"Where's my son? He's supposed to help me."
"I'm your son."
The father studied Terry's face. "Yeah, I can see the resemblance to your mother. Her people always had that pallor. Like they was shut up in a root cellar," he said.
Terry put on the new suit he had bought with the money he had earned at the grocery and walked to the junior prom and convinced himself he really didn't care about the prom one way or another; he was just going there to watch the jocks and snarfs and frumps and socials and sluts with their pushed-up boobs jerk each other around. He stood by himself for most of the dance, creating the illusion of activity, taking a smoke outside, walking down the emptiness of the corridor to the boys' rest room, constantly fixing his glasses on his nose, lifting the corner of his mouth in an expression that could be interpreted as either disapproval or interest.
Then he asked a girl to dance. Her father was a Mason and real estate broker who sold lakefront lots in the mountains to people from the North, and the family lived in a two-story brick house with a gazebo on the lawn, on a hill above the town. She was plump across the middle and chubby under the chin, but she looked cute with her Dutch-boy haircut, and she had always spoken to him in the halls, unlike most of the girls whose families had money.
"I'd love to dance, Terry," she said, then leaned close to his ear, her breath husky and cold and scented with raspberry from the wine coolers the jocks had been handing out in the parking lot. "I have to go to the bathroom. I'll be right back."
The girl walked with two of her friends down the corridor, the three of them looking back at him briefly and giggling. He went out the side exit and lit a cigarette in the shrubbery and looked up at the moon. Then he realized the window to the girls' rest room was right behind him, the top portion of the glass pulled down for ventilation.
"Did you check that suit? Neon blue with white socks. He must have gotten it at a black funeral home," the plump girl said.
"Don't knock those socks, Jenny. They match his dandruff," another girl said, and the three of them howled.
He stood a long time in the shadows, his cheeks tingling, the blood singing in his ears. Then he walked down the empty street, back into his own neighborhood, the music from the dance fading behind him. The sodium street lamps glowed like a gray vapor on the clapboard houses, the outdated cars, and the vegetable gardens that people grew out of necessity, not choice. He walked past his house on the alley where his parents were watching television, out to the lounge on the highway, where the vinyl upholstery was red and black and the bartender was built like a steroid addict and wore gold earrings and black leather, and the traveling salesmen stayed late.
The man who picked him up at the bar said he was from Raleigh but he had a Yankee accent.
"If I could buy you the best thing in the world, what would it be?" the man asked.
"Buster Bars at the Dairy Queen. I ate twelve of them once," Terry said.
"You're still all boy, aren't you?" the man said, and touched his hair in the car.
At the motel Terry ate the Buster Bars out of a paper bag, taking his time, enjoying each bite while the man tried to suppress the discomfiture his desire was causing him.
"There's a refrigerator over here. You can save some of them for later," the man said. "I'll think about it," Terry said. When they made love Terry realized for the first time in his life the power a female, or one taking her role, could exercise over a man.
Later, the man showered and dressed and began talking about a trip he was taking to Hollywood with his son, who went to a private college in Massachusetts. A neon sign glowed through the curtain and gave a peculiar purple hue and shape to the man's mouth, like a distorted flower. Terry could not remove his stare from the man's mouth and the way it moved against the pallor of his skin. He found himself becoming angrier and angrier, although he didn't know why.
"Why don't you stop talking? Why don't you shut up about your son?" Terry said.
"Beg your pardon?" the man said, turning from the mirror where he was knotting his necktie. When Terry didn't reply the man grinned in the mirror and continued knotting his tie. "I'd like to call you when I'm in town again. This evening was special for me, Terry. You make me feel young."
Terry felt a rage like someone kicking open the door to a furnace next to his skin. He drove the man's head down on the toilet bowl and smashed his mouth again and again on the rim until the porcelain was striped with red from the top of the bowl to the waterline. Then he emptied the man's wallet and ripped his watch off his wrist and his class ring off his finger and shook the wallet's contents into the toilet bowl and dropped the wallet in on top of them.
"There's still a Buster Bar in the fridge," he said, and jiggled with laughter.
Nine months in the state reformatory, then one day after his eighteenth birthday he was discharged and his records sealed. Not a bad deal. He got a GED inside and learned how to make prune-o, hot-wire a car, cook down diet pills and shoot them up with an eyedropper, and dive Dumpsters for people's credit card and phone and bank account numbers.
But the revelatory event that would change his life came about by pure accident.
He wandered into a gun show at the high school gym. The building was packed with hunters, collectors, Civil War enthusiasts, competition shooters, people Terry had never taken seriously and did not take seriously now. But at one display table was a group of four men who were different from everyone else in the room. Their bodies had the hardness of professional soldiers, and they wore neatly trimmed goatees and black T-shirts and their arms were scrolled from the shoulder to the wrist with intricate tattoos. They grinned at the people drifting up and down the aisle, but there was no mistaking the black electricity in their eyes, the dried testosterone in their clothes, the invasive look that made other people swallow involuntarily.
Their table was spread with Lugers and Nazi memorabilia. Terry picked up a pamphlet with a headline about a Zionist Occupational Government.
"What's a Zionist?" Terry asked.
One of the men pushed a chair toward him with his foot. "Have a seat, kid," he said, then rested his arm across Terry's shoulders.
The man's arm felt heavy and thick across the back of Terry's neck, a sensual heat and power transferring from the man's body to his. When Te
rry glanced out at the people in the aisle, their eyes quickly turned away. Terry felt his loins tingle like a swarm of bees.
It WAS dusk at the compound now, the river streaked with the last gold light of the day, the air cool and smelling of cut hay and Carl's prize Angus, which were drinking in the slough.