‘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.
After her initial thrashing and efforts to expel him, she lay perfectly still, enduring. The lubricated interior of the dildo pulled and slid against Todd’s engorgement. Delightful. Heavenly. His fingers toyed with the rubber bulb in his left hand.
Far away, Dussander recited pulse, blood pressure, respiration, alpha waves, beta waves, stroke count.
As the climax began to build inside him, Todd became perfectly still and squeezed the bulb. Her eyes, which had been closed, flew open, bulging. Her tongue fluttered in the pink cavity of her mouth. Her arms and legs thrummed. But the real action was in her torso, rising and falling, vibrating, every muscle (oh every muscle every muscle moves tightens closes every) every muscle and the sensation at climax was (ecstasy) oh it was, it was (the end of the world thundering outside)
He woke to that sound and the sound of rain. He was huddled on his side in a dark ball, his heart beating at a sprinter’s pace. His lower belly was covered with a warm, sticky liquid. There was an instant of panicky horror when he feared he might be bleeding to death… and then he realized what it really was, and he felt a fainting, nauseated revulsion. Semen. Come. Jizz. Jungle-juice. Words from fences and locker rooms and the walls of gas station bathrooms. There was nothing here he wanted.
His hands balled helplessly into fists. His dream-climax recurred to him, pallid now, senseless, frightening. But nerve-endings still tingled, retreating slowly from their spike-point That final scene, fading now, was disgusting and yet somehow compulsive, like an unsuspecting bite into a piece of tropical fruit which, you realized (a second too late), had only tasted so amazingly sweet because it was rotten. It came to him then. What he would have to do. There was only one way he could get himself back again. He would have to kill Dussander. It was the only way. Games were done; storytime was over. This was survival.
‘Kill him and it’s all over,’ he whispered in the darkness, with the rain in the tree outside and semen drying on his belly. Whispering it made it seem real.
Dussander always kept three or four fifths of Ancient Age on a shelf over the steep cellar stairs. He would go to the door, open it (half-crocked already, more often than not), and go down two steps. Then he would lean out, put one hand on the shelf, and grip the fresh bottle by the neck with his other hand. The cellar floor was not paved, but the din was hard-packed and Dussander, with a machinelike efficiency that Todd now thought of as Prussian rather than German, oiled it once every two months to keep bugs from breeding in the dirt Cement or no cement, old bones break easily. And old men have accidents. The post-mortem would show that ‘Mr Denker’ had had a skinful of booze when he ‘fell’. What happened, Todd?
He didn’t answer the door so I used the key he made for me. Sometimes he falls asleep. I went Into the kitchen andsaw the cellar door was open. I went down the stairs and he…he…
Then, of course, tears.
It would work.
He would have himself back again.
For a long time Todd lay awake in the dark, listening to the thunder retreat westward, out over the Pacific, listening to the secret sound of the rain. He thought he would stay awake the rest of the night, going over it and over it But he fell asleep only moments later and slept dreamlessly with one fist carted under his chin. He woke on the first of May fully rested for the first time in months.