Apt Pupil

10

The old man stood halfway down the compound’s aisle, smiling broadly, as Dave Klingerman walked up to meet him. The frenzied barking that filled the air didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest, nor the smells of fur and urine, nor the hundred different strays yapping and howling in their cages, dashing back and forth, leaping against the mesh. Klingerman pegged the old guy as a dog-lover right off the bat. His smile was sweet and pleasant. He offered Dave a swollen, arthritis-bunched hand carefully, and Klingerman shook it in the same spirit.

‘Hello, sir!’ he said, speaking up. ‘Noisy as hell, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t mind,’ the old man said. ‘Not at all. My name is Arthur Denker.’

‘Klingerman. Dave Klingerman.’

‘I am pleased to meet you, sir. I read in the paper -I could not believe it — that you give dogs away here. Perhaps I misunderstood. In fact I think I must have misunderstood.’

‘No, we give ‘em away, all right,’ Dave said. ‘If we can’t we have to destroy ‘em. Sixty days, that’s what the state gives us. Shame. Come on in the office here. Quieter. Smells better, too.’

In the office, Dave heard a story that was familiar (but nonetheless affecting): Arthur Denker was in his seventies. He had come to California when his wife died. He was not rich, but he tended what he did have with great care. He was lonely. His only friend was the boy who sometimes came to his house and read to him. In Germany he had owned a beautiful St Bernard. Now, in Santa Donato, he had a house with a good-sized back yard. The yard was fenced. And he had read in the paper… would it be possible that he could…

‘Well, we don’t have any Bernards,’ Dave said. ‘They go fast because they’re so good with kids—’

‘Oh, I understand. I didn’t mean that—’

‘—but I do have a half-grown Shepherd pup. How would that be?’

Mr Denker’s eyes grew bright, as if he might be on the verge of tears. ‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘That would be perfect.’

The dog itself is free, but there are a few other charges. Distemper and rabies shots. A city dog licence. All of it goes about twenty-five bucks for most people, but the state pays half if you’re over sixty-five — part of the California Golden Ager programme.’

‘Golden Ager… is that what I am?’ Mr Denker said, and laughed. For just a moment — it was silly — Dave felt a kind of chill.

‘Uh… I guess so, sir.’

‘It is very reasonable.’

‘Sure, we think so. The same dog would cost you a hundred and twenty-five dollars in a pet shop. But people go to those places instead of here. They are paying for a set of papers, of course, not the dog.’ Dave shook his head. ‘If they only understood how many fine animals are abandonee every year.’

‘And if you can’t find a suitable home for them within sixty days, they are destroyed?’

‘We put them to sleep, yes.’

‘Put them to… ? I’m sorry, my English—’

‘It’s a city ordinance,’ Dave said. ‘Can’t have dog-packs running the streets.’

‘You shoot them.’

‘No, we give them gas. It’s very humane. They don’t feel a thing.’

‘No,’ Mr Denker said. ‘I am sure they don’t’

Todd’s seat in Introduction to Algebra was four desks down in the second row. He sat there, trying to keep his face expressionless, as Mr Storrman passed back the exams. But his ragged fingernails were digging into his palms again, and his entire body seemed to be running with a slow and caustic sweat.

Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t be such a goddam chump. There’s no way you could have passed. You know you didn’t pass.

Nevertheless, he could not completely squash the foolish hope. It had been the first algebra exam in weeks that looked as if it had been written in something other than Greek. He was sure that in his nervousness (nervousness? no, call it what it had really been: outright terror) he had not done that well, but maybe… well, if it had been anyone else but Storrman, who had a Yale padlock for a heart…

STOP IT! he commanded himself, and for a moment, a coldly horrible moment, he was positive he had screamed those two words aloud in the classroom. You flunked, you know you did, not a thing in the world is going to change it.

Storrman handed him his paper expressionlessly and moved on. Todd laid it face-down on his initial-scarred desk. For a moment he didn’t think he possessed sufficient will to even turn it over and know. At last he flipped it with such convulsive suddenness that the exam sheet tore. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth as he stared at it. His heart seemed to stop for a moment.

The number 83 was written in a circle at the top of the sheet. Below it was a letter-grade: C Plus. Below the letter grade was a brief notation: Good improvement! I think I’m twice as relieved as you should be. Check errors carefully. At least three of them are arithmetical rather than conceptual.

His heartbeat began again, at triple-time. Relief washed over him, but it was not cool — it was hot and complicated and strange. He closed his eyes, not hearing the class as it buzzed over the exam and began the pre-ordained fight for an extra point here or there. Todd saw redness behind his eyes. It pulsed like flowing blood with the rhythm of his heartbeat. In that instant he hated Dussander more than he ever had before. His hands snapped shut into fists and he only wished, wished, wished, that Dussander’s scrawny chicken neck could have been between them.

Dick and Monica Bowden had twin beds, separated by a nightstand with a pretty imitation Tiffany lamp standing on it. Their room was done in genuine redwood, and the walls were comfortably lined with books. Across the room, nestled between two ivory bookends (bull elephants on their hind legs) was a round Sony TV. Dick was watching Johnny Carson with the earplugs in while Monica read the new Michael Crichton that had come from the book club that day.

‘Dick?’ She put a bookmark (THIS IS WHERE I FELL ASLEEP, it said) into the Crichton and closed it.

On the TV, Buddy Hackett had just broken everyone up. Dick smiled.

‘Dick?’ she said more loudly.

He pulled the earplugs out. ‘What?’

‘Do you think Todd’s all right?’

He looked at her for a moment, frowning, then shook his head a little. lJe ne comprends pas, cherie.’ His limping French was a joke between them; he had met her in college when he was flunking his language requirement. His father had sent him an extra two hundred dollars to hire a tutor. He had gotten Monica Darrow, picking her name at random from the cards tacked up on the Union bulletin board. By Christmas she had been wearing his pin… and he had managed a C in French.

‘Well… he’s lost weight.’

‘He looks a little scrawny, sure,’ Dick said. He put the TV earplugs in his lap, where they emitted tiny squawking sounds. ‘He’s growing up, Monica.’

‘So soon?’ she asked uneasily.

He laughed. ‘So soon. I shot up seven inches as a teenager — from a five-foot-six shrimp at twelve to the beautiful six-foot-one mass of muscle you see before you today. My mother said that when I was fourteen you could hear me growing in the night’

‘Good thing not all of you grew that much.’

‘It’s all in how you use it.’

‘Want to use it tonight?’

‘The wench grows bold,’ Dick Bowden said, and threw the earplugs across the room.

After, as he was drifting off to sleep:

‘Dick, he’s having bad dreams, too.’

‘Nightmares?’ he muttered.

‘Nightmares. I’ve heard him moaning in his sleep two or three times when I’ve gone down to use the bathroom in the night. I didn’t want to wake him up. It’s silly, but my grandmother used to say you could drive a person insane if you woke them up in the middle of a bad dream.’

‘She was the Polack, wasn’t she?’

‘The Polack, yeah, the Polack. The mockie, why don’t you say? Nice talk!’

‘You know what I mean. Why don’t you just use the upstairs John?’ He had put it in himself two years ago.

‘You know the flush always wakes you up,’ she said.

‘So don’t flush it.’

‘Dick, that’s nasty.’

He sighed.

‘Sometimes when I go in, he’s sweating. And the sheets are damp.’

He grinned in the dark. ‘I bet.’

‘What’s that… oh.’ She slapped him lightly. "That’s nasty, too. Besides, he’s only thirteen.’

‘Fourteen next month. He’s not too young. A little precocious, maybe, but not too young.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Fourteen or fifteen. I don’t remember exactly. But I remember I woke up thinking I’d died and gone to heaven.’

‘But you were older than Todd is now.’

‘All that stuffs happening younger. It must be the milk… or the fluoride. Do you know they have sanitary napkin dispensers in all the girls’ rooms of the school we built in Jackson Park last year? And that’s a grammar school. Now your average sixth-grader is only ten. How old were you when you started?’

‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘All I know is Todd’s dreams don’t sound like… like he died and went to heaven.’

‘Have you asked him about them?’

‘Once. About six weeks ago. You were off playing golf with that horrible Ernie Jacobs.’

‘That horrible Ernie Jacobs is going to make me a full partner by 1977, if he doesn’t screw himself to death with that high yellow secretary of his before then. Besides, he always pays the greens’ fees. What did Todd say?’

‘That he didn’t remember. But a sort of… shadow crossed his face. I think he did remember.’

‘Monica, I don’t remember everything from my dear dead youth, but one thing I do remember is that wet dreams are not always pleasant In fact, they can be downright unpleasant.’

‘How can that be?’

‘Guilt All kinds of guilt Some of it maybe all the way from babyhood, when it was made very clear to him that wetting the bed was wrong. Then there’s the sex thing. Who knows what brings a wet dream on? Copping a feel on the bus? Looking up a girl’s skirt in study hall? I don’t know. The only one I can really remember was going off the high board at the YMCA pool on co-ed day and losing my trunks when I hit the water.’

‘You got off on that?’ she asked, giggling a little.

‘Yeah. So if the kid doesn’t want to talk to you about his John Thomas problems, don’t force him.’

‘We did our damn best to raise him without all those needless guilts.’

‘You can’t escape them. He brings them home from school like the colds he used to pick up in the first grade. From his friends, or the way his teachers mince around certain subjects. He probably got it from my dad, too. "Don’t touch it in the night, Todd, or your hands’!! grow hair and you’ll go blind and you’ll start to lose your memory, and after a while your thing will turn black and rot off. So be careful, Todd."’

‘Dick Bowden! Your dad would never—’

‘He wouldn’t? Hell, he did. Just like your Jewish-Polack grandmother told you that waking somebody up in the middle of a nightmare might drive them nuts. He also told me to always wipe off the ring of a public toilet before I sat on it so I wouldn’t get "other people’s germs". I guess that was his way of saying syphilis. I bet your grandmother laid that one on you, too.’

‘No, my mother,’ she said absently. ‘And she told me to always flush. Which is why I go downstairs.’

‘It still wakes me up,’ Dick mumbled.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

This time he had actually drifted halfway over the threshold of sleep when she spoke his name again.

’ What? he asked, a little impatiently.

‘You don’t suppose… oh, never mind. Go back to sleep.’

‘No, go on, finish. I’m awake again. I don’t suppose what?’

That old man. Mr Denker. You don’t think Todd’s seeing too much of him, do you? Maybe he’s… oh, I don’t know… filling Todd up with a lot of stories.’

‘The real heavy horrors,’ Dick said. ‘The day the Essen Motor Works dropped below quota.’ He snickered.

‘It was just an idea,’ she said, a little stiffly. The covers rustled as she turned over on her side. ‘Sorry I bothered you.’

He put a hand on her bare shoulder. ‘Ill tell you something, babe,’ he said, and stopped for a moment, thinking carefully, choosing his words. ‘I’ve been worried about Todd too, sometimes. Not the same things you’ve been worried about, but worried is worried, right?’

She turned back to him. ‘About what?’

‘Well, I grew up a lot different than he’s growing up. My dad had the store. Vic the Grocer, everyone called him. He had a book where he kept the names of the people who owed him, and how much they owed. You know what he called it?’

‘No.’ Dick rarely talked about his boyhood; she had always thought it was because he hadn’t enjoyed it She listened carefully now.

‘He called it the Left Hand Book. He said the right hand was business, but the right hand should never know what the left hand was doing. He said if the right hand did know, it would probably grab a meat-cleaver and chop the left hand right off.’

‘You never told me that.’

‘Well, I didn’t like the old man very much when we first got married, and the truth is I still spend a lot of time not liking him. I couldn’t understand why I had to wear pants from the Goodwill box while Mrs Mazursky could get a ham on credit with that same old story about how her husband was going back to work next week. The only work that fucking wino Bill Mazursky ever had was holding onto a twelve-cent bottle of musky so it wouldn’t fly away.

‘All I ever wanted in those days was to get out of the neighbourhood and away from my old man’s life. So I made grades and played sports I didn’t really like and got a scholarship at UCLA. And I made damn sure I stayed in the top ten per cent of my classes because the only Left Hand Book the colleges kept in those days was for the GIs that fought in the war. My dad sent me money for my textbooks, but the only other money I ever took from him was the time I wrote home in a panic because I was flunking funnybook French. I met you. And I found out later from Mr Henreid down the block that my dad put a lien on his car to scare up ‘And now I’ve got you, and we’ve got Todd. I’ve always thought he was a damned fine boy, and I’ve tried to make sure he’s always had everything he ever needed… anything that would help him grow into a fine man. I used to laugh at that old wheeze about a man wanting his son to be better than he was, but as I get older it seems less funny and more true. I never want Todd to have to wear pants from a Goodwill box because some wino’s wife got a ham on credit. You understand?’

‘Yes, of course I do,’ she said quietly.

‘Then, about ten years ago, just before my old man finally got tired of fighting off the urban renewal guys and retired, he had a minor stroke. He was in the hospital for ten days. And the people from the neighbourhood, the guineas and the krauts, even some of the jigs that started to move in around 1955 or so — they paid his bill. Every fucking cent. I couldn’t believe it. They kept the store open, too. Fiona Castellano got four or five of her friends who were out of work to come in on shifts. When my old man got back, the books balanced out to the cent.’

‘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.

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.