Let's Go Play at the Adams'

When he had tried to get himself inside of the girl-dumb Barbara shaking her head No, No,

No-he had had the worst time finding out where. With humorless concentration, not to say

intensity, he had taken the failure hard: it defeated manly dignity. Nonetheless he knew

approximately where to look and so got his finger in: thereafter, he attempted to put his

penis into the same opening (were there two?). His reactions were discouraging. First, it

hurt; second, he was so excited that he came almost at once. If there was further remnant

memory, it was that Barbara made an angry-animal sound not at all like the sighs of love

and passion satisfied the world had led John to expect. Thereafter, considering the

unsatisfactory nature of the coupling, there was drowsing, desirable bliss. It was something

one could grow to like if done properly. There, exactly, was tomorrow's problem.

He was going to do it again, of course, but better if possible-for himself anyhow. No other

thought-no consideration of Barbara's actions and reactions, thoughts or feelings-so much

as shadowed his mind. Had he been asked about her, he would have said male fashion-that

he didn't give a shit.

125

Paul, obviously unaware of John's thoughts, had-equally and obviously-the same principal sub-

ject on his own mind as the somewhat thwarted night settled down. Unlike John, he was not

free to roam the creek in a rowboat or even ramble around the rather considerable piece of

McVeigh property. Instead he sat encapsulated in his room, a beating heart in the unresponsive

body of the house. But tomorrow-such was the relieved contract between parents and child-he

would not only be released again, but pitched out, free to run and play and torture a grown

girl. This whole adventure was for Paul like a string of erotic Christmas Days all in a row.

Like John-again-the thrust of Paul's thought was entirely sexual. Compared to other thirteen-

year olds, Paul was very nearly jaded. At five he had peeked at his naked older sister; at eight,

he had found his father's magazines; at ten, his imagination had already taken him far beyond

what the world could ever offer. At twelve, he understood that he was closed in and that his

best dreams would never come true because of "people."

Like John-still again-Paul loathed adults.

Yes, they held you down; yes, they dominated; yes, they kept you away from the fun; but Paul

had a deeper complaint. Yes, they were more stupid-by far. His contempt was the entire heap

of contempt of the "mind people" against the "no-neck people." He despised no-necks, and on

this point at least, he felt himself on sound footing.

Adults were unseeing, insensitive, slow, dull-witted and catastrophic in their makeup. They

smashed and blundered about. How could they be human at all? Paul was not related. He held

like the blade of his knife an absolute division between himself, and them, and the division

would never be mended. He could see where they could not; he was cheered when they wept;

he was clear where they were unclear. The only hitch to this was that they dominated. They ran

the world.

Paul's feeling was Jess one of hatred than pure

126

separation. They were not people. He did not grant their existence anymore than after

waking he granted the existence of his strange dreams. He did not grant the existence of

his parents (though he had to grant their power, surely enough). He did not grant the

existence of schoolmates; he did not grant the existence of so imperfect a world. Paul was-

given other times and circumstances---capable of an Auschwitz, an Inquisition, a Rape of

the Sabine Women. He would kill cheerfully, simply because the victims offended the pat-

terns of perfection he would then create. A world of Pauls would be-to his mind-a perfect

world.

To that extent, when he thought of Barbara, he thought only of her skin and of his knife

blade passing in and passing out, passing in and passing out, accompanied by the instant

appearance of blood. There! He would show them. In his night imagination he heard a

scream, but it was them screaming, not anyone in particular at all. It was great.

Only Dianne escaped his fervor: first, because she understood him and told him things;

second, because she was bigger and older; third, because she was fairly ugly and

uninteresting; and last, because she was his sister. Within this unsentimental roster of

priorities, her chief value to him remained that of storyteller, exciter.

Dianne was widely-· though not well-read. She devoured her mother's book-club novels as

fast as they fell through the mail. She poked and pried around the house and read

everything in it from Organic Gardening to High-Speed Emulsions (photography). She was

off to the library every time the family car went into Bryce. She was a fund of scattered,

not too well-considered, knowledge. Those things she shared with Paul, however, had a