The telephone rang.
Oh no, he protested
Let me alone.
The ringing continued, mocking him the way Janza had mocked him.
Let it be, let it be, like the Beatles sang.
Still ringing.
And he saw suddenly that he must answer. They didn't want him to answer this time. They wanted to think that he was incapacitated, injured, unable to make it to the phone.
Jerry lifted himself from the bed, surprised at his mobility, and made his way through the living room to the phone. Don't stop ringing now, he said, don't stop ringing. I want to show them.
"Hello." Forcing strength into his voice.
Silence.
"I'm here," he said, shouting the words.
Silence again. Then the lewd chuckle. And the dial tone.
"Jerry… oh Jerry…"
"Yoo hoo, Jerree…"
The apartment Jerry and his father occupied was three floors above street level and the voices calling Jerry's name reached him faintly, barely penetrating the closed windows. That distant quality also gave the voices a ghostly resonance, like someone calling from the grave. In fact, he hadn't been certain at first that his name was being called. Slouched at the kitchen table, forcing himself to sip Campbell's Chicken Broth, he heard the voices and thought they were the sound of kids playing in the street. Then he heard distinctly —
"Hey, Jerry…"
"Whatcha doing, Jerry?"
"Come on out and play, Jerry."
Ghostly voices from the past recalling when he was a little boy and the kids in the neighborhood came to the back door after supper calling him to go out and play. That was in the sweet time when he and his parents lived together in the house with the big backyard and a front lawn his father never got tired of mowing and watering.
"Hey, Jerry…"
But these voices calling now were not friendly after-supper voices but nighttime voices, taunting and teasing and threatening.
Jerry went into the living room and looked down cautiously, careful not to be seen. The street was deserted except for a couple of parked cars. And still the voices sang.
"Jerree…"
"Come out and play, Jerry…"
A parody of those long ago childhood pleadings.
Peering out again, Jerry saw a shooting star in reverse. It split the darkness and he heard the dull plunk as a stone, not a star at all, hit the wall of the building near the window.
"Yoo hoo, Jerree…"
He squinted at the street below but the boys were well hidden. Then he saw a spray of light sweeping the trees and shrubs across the street. A pale face flared in the darkness as the ray of a flashlight caught and held it for a moment. The face disappeared in the night. Jerry recognized the plodding gait of the building custodian who evidently had been drawn out of his basement apartment by the voices. His flashlight swept the street.
"Who's there?" he shouted. "rm gonna get the police…"
"Bye, bye, Jerry," a voice called.
"See you later, Jerry." Fading into the dark.
The telephone ruptured the night. Jerry groped upward from sleep, reaching for the sound. Instantly awake, he glanced at the alarm clock's luminous face. Two-thirty.
Painfully, his muscles and bones protesting, he lifted himself from the mattress and poised, on one elbow, to thrust himself from the bed.
The ringing persisted, ridiculously loud in the stillness of the night. Jerry's feet touched the floor and he padded toward the sound.
But his father was already at the phone. He glanced toward Jerry and Jerry drew back into the shadows, keeping his face hidden.
"Madmen loose in the world," his father muttered, standing there with his hand on the phone. "If you let it ring, they get their kicks. If you answer, they hang up and still get their kicks. And then start all over again."
The harassment had taken toll on his father's face, his hair disheveled, purple crescents under his eyes.
"Take the phone off the hook, Dad."
His father sighed, nodded assent. "That's giving in to them, Jerry. But what the hell. Who are them, anyway?" His father lifted the receiver, holding it to his ear for a moment, then turned to Jerry. "The same thing, that crazy laugh and then the dial tone." He placed the receiver on the table. "I'll report it to the telephone company in the morning." Peering in at Jerry, he said, "You okay, Jerry?"
"Fine. I'm just fine, Dad."
His father rubbed his eyes, wearily.
"Get some sleep, Jerry. A football player needs his sleep." Trying to keep it light.
"Right, Dad."
Compassion for his father welled in Jerry. Should he tell his father what it was all about? But he didn't want to involve him. His father had given in, taken the receiver off the hook, and that was defeat enough. He didn't want him to risk more.
In bed once more, small in the dark, Jerry willed his body to loosen, to relax. After a while, sleep plucked at him with soft fingers, soothing away the ache. But the phone rang in his dreams all night long.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Janza, can't you do anything right?"
"What the hell are you talking about? By the time we got through with him, he'd been willing to sell a million boxes of chocolates."
"I mean those kids. I didn't tell you to make it a gang bang."
"That was a stroke of genius, Archie. That's what I thought it was. Let him get beat up by a bunch of kids. Psychological — isn't that what you're always talking about?"
"Where'd you get them? I don't want outsiders involved in this?"
"Some animals from my neighborhood. They'd beat up their own grandmothers for a quarter."
"Did you use the queer pitch on him?"
"You were right, Archie. You called it beautiful. That really spaced him out. Hey, Archie, he isn't queer, is he?"
"Of course not. That's why he blew up. If you want to get under a guy's skin, accuse him of being something he isn't. Otherwise, you're only telling him something he knows."