Free Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller by Clifford Irving Page A

door, yanked it open, then grabbed Pablo’s haunches with both hands. The whole heavy quivering mass of hairy dog tumbled across my lap. Pablo wound up mostly on the floor, on my feet, except for his smelly hind end and tail, still on my lap. I could feel his lungs and belly collapsing and refilling with air. Under his chest, my left foot couldn’t budge.
    “You okay?” Carter asked me. “Got room? Can you breathe?”
    I didn’t want to breathe.
    “Pablo, just stay, you fuckin’ monster.” Carter swung up, thumping his body into the seat behind the wheel. “Daisy, get your lard off the goddam clutch. Git to the back, you dumbass porker.”
    She understood his kicks and pressed as best she could against the back of the seat. The heels of Carter’s boots were able to lean on her rib cage and the balls of his feet could work the pedals at the same time as he turned the ignition key and shifted the knob into gear. Daisy panted. The engine rumbled. The pickup shook. We shot away from the curb in the hospital parking lot, and Carter’s lips curved into a grin.
    “We have lift-off! “
    When we got out on the two-lane highway I realized the truck had only one headlight. The posted speed limit was forty and we cruised along the highway at fifty miles an hour in the rain. Carter saw me glance at the speedometer. “You can always go five or six miles over the limit,” he said, “and the cops don’t never pick you up for speeding. That’s the unwritten law.”
    We were almost to the village of Water Mill when he flicked his eyes toward me. “So you got a crush on Amy?”
    I felt my face burning.
    “Hey, when I was your age I had a crush on this girl lived up the street. Jeannie Nolan. Her dad was a fireman. Her and I used to… no, I ain’t gonna tell you that story, ‘cept to say that she got my dick tender. Don’t want you to get any ideas.” And he laughed, but not with mirth or even cheer; it was a sound like stone grinding on concrete.
    “How old are you, Billy?”
    “Eleven.”
    He swiveled his head to look at me, and I reddened even more.
    “Almost twelve,” I said. “I skipped a grade.”
    “Well, never mind what I said about crushes. You’re too young for that. Weenie’s hardly grown, right? You beat your meat yet?”
    I felt bright red from my neck to my ears.
    The fact is, I had done it twice. Once in bed, once in the bathroom. But each time, nothing came out. It took about a minute, and I felt this big rush — a whoosh — but I couldn’t shoot. Nothing there.
    “That’s private,” I said to Carter.
    He hammered me on the shoulder with a horny palm.
    “I like that answer, Billy. You don’t let people push you around. That’s what people say about me, so I respect it in someone else. When I have something private in my life, I keep it to myself. Unless I feel like telling it, which I do, right now. You want to know something private about me, something hardly anybody else knows?”
    He didn’t wait for an answer.
    “I’m a foundling. You know what that is?”
    “A baby left on a doorstep.”
    “Right. Like in David Copperfield . And Moses in the bulrushes. The thing is, some people look down on foundlings. They call them bastards. Here’s the big thing. These kids, the foundlings—I prefer that – sometimes they’re left by some rich person who can’t afford to admit that she gave birth to the kid. You follow?”
    The truck swayed from side to side in the rain, while I clutched the door handle with one hand and Iphigenia’s gym bag with the other. We surged out of Bridgehampton, heading east. I looked at the speedometer — coming up on sixty.
    Something bright red zipped by the window on my side.
    “Carter, we just passed a police car.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “Off the road, on the Sagaponack turnoff.”
    “Doing what?”
    “Stopping another car.”
    “Then he don’t care about us. Pay attention. Years later, the rich woman finds out where the foundling lives. Some lawyer