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!
CHAPTER THREE
Before long, Lenny had become highly skilled in his trade. His looks had ripened into full bloom, and the prices that Carl asked for him had risen accordingly. Lenny’s cut was five dollars now, and Carl kept the other five or ten for himself. The tin can under the bed had been replaced by a strongbox, and occasionally Lenny would take some of the money and spend it on new clothes or something for himself.
His