lightning bolt of pain shot through him, seeming to split his body in two, and a hand clamped tightly over his mouth to stifle the scream of pain that rose in his throat. The pain grew, surging up within him again and again. Carl’s breath was loud in his ear, and he knew that it was too late now to struggle.
He lay in an agony of physical pain and mental shame until it was over, barely fighting back the nausea as Carl’s motions became more rapid and more violent until finally, with a gasp of delight, Carl convulsed violently again and again.
CHAPTER TWO
Things were never right for Lenny Adams. For as long as he could remember, life had never been anything but a contest to see who could screw who the first and the roughest.
Some kids could look back on their childhood with pleasure and remember it, or at least imagine it, as a time of pleasure hours and happy fun. Not so with Lenny. He remembered his mother, a nagging selfish woman who hadn’t cared in the least for anybody but herself, whose only concern was her own comfort.
He couldn’t remember his father too clearly, although he hadn’t been all that young when his father had gone. From what he did remember, his father had been a nice enough guy, quiet, never angry, patient as anything. He had to be patient to live with the woman he had for a wife. Lenny couldn’t bring his father to mind without picturing his mother too, following the little man around, nagging him, telling him how worthless he was, and yelling that she needed more money to keep the house. The last must have been a real joke—the house was never kept. As a very small child, Lenny had been made to take care of the dishes and keep things picked up, and the house-cleaning that he did daily under his mother’s supervision was about all that ever got done.
Lenny might have liked his father, but there was never much opportunity for the two of them to get to know each other without the presence of the nagging, shrewish woman who turned everything into an ordeal. And then one day Lenny’s father left. There wasn’t any explanation of it so far as Lenny was concerned. His father didn’t come home for dinner one night, and when Lenny mentioned it, his mother told him bitterly that he wouldn’t be coming home again ever.
When he got a little older, Lenny gradually understood that they had separated, and that they were divorced. For a full year, he waited hopefully for his father to come back, not to stay, but to take him away also. He could not believe that a man as gentle and calm as his father could leave him there to suffer alone. But his father never came back for him, and after a time Lenny’s fervent desire dimmed and became instead a deep seated bitterness toward the man who had abandoned him, and eventually toward all men. Men, it seemed to him, were a weak and worthless lot, not fit for anyone’s affection. As for women, they were a race of vicious, bitter animals to be dealt with by whatever means.
He knew that his mother saw men, plenty of them, and he had acquired enough knowledge in the alleys of their dreary neighborhood and from the conversation of other boys to know exactly why she was seeing them and what was going on behind the closed doors of her bedroom. He avoided all men like the plague, hating them all with the same intense hatred he felt for his mother. That one of them might become a permanent fixture in the household never entered his mind until his mother introduced him to Carl.
“Kid, I want you to meet Carl,” she announced one afternoon, placing herself in the doorway to block Lenny’s intended departure from the house. “You’d better be nice to him, he’s gonna be your old man.”
Lenny jumped almost a foot off the floor and stared in open astonishment at his mother. This was something he had never suspected might happen, although he knew that people did get married more than once.
He forced himself finally to look past his mother at the man standing behind her.
Carl was a far cry from what his father had been. They were both quiet types, but there any similarity ended. His father’s quietness had been the solitude of an unhappy but long-suffering man, and his father had never been anything but a simple creature of hard work and few needs.
Carl appeared to Lenny at once as the sort of man who was the villain in the cheap movies he sometimes saw, a thin, gaunt man with shrewd features and little eyes that darted about constantly, observing everything that went on about him. A narrow, shiny mustache added a sinister note to the dark, tight mouth.
“Pleased to meet you,” Carl had told him, extending a hand toward Lenny.
Lenny took the hand silently, but he knew as he met those black, cold eyes that Carl’s kindness toward him was only an act, an automatic device to assist him in getting whatever he wanted out of people.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Carl was saying, and Lenny was uncomfortably aware that Carl was still holding on to his hand, the moist fingers clenching his own tightly.
“The kid’s anti-social,” his mother said, with a hoarse chuckle. “Don’t worry about him, he’s no trouble.”
Carl let go of his hand finally, and Lenny seized the first opportunity to escape from the house and the two of them together. He didn’t like Carl Jacobs, and the thought of sharing a house with the man was almost terrifying. He even thought of running away, but the big city offered no hospitality to him. He had no money, and no way of making any, and he was too afraid of strangers to plunge out into a city full of them.
Carl moved in a few days later, and Lenny never knew if the man and his mother had actually gotten married or not, nor did he care. The man was always in the house, watching Lenny as he came in and out, his eyes always following the boy until Lenny felt like a piece of food being devoured by the hungry eyes. Carl would show up at any time, in any place.
He cared nothing for Lenny’s instinctive desire for privacy or his shyness. Lenny would be taking a bath, and the door would open and Carl would come in. Sometimes Carl would use the bathroom, making no attempt at modesty, and sometimes he would just stand by the tub and stare down at Lenny until Lenny wished that he could sink under the water and just disappear.
If Carl would decide that he was in a romantic mood, he would ignore Lenny’s presence altogether while he made the overtures to Lenny’s mother. Once, while Lenny sat across the room staring open-mouthed over the top of a book he was reading, the man opened his mother’s blouse. Lenny felt a wave of nausea as his mother’s huge, flabby breast came into view, but he watched with horrified fascination at what Carl did right there with him watching.
And now, Lenny thought, his eyes filled with bitter tears of pain and humiliation, Carl had raped him!
He was only half conscious of the fact that it was over. He heard Carl get up from the bed, but he lay where he was as though dead.
“Don’t say anything about this to your old lady, okay?” Carl said finally.
Lenny opened his eyes, his anger coming to life again. “You know I will,” he snapped fiercely.
Carl smirked viciously as his hand went into his pocket. The hand emerged holding a knife. There was a click, and the blade gleamed wickedly in the light. “I don’t think you will,” he said, stooping over Lenny again. Lenny said nothing. For a brief moment he met Carl’s eyes, then he looked away, defeated.
“That’s better,” Carl said with a small laugh, closing the knife. His hand came back to Lenny’s leg. “Besides, I like you. You and I can have a lot of fun together.”
Lenny shuddered beneath the hand. “Don’t worry,” Carl went on, stroking the leg brazenly. “It’s always rough the first time, but you’ll learn to like it, you’ll see.”
From that time on, Lenny was never safe from Carl’s twisted desires. He never knew when Carl might appear in the room, sometimes waking him from his sleep in the middle of the night. The man was insatiable, and the more Lenny fought against him or suffered from the acts, the more pleasure Carl seemed to derive from them.
After a time a merciful numbness began to develop in Lenny’s mind, and he ceased to care. It was something that happened from time to time to his body, something he no longer cared about.
It was several weeks