Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 Read Online Free

crests, like the
sea. You can't tame the sea."
                   "Who wants to be a neat freak
anyway?" his son, Christopher, would say. "It sucks."
                   "ShooWAH," would say Derry, the bog
creature herself, casting his way a gesture reminiscent of a Haitian papaloi
floating a curse.
                   What bothered Burnham grinned at him from its
place of honor stapled to the door—an enormous black-and-white poster of Che
Guevara, complete with scruffy beard, jaunty beret and feline smirk.
                   What bothered him also stared at him from the
far wall of the foul room—the bulbous dome of Mao Tse-tung bobbing in the
Yellow River, a hoary and patently phony photograph.
                   And what bothered him sat in a crystal
wineglass alone on a shelf, cradled in a bed of wilted ivy leaves, like a relic
of the True Cross—a cigar butt sold to Derry as once having been chewed by the
very teeth, caressed by the very lips, licked by the very tongue of Fidel
Castro.
                   And what bothered him filled the room like
swarming gnats, pinned, pasted, nailed and hung on wall and ceiling— pictures
of Arthur Scargill and Karl Marx and Lenin, newspaper clippings about the Red
Brigades and the Shining Path and the Symbionese Liberation Army and Islamic
Jihad, a homemade doll representing Ho Chi Minh as an angel, a shell casing
from a Sandinista artillery round (authenticated by Cyrillic stenciling),
and—most conspicuous of all, for it seemed to shout "J'accuse!" at
Burnham—a blank square on the robin's-egg blue wall from which Burnham had one
day (finally drawing the goddamn line) ripped down an idolatrous portrait of
Joseph Stalin.
                   "He was a maniac!" Burnham had said,
as he tore Stalin into tiny pieces. "He massacred twenty million of his
own people."
                   "So?" Deny had said.
                   ''So? What kind of argument is 'so'?"
                   "Propaganda." Smiling serenely in
her perceived triumph. Deny had retired to the den, there to take counsel from
the avatars of MTV.
                   Burnham tried every morning to avoid noticing Derry 's room, but because it was the last room
before the turn at the top of the stairs, he dared not accept the challenge and
close his eyes as he passed the door, for fear of missing the first step and
plunging headlong down the steep, narrow staircase. So every one of Burnham's
days was launched with sour thoughts about his prodigal progeny.
                   My daughter the Maoist. Didn't she know that
even Maoists weren't Maoists any more?
                   Castro worship, for Christ's sake! What did a
twelve-year-old girl know about Fidel Castro? He knew about Fidel Castro. He
had been at college in 1960, when McGeorge Bundy had sucker-punched an entire
generation by parading Fidel around the campus as the savior of the
downtrodden. Burnham would never forget the speech ' '/Queremos libertad!
Queremos paz! Queremos pan!" He had hollered and cheered along with
everyone else. Why not? No threat there. Less than two years later, a lot of
those same college boys were having their heads shaved and learning how to fire
M-14's because Fidel's list of queremoses had grown to include nuclear-tipped
missiles.
                   Why didn't the child fall in love with a rock
star, one of those harmless hermaphrodites who look like fruit salad and write
profound statements about the human condition, on which they are recognized experts,
having lived for the better part of two decades?
                   Why wasn't her room papered with posters of
disaffected boys and material giris, all of them oozing with grim determination
to slake their animal appetites?
                   Burnham heard his Puritan forebears whispering
from the beyond, but he defied them. His generation had