Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page B

needs Small. I’ll see about it.”
    “Yeah, you do that, Charlie,” Spivack said, “and while you’reat it why don’t you see about your buddy Roscoe. I want that little bastard put on Report, is that clear? If he shoots me out one more time I’ll have his nurse’s license. Is that clear?”
    “All right; try to keep your voice down, Doctor.”
    “Charlie’s the only halfway decent one they’ve got,” Spivack said when they were walking again. “Know something? This fucking place was built in the nineteenth century and it hasn’t changed a bit. Look at that.” He pointed to a bench. “And you seen the benches in the mess hall? Antiques! Antiques! Get some faggot antique dealer up here and he’d pay a thousand bucks apiece for ’em. Listen. Little piece of advice. Watch out for Roscoe. First morning I was in here he let me sit in my own urine for an hour and a half. An hour and a half ! And mind you, this was after I’d asked him for a urinal seven times. Bastard kept telling me to go to the latrine, go to the latrine, go to the latrine.”
    “Why didn’t you go?”
    Spivack struck his own head with the heel of his hand in a spasm of exasperation. “You’re missing the
point
, Wilder! The point is, when a patient asks a nurse for a urinal he’s supposed to
get
it. Ah, Christ, I thought you showed a glimmer of intelligence, but you’re just as fucking dumb as all the other fucking – Look: get lost for a while, okay? My father and my sister are coming to see me tomorrow and I happen to have a few things on my mind.”
    So he was alone again, but it wasn’t long before he had his Small pajamas, which were heartening; then he joined a group huddled in one of the padded cells whose door had been propped open. The man with the newspapers was there – he had spread part of his collection on the floor for study – and among the others were two young boys, white and Negro, who sat deep in conversation against the rear wall.
    “… So we was all fooling around this vacant lot up behind the Breyer’s Ice Cream sign, see,” the white boy was saying, “and see, I should of gone home when the other kids did; that’s where I made my mistake. Anyways, it was getting dark and me and this Kovarsky was just kind of sitting there talking and smoking cigarettes behind the sign, and then he—”
    “Hold on a second, Ralph, you goin’ too fast. Who’s this Kovarsky?”
    “I just told you. He’s this big-shot kid in the neighborhood out home; all the kids are scared of him; I mean he’s, you know, real big and he talks tough and he’s got a Record. Breaking and Entering. He’s nineteen. Anyways, he says for me to stick around after the other kids go home and I says okay. I mean I know it was dumb but I guess I was kind of – I don’t know, kind of—”
    “Flattered, right?” the Negro boy said. “Sure, I can see that. So then what?”
    “So then he starts giving me cigarettes and telling dirty stuff about girls, telling the names of all the girls in the Senior Class he’s had innercourse with, and like that. You know.”
    “Yeah, shit, I know those kinda guys. How old’re you, Ralph?”
    “Fifteen. I mean I’m fifteen now; I was fourteen then. So anyways, all of a sudden he kind of moves in close and opens up his pants and tells me to – you know. Go down on him. Blow him.”
    “Jesus.”
    “So I tell him no and I get up quick and start to run around the sign and he makes a grab for me and says he’s gonna break my arm. That don’t scare me – I know he can’t do nothing like that on account of his Record – but then he says, ‘Okay, kid, you got a choice: be nice to me and I won’t tell nobody nothin’.Run on home, and I swear to God you’re never gonna hear the end of this.’ ”
    “Oh, Jesus,” the Negro boy said.
    “So I go home, and the next day at school all the kids start in on me. You know. ‘Hey, Ralph, what’s it taste like?’ That kind of stuff. Dirty stuff. Or