Читать книгу Love's Pawn - Victor Jay - Страница 6

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 later that Carl brought a friend home with him one afternoon. Lenny’s mother was out, and Lenny had thought himself safe from any disturbance. He had just finished a bath, trying to find some comfort from the afternoon’s sultry heat. He was lying across his bed wearing nothing but a pair of jockey shorts, lazily reading a book when he heard the front door open and close.

His first thought was that his mother and Carl had returned home together. The footsteps were almost to his room before he realized that it was not a woman with Carl, but another man.

They appeared in the doorway before he had time to get up from the bed or cover himself. The man with Carl was fat and aging, an unattractive hulk of a man who seemed to overpower the room as he entered it.

“This is him,” Carl was saying to the fat man. “Lenny, this is Joe. Joe wanted to meet you.”

Lenny felt a new wave of revulsion as he recognized the expression on Joe’s face. Joe was staring brazenly at him, his wide eyes moving hungrily up and down the length of exposed body.

“Why don’t you two get acquainted,” Carl was saying. He was already backing out of the room, pulling the door closed behind him. His eyes met Lenny’s, and the warning in them was obvious. His hand patted the pocket which held the ever present knife.

“You’re very nice,” the fat man said when Carl had gone. He moved slowly toward the bed, his eyes glued to Lenny’s jockey shorts.

Lenny closed his eyes, fighting off the fury that threatened to explode within him. Someday Carl would pay for this—someday the whole rotten, stinking world would pay for the way he had been made to suffer.

The fat man was with him on the bed. Damp, eager hands tugged at the cloth around Lenny’s hips, and automatically, like a machine, his body responded. He had learned well from Carl, he knew just what to do and how to do it, and despite his hatred and the fact that there was no pleasure in it for him, he provided his partner with the maximum delight. He didn’t even bother to open his eyes afterward when the fat man got up, wheezing, dressed and left the room.

After that, there was not only Carl, but an increasing string of strange new friends that he brought home with him whenever the mother was out. They were a widely mixed assortment of men, some young, some old, some ugly and some not so ugly, but they all shared one thing in common—their undisguised lust for the sexual pleasure his body offered them.

It was weeks later before Lenny discovered what was going on. One of the men had just finished with him, and was beside the bed, dressing. Lenny was staring at him with blank eyes that gave no clue of his feelings, and wondering what made such animals of men, what drove them to the limits that they had reached.

The man finished dressing and looked down at him. “Who do I give the money to?” he asked in a business-like tone.

Lenny’s eyes widened slightly. “Money?” he repeated, puzzled.

The man stared at him for a moment before a look of comprehension came over his face. “Oh, I get it,” he said quietly. “Forget it, okay.”

The man left, and Lenny heard him talking to Carl in the hall outside. He lay on the bed and thought back over the past weeks. Money, of course. These men weren’t Carl’s friends, they were customers, and he was the merchandise Carl was selling. While he had been on this bed, satisfying the desires of all these strangers, Carl had been pocketing the money that they paid for their brief time with him.

Carl came into the room a short time later. He grinned at the expression on Lenny’s face. “So he told you about the money,” he said slowly.

“They’ve been paying you to shack up with me,” Lenny snapped, too angry now to care about the knife or Carl’s threats. “And you never told me about it.”

“Okay, okay,” Carl said with a wave of his hand. “Don’t let it get to you. Look, there’s no reason why we can’t both make a profit out of this. You got a right to a little spending money, so I’ll split it with you.”

He took his billfold out of his pocket and pulled out two one dollar bills, tossing them to the bed. “They give me five bucks. You get two of it, okay?”

Lenny knew that he had no real choice in the matter. But he had another reason, too, for nodding his head finally. The money. He had never had any money of his own and this was his chance to make some. Maybe eventually he could even earn his freedom from Carl. At any rate, he knew that he would have to continue enduring the procession of men coming in and out of his bedroom—he might as well be making some money while he was at it.

“Just one thing,” he said. He had grown hard and bitter during his time with Carl, and he knew that the value of his body could be an effective tool for handling Carl. “If we’re going to make a business of this, let’s keep it a business. Every time you come in here to see me, you’re throwing away that much money we could be making off of me. Okay?”

Carl was surprised, and for a moment Lenny expected him to become angry, but he thought about it for a moment and finally laughed again. “You’re right at that. I’ll have to hand it to you, you’re a smart little kid.”

After that Carl didn’t bother him. His greed proved to be more powerful than his lust. But if Lenny had expected to gain any freedom or rest for himself, he had been mistaken. Carl had taken him at his word, and the time that he had previously spent with Lenny was given over to new customers.

If Lenny was no happier than in the past, at least he was making a little money now, and his hoard was growing slowly but steadily. There were many times, he was sure, when Carl was paid more than the five dollars, but he didn’t risk the chance of asking about it. He took his two dollars each time and added it to what he had in the tin can under his bed. With the knowledge of his sexual power and the hold that it gave him over men, his shyness was quickly vanishing, and in its place was an arrogant disregard for anything and anybody. The world existed for him to get what he could out of it.

It was inevitable that his mother would find out eventually. Lenny didn’t know how it had been possible to keep things as they were for so long without her finding out. He considered it likely that she was spending her time making money in much the same way, and more than likely Carl was managing her business just as he was managing his own.

She came home one afternoon while Lenny was with one of Carl’s friends. Lenny felt the man in bed with him tense and jerk away. He opened his eyes and looked toward the door, to see his mother standing there, staring at them. She turned and walked away from the door.

When the man had left, his mother came in again, standing in the doorway with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, her voice and face emotionless. “Carl tells me you two been making a little spending money for yourselves,” she said.

“Why not,” Lenny answered her with a calmness that belied his true feelings. “It’s not a bad racket.”

“You got no beefs?” The question impressed him as a strange one, coming from her. He wondered, almost idly, if she were for the first time trying to express a motherly interest in him. More likely, he concluded bitterly, she was thinking about the legal risks.

“No beefs,” he told her curtly. He reached for the pack of cigarettes on the dresser, and lit one. This was another habit.

She shrugged, and left without saying anything more. After that they didn’t concern themselves with whether she was in or out of the house, and business picked up steadily.

No beefs? The hell he didn’t have any beefs! He’d been taken advantage of by his stepfather and by all the vile male creatures who’d come lusting into his bedroom.

It was time, Lenny decided, to start taking some advantage for himself!