The Magician by Sol Stein Page B

father said.
    Urek looked to his mother, hoping for something.
    “I’m dropping the case,” said Thomassy.
    Urek felt a family alarm, his, his father’s, his mother’s. Without Thomassy they were unprotected.
    “Please, Mr. Thomassy.” His mother was finally speaking.
    “Be a sport,” the father fumbled. “I’ll see the kid behaves.”
    “Yeah,” said Urek.
    “You shut up,” said his father.
    “You know what he’s done now?” said Thomassy quietly.
    Clearly they didn’t.
    “He tried to kill the other kid in the hospital.”
    “He what?”
    “He cut the tube going down the boy’s throat.”
    Thomassy took the father’s arm before he could strike again. “Hold it!”
    The father subsided, a gray bag collapsed of wind. Thomassy let his arm go and turned to Urek.
    “You were in enough trouble already. What the hell did you do it for?”
    All three waited for an answer.
    He had no answer he could articulate.
    Paul Urek, feeling no strength in his arms, slipped his belt from his pants, folded it in two, and then swung the folded strap against the boy’s upraised arm again and again and again, Urek yelling, “Cut it out!” but defending himself only with his arms, the mother crying out, and finally Thomassy shouting, “For Christ’s sake, stop!” The puffing man no longer swung his rage against his son. He turned to Thomassy, saying, “Please, please, you got to handle this case, maybe he should get out of school and get a job, or enlist, or go to a nut house, maybe that’s where,” and then at the very top of his strident voice, “I don’t know what to do!”
    Thomassy took the strap out of the father’s hands and put it down on a table.
    “Looks to me like he’s in a nut house already.”
    Urek’s mother spoke seldom. Now she said, “I beg you, Mr. Thomassy, help Stanley.”
    “I’ll pay you anything,” said the father, a comment Thomassy ignored.
    “I beg you,” Mrs. Urek repeated, holding her hands out like a frightened peasant woman entreating aid. “He’s my only boy.”
    “You have all of you got to do everything I say,” Thomassy said.
    Mr. and Mrs. Urek nodded, then looked at their son. He nodded too.
    “Okay,” said Thomassy, just as they all heard the sound of a car drawing up.
    Paul Urek opened the door,” a belittled man. The policeman who had gone for the warrant was striding toward the house, followed by Chief Rogers.
    The cop who had guarded the door shouted toward them, “The kid’s in there, I could hear his voice!”
    Thomassy stepped forward with assurance. “Everything’s under control,” he said.

Chapter 13
    Ed sat back against two propped pillows. The bed rose under his knees, then sloped to the foot, where his chart hung for the inspection of the white-coated men and women who came by in shifts, flicking a glance toward him (to see if the bed was occupied? to see if he was alive?). Ed thought it would make you feel better about what these people were doing to you (pills, tubes, temperature, pulse, needles) if they’d pretend you were really there.
    The new waitress in Walker’s Diner was like that. She took your order, brought your food, wouldn’t notice if you had two heads. He’d had breakfast there with Lila—it was a great illicit feeling to have breakfast in a diner instead of at home—and Lila, when she’d seen the glazed look of the blonde waitress, said, “Meat,” and the waitress answered, “What kind, honey?” and Lila said, “Human,” and the waitress said with her pencil, “Just point to it on the menu, honey.”
    “If I’d made enough trouble,” said Lila, “she would have looked at me.”
    School was the same. When a new term started, thirty kids would be looking at the teacher to see who he was, was he worth learning from, did he seem smart or interesting or just a time-server. Did the teacher look at his new students, wondering which of these teen-age nobodies was a potentially interesting person, maybe even now? If