He gave another forward lunge and ran his upper thighs into my desk. The book he’d been reading, Caring for the Mental Patient in Institutions, gave a jump, and the smaller, pamphlet-sized book which had been hidden inside it popped out. No wonder Percy had looked guilty when we came in. It wasn’t The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah, but it was the one we sometimes gave to inmates who were
feeling especially horny and who had been well-behaved enough to deserve a treat. I’ve mentioned it, I think – the little cartoon book where Olive Oyl does everybody except Sweet Pea, the kid.
I found it sad that Percy had been in my office and pursuing such pallid porn, and Harry – what I could see of him from over Percy’s straining shoulder – looked mildly disgusted, but Brutal hooted with laughter, and that took the fight out of Percy, at least for the time being.
“Oh Poicy,” he said. “What would your mother say? For that matter, what would the governor say?”
Percy was blushing a dark red. “Just shut up. And leave my mother out of it.”
Brutal tossed me the straitjacket and pushed his face up into Percy’s. “Sure thing. Just stick out your arms like a good boy.”
Percy’s lips were trembling, and his eyes were too bright. He was, I realized, on the verge of tears. “I won’t,” he said in a childish, trembling voice, “and you can’t make me.” Then he raised his voice and began to scream for help. Harry winced and so did I. If we ever came close to just dropping the whole thing, it was then. We might have, except for Brutal. He never hesitated. He stepped behind Percy so he was shoulder to shoulder with Harry, who still had Percy’s hands pinned behind him. Brutal reached up and took Percy’s ears in his hands.
“Stop that yelling,” Brutal said. “Unless you want to have a pair of the world’s most unique teabag caddies.”
Percy quit yelling for help and just stood there, trembling and looking down at the cover of the crude cartoon book, which showed Popeye and Olive doing it in a creative way I had heard of but never tried.
“Oooh, Popeye!” read the balloon over Olive’s head. “Uck-uck-uck-uck!” read the one over Popeye’s. He was still smoking his pipe.
“Hold out your arms,” Brutal said, “and let’s have no more foolishness about it. Do it now.”
“I won’t,” Percy said. “I won’t, and you can’t make me.”
“You’re dead wrong about that, you know,” Brutal said, then clamped down on Percy’s ears and twisted them the way you might twist the dials on an oven. An oven that wasn’t cooking the way you wanted, Percy let out a miserable shriek of pain and surprise that I would have given a great deal not to have heard. It wasn’t just pain and surprise, you see; it was understanding. For the first time in his life, Percy was realizing that awful things didn’t just happen to other people, those not fortunate enough to be related to the governor. I wanted to tell Brutal to stop, but of course I couldn’t. Things had gone much too far for that. All I could do was to remind myself that Percy had put Delacroix through God knew what agonies simply because Delacroix had laughed at him. The reminder didn’t go very far toward soothing the way I felt. Perhaps it might have, if I’d been built more along the lines of Percy.
“Stick those arms out there, honey,” Brutal said, “or you get another.”
Harry had already let go of young Mr. Wetmore. Sobbing like a little kid, the tears which had been standing in his eyes now spilling down his cheeks, Percy shot his hands out straight in front of him, like a sleepwalker in a movie comedy. I had the sleeves of the straitjacket up his arms in a trice. I hardly had it over his shoulders before Brutal had let go of Percy’s ears and grabbed the straps hanging down from the jacket’s cuffs. He yanked Percy’s hands around to his sides, so that his arms were crossed tightly on his