Because the Night by James Ellroy Read Free Book Online Page B

the following day, tousling his hair and calling him “Dad’s little ratter.” Johnny goes straight for his father’s gun rack, grabs a twelve-gauge pump and strides outside to the kennel, where five Labradors and short-haired Pointers frolic behind barbed wire. Johnny blows the dogs to kingdom come and turns to face his father, who turns white and faints. Weeks go by. His father shuns him. Johnny knows that his father has given him a precious gift that is far more valuable then standard manhood. Johnny loves his father and wants to please him with his newfound strength.
    1957
. “Green Door” by Jim Lowe climbs the hit parade and fills Johnny with portents of dark secrets.
    â€œMidnight, one more night without sleeping.
    Watching, ‘till the morning comes creeping.
    Green door, what’s that secret you’re keeping?”
    Johnny wants to know the secret so he can tell his father and make him love him.
    The quest for the secret begins with a shinny up a drainpipe into a neighbor’s darkened attic. Johnny finds coyotes mounted on roller-skates wheels and department store mannequins. The mannequins have been gouged in the facial and genital regions and red paint has been daubed in the holes and left to trickle off in simulation of wounds. Johnny steals a coyote’s glass eye and leaves it on his father’s desk. His father never mentions the gift. As other gifts from other dark houses follow, Johnny perceives that his father is terrified of him.
    Johnny’s housebreaking career continues; the spacious homes of Westchester County become his teacher and friend. Thoughts of earning his father’s love grow mute beside the haphazard tides of passion that he assimilates in shadow-shrouded bedrooms and hallways. Green door after green door after green door bursts open. And then there was the next to the last door and the man in the uniform, and the last door opening on a pitch-black void.…
    The darkness deepened as the Time Machine suffered its final malfunction, its chronograph needle stuck permanently on June 2, 1957. The void stretched into months. The callow Johnny Havilland who entered was only a shell compared to the self-sufficient John who emerged.…
    Always this memory gap, the Night Tripper thought. Father was there when he entered and gone when his recollections again assumed a linear sequence. He took Goff’s photographs of Linda Wilhite from his desk and fanned them like a deck of cards. Linda came briefly to life, the slash of her mouth speaking bewilderment. She wanted to know why he was as great as he was.
    Havilland ruffled the photos again, making Linda beg for the answer. He smiled. He would tell her, and he would not need the Time Machine to help him.
    1958. Father had been gone for months; Mother, in a perpetual sherry haze, didn’t seem to care. Checks came in bimonthly, drawn from the tax-exempt trust funds that Father’s father had started almost half a century before. It was as if a giant puppetmaster had snatched the man into eternity, leaving his material wealth as wonder bait to ensure that Johnny could have anything he wanted.
    Johnny wanted knowledge. He wanted knowledge because he knew it would give him sovereignty over the psychic pain that all the human race save himself was subject to. His grief over his father’s disappearance had transmogrified into armor sheathed in one-way transparent glass. He could look out and see all ; no one could look in and see him. Thus invulnerable, Johnny Havilland sought knowledge.
    He found it.
    In 1962 John Havilland graduated from Scarsdale High School, number one in his class, hailed by the school’s principal as a “human encyclopedia.” N.Y.U. and more scholastic honors followed, culminating in a Phi Beta Kappa key, Summa Cum Laude graduation and a full scholarship to Harvard Medical School.
    It was at Harvard Med that John Havilland was able to combine his knowledge-lust and