
He thrust forward suddenly, parting her with no grace. She shrieked like a firebell.
