LORD RANDY, MY SON
Introduction to
LORD RANDY, MY SON:
We were plunging up a dangerously twisting valley road in Madison, Indiana. The tires squealed like shoats and I cowered in a far-right corner of the front seat. It was a big car, and he continually executed four-wheel drifts around curves that sent the back wheels over the edge. I got one clear view down into the green and handsome valley in which Madison nestled as we tipped precariously, and he accelerated going into another turn. Behind us, I suddenly heard the growler of an Indiana State Trooper as his gumball machine flashed a warning red. He was coming up on us fast. The speed limit was twenty on these lunatic curves, but the lunatic behind the wheel was doing almost seventy. I was grateful for the fuzz coming up on us; I might spend the right in the slammer as unwilling accomplice to the driver, but by God I’d be alive to be arraigned. The driver could clearly see the fuzzmobile in his rear-view, but he didn’t seem to give a damn. He floored the accelerator and the big sedan surged around another curve. I think I screamed. (Most unusual for me. I used to drive a dynamite truck in North Carolina, than whose road there are none twistier, and I’m not easily shook. But aside from Norman Spinrad’s driving, I’m a good passenger, also having raced sports cars. But this time...)
Finally we mounted the crest of the hill and the big sedan let out full. Around 110 I yowled for the driver to stop before that bloody Indiana cop sailed right up our tailpipe. He grinned lopsidedly—which is the only way he can smile—and hit the brakes. We slewed to a stop, half into the oncoming lane, and I collapsed against the seat. The fuzzmobile jazzed in and around us, barely missing us, and locked brakes. The whipcord cop came on the run, his face spotted with fury. He took seven-league strides and was shrieking even before he got his head in the window. His gun was drawn. “You dumb sonofabitch!” he yelled, the throat cords standing out in cunning relief. ‘You know how fast you were goin’, you ignorant goddam clown? You know you coulda killed me and you and everybody else on this goddam road, you goddam dumb ... oh, hi, Joe.”
He grinned and holstered the big-barreled weapon. “Sorry, Joe, didn’t recognize you.” He grinned hugely, shrugged his shoulders as if he knew it was the Natural Order, and walked away. He pulled out fast, Joe slipped it into drive and burned rubber following him. “Friend of mine,” said Joe L. Hensley. Grinning lopsidedly. I think I fainted.
Carol Carr says Joe L. Hensley is a teddy bear. Sure he is.
Change of scene: Fort Knox, Kentucky, 1958. I am standing in front of the Captain, CO of my infantry company. He is very unhappy with me. I have hornswoggled him. I have been living out of the barracks in a trailer for the past six months though I’m no longer married, which he has only recently found out. He is furious with me. I have broken every rule imaginable in his company. He hates me a lot. He is yelling that he will see my ass in Leavenworth, and he means it. I suddenly break and run, dashing out of his office, through the orderly room, down the hall, and into the day room. I get into the phone booth and close the door, pulling the receiver with me. The slatwood lower half of the booth hides me from sight. I get my number in Madison. “Joe!” I howl. “They’re tryin’ to railroad me. ... HALP, JOE!” They have located me now, they are trying to get into the booth. I have my leg locked in position, holding it closed. They take a fire ax and break the glass They drag me out: I’m still clutching the receiver screaming, “HALP, JOE!” They haul me back into the Captain’s office. He puts me under armed guard until the court-martial papers can be drawn up. ‘Your ass will die in Leavenworth!” shouts the Captain, becoming apoplectic.
Within two hours there are three, count ‘em, three Congressional Inquiries on the Captain’s desk. Why are you annoying Pfc Ellison? one of them says. Leave Pfc Ellison alone, a second one says. Pfc Ellison has friends, the third one warns. Then Stuart Symington’s inquiry comes in, and the Captain knows he has been outgunned. He sentences me to one week washing barracks windows. My ass never sees the inside of Leavenworth. The Captain has a nervous breakdown and is sent to the Bahamas to recover, if possible. Joe L. Hensley is out there in Madison, Indiana, grinning lopsidedly.
Carol Carr says Joe L. Hensley is a pussycat. Better believe it.
Hensley is not to be believed. Legend-in-his-own-time kind of thing. He is one of the most gigantic men I’ve ever seen. Well over six foot six, he is solid meat from top to bottom, with a fuzzy crew cut that makes his head look like one of those plaster gimcracks you used to be able to buy in Woolworth’s that you plant the grass seed in, and it grows out to look like Joe’s crew cut. He has a face made of Silly Putty and he loves to twist it into imbecilic expressions, giving the impression he is a waterhead. It only serves to lull the opposition into a false sense of security. One night in a bar in Evansville, Indiana, Joe and I were braced by a pair of lummoxen who wanted to brawl. Joe got that cockeyed grin on his face, began making guttural sounds like Lenny in Of Mice and Men and burbled, “Sure, I’d like t’fight, uh-huh, sure, sure I would,” and he went over to a brick wall and started pounding it with his “dead” hand—the one with the nerve ends dulled from having been scorched in a fire—until the bricks shattered and his hand was ripped and torn and bits of bone were sticking out through the torn skin and blood was all over the place. The two bully boys suddenly went very green, one of them murmured, “This guy is a nut!” and they fled in horror. I think I vomited.
All of which only begins to shade in the incredible personality of Hensley the Runamuck. Despite the fact that he is the very incarnation of Morgan/McMurphy/Yossarian/Sebastian Dangerfield / Gully Jimson all hoisted up into one petard, Hensley is a pillar of the community, a highly respected attorney whose political record reads as follows:
County attorney for Jefferson County, Indiana, in 1960: attorney for the Madison City Plan Commission from 1959 to 1962; elected to Indiana General Assembly in 1960, serving in 1961-62; chairman of the Governor’s Traffic Safety Advisory Commission from 1961 to 1965; member of the Criminal Code Commission of the state of Indiana; elected prosecuting attorney of the Fifth Judicial Circuit of the state of Indiana. In 1966 he ran for the legislature again in a five-county area and was shabbily defeated by 70 votes. It was possibly his coming out in favor of smut and pornography that turned the tide. It was called Bluenose Backlash.
Joe was born in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1926 and grew up there, and grew up and up and up and up. He attended Indiana University for both undergrad and law school work. He served two years overseas during Nastiness No. 2 in the South Pacific, and was recalled for sixteen delightful months during WW II 1/2, Korea. He is married to the lovely Charlotte (and she gotta be lovely for me to like her with a name like that, which was the name of my first wife, which if another story entirely) and has one child, Mike, age twelve.
I first met Hensley at a Midwestern Science Fiction Convention in the middle Fifties, and we have been chums ever since. There are those who contend we are the contemporary incarnation of the Rover Boys. Them as says it refuse to present themselves for personal attention by the deponents. Joe does not write nearly as much as he should. His talent is a natural, free-wheeling delight, kept in check chiefly by his analytical lawyer’s mind. The emotional content of a Hensley story, however, is usually several points higher than most of the current scriveners’ crop. I will let the madman speak in his own defense at this point:
“I began writing in 1951 and sold one of my early efforts to Planet Stories. Thereafter, I entered into an agreeable and interesting relationship with them. I would write a story and Planet would buy it. I began selling to other magazines and have had sales to such magazines as Swank (with Harlan Ellison), Rogue (with Harlan Ellison), Amazing Stories (with Harlan Ellison), and to most of the science fiction and men’s magazines, such as Gent, Dapper and others (without Harlan Ellison). A novel, The Color of Hate, was published in 1960; another, Deliver Us to Evil, is making the rounds; and a third, Privileged Communication (title suggested by Harlan Ellison), is under way, and will be completed this year.
“The story that follows I consider to be the best short story that I have written, ever. Other than that, deponent saith not.”
* * * *
LORD RANDY, MY SON
by Joe L. Hensley
He rebelled on the night the call came to leave the warm and liquid place; but in that way he was weak and nature was strong. Outside, the rains came; a storm so formidable that forecasters referred to it for all of the time that was left. He fought to remain with the mother thing, but the mother thing expelled him and in fear and rage he hurt the mother thing subtly. Black clouds hid the stars and the trees bent only to the wind.
* * * *
The night before, Sam Moore had let his son Randall play late in the yard - if “play” it was. The boy had no formal games and the neighborhood children shunned the area of the Moore house. Sometimes a child would yell at the boy insultingly from some hidden place, but mostly now they stayed away.
Sam sat in the chaise longue and watched dully, trapped in the self-pity of writing his own obituary, asking the timeless questions: Who were you? What did you ever do? And why me? Why me now?
He watched the child with concealed revulsion. Randall moved quietly along the back line of hedges, his small-boy eyes watchful of the other yards that bordered his own. There had been a time when it was a fetish with the neighbor children to fling a rock when passing, before the two Swiehart boys, running away after disposing of their missiles, had fallen into a well no one had ever known existed in the corner lot. Too bad about them, but Randall lived with the remembrance of the rocks and appeared to distrust the amnesty. Sam watched as the boy continued his patrol.
The pain within had been worse on that day and Sam longed for the forgetfulness of sleep.
Finally it was time.
* * * *
The first one came in silence and the memories of that night are lost in time. That one grew easily and alone, for only later life is chronicled. His people migrated and memory flickered into a mass of legends. But the blood was there.
* * * *
Item: The old man had gardened in the neighborhood for several years. He was a bent man with a soft, broken-toothed smile, bad English, and a remembrance of things past: swastikas, yellow stars, Buchenwald. Now and then he wrote simple poems and sent them to the local newspaper and once they had printed one. He was a friendly old man and he spoke to everyone, including one of the teenage, neighborhood queens. She chose to misunderstand him and reported his friendliness as something more.
On that day, a year gone now, the old man had been digging at rosebushes in the front yard of the house across the street. Randall had watched, sucking at a peppermint stick the old man had given him, letting the juice run from the corners of his mouth.
The black car had squealed to a stop and the three purposeful boys gotten out. They wore yellow sweaters. On the back of each sweater an eagle had been cunningly worked into the material so that the woven wings seemed to take new flight as shoulders moved. Each boy carried a chain-saw band with a black taped handle. Randall watched them with growing interest, not really understanding yet.
They beat the old man with powerful, tackle-football arms and he had cowered away, crying out in a guttural, foreign tongue. It was over quickly. The old man lay crumpled and bleeding in the rich, dark dirt. The boys piled back into the black car and peeled away at high speed. Randall could hear the sounds of their laughter, like pennants fluttering after them.
Two blocks away the land was not suitable for building. There was a steep hill. The tire blew there and the black car went over the hill gaining speed. It cartwheeled down, spouting enormous geysers of flame, a miniature ferris wheel gone mad; and fire gushed out with an overpowering roaring sound that almost blocked out the screams.
* * * *
In the morning Sam Moore awoke unrefreshed. On that Saturday the housekeeper-babysitter came on time for a change and he left them sitting in the family room. The television was blaring a bloody war movie, where men died in appalling numbers. Randall was seated, legs crossed, on the floor in front of the television, watching avidly. Mrs. Cable watched the screen and refused to meet Sam’s glance, lost in her own bitter world. There’d been a time when Sam had issued instructions before leaving, but those days were gone. Not very many women would care for a retarded child. Now, enmeshed in his own problem, and really not caring much, he said little. If the watching was casual and the safety of the boy only probable ... he had still carried out the formal, social necessities of child care.
He looked at the boy and something within him darkened. Ann had been brilliant and her pregnancy had been normal; but the birth had been difficult and the boy a monstrous problem. She had changed. The boy had not. Early tests on him had been negative, but physically there had always been a lack of interest, slow movement, eyes that could track and follow, but did not.
He could not force himself to approach the boy this morning.
“Good-by,” he said, and received a brief look upward with minor recognition involved. A boy is only three once; but what happens when he is three and eight at the same time? When he will be three forever?
On the television screen a dark-skinned soldier dragged his white captain from the path of an onrushing tank. Sam remembered the script. It was one of Hollywood’s message films. Comradeship would continue until the dark-skinned one needed another kind of help.
Outside, he failed to notice the loveliness of the day. He stood in front of the garage and considered. (With the rolling door down, the garage was tight. He could start the car and it would be easy. That was what Ann, his wife, had done, but for a different reason and in a different way. She’d swallowed a box of sleeping pills when he was out of town trying a case. That had been a long time ago after the hospitals and clinics, after the last of the faith healers with their larcenous, sickening morality, the confident, grasping herbalists, the slick charlatans and quacks to whom, in desperation, she’d taken the boy. Four years now. No one had examined Randall since.
(She’d never been really there after Randall was born. She’d wandered on for a while, large, sensitive eyes looking out from some faraway place, her mind a cluttered dustbin of what might have been.)
(“Just don’t touch me,” she had said. “I know they said we ought to have another, but don’t.... Please, Sam.” And that which was still partially alive in him had died. He knew it was the boy. Now ... it wasn’t that he’d not loved her, but he could recall her face only in the boy’s face, in that small and hateful visage, that face that had killed the thing Sam loved.)
He rolled up the garage door with a clang, and drove to law office. Another day, perhaps another dollar. There weren’t many days left now. Dr. Yancey had said six-months to a year and that had been more than four months ago; on the day they had opened Sam Moore and quickly sutured him again to hide the corrupt mass inside.
“Too far along,” Yancey had said, and then added the old words of despair that many men finally hear: “Nothing we can do.”
* * * *
Siddharta Gautama came easily in the park with the remembrance of elephants. Legends say that the trees bowed to him. His mother, Maya, felt sustained by an intense feeling of power. The blood was strong, but the child was slow and sheltered and the fulfillment never reached, the gift grown into vagueness, never fully used.
* * * *
Item: Randall sat under a tree in front of the Moore house. He watched the world around him with curious intensity. A honey bee flew near and he watched the creature with some concern, but it did not attack. They didn’t bother him much since that one had stung him in the spring, and he’d destroyed them all for a ten-block radius.
He could hear the loud noise long before he could tell from where it came. A sound truck blared close by. In a few moments it came to Randall’s corner and slowed. On its side there was a garish picture of a man in priestly robes holding a rifle in front of his chest, eyes flashing fire. The sign below said: “Father Tempest Fights Communism.” Music boomed over the speakers, decibels above the permitted limits. Randall held his ears. The sound hurt.
The driver cut the music back and turned up the volume in his hand microphone. “Big rally tonight!” he called. “Hear Father Tempest save the world and tell YOU how to right the infiltrators who would destroy us. High school gym, seven o’clock.” The voice took on a threatening note. “Don’t let your neighbors be there without you.” In the other seat beside the driver, a man in priestly robes smiled and made beneficent gestures as people came to doors and windows.
Overhead there were sudden clouds and a few drops of rain fell. Lightning bolted from the sky, missed the tall trees, and made a direct hit on the sound truck. Silence came and Randall removed his hands from his ears. People ran into the street and, in a while, Randall could hear a siren.
He left the front yard and went to the window at the side. From there he could see Mrs. Cable. She had managed somehow to sleep through it all. Her mouth hung open and she snored with an easy rhythm. The television was still on, hot with a soap opera now.
Randall began to pace the back hedge fence, guarding it. There’d been one boy who appeared friendly and would smile at Randall and then slyly do little things of pinching and hitting when no one watched. That was the boy with the BB gun, who shot the squirrel that took the bits of food from Randall’s hand, the boy who killed one of the fish in the fishpond. The squirrel still lived, but it was more cautious now. And there were still three fish in the pond. There had always been three, except for that one day. One of the fish now was not quite the same colour and shape as the others.
The big dog came into the yard through the hedge and they frisked together.
Randall smiled at the dog. “Nice dog,” he said. A stump of tail waved in adoration.
* * * *
Sam spent a dreary day in the office, snapping at his secretary, being remote to clients. Now he was not as busy as he’d once been. He refused cases that might drag. Partly it was the alien thing that grew inside, but partly—and he had a sort of sullen pride about it—there was the matter of being too good at his job. He’d surrounded himself with the job when Ann had gone, merged into it. Now he refused the proffered retainers to defend or prosecute that which he knew he wouldn’t live to see. It was a minor, ethical point, but a man takes greater cognizance of minor points when he begins to die.
His own decisions grew harder to make and clients read it in his eyes and voice. The motley mob that had once invaded his office fell to a whisper and soon, there was time.
He thought about the boy. He knew he’d ignored the child after Ann’s death and, worse, he’d hated the boy, relating it back to Ann, knowing that her suicide was a product of what the boy was.
The newspaper offered escape. The world grew more sour daily and so seemed easier to leave. Today two more countries had quit the United Nations. Sweden reported increased fallout. There was indecisiveness over a new test ban. Two African nations announced the development of their own bombs. In Mississippi a member of a fanatical white organization had shot and killed a circuit judge who’d sentenced nine men accused and convicted of lynching a civil rights worker. In his own state an amendment to the state constitution outlawing the death penalty had lost by a wide margin.
On the way home there was an ache in his back that had never been there before.
* * * *
Ching-tsai dreamed deeply on the night of coming. The chi-lin appeared to her. She dreamed and missed the dragons that walked the quiet skies. Once again the child was slow and sheltered and kept apart.
* * * *
Item: Mrs. Cable slept on. Keeping away from prime time, which was reserved for westerns, giveaway shows, comedies and the like, the television presented a program on a housing development in New York. They showed the tenements that were being replaced; they showed the narrow streets and the tired and dirty people. Cameras cleverly watched as the buildings came down and high-rise, low-rent apartments were built. The reporter’s voice was flat and laconic. Crime continued in the rebuilt area. The favourite now was to catch the rent collector in the elevator, strip him, and jam small change up his rectum. Rape increased, for the apartments were better soundproofed than the old tenements.
Randall watched. The people still looked tired and dirty.
After the documentary there was another soap opera. Mrs. Cable came awake and they watched together. This one was about a man and woman who were in love and who were married, but unfortunately not to each other.
* * * *
The house was hot and empty. Sam went to the open window and saw them. Mrs. Cable was stretched out on the chaise longue, a paper held over her eyes to block the fierce sun. Randall was at the goldfish pond that Sam had constructed in a happier year. Three hardy goldfish had outlived the last harsh winter and the indifferent spring. What they subsisted on, Sam could not guess. He knew that he didn’t feed them.
The boy held small hands over the pool and Sam watched covertly. It was as if the child felt Sam’s eyes on him, for he turned his head and smiled directly at the window. Then he turned again to the pool, trailing quick hands in the water. The right one came up gently grasping a goldfish. The boy passed it from hand to hand, inspecting it as it wriggled, then dropped it into the water and the hand sought another.
It was something that Sam had never seen before, but the boy did it with an air, as if it were an often-repeated act.
Randall had an affinity for animals. Sam remembered the incident of the dog. The back neighbors owned a large and cantankerous German shepherd that had been a neighborhood terror since acquisition. Once, when Randall made one of his periodic runaways, Sam had come upon the boy huddled against the dog. Sam stood watching, half expecting the animal, which its owners normally kept carefully chained, to rend and tear. But the dog made no overt move and only whined when Sam took the boy away.
Lately the dog’s conduct must have improved with age, for Sam had seen it playing happily around the neighborhood.
He made up a check and took it out to Mrs. Cable. It paid her for the week and she took it with good grace. Payday was the only time she unbent and showed any real desire to talk.
“Lots of excitement,” she said. “Lightning hit a truck right down the street. I was asleep, but Mrs. Taldemp was telling me. Two men killed.” She shook her head in wonder. “Right down the street and I missed it.” She nodded at Randall. “He’s coming along. He does things he didn’t used to do. Those mean little ones that used to throw rocks don’t come close any more. He used to try to run to them and give them his toys, but he just watches now if he sees one. They stay away when he’s outside.” She shook her head. “He still don’t talk much, but sometimes he’ll say something right out loud and clear when I ain’t expecting it.” She laughed her whinny laugh. “It’s a shame nothing can be done for him. You still trying to get him in that state dumb school?”
Sam fought the pain inside. “Not much use,” he said shortly. “They’re full. He’s way down the list to get in.”
He escorted her to the front door. On most days she kept conversation to a minimum, but today she wouldn’t run down.
“He’s sure quick. There’s a squirrel up in one of them trees. I turned my back and he was up there feeding it. I thought you said that old elm was rotten?”
Sam nodded. Every movement sent a wave of pain up his back.
“Well, he climbed up it and I had a dickens of a time getting him down. Don’t seem rotten to me,” she grumbled.
It was rotten. It had died this spring and never come out in leaves. Sam could see it vaguely out the back window. The other trees were in full leaf. He imagined that he could see buds and small leaves on the elm, but he knew he must be wrong.
He finally got Mrs. Cable out the door and called Doc Yancey. When that was done he eased gingerly into a chair. The pain receded slightly. The boy sat on the floor watching him with a child’s curious intentness, head cocked slightly, completely without embarrassment. Sam admitted to himself that the boy was handsome. His features were regular, his body wiry and strong. Once Sam had visited the State Mentally Retarded Home and the eyes of the children there were what he most remembered. Most those eyes had been dull and without luster. A few of the eyes had been foolers. Randall’s eyes were foolers. They were bright with the brightness of cold snow, but they lacked involvement with the world around him.
“You hurt, Father?” Randall questioned. He made a tiny gesture with one hand, as if he were testifying and had found a sudden truth and was surprised by it. ‘You hurt, Father,” he said again. He pointed out the window. “All hurt,” he said.
“Yes,” Sam said. “The whole world hurts.”
The boy turned away as Sam heard the car in the drive. It was Dr. Yancey. The man came in with brisk steps and Sam had a moment of quick, consuming hatred for the other man; the solid, green envy of the sick for the well.
Dr. Yancey spoke first to the boy. “Hello, Randy. How are you today?”
For a moment Sam did not think the boy would answer.
Randall looked at the doctor without particular interest. “I am young,” he said finally, in falsetto.
“He says that sometimes to people,” Sam said. “I think he means he’s all right.”
Yancey went into the kitchen and brought back water and a yellow capsule. “This won’t put you under.” He handed the capsule and water to Sam and Sam downed them dutifully. He let Yancey help him from the chair to the couch. Expert fingers probed him. The boy watched with some interest.
“You’re swollen, but there aren’t any real signs of serious organ failure. You really ought to be in a hospital.”
“Not yet,” Sam said softly. “There’s the boy.” He looked up at Yancey. “How long, Doc?” He asked it not really wanting to know and yet wanting to know.
“Not very long now, Sam. I think the cancer’s spread to the spine.” He kept his voice low and turned to see if the boy was listening.
Randall got up from the floor. He moved quietly and gracefully out of the room and down the hall. A light clicked on in the study.
“He’s sort of unnerving,” Sam said. “He’ll go back in the study and get down some books and turn pages. I’ve got a good encyclopedia back there and some medical books I use in damage cases. I suppose he likes the pictures. Sometimes he spends hours back there.”
* * * *
Some say Ubu’l Kassim destroyed his father two months before the coming. The shock of death and birth weakened the mother thing and she died a few years after. His life was confused, moving from relative to relative, slow maturation. Something within him hid from the world until early manhood.
* * * *
Item: The books were puzzling. There was so much in them that was so clearly wrong, but they were not cruel of themselves, only stupid and careless. He remembered the mother-thing and wondered why he had hurt her. The father-thing was hurt also, but he had not done that. There was no love in the father-thing, but the father-thing had never hurt him.
The books were no help.
Alone, unaided by what the world had become and what it meant to him, he made his decision. He made it for the one time and the one thing, putting the rest back, delaying.
* * * *
The pill was effective for a few hours and then it began to wear off. He took another and checked the boy. Randall lay in his bed, small body lost in covers, breathing slowly, evenly, his eyes open.
“Where is the mother?” he asked.
There were two feelings. Sam had the desire to destroy the boy and an equal feeling to catch the child up and hold him close. He did neither. He rearranged the covers.
“She’s gone far away,” he said softly to the boy.
Randall nodded.
Sam straightened the study. The boy had been at his books again. He put them back on the shelves. He went to his own bed. Sleep came quickly.
Outside, in the neighborhood, most lights were still on. People stared uneasily at their television screens. There was another confrontation, this time in the Near East. Hands moved closer to the red button, the button that man had made. The President spoke and tensions eased, for some. The world, for what it was and what all men had made it, would remain for a while.
For Sam there was a dream.
The faces of a thousand clients came and blended into one sick and ignorant and prejudiced face, a “never-had” and “never-will” face that whined the injustice of life as it spawned children to be supported by the myriad public doles. It was a face that Sam knew well, a face that pleaded for divorce and demanded alimony and plotted rape and confessed murder. It was a face that hated all minorities and majorities of which it was not the leading member, that cursed fate and defrauded welfare. Partly the face was familiar and he knew it, for it was his own face.
It was a dream built of fifteen years of practice. It was not a nightmare, for it was far better than life.
The dream fit life though, and at the moment of dreaming, if he could have made a rational choice, if the instinct for life had not been so strong and inbred, he would have chosen death.
He came almost to wakefulness once, but he slid back into the well where there was only one tiny circle of light. Ann and the boy were there. They touched him with soft hands. He turned them into the circle of life and their faces could be seen and those faces bore the same marks as his client-self face, cruel, sick, angry, and in pain. Their hands still touched him and he writhed to escape, revolted at the touch. With horrible pain and with tearing and burning he retched the gorge within him away.
He awoke.
Only one pair of hands was real.
Randall stood by the bed. The boy’s hands were laid lightly across the bed, resting and unmoving on Sam’s chest. There was something in the boy’s face, an awareness, a feeling. Sam could not read it all, but there was satisfaction and accomplishment and perhaps even love. Then expression wandered away. The boy yawned and removed his hands. He walked away and Sam soon heard the rustle of the silk comforter from the boy’s bedroom.
A spasm of empty pain came. Sam got up weakly and made it to the kitchen and took another pill and sat for a while on the couch until it took effect. He came back past the boy’s room and looked in. Randall lay straight in bed. There was a bright sheen of sweat on the child’s forehead. His eyes were open, watching and waiting.
“I am young,” the child said again, plaintively and to no one.
“Yes,” Sam said softly. “So very young.”
“There was a head thing,” Randall said slowly, searching for words. “Hurt doggy.” He reached a small finger out and laid it on Sam’s wrist. “Fish always hungry. I gave to them.” He shook his head. “See words, can’t say them.” Confidence came in his voice. “I will grow more quickly now.” He moved his hands off Sam’s wrist and closer to the abdomen. “All gone now. All gone every place,” he said, and the look of Sam’s bedroom came fleetingly again.
Sam watched without comprehension.
The cold, lost eyes watched him and the next words turned Sam’s blood cold. The boy’s voice came up in volume and with a ferocity that Sam had never heard before. “See things on teevee, read them in the books and papers, so many bad things, all hate out there like others hate me.” He touched his own small head. “So many things in here not ready yet.” The eyelids closed tight and a tiny tear came at each corner. “Not sorry. I will grow older,” Randall said, his voice a cruel, unhuman promise.
* * * *
There was Another who was born in a manger and died on a cross. That One was sheltered for a while and maturity was unforced.
But the new One, the One born for our times, would see man’s consuming hate of all others, so consuming that the hate extends even to himself. See it in Alabama and Vietnam and even in the close world around Him. See it on television and read of it in the newspapers and then grow unsheltered in this world of mass and hysterical communication.
Then plan. Then decide.
This one would come to maturity and ripen angry.
* * * *
Afterword:
As this story appears I will have passed my fortieth birthday, a dangerous time in itself. I suppose that this is a story that I’ve wanted to do for a very long time, but the writing of it and particularly the finishing of it, the polishing that makes a told-tale into a story, had a depressing effect upon me. I was unable to shake the feeling that in some way I was flaunting God. There was a time when I seriously considered withdrawing the story, but I’m glad now that I didn’t. In its way “Lord Randy, My Son” is a deeply religious story, combining that part of me which is best with that part of the world I recognize as worst, but then it’s always been a bad but interesting world. I am a lawyer by profession and I will admit that parts of the dream sequence are intensely personal.
If a writer is ever happy with any story, except the “next” one that he’s going to do, then I’m happy with this one.
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