by Stephen King
“Dick Bowden! Your dad would never—”
“He wouldn’t. Hell, he did. Just like your 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. “I’ll 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 neighborhood 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 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. Halleck down the block that my dad put a lien on his car to scare up that two hundred bucks.
“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 neighborhood, 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, Pap?’ 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 San Remo 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 how there was maybe 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 color 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 color plate of Teddy Roosevelt cresting San Juan Hill. Helpless Cubans were falling away from the hooves of Teddy’s horse. 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.�
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“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 One. I’ll make a crib in Study Hall Two 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 saber 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 he 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 rubber 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 its 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 fireball.
After her initial thrashings 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 ringers 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 dirt 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 gave me. Sometimes he falls asleep. I went into the kitchen and saw 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 curled under his
chin. He woke on the first of May fully rested for the first time in months.
11
May, 1975.
For Todd, that Friday was the longest of his life. He sat in class after class, hearing nothing, waiting only for the last five minutes, when the instructor would take out his or her small pile of Flunk Cards and distribute them. Each time an instructor approached Todd’s desk with that pile of cards, he grew cold. Each time he or she passed him without stopping, he felt waves of dizziness and semi-hysteria.
Algebra was the worst. Storrman approached . . . hesitated . . . and just as Todd became convinced he was going to pass on, he laid a Flunk Card face down on Todd’s desk. Todd looked at it coldly, with no feelings at all. Now that it had happened, he was only cold. Well, that’s it, he thought. Point, game, set, and match. Unless Dussander can think of something else. And I have my doubts.
Without much interest, he turned the Flunk Card over to see by how much he had missed his C. It must have been close, but trust old Stony Storrman not to give anyone a break. He saw that the grade-spaces were utterly blank—both the letter-grade space and the numerical-grade space. Written in the comments section was this message: I’m sure glad I don’t have to give you one of these for real! Chas. Storrman.
The dizziness came again, more savagely this time, roaring through his head, making it feel like a balloon filled with helium. He gripped the sides of his desk as hard as he could, holding one thought with total obsessive tightness: You will not faint, not faint, not faint. Little by little the waves of dizziness passed, and then he had to control an urge to run up the aisle after Storrman, turn him around, and poke his eyes out with the freshly sharpened pencil he held in his hand. And through it all his face remained carefully blank. The only sign that anything at all was going on inside was a mild tic in one eyelid.
School let out for the week fifteen minutes later. Todd walked slowly around the building to the bike-racks, his head down, his hands shoved into his pockets, his books tucked into the crook of his right arm, oblivious of the running, shouting students. He tossed the books into his bike-basket, unlocked the Schwinn, and pedaled away. Toward Dussander’s house.