Kitten with a whip (13 page)

"Nothing," said Buck.

*Tou got it all, man," Pancho added.

"What do you fellows do?" David asked. "I mean, you got jobs of some kind or are you still in school or what?"

"No, we don't go to school," said Pancho. "We got work permits."

"But we don't bruise ourselves," Buck elaborated. "We just kind of move around. Haven't made up my mind what to do yet. Something big, Hke."

"Yeah, might as well shoot high," David said agreeably. He began to edge into his foremost topic. 'Too bad about Jody's troubles."

"That Jode bitch." Pancho wore his showy grin but he gave a httle twist to his neck unconsciously. "Every time, comes up smelling Hke roses." He glanced Buck's way and said quickly, * But I guess you could do worse, Dave."

Buck shrugged. "All rigged with the same standard equipment."

"Well, you understand this isn't a permanent arrangement," David said.

"What you knocking?" Pancho was still talking to Buck. "Wasn't it you who told me when you and

My-

"Shut up," Buck advised quietly. Pancho did. David tried to fathom the undercurrent to the conversation but couldn't. Presently, Buck remarked, "Okay, she's got a big-type opinion of herself but she's not too far out. Just needs to be slapped around now and then. Right, Dave?"

"I wouldn't know."

He had no time to reach his point. The three girls came in, all of them now reeking of his wife's cologne. Jody was beaming with pride, "—and this is the kitchen and out there's the patio I was telling you about. With the feet-up chairs, like Hollywood?"

Her tourists were plainly impressed too, by the appreciative way they looked David over again. Nina said, "It wouldn't pain me none to get around with somebody like you. Her expression was undoubtedly supposed to be sultry and he had no idea how best to fend off her juvenile fawning. All he could think about

was, My God, she's making eyes at me and she doesnt even have a bust yet, to speak of.

There were things worse than Jody.

Pancho got into the act, clowning again. In a high-pitched mock-indignant voice, he asked Nina, "What about me, precious? Don't make me cry!"

"Big deaV' she scoflFed. "The only thing you ever bought me was a box of rubbers."

"So don't push your luck or I'll start letting you take your chances."

"Big deal."

"Oh, you kids shut up." Midge was gazing raptly out the back door into the dark. "No swimming pool? I expected sure you'd have a swimming pool, with your dough. A swim sure would go good about now, a hot night like this."

Buck shoved toward her one of the highballs that David had prepared. "Take a dive into that."

Nina said, "Yeah, don't hot up, hot down."

David had made the drinks weak, not wanting things to get out of hand. But as the pack jostled out of the kitchen toward the hving room, he saw Pancho surreptitiously taking the bottle along. The cushiony front of Midge's sweater pushed against David's elbow, lingering, and she was looking up at him calculatingly. "Oh, guy!" she exclaimed softly, invoking some deity beyond his experience. "You must have really gone hot for her."

"Nothing like that," he said, trying to escape the press of her breasts. "Just trying to give the kid a break."

"I like older men, too. I don't mind it when they go for kids."

Jody turned up to take possession of David's other arm. "You wouldn't be trying to cut in on my date, would you, two-legs?" she inquired sweetly.

"Your date?" Midge echoed. "Guy, that's a laugh, considering everything."

"It's my party so unless you want to get popped in your fat boobs—"

David cut in to keep the quarrel from deepening. ''Doesn't anybody want to eat? I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm hungry."

He had said the right thing. The five of them sur-

rounded the food as if it were an enemy. David managed to gather up the makings of a lunch meat sandwmch before the coffee table was swept clean. He retreated to his big easy chair, the husband's household throne from which he had always dominated the room in the evenings. Not tonight. He might be able to influence this mob of gobbling ruffian youngsters, but never dominate. To attempt that would be to ram headlong into their chief characteristic, the bold stripe that ran through and motivated and even animated each of them: defiance. That was their overriding reaction to anything, even to their loose suspicious friendships with each other. Defiance was actually their pride and their joy, and the object of it didn't matter any more than the consequences; only their attitude mattered to them, the childish reactionary attitude that had become a thing in itself. And had they the sense to reahze this was the god they bowed down to, they would have defied it, too. They had never outgrown the formidable conservatism of infancy. They would never reach adulthood.

For that moment, as apart from them as from zoo animals, he felt sorry for them. He was in trouble but they were doomed.

He couldn't figure out where they came from, what hand had shaped thom. They weren't mentally deficient although they didn't reveal the effects of any education at all. He knew that all younger generations contrived their own private languages for reasons of distinction and secrecy as they writhed through their most uncomfortable growing period, the aching skinless years after puberty. But the jargon of Jody and her friends seemed carried further somehow into the realms of the vulgar and the inexact and the senseless, as if they had no real desire to communicate at all. He had a brief vision of their being tired; not knowing it, of course, in the galvanic spasms of their youth, but being bone-weary just the same. Maybe they regarded life as something to be gotten over with so they could lie down and rest; maybe they were the end products of all the proud struggling generations before, half a dozen millenna of world-weariness had been settled on them and they were—in more than their gibberish—the hving end.

The dying end. They didn't care. Their air of defiance struck David as beariag a strong taint of death-wish.

He came back to earth and tried to see them as individuals. Pancho—he was easy to dismiss as a product of the border, perhaps too easy. Nina—well, the disfigurement of the mastoid scar might have warped her life. And he had gathered from something she'd said that she was living in a foster-home, not her first. Midge—he didn't know what had brought her here; he still felt, without tangible evidence, that she came from a fairly well-off home, maybe even well-to-do. She had carried in, besides her purse, a sort of large metal dispatch case that bore what he supposed was her monogram. It looked expensive, whatever it was. But what about Buck Vogel? And Jody? After two days with Jody, he still couldn't figinre her out or anticipate her or locate any common ground. Even more so with Buck, the champiag blond curried animal who might have been created yesterday. Who were they all? It didn't seem possible that the same society that offered straight clear roads up to his own sort of life should let these kids go so far astray. Yet, was there reaUy such a vast difference between hdmself and them, was he as high and mighty superior as he would Hke to think? Take his own jargon of stress engineering. How many people outside the profession could understand that cabalistic tongue? And perhaps there lay a clue to the origin of his guests. They too were professionals. Brought into a world childishly muddled, they had become professional children.

"Old gloomy guts." Jody giggled, perching her bottom on the arm of his chair. She clanked the neck of the bourbon bottle against the rim of his glass. Its emptiness surprised him; he'd been meaning to go slow. "Fill up," she commanded. "This is cloud tSne, remember?"

"Coining out party," Nina said from the sectional. "Jody came out of the Hall."

'Tfeah, how'd you like it in there?" Pancho asked, his eyes spiteful. "You sugar up to Queen Mary?"

Jody rubbed her knuckles. "I creamed her the first night, stinky. Another thing, they haven't named a crap-per after me yet."

"Ah, take it easy," Midge said.

David said, "Careful where you put that drink, will you? This carpeting is brand new and I don't want anything spilled on it."

Sulkily, Buck picked up his glass from the floor and put it on the coffee table. "Couldn't make a spot, too danm weak. Hey, Jody, unlatch the bottle over 1 here, will you?"

Resentments were flying all over the room, bouncing off the walls, piercing each other, none combining yet. David tried to clear the air. He fiddled with his newly filled glass, the one he wasn't going to touch. "Help yourseB to the bourbon. I was thinking, it being Jody's eighteenth birthday and her party, we ought to congratulate her."

Buck, towering on the other side of the room, squinted at him. "Today? Tody eighteen?"

Jody's face tightened. "Why not?"

"Your birthday's not for another four-five months, that's why not. 1 ought to know, that's why not. Eighteen —Jesusl" The others were laughing at her. "The Adult Authority gone to your head?" The others laughed more.

"You better close your hole, small time," Jody said fiercely. "I can have a birthday party any time I please."

It was a running duel among their little society of five. The discomfiture of any one of them was worthwhile but best of all was the demeaning of either of the two strong ones. Buck or Jody. They were a sect of Assassins.

Jody, returning to her perch by his side, gave him a look the others didn't see. A pleading, embarrassed look that was quickly replaced by her smile for-public-consumption. For once, she had been hurt, and in some way that concerned him only, not the others. Why had she wanted that particular fib to be preserved? Whatever age she was didn't affect his precarious position one way or another. But evidently she had wanted him to believe she was fully eighteen, as if that meant true maturity to her, putting both of them on the same plane.

There was a dull silence, the two of them in the easy chair, the other four across the room, on or about the sectional. "I got platters," Midge said. "Anybody else got anything?"

Buck looked at Jody. "You got anything? Bennies, even?"

"How would I get anything?"

He crooked a thumb at David. "Because he*s got money."

"Well, I haven t got a thing." She ran a forefinger through David's hair. "I haven't needed kicks."

Buck swore disgustedly. "Well, I been broke royal. Guess we'll have to flake through on the whisky."

"Smile, baby doll," said Pancho. "I still got left one reefer."

"Only one?"

"What you think, they come up when I belch? Treat me good or I'll smoke it all myself." Buck gazed down at him steadily and Pancho laughed hastily. "Don't harden up on your buddy. We always go buddies, don't we?"

"Just don't you forget it; and then maybe I wont, either."

Pancho's face went mask-Hke with anger and his be-ringed hands closed into fists. But one of the girls said, "Oh, quit the yapping and Hght the thing, why don't you?" That reheved the pressure somewhat, the two boys turned away from each other, and Pancho began digging in his levi pockets.

Buddies . . . But not only were their bonds of friendship frayed and suspicious, David couldn't wholly unravel their sexual agreements. There was no definite pairing off between couples, as he had been accustomed to in his dating days. Jealousy existed among them to some ragged degree, but Buck made overt propositions to Nina at the same time he was fondling Midge's thigh, and Pancho did much the same, and nobody seemed to be surprised or to care. The only clear-cut relationship was David's own with Jody, and that was an irony he didn't rehsh.

A cloying stench arose in the room. The marijuana cigarette looked like one of the old tan-paper hand-rolled variety that were seldom seen any more. Limp and under-packed, it passed from hand to hand, burning quickly. David shook his head when Nina offered it to him. He was curious but he wanted to keep his mind

clear; he had stopped drinking for the evening, too. He watched Jody take her turn matter-of-factly.

The reefer lasted for two short puflFs a piece. When it was no longer smokable without burning tne Hps, Pancho carefully pinched out the butt and put it back in his pocket. David couldn't see that the narcotic had any effect on any of them. The general atmosphere became less charged with tension than before but that could be attributed to the hquor or even the food. As the conversation began to dwindle, Midge opened her metal case. It contained phonograph records—Jody had obviously told them about his hi-fi set. David got up and put tne records on rather than have any of the kids fooling around with the equipment. He returned to his chair, wondering what the youngsters were dancing to these days.

They didn't dance. They didn't respond to the music with any physical movement at all. They sprawled full-length on the sectional and on the floor, their faces all pointed toward the record player, and hstened with scowls of concentration. David knew that he had no ear for music and very httle taste; what he liked to hear were comfortable sounds. But in Midge's collection every piece sounded to him like the one before: a monotonous pounding beat on every kind of percussion instrument, occasionally paralleled by wandering notes from a piano or intruded upon by a panting off-key saxophone. He could find no tune to follow, not a trace. It came to him that he was scowling as hard as the rest of them.

He had set the volume at what he considered a normal level but this didn't satisfy any of them. Twice he got up to increase the sound a few decibels; the second time Tody brushed him aside and turned the volume and bass knobs until the walls seemed to throb with the booming rhythm. He began to shout out an objection but changed his mind and cut it short. The noise was terrible but at least it was keeping his guests quiet.

He retreated to the kitdien and shut the door. He leaned on the sink, still feeling the beat of the muffled rhythm in his belly, and blankly contemplated the pair of miniature pots on the windowsill, each containing

a dwarf cactus. Virginia had bought them at last years P.T.A. carnival on the school grounds; that was during Katie's first few months of kindergarten and it was her ! loyal contention that her parents should at least buy something. Virginia didn't even like cacti; she said they always looked as if they were sufiFering. But onto the kitchen windowsill they went and there they stayed, by fiat of Katie. She was sharing her school with them. And the time that Virginia . . .