Perry placed the receiver in its cradle and pondered what to do. Mrs. Cottrell was, without question, a fox—not only in the salacious sense of the word but in her slyness. In his encounters with her since Larry Cottrell had made the dumb mistake of getting high while babysitting, Perry had detected a sharpening of her interest in him, a glint of mischief in her eyes. Larry had sworn to Perry that he hadn’t narked him out, but his mother obviously suspected who’d sold him the dime bag. And now Perry had discovered, by accident, at the corner of Pirsig and Maple, a dangerous liaison between Mrs. Cottrell and the Reverend Father. To be busted by the Reverend now, after forming his resolution and liquidating the asset, would be the height of irony.
Impelled by worry, after watching his father speed away on Pirsig, he’d postponed the rest of his Christmas shopping and walked to the Cottrell residence for a word with Larry. If all Larry’s mother had was a suspicion, and if she happened to voice it to the Reverend, Perry could simply deny everything. The worry was that Larry was weak. If he’d fingered Perry by name, despite swearing that he hadn’t, denials would not avail.
Larry could have been Exhibit A in Becky’s contention that Perry merely used people. For a while, Perry had dodged him at Crossroads meetings and inventively deflected his invitations to hang out. Larry was immature, a squeaker, a newcomer, and thus of scant utility to Perry in his quest to reach the center of Crossroads. But Perry couldn’t baldly reject him without running afoul of Crossroads precepts. One day, after school, Larry attached himself to Perry and Ansel Roder as they made their way to Roder’s house. Roder was in a magnanimous mood that day. Learning that Larry had never tried pot and very much wanted to, he included him in the passing of the bong, whereupon Larry embarrassed Perry. With ear-grating giggles, he offered a running play-by-play of his mind’s reaction to chemical insult, and when Roder finally told him to shut the fuck up he gigglingly explicated his insulted mind’s reaction to it. He giggled, too, when he bumped into Roder’s turntable and harmed the LP that was playing. Roder took Perry aside and said, “I don’t want that kid here again.” Perry was of similar opinion, but Larry, serenely unaware of how uncoolly he’d behaved, proceeded to pester him to be included in future festivities. He was a poignant figure, messed up by the recent death of his father. To sell him drugs would have been a pure kindness if it hadn’t also made rationally self-interested sense: here was a loyal customer, a known quantity, whose mother gave him a handsome allowance. To then smoke with him the pot he bought might likewise have been construable as charity, an act of friendship, if it hadn’t accorded with Perry’s strategic desire to be less dependent on Roder’s generosity, and with certain other benefits. It was proving pleasant to Perry to have an adoring acolyte in Crossroads, pleasant to see his foxy mother up close, in her den, pleasant to exercise his dexterity on the model airplanes that Larry could afford with his allowance, pleasant to dip brushes into the nifty square bottles of paint he’d long coveted at the hobby shop. Not until Larry got himself busted by his mother—semi-deliberately, as a self-destructive way of defying her, Perry suspected—did the costs of their friendship outweigh the benefits. Larry had promised his mother he wouldn’t buy more pot, and Perry, despite having lost him as a customer, was obliged to remain friends with him, lest he be hurt and nark him out.
The Cottrell house was a white brick Colonial, impressively large for a widow and two children. Larry was at home with his kid sister and invited Perry in from the snow.
“We have a problem,” Perry said when they were in Larry’s bedroom. “I just saw your mother with my father.”
“Yeah, they’re doing some church thing in the city.”
“Well, so, I have to ask again. Is our secret safe with you?”
Among Larry’s insecure tics was rubbing the sebaceous nodes around his nose and sniffing his fingertips. Perry, too, enjoyed the smell of his own sebum, but such sniffing was better done privately.
“You understand why I’m asking.”
“You don’t have to be paranoid,” Larry said. “The whole thing’s over, except that I can’t watch TV for another nine days. I’m going to miss the Orange Bowl.”
“No mention of my name, then.”
“I already swore to you. Do you want me to get a Bible?”
“No need. I just hadn’t imagined your mom going into the city with my dad. It was only the two of them. I have a bad feeling that we haven’t heard the last of this.”