The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee Page B

paid but she was having a tea with a friend and told him to come after dark. He had known his father would never depart the pub so early, and that his mother would not be expecting him. The thought of lingering with her in her bed electrified him, the last block or so difficult for him to walk comfortably, his erection already straining his dungarees. He’d been with her once before (voraciously petting, if briefly, in her kitchen) but at that point she was the first mature woman he’d touched, and the give and savor of her body (not as firm as that of his sisters’ friends, nor as blandly scentless) was a revelation; he was drawn to the moist tang of her skin, the scant animal note at the nape of her neck, between her breasts.
    It had already begun to rain, and when he entered the darkened screen porch he was suddenly afraid that he’d mistaken what she’d said to him earlier, but then the parlor light went out and she descended and wound about him like a silken cloak. She was warm and naked beneath her thin bathrobe. She knelt and had hardly put him in her mouth when he helplessly came. In embarrassment he crumpled and made to get away but she gripped him and said it’s okay as long as you do the same, and it was then, at her command, that he learned to swim the slant lightless depth, make his way instead by only treading.
    Just before dawn he ran home in the steady rain to find a police cruiser parked in front of his house. All the lights were burning. He could see two of his sisters moving about upstairs. He went around back and heard his mother at the kitchen table telling the officers sipping the coffee she’d made that her husband and son had never not come home before. Could some drifters have rolled them and tied them up somewhere? Really, where could they have gone? It was too small a town. She didn’t have to tell the officers that Jackie Brennan had no mistress, for everybody in Ilion well knew he was an uxorious man whose infinite gratitude to his pretty wife for accepting his deformations sometimes also made him crazy when he drank, his imaginings usually centering on her infidelities (which were none), or else he’d be mopey, glum, and self-pitying. One of the policemen caught sight of Hector peering around the hedge and called out, his mother turning to see him. When he went inside, they asked where his father was and where he’d been after he left the pub but he couldn’t tell them about either thing, especially about Patricia Cahill, as one of the cops was her cousin. His mother kept asking him how he could leave his father to drink alone. Hector was silent, but was desperately worried now, too, and begged the officers that he might accompany them as they went to retrace his steps from the pub.
    As he rode in the police car he felt a much purer shame than anything he might have felt with Patricia Cahill, and he began to cry; he knew he should have stayed with his father, as any decent son would, most of all if that father was Jackie Brennan. How many men craved such company of their sons, for whatever reason? With him gone missing, Hector suddenly understood what he in fact was for his father, and what he should always be: his ideal figure, a body supreme, his sturdiest hand, and foot, and liver. He would never leave him again. When they got to the pub, the officers and he walked in three directions, looking for any sign of him. Then he spotted his father’s porkpie hat at the head of an alleyway between two warehouses; the alleyway led down to an old dock on the canal. The end of the dock had clearly just collapsed, the splintered edges fresh and jagged. The high water was swirling off muddily, heavy with a current; the locks had been opened upstream.
    “Could he swim?” asked the policeman, Patricia Cahill’s cousin.
    Hector shook his head. Because of his handicaps his father had never learned how, and was otherwise naturally reluctant to show himself.
    “I’ll call the dredger,” the