“First, liberty. I would free him, and the brand mark on his right calf would be eliminated.”

“The slaves had been branded?”

“Yes. I would imagine this branding to be taking place, but it would not be on the island; it would be in the locker room of the Twain School, the locker room of the gym. Then we would be on the island and I would say, ‘If you choose liberty, you may go, but beware, because the first noble who sees you may capture you and make you his slave.’

“Secondly, he could remain my personal slave, in every sense of the word. Thirdly, I might sell him to some other noble. But if I did, he would receive bad treatment and would beg to come back to me. He would write me secret messages, using the pet secret word of the island. He would sign himself by that word.”

“And what was that?”

“Your kitty, or your pussy,” Judd says quietly.

I have tried to feel my way into the mind of Artie, but there are areas of impenetrable density that I suppose will for ever remain dark. It is curious that we all thought we knew Artie better than we knew Judd, since he was among us more, and perhaps that is why we puzzled less over him than over Judd. And another confusion resulted from our pairing them, from our feeling that they were in the crime to the same degree precisely, utterly commingled. This tendency to confuse them was to continue all the way through the trial, with lawyers and psychiatrists again and again naming the one when they meant the other. The record is filled with these snap-ups. “Steiner-” “You mean Straus?” “Yes, yes, I mean Straus-”

Thus they were a joint personality in our minds. Yet from their revelations to the psychiatrists, different patterns could be traced.

And despite the streaks of darkness in Artie’s revelations, a good deal can be made out of how these two distorted personalities conjoined. Artie was cunning and apt to withhold incidents in telling of his life. But when Dr. Allwin led him into his fantasy life, Artie, too, became easy and garrulous. Yes, he had indulged almost every night in picturizations, as he called them. There was something uncanny in the way they dovetailed with Judd’s.

Judd’s dominant fantasy rôle was that of a slave; Artie saw himself as a master. He was the chief of all criminals, commanding absolute obedience.

Even on the reverse side of their fantasies, there was an interlocking symmetry. Judd as a slave was, however, a superior being, a champion, a godlike, handsome person. Thus, while an inferior in the nominal side of his rôle he was superior on the active side. He lived in comfortable quarters, and he was the mentor of kings. Conversely, Artie was superior in the nominal side of his rôle he was a master mind, a chief, yet in carrying out his picturizations he saw himself as captured and jailed, chained and in rags. He derived greatest satisfaction from imagining himself incarcerated and whipped.

And in real life their fantasy relationships were carried out with beautiful inevitability. Both now related their strange compact, made after the frat-house robbery – the compact in which Artie was the master who must be implicitly obeyed; and yet, the other side of the agreement was the sexual act in which Artie had to submit and which was carried out in the spirit of a rape, a violence, almost a punishment – but, as in his fantasy, a punishment which he passively enjoyed.

Then, when he was nine, Artie’s little brother Billy was born. Three developments came with this event in Artie’s life. It was at nine, he told Dr. Allwin, that he first started pinching small articles from the counters of the Five and Ten. And it was then too that he began voraciously to read dime novels, hiding them from Miss Nuisance. The story of a kidnapped baby, hidden in the attic, made a lasting impression on him.

And it was then that he secured his first real information about sex.

There is the overcurious little boy, peeking, prying, trying to discover the secret of how the baby comes. Maybe Mumsie and Popsie are having the baby really because they want someone else, not you. Nobody wants you. Except maybe Hank, the chauffeur, who lets you hang around the garage. Miss Nuisance hates him – Hank is dirty, filthy, says Miss Nuisance. Because Hank does all kinds of things with girls. Everybody knows.

Hank is working around the car, the hood is open, and the garage is filled with the smell of gas and grease and rubber.

“Hand me the big hammer, Artie, will you?” The hammer has a sledge head. There is black tape wrapped around the handle for a grip. Hank is halfway under the hood, chiselling at something, with a chisel that cuts through iron. “The bloody nut is stuck,” he says. “That screw is tight as a witch’s twat.” That’s a bad word, and then Hank laughs at a big joke he just thought of – a joke about a couple that got caught being lovey-dovey and the police and the fire department had to be called to pull them apart. “Pull what apart?” Artie asks. “Their faces?” And Hank roars. And that is the day Hank tells Artie about the difference between men and women. It’s just like this nut and bolt, he says, just like a key and a keyhole!

When a fellow grows up, Hank says, the pecker gets big, and sometimes it swells up, it gets as hard as a goddam hunk of steel, and Hank shakes the chisel in his hand, to show how hard it gets.

Artie has picked up the chisel Hank put down. “What’s the tape on there for?” the boy asks. And Hank says, “For a grip, so the shaft won’t get too slippery from the sweat of the hand.” And then he breaks out into a real roar of dirty laughter. “That’s a good one, but don’t ever tell that to a girl!”

“What?” asks Artie, puzzled.

“That!” says Hank, taking the chisel in his fist, holding it the wrong way, the iron in his hand. “Boy, you could really knock them dead with something like this! Boy, there must be many a little man with a no-good pecker wishes he had one like this!”

And just then Miss Nuisance marches in on them. “Artie! What are you doing here?”

A tool, a rod – “stiff as a rod”, the frat brothers said, hard as steel, knock them over with it – Sure he would go along. He’d show them he was a man. They claimed they’d done it the first time at fifteen, at fourteen, at thirteen. He’d done it lots of times already, he said – hell, he’d done it to his governess; that’s why she had to leave.

And in Mamie’s place the fellows stood around in a circle, close. The raucous laughter… there was his broad all spread out and waiting, and he couldn’t, he couldn’t – hell, many times, when he was alone, it did – but now, “little mousey”, she said, and they all roared, the bastards, the stinking sonsabitches.

Sonofabitch thing. Hard now in jail when you couldn’t – when you wanted it, limp as a rag. With Judd that time with the two broads, that little punk Judd doing it on the other side of the car. And his own broad trying to let him off easy, wagging her finger at it – “You bad little boy, you had too much to drink, didn’t you?” and, giggling, “He just wants to curl up and go to sleep.”

With his agreeable candour, Artie told Dr. Allwin of all the early little things – about swiping money from a lemonade stand he operated with another boy, about taking his big brother’s Liberty Bond, for surely the doc had already been told. Artie told of things with Judd – the Edison electric car, the bricks in windows, the time a cop shot at them, the frat house in Ann Arbour.

“Wasn’t there something else, in between?”

“No -?” How much did the doc know from Judd, from the family?

“And wasn’t there a trip to Oak Park?”

Why, yes, it had slipped his mind. Artie smiled and told of the time he and Judd planned to hijack the cellar of Joe Stahlmeyer’s house, full of Canadian stuff worth twenty dollars a bottle. Artie had a revolver along and also -