Crossroads

Or, failing that, at least less bad.

Although his motives for so resolving suggested that the badness was underlying and perhaps intractable.

For example: the reluctance he now felt, as he stood up and headed back down the drafty staircase, to liquidate the asset. The liquidation was a sentence he’d passed on himself, a punitive fine he’d levied at the peak of his resolution, but now he wondered if it was really necessary. He had in his billfold the twenty-dollar bill his mother had slipped him for Christmas shopping, plus eleven dollars he’d managed not to spend on poisoning his central nervous system. The camera that he and Judson had admired in the window of New Prospect Photo cost $24.99, not including sales tax and rolls of film. Even if he could find a cheap used frame for his gouache portrait of his mother and bought paperbacks for everyone else—and his irritation at having to buy anything for Becky or Clem or the Reverend was already an ominous violation of his resolution—he was facing a shortfall.

And there was a cheaper way. Judson would also have liked to get the game of Risk, a new one of which cost less than half the camera, and to play it with Perry in their bedroom, which Perry would gladly have done as a further gift to Judson, being fond of the game himself. But along with every other game involving war or killing, any toy that shot projectiles or could be imagined to shoot them, any representations of soldiers, warplanes, tanks, etc.—in short, every thing a normal boy like Judson most wanted—Risk was forbidden in the house, owing to the Reverend’s violent pacifism. Perry did have an arsenal of rational arguments at his disposaclass="underline" Wasn’t the object of all games a kind of warlike vanquishment? How come the virtual slaughter in chess and checkers didn’t run afoul of the ban? Was it truly obligatory to view the pleasing enameled lozenges of Risk as “armies,” rather than as abstract markers in a game of topological strategy and dice-rolling? If only it were possible to argue with his father without flushing and choking up with tears of anger and hating himself for being smarter, but also less good, than the old man! A fine gift to Judson a fight would be on Christmas morning.

Concluding, reluctantly, that there was no saving the asset, he shut the stairway door behind him and found Judson where he’d left him, in their bedroom, reading a book beneath the homemade reading light that Perry had rigged up for him above his captain’s bed. Judson’s corner of their room recalled the cabin of the Spray, the globe-circling vessel of his hero Joshua Slocum—everything in its place, clothes folded and stowed beneath the bed, fifty-cent paperbacks ordered alphabetically by title, Dinky cars parked on a little shelf at parallel diagonals, alarm clock tightly wound—outside which raged the sea of Perry, for whom folding clothes was an irrational waste of time and ordering his possessions a superfluity, since he remembered exactly where he’d left them. The asset was under his bed, in the padlocked plywood strongbox that he’d built as his final project in eighth-grade shop class.

“Hey, kiddo, sorry to bother you,” he said from the doorway. “But I need you to go somewhere else.”

Judson’s book was The Incredible Journey. He frowned elaborately. “First you tell me I have to stay here and then you tell me I have to leave.”

“Just for a minute. Unusual commands must be obeyed at Christmas time.”

Judson, not budging, said, “What do you feel like doing today?”

A sideways question.

“Right now,” Perry said, “I feel like doing something you need to leave the room for.”

“Later, though.”

“I have to go downtown. Why don’t you go over to Kevin’s? Or Brett’s.”

“They’re both sick. How long will you be gone?”

“Possibly until dinnertime.”

“I have a new idea for how to set the game up. Can I do it while you’re gone and we can play it after dinner?”

“I don’t know, Jay. Maybe.”

A bruise of disappointment in Judson’s face returned Perry to his resolution.

“I mean, yes,” he said. “But the game’s not coming out before then, you understand?”

Judson nodded and hopped off the bed with his book. “Promise?”

Perry promised and locked the door behind him. Ever since he’d manufactured a copy of Stratego, rather cunningly, out of shirt cardboard, his brother had been mad to play it with him. Because it was nominally a game of bombs and killing, it carried the risk of confiscation by the higher powers, and Judson had needed no telling to keep it a secret. There were many worse little brothers in New Prospect. Not only was Judson Perry’s best evidence of the reality of love, he was such an appealing and well-regulated youngster, nearly as smart as Perry and much better able to sleep at night, that Perry sometimes wished that he, Perry, were his little brother.