They’d been keeping him in the basement of a farm house. For how long, I couldn’t tell - I only knew that it wasn’t going to be for much longer. He was about my age, about my height, probably had been about my weight before they’d stopped feeding him. They said his name was Ricky, and that he came from Minnesota. They didn’t say that he was scared out of his wits and wanted to go back to Minnesota as soon as he could, because they didn’t have to. It was in his eyes, as clearly as anything has ever been in anyone’s eyes.
Ricky had dropped out at the age of seventeen. Dropped out of school, dropped out of his family, dropped out of just about everything that a young man can drop out of - but then, pretty soon, he’d dropped into some other things, alternative things, and they’d made him feel better about himself. For a while, anyway.
Ricky felt a lot worse about himself at this moment; most probably because he’d managed to get himself into one of those situations where you’re naked in the cellar of a strange building, in a strange country, with strangers staring at you, some of whom have obviously been hurting you for a while, and others of whom are just waiting to take their turn. Flickering across the back of Ricky’s mind, I knew, were images from a thousand films, in which the hero, trussed-up in the same predicament, throws back his head with an insolent sneer and tells his tormentors to go screw themselves. And Ricky had sat in the dark, along with millions of other teenage boys, and duly absorbed the lesson that this is how men are supposed to behave in adversity. They endure, first of all; then they avenge.
