Chapter 4
Ellen thought about what had happened for the entire day. She would have to talk to Joel and discuss with him the reasons why she wanted Keith seeing a psychiatrist. It went without saying that she wouldn't be able to give Joel her real reasons for having their son psychoanalyzed. So she tried finding some excuses in her own mind that might make her husband understand the need for their son to visit a "shrink."
Since Saturday was half-a-day, Joel usually returned from the bank by three. But at four, he still hadn't returned, nor had he phoned. This was unusual to say the least, but Ellen assumed her husband had been caught up in some minor bank squabble, and it would take some figuring on his part to set everything straight.
By five-thirty, her husband still hadn't come home. She phoned the bank, but there was no answer. The place was definitely closed. In all the years she had been married to Joel, this had never previously happened. She was convinced something was wrong.
When Keith came home from work, at six, she told him his father hadn't come home yet, and this bothered the boy.
"Did you phone him and tell him what went on between us?" he asked, thinking his mother, in her naiveté, might have felt it incumbent on her to tell her husband what had transpired between himself and her. If so, his father might be off in some bar, on a drunk.
But Ellen insisted she had neither spoken to, nor seen Joel, his father, since the man had walked out of the house earlier in the day. Now Keith was somewhat worried.
He knew his father was the main source of income for the house. Without his father, they would be in trouble, and he didn't know why, but he had a feeling his father had no intention of showing up.
He sat up with his mother, waiting the whole night, and the following morning, they phoned the police. An investigating patrolman came; they gave him all the information concerning her husband, including a photo, and he went away.
Ellen felt queasy. She was afraid something had happened to her husband. But it wasn't until the following day that she had her answer. The bank had reasoned precisely the opposite from the way Joel Blackton had thought. The moment they were told, by the police, that one of their employees was missing, they ran an immediate check on their books and cash reserves, and they discovered more than four hundred-and-fifty thousand dollars was missing. They informed the police and an A.P.B. was put out for Joel Blackton, but the police were fairly certain that unless the man was a fool, he would no longer be in the vicinity.
Ellen was informed in the afternoon, and when she was told, she fainted. When Keith came home, a police matron was with his mother, and she told the youth what had happened. The boy knew he would have to go to work full-time from then on. He also knew he would never go to college, which didn't really bother him since he would have felt wasted there, anyway. Keith assured the matron he would take care of things, and the matron left.
He felt frustrated for a moment, deserted by his father, but the frustration suddenly yielded to elation. There was no way in the world his mother would ever be able to tell his father what had happened. More, his mother was his now, all his, to do with as he pleased, and when she was over the shock of his father being gone, it would please him to do all kinds of things with her, things she had never done with his father. His old man had always been somewhat straitlaced when it came to sex. Unlike his dad, Keith had read lots of books, and though he'd had the opportunity to practice on some female classmates when he had been in high school, he had resisted temptation because his mother was the woman whom he loved. Oh, yes, he loved her, though admittedly in a perverted way. Perverted not only in that he had desires to fuck her, but in that he wanted to watch others fuck her and do all kinds of things to her.
He had bided his time, waited, and on his seventeenth birthday he had lost his virginity by slipping it to his mother when she had been half asleep. But his father, by going away, had unwittingly given the boy the best birthday present ever, because he had given Keith his mother, Ellen Blackton, to do with as he wished.
In fact, in order to celebrate, Keith decided he would throw a party. First, he and his mother had to straighten things out about household support. He had already started working full-time, and his mother, who really wasn't too skilled at anything, had finally gotten a job as a receptionist at one of the local offices on the main drag in Baldport, on Long Island, which was where they lived. She was able to hop the bus to work every day, which meant he had the car. Having passed Driver's Ed in high school, Keith, at seventeen, already had his driver's license, and so drove to Valley Trickle, the next village to Baldport, where he continued to work at the photo studio. Between his mother and himself, they managed to bring home three hundred dollars a week, which, while a long way from being a worthwhile salary, was at least something on which they were able to live without having to dip into the small savings account his father had left in his mother's name.
"We don't need him," he told his mother on the following Friday night. "We'll never need him again. I'm gonna take care of you the rest of my life."
"Stop it!" she snapped. "Someday I'll get old and ugly, and you won't care about me. Besides, I don't want more of what you've already done to me."
"Who the heck d'you think you're kidding?" he laughed. "You want it, you want it more than ever."
"But not from you," she snapped. "It's wrong."
"I see," he nodded. "From someone else, anyone else, it would be all right, huh?"
"Yes," she nodded. "Anyone else isn't my son."
"Shit! I'll bet you'd fuck for the whole neighborhood before you'd put out willingly for me again."
"What's wrong is wrong," she insisted.
"How d'you know what's really wrong?" the boy asked. "When we fucked, you loved it. What the hell is wrong with loving to fuck?"
"Please, Keith!"
"All right," he told her. "All right, tell you what. I'll throw a little party here tomorrow night, and you can have your pick of a whole bunch of single guys I know your age."
"What?"
"Where I work, in the Valley Trickle Mall, there're a lot of single guys," he told her. "We'll have a party here, you'll meet some of them, and who knows, maybe you'll find a guy you like."
"But why?" she asked.
But Keith didn't answer. Ellen was going to learn things the hard way.