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The boy watched, half fascinated, half repelled by what he saw as he crouched outside the back window, peeking through a narrow aperture where the drapes didn’t quite meet, his anger festering. Never blinking, he gnawed nervously on a hangnail already oozing blood, turning his head slightly to spit out a minute piece of hard skin, his scowl remaining fastened on the scene within the room. For some time he continued to worry the offending spot, his incisors clicking hard together when they slipped off their quarry. The meaning of the word "voyeur" had not as yet become known to him, but that’s exactly what he had been over the past several weeks. Embarrassed afterwards, he swore he would never do it again. But whenever that man came again, all smiles and false joviality, the boy’s stomach knotted even as he forced himself, for her sake, to be at least civil before making his escape. And then, fighting and losing the battle with his conscience yet again, he slipped from his own window onto the landing of the fire escape, sidled to the far window where he squatted and listened to them whisper and softly laugh together before doing it -- the it that inexorably drew him back to the slightly open drapes, his hot cheek pressed to the cool glass while he watched and fumed. When it was over and they finally left the room, both all neat and tidy again, he waited a few seconds more, used his wadded handkerchief to remove the mark his cheek always made on the glass, and slipped back into his room. He was a sneak, not a fool. Every time he swore she had to be warned about this man -- and every time he knew she wouldn’t listen to him, that she would be so angry she might ....... well, she wouldn’t kick him and Tippy out, he felt, but things would never be the same. She wouldn’t believe him, either -- of that he was totally sure. Nobody ever believed a kid! "Well," he hissed to himself in his anger, "things sure ain’t the same already, now that this bastard is always hanging around!" And he whispered the forbidden word, with considerable relish over and over, "Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!" Somebody had to do something! He tried only once to talk to her about this guy, and first she laughed, and then she frowned, and finally her lips as tight as he’d ever seen them, she told him he had to stop talking that way; his attitude was already unpleasant, extremely childish, and made it hard on everyone, not the least of all himself. She wanted to hear nothing more about it. And the final insult, "I won’t hear any more of this, Patrick. Grow up! If I choose to spend time with someone, it is none of your business." And that was it. Well, it was his business because this was his home, too, even though it was only because she had allowed him and Tippy to move in permanently when his mother died, her sister. And it was his business, because she was the only family he had. Too, he loved her, although at his adolescent worst, he would have died before saying that. "Somebody has to do something!" he muttered again, this time aloud, causing Perry to say as she passed his now open bedroom door, "Did you say something, Patrick?" "No, nothin’," he answered, scowling. "Well, we’ll be having dinner in about twenty minutes, so wash up and come downstairs, okay?" We! Ain’t that just wonderful? The bastard is going to hang around again! "Okay," was what he said. "Somebody has got to do something!" he whispered to Tippy, the mutt dog staring earnestly up at him, his bushy tail busily dusting a section of the floor, a pink tongue hanging limply from his once black muzzle as he gave his entire attention to his god, this gawky, anxious and wonderful human child -- all his own. Done with the washing up for dinner, Patrick slouched, Tippy trailing as he always did, from his bedroom to the front of the second-floor residence of Periwinkle Blue over her restaurant, "Perry’s Place," and started down the stairs. After the terrible fire that had once gutted the place, a fire set by another man who fully intended Perry should die in the ruins of her business, at the landing a large window had been set into the wall for light on the narrow stairway, and Patrick glanced out just as the woman who had bailed him out of a jam once before glanced through her own ground-level window from across the street, met his eyes, grinned, and waved up to him. He flapped a hand at her, thinking not for the first time that Sheila was definitely the somebody who would do something. After all, the dame was a private eye, right? Perry was her friend, right? And somebody had to do something! |