Teddy (The Pit)

by John Gault

  “She does have a nice one, Jamie,” Teddy taunted.

  “Dammit, Teddy, shut up! It’s not true anyway; you just made it all up!”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” Teddy said. “Anyway, my young friend, tell me about your day. It gets awfully lonely for old Teddy, stuck in this room all day with nobody to talk to.”

  Jamie lay down on the bed and shifted Teddy so that they were facing one another. First he told him that they might be moving again, out to Seattle. All Teddy asked was when, and all Jamie told him was he didn’t really know, but probably soon, in a month or so.

  “Is that it?” Teddy asked. “Is that all you have to tell me?”

  Jamie smiled. Now was his chance to get even with Teddy for all the teasing about Barbara, about her being naked. “Well,” he said, drawing out the word, “I guess what happened in the woods today was kind of interesting.” Then: “Nah, you probably wouldn’t think so.” With that he rolled off the bed and went over to his desk, where he picked up a history textbook and began thumbing through the pages. He turned them ever so slowly, feeling Teddy’s eyes trying to bore through the back of his head.

  Finally the exasperated voice admitted defeat, “Okay, Jamie, you’ve made your point.” Jamie slammed the book closed triumphantly and dropped it back onto the desk. He was smiling happily when he resumed his position on the bed.

  “So?” Teddy said.

  “Just a second.” He went to the door and pressed his ear against it, listening for listeners. No, it was okay. They were still downstairs talking about Seattle.

  “An old man fell down the hole today,” Jamie said as. he padded back to the bed. “I tried to stop him, but he fell down anyway. I saw him down there and he was dead. And then my friends came, and I guess they must have taken him some place down there, some other place I mean. It’s okay, though, ’cause he was really dead.”

  When they were face-to-face again, Jamie asked, “Did you ever see a dead person, Teddy?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Did it bother you? Did it scare you, I mean?”

  “Nothing bothers me, you know that. Now please get on with the story.”

  Jamie eyed the door once more. If Tom or Barbara caught him talking to Teddy again, they might send Teddy away forever, like they’d almost done three years ago. If it hadn’t been for good old Dr. Kelso, they might have too. They’d been very careful ever since, he and Teddy, but you could never be too careful. After about thirty seconds of hard listening, Jamie was satisfied that nobody was lurking in the hall, so he turned his attention back to Teddy.

  “What do you think, Teddy?” he asked earnestly. “Should I tell somebody about it? Should I tell Tom and Barbara?”

  “What’s the point?” Teddy replied wearily. “The old bastard’s dead and gone, and that’s all there is to that. If you tell anybody, the cops’ll come and question you and want to know why you didn’t run right down to the police station and report it. They’ll want to know what you were doing there in the woods in the first place. And if they start snooping around, who knows? They might even find your beasties.”

  “Don’t call them beasties, Teddy. They’re troglodytes, like I told you. Trogs. Like I showed you in the book.” He hadn’t realized he was half-shouting until Teddy barked, “Keep your goddamned voice down!” Then he heard the footsteps in the hall and saw the doorknob begin to turn. Barbara stepped into the room, looking slightly curious, but mostly unhappy. Her blue eyes, almost precisely the same color and shape as Jamie’s own, swept the room, then turned hard on Jamie and Teddy.

  “Jamie,” she demanded, “who are you talking to in here? Are you talking to that bear again, that pajama bag? Jamie, Jamie, I thought we had an understanding.”

  He bounded to his feet, placing himself strategically between her and Teddy. “Of course not, Barbara,” he said, as if he had never heard anything quite so silly. “Why would I talk to a bear?” As if to prove his point, he swept Teddy off the bed, back onto the floor where he’d found him earlier. Teddy’s eyes blazed, and his mouth curled into a silent snarl. Oh-oh, Jamie thought, am I ever going to get it for this. But first problems first. “I was just . . . uh . . . rehearsing, Barbara. For the school play.” He could see that her expression hadn’t changed, so he plunged on. “Didn’t I tell you? I have a part in the school play. You know, for the end of the term . . .”

  “You are in a play?” she laughed. Then she caught herself and added, with appropriate gravity, “Well, Jamie, isn’t that wonderful.”

  So now they were even: he had given her a lie she could live with, and she had come back with phony praise. Fine with him. He had thrown her off the track again, and she was happy to be off that track. It wasn’t the kind of relationship mothers and sons seemed to have in the books he read, but it suited him and it apparently suited her as well.

  “Can I help you learn your lines?” She asked.

  “Nah,” he replied, watching for the relief to flicker into her eyes—which it did. “I can do it okay myself.”

  She closed the door quietly behind her. Jamie didn’t have to listen for the retreating footsteps; she would leave him alone for a while now. He climbed across the bed, bracing himself for what he knew was coming. “Teddy?”

  “Go fuck yourself in the ass!”

  “I’m really, really sorry,” Jamie said, lifting Teddy out of the dusty corner one more time and brushing him off gently and straightening his left leg back into sitting position. He tried to hug Teddy, but he could feel the resistance, the blunt, dirty white ends of the little arms shoving him away. Jamie tried to avoid looking directly into the black button eyes. He knew what he would see there; he had seen it before.

  “I had to do that,” he explained when they were back on the bed. But Teddy faced away, and all Jamie could do was stroke him lovingly along the closed zipper and apologise some more and try to make the bear understand. “She’ll take you away, Teddy. She’ll take you and throw you in the garbage. She hates you, Teddy.”

  Then he lay back and closed his eyes, waiting for Teddy’s anger to fade, as he knew it would. A few minutes later he gently rolled Teddy on his back, head on the pillow, and together they lay there, staring at the ceiling.

  Finally, Teddy broke the silence.

  “You owe me one, Jamie. You have to make it up to me.”

  “Sure, Teddy. Anything.”

  “You know what I want you to do.”

  Yes, Jamie sighed deeply, he knew. He couldn’t understand, at least not completely, what pleasure Teddy got out of it. And as for himself, well, it did feel kind of good while he was doing it, but afterwards he felt unhappy and confused and ashamed. So he’d pretend, as long as he could, that he didn’t know what Teddy meant. Teddy gave him a few seconds, then whispered in his ear, “Come on now, Jamie, you said ‘anything.’ Now why don’t you get out the magazine—or the book, if you’d prefer—and we’ll get down to it, so to speak.” Jamie still hesitated, and Teddy played his trump: “Or we could do it the way I like best anyway, couldn’t we? Did I tell you how sexy-looking Barbara was today? Well, let’s start with those beautiful tits. They . . .”

  Jamie’s hand was over his mouth. “No, Teddy,” he sighed his defeat, “not that. I’ll get the magazine.”

  “And take your clothes off too,” Teddy ordered. “And put the light on.”

  Jamie slid his hand along between the mattress and box spring until his fingers found the thick, glossy magazine, the Playboy he’d found the previous fall while checking out the next-door neighbor’s garbage late one night. Despite himself, despite his spoken and unspoken protests, just touching that much-tattered magazine sent a pleasant little jolt into his groin. He slid it from its hiding place and opened it to the girl he liked the best, not the Playmate, but the blond with the German name and the incredible tits.

  Jamie’s penis, still no bigger than his thumb and as hairless as the day he was born, began to grow and throb, just at the thought of the German girl and her ti
ts, and by the time he had his pants and undershirt yanked off, it was curving in a rigid arc toward his belly. With fumbling fingers, he got the magazine open and held it up, one-handed, so both he and Teddy could see. The other hand—the left—slid down his belly, almost as if it had its own mind, touched tentatively, then encircled and closed. The familiar sensations flooded through his body; his eyes felt terribly heavy, his throat full, his cheeks burning. His left hand began to move up and down, rhythmically, and he closed his eyes. He was getting close, so close.

  Then Teddy screwed it all up.

  “Do it. Do it. Dooo it, Jamie! Hurry, hurry!”

  Jamie rolled away and sat on the edge of the bed. He released his penis and felt it start to sag and wither. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said. He got shakily to his feet and started toward the door.

  “We had it, Jamie,” Teddy said, his voice thick and hoarse. “We really had it that time.”

  “Until you opened your big mouth, Teddy,” he said coldly. He opened the closet door and took his yellow robe off the hook and struggled into it. “I’m going to the bathroom. To pee.”

  By the time he reached the bathroom door his anger with Teddy was just about gone. He couldn’t stay mad at his best friend—his only friend really, until he found the trogs—for very long. In that way, they were very much alike.

  From the time he was a child in Hyannis, Massachusetts, Tom Benjamin had been forced to feign interest in baseball. His father, a small-time contractor who made a fair but not particularly good living replacing sidewalks and streets in a dozen Cape Cod towns, put on his Red Sox hat in April and rarely removed it until the team was mathematically eliminated from the pennant race, which, in the late Forties and throughout the Fifties, was often more early than late, Ted Williams notwithstanding. And every Sunday when the Sox were at home, Tom, his father, and his younger brother, Terry, would drive into Boston and settle down with hot dogs and pop on the hard bench seats along the left field foul line. Terry had actually gone on to play pro ball, getting as far as South Bend in the Three-I league before a shattered ankle sent him back home to the family business.

  But the fact was that Tom Benjamin never liked baseball at all. He didn’t like playing it, and he didn’t like watching it, and he didn’t like talking about it. The University of Minnesota had offered some respite, at least until his senior year when the old Washington Senators moved into Minneapolis-St. Paul—or Bloomington, to be precise—to become the new Minnesota Twins.

  There was one thing Tom Benjamin knew, however, and it was simply that the best way to develop friendly business relationships with the people above and the people below was to have the ability to talk baseball.

  Which was why he was lying on the floor, a couple of hand-hooked cushions propping up his head, digesting the last Brewers minutiae from the sports pages of the Milwaukee Journal. Was he a Brewers fan? You bet he was! He’d also been an Atlanta Braves fan when they’d lived there. And a Mets fan. And an Expos fan. In a few weeks, no doubt, he’d be cheering for the Seattle Mariners and saying wise things like, “For an expansion club they’re not doing too bad, are they?” and “You gotta like that kid, Bochte, at first base,” and “No problem that a third baseman and a good left-handed starter wouldn’t solve.”

  He felt Barbara looking at him. After fifteen, nearly sixteen, years of marriage, neither had to announce a need to talk. When they were younger, both before and after Jamie was born, they used to boast to one another and to their friends about how much in tune they were, about how beautifully they communicated their needs silently. Why was it that now Tom found this “magic” so irritating? And not just at this very moment. For some time.

  “Yes, dear,” he said, combining the words with a little sigh. The sigh was not lost, nor was it really meant to be.

  “I was just thinking about moving again . . . and about Jamie. I don’t think he’s well yet, like Dr. Kelso said he’d be. You know, what we’ve talked about before, about all the moving and everything not being too good for him.”

  “He seems okay now.” Tom folded the paper and put it aside. She was obviously ready for a serious conversation and he knew he had to at least be polite and pretend to be interested. Jamie was like baseball to him. Always had been.

  This could be a long one, he figured, so he tapped a Salem 100 out of the pack beside him and patted the pockets of his denim cutoffs until he detected the oval cylinder of the Bic lighter. The smoke tasted terrible, as it usually did by evening, thirty or thirty-five cigarettes removed from those first sweet, calming vapors of the morning. But he kept it going anyway, sacrificing pleasure for the need of a prop.

  “He seems better now,” she corrected, almost absently. That was her way. In order not to sound anxious, she tried to make even her serious conversations sound casual. She was sewing the underarms back into one of Jamie’s school shirts, and on this occasion, that was her prop. “But I don’t really think he’s okay. I think he’s still talking to that . . . that bear.”

  No, God damn it, this was not going to be a long conversation. Not now, not after that. He retrieved the newspaper and held it up between them, pretending to read.

  “Tom?”

  “Look,” he said, throwing the paper aside, “I am not going to get into another fucking conversation about Jamie and that fucking bear, do you understand? He doesn’t talk to the bear, he’s not crazy, and he’s just like any other boy going into adolescence. Now drop it, Barbara. Just drop it!”

  He rolled over on his stomach, punched out the remains of the last Salem cigarette, and lit the next.

  “I just wish we didn’t have to move again,” she sighed, talking to the room generally in her husband’s effective absence. “I wish sometimes he could have seen Dr. Kelso longer, or even that other psychiatrist none of us liked, Dr. Applegate . . .”

  “Applebaum,” he corrected, the sarcasm dripping. “His name was Applebaum. And he was a psychologist, not a psychiatrist. And as far as I’m concerned, both of them were a waste of money.”

  C H A P T E R

  3

  The James K. Polk elementary school was built in the late Sixties, and in both structure and educational philosophy, it was a progressive school. Students sat in little groups doing projects and expressing themselves; and there were few teachers, but lots of “resource people.” Marian Lynde, however, was not a resource person. She was a teacher, trained in and for a time when sentences had to be broken down into their component parts, when two-plus-two was always four, and students were graded with As, Bs, and even Fs. She was not an old woman—forty-seven is not very old, except maybe to the very young—and she wasn’t what one generally described as rigid, either. She’d started teaching in 1952, right after graduation, and called a temporary halt nine years later when Mikey, the first of her three sons, was born. She’d returned to her trade in 1976 at midterm, a few weeks after her husband died from a lingering cancer of the throat.

  So Marian Lynde knew a lot about young boys. In fact, she sometimes imagined that she knew all about young boys. She’d watched two younger brothers grow to manhood and raised three sons of her own—not to mention the dozens who had passed through her classrooms in twelve years of teaching. Jamie Benjamin, she decided, was no worse than most—stranger than most, certainly, but not the strangest and not the worst. And she couldn’t remember a brighter child, boy or girl.

  Nor was she particularly shocked by the book in front of her. The women looked a little more tarty than she was accustomed to seeing in art books, and she wasn’t entirely comfortable with women in chains or under apparent sexual menace, but she had no real inclination to blush, much less to recoil in horror. Times had changed, obviously, from the days when her husband brought Playboy home. She made a mental note to herself to take a look through Penthouse the next time Mikey left his copy lying around in the living room.

  No, she decided, closing the book and turning back to the examinations she was supposed to be marking, she
would not call Jamie Benjamin’s mother and tell her what Jamie had brought to class for the free-reading period. Yes, there was something quite odd about a twelve-year-old boy nonchantly opening a book like White Women in front of a grade eight class and teacher, but she could find nothing particularly odd in a twelve-year-old boy wanting to look at those kinds of pictures. Even if the school term hadn’t been almost over, she wouldn’t have handled it any differently. Boys will be boys. Besides, Jamie was a good student, the best in his class, certain to win the math, history, English, and science prizes. He was one of those rare children who actually worked up to his potential, which, she knew from the intelligence test results, was considerable, if not downright awesome. But she also knew that while Jamie would win all the prizes, he would never be valedictorian. The kids in the graduating class at Polk elected their valedictorian, and those kids did not like Jamie Benjamin.

  The screech of the chalk on the blackboard behind her did not make her wince. She was immune, long since conditioned and inured to it. However, because he obviously wanted her attention, she gave it to him. “Jamie, if you do that again, I’ll give you another hundred lines. And don’t think you’re keeping me here, because I have to get these exams marked anyway.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Lynde,” Jamie replied. The third blackboard was filled, and he was moving to the fourth. He’d already written the damn thing seventy-three times, but he looked back anyway, just to make sure he had the words right.

  I WILL NOT BRING ADULT BOOKS TO SCHOOL.

  Damn Teddy. Jamie had told him this would happen, that he’d get caught—how could he not get caught?—and punished. But Teddy’d said not to worry, that if everything went according to plan, it would all be worth it. Teddy had said that Mrs. Lynde wouldn’t do anything bad to him, and Jamie grudgingly admitted Teddy had been right about that.

  But his arm ached, and his hand felt like it was turning into a claw. Flexing it, in case she caught him looking, he glanced over at Mrs. Lynde and noted happily that she had opened the book again and was turning the pages slowly. Any time now, he thought.