Not a Creature Was Stirring(5)

Myra was out there somewhere, getting a bug in her ass about dear old Daddy. Myra always had a bug in her ass about something. That was her thing. Just like being a first-class son-of-a-whore was Daddy’s thing.

Just like gambling was his thing.

He thought about calling Bennis and decided against it. She’d got him out of the hole that first time without asking questions. She’d get him out of this one the same way. He wasn’t going to ask her. In direct contradiction to the way he lived and the things he said when he had anyone but Bennis for an audience, Chris had a streak of moralism in him. Bennis would let him bleed her forever. For precisely that reason, he couldn’t go to her. After all, he was the one with the nice little chunk of family money. Bennis had what she made and nothing more.

(We’re gonna take your thumb.)

They were going to take his thumb. Yes, they were. And after they took his thumb they were going to take the rest of him, piece by piece, because this time he was in for $75,000 and there was no way he could pay it. Not now, not tomorrow, not two days from tomorrow. What the hell had he bet in on, anyway?

Did they know about Engine House? Probably. But he knew his father. Engine House was a fortress. Daddy was the ultimate paranoid.

He rubbed his hands against his face and went back to trying to think.





4


“You must understand,” the chairman of the English department was saying, “no matter how liberal the times have become, we cannot, in cases like this, ignore the traditional consequences.” The chairman of the English department looked like a fish wearing a toupee. At least, he looked that way to Teddy Hannaford, and Teddy had always prided himself on his powers of observation and his ear for a good metaphor. Simile. Whatever. The chairman of the English department was a turd, and all Teddy wanted on earth was not to have to listen to him.

Unfortunately, at the moment he had no choice. He sat awkwardly in the chairman’s visitor’s chair, his right leg in its brace as stiff as a length of hardwood, thinking they could have saved half an hour if the chairman had just fired him outright. Instead, the fish was making a speech. And a banal one at that.

Teddy started to put a hand to his head and stopped himself. Unlike everybody else in the family, he had not been born with hair that flourished under any and all conditions. He was going bald at the top and thinning in every other place. It was not something he could think about with charity. They, after all, were just fine—Bennis and Emma and Bobby and Chris and even Anne Marie. He never counted Myra, because Myra was a housewife. Nobody took housewives seriously. But the rest of them—. Emma was young and pretty. Chris was screwing every blonde in Southern California. Anne Marie was always in the society magazines. Bobby had been given the biggest chunk of money. And then there was Bennis.

Sometimes, when he went into the Waldenbooks in Kennebunk and saw all those ridiculous books taking up more shelf space than Dreiser, he wanted to scream. Bennis had been the pain of his life for as long as he could remember. Here she was again, making idiots of them all with stories about unicorns and knights in shining armor. They even carried her trash in the college bookstore. And The New York Times Magazine had done a silly article called “The New Face of Fantasy Fiction” and put Bennis right on the cover.

No matter what the chairman of the English department said this interview was about, it was really about Bennis. Teddy knew. He also knew it was Bennis’s fault his leg was in a brace and his knee wouldn’t bend. He hadn’t figured out how that worked—Bennis had been in Paris the day Daddy had taken him for a ride and tried to kill him—but he was sure he would be able to unravel it if he put his mind to it.

The fish squirmed in his chair, cleared his throat, and tried a smile. “There is also,” he said, “the question of your alleged motive in this, uh, action.”

“Motive?” Teddy could practically feel the antennae rise up out of his head, like the retractable ears on a Martian in a fifties alien invasion movie.

“Miss Carpenter,” the chairman said, “claims you made this suggestion to her as the means by which she could receive credit on a paper you were writing for NEJLA with research you had used from her final project in Victorian Authors.”

NEJLA was the New England Journal of Literary Arts. What the fool was trying to say was that Susan Carpenter claimed Teddy had told her she’d have to sleep with him if she wanted her name on the article he was submitting to NEJLA on women in the Victorian novel. Where the fish had it wrong was in that bit about “using some of Miss Carpenter’s research.” He had not used some of Miss Carpenter’s research. He had stolen her paper outright.