Different Seasons(69)

“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 f**king 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 bu**ocks 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