Speaking of Lust - the novella Read Free

does she know. But she’ll let me in, and cover for me.”
    His tent mate stirred when he returned, wanted to know where he’s been. The latrine, he said. The other boy went back to sleep.
    He lay there and watched through the tent flap as dawn broke. He was a boy---fourteen now, he’d had a birthday since that first kissing lesson---but he felt like man. I just got laid , he told himself. I fucked my sister . A man, yes, and a sinner.
    He wondered what his punishment would be.
    Within hours, he found out.
    Shortly after breakfast, after they’d divided into groups for morning activities, a Sheriff’s Office car pulled into the camp grounds. A tall man wearing sunglasses got out and talked to the scoutmaster. Then the two men walked to where Billy was sitting, trying to undo a bad knot in the lanyard he was making. It was kid stuff, entwining the plastic lacing to make a lanyard, and pretty tame compared to fucking your sister in a motel room, but if you were going to do it you might as well get it right.
    The scoutmaster hunkered down beside him, his red face troubled, the perspiration beading on his large forehead. The Sheriff, or whoever he was, stood up straight as a ramrod. And the scoutmaster explained that there had been some trouble, that Billy was an orphan now, that both of his parents were dead.
    Of course he couldn’t take it in. He was numb with shock. How could they be dead? He found out gradually, with no one eager to tell him too much too soon. They were shot, he learned, his mother three times, twice in the chest and once in the face, his father once, the bullet entering his open mouth and exiting through the back of his skull. Death for both was virtually instantaneous. They didn’t suffer, he was told.
    And finally he was told who had done it. His father had come home drunk, and evidently there had been an argument. (He nodded as he took this in, nodded unconsciously, because this was something he already knew. But he wasn’t supposed to know it, because who could have told him? He’d been at the camp the whole time.)
    The person who told him made nothing of the nod. Maybe it only indicated that this was nothing uncommon, that his father often came home drunk, that his parents often argued.
    But this argument had an atypical ending, because Billy’s father had concluded it by taking a handgun from his desk drawer and putting three bullets into Billy’s mother and, in remorse or anger or God knows what, blowing out his own brains.
    The boy knew whose fault it was. It was his, his and his sister’s. While they were crossing the last barrier, their father was murdering their mother, then sinning against the Holy Ghost by taking his own life.
    As he remembered it, the ensuing days and weeks passed in a blur. While the authorities tried to find a relative who could take them in, Billy and Carolyn went on living in the house where their parents had died. No agreeable relative emerged, and the two were of an inconvenient age, too young to be on their own, too old to be placed in foster care. The officials shuffled papers and forgot about them, and they stayed where they were. Carolyn did the shopping and prepared the meals, Billy cut the grass and raked the lawn and shoveled the walk.
    A week after the tragedy, they resumed sleeping together.
    “ All we’ve got is each other,” she told him. “What happened’s not our fault. I’ll tell you something, it was going to happen sooner or later, and if we’d been home that night we’d have wound up dead, too. The way he drank, the way he got when he drank? And the way she provoked him? ‘Man Kills Wife and Self.’ If we had been home, it would have been ‘Man Kills Wife, Two Children, and Self.’ That’s the only difference.”
    He knew she was right.
    All they had was each other, and they loved each other. Socially, they withdrew further into themselves. For a year or two, this was unremarkable, a natural consequence of the family tragedy they