‘No, Dad, please don’t do that. I mean, don’t punish Mr Denker for something that’s my fault. I mean, he’d be lost without me. I’ll do better. Really. That algebra… it just threw me to start with. But I went over to Ben Tremaine’s, and after we studied together for a few days, I started to get it. It just… I dunno, I sorta choked at first.’
‘I think you’re spending too much time with him,’ Bowden said, but he was weakening. It was hard to refuse Todd, hard to disappoint him, and what he said about punishing the old man for Todd’s falling-off… goddammit, it made sense. The old man looked forward to his visits so much.
That Mr Storrman, the algebra teacher, is really hard,’ Todd said. ‘Lots of kids got Ds. Three or four got Fs.’
Bowden nodded thoughtfully.
‘I won’t go Wednesdays anymore. Not until I bring my grades up.’ He had read his father’s eyes. ‘And instead of going out for anything at school, I’ll stay after every day and study. I promise.’
‘You really like the old guy that much?’
‘He’s really neat,’ Todd said sincerely.
‘Well… okay. We’ll try it your way, slugger. But I want to see a big improvement in your marks come January, you understand me? I’m thinking of your future. You may think junior high’s too soon to start thinking about that, but it’s not. Not by a long chalk.’ As his mother liked to say Waste not, want not, so Dick Bowden liked to say Not by a long chalk.
‘I understand, dad,’ Todd said gravely. Man to man stuff.
‘Get out of here and give those books a workout then.’ He pushed his half-glasses up on his nose and clapped Todd on the shoulder.
Todd’s smile, broad and bright, broke across his face. ‘Right on, dad!’
Bowden watched Todd go with a prideful smile of his own. One in a million. And that hadn’t been anger on Todd’s face. For sure. Pique, maybe… but not that high-voltage emotion he had at first thought he’d seen there. If Todd was that mad, he would have known; he could read his son like a book. It had always been that way.
Whistling, his fatherly duty discharged, Dick Bowden unrolled a blueprint and bent over it.
6
December, 1974.
The face that came in answer to Todd’s insistent finger on the bell was haggard and yellowed. The hair, which had been lush in July, had now begun to recede from the bony brow; it looked lustreless and brittle. Dussander’s body, thin to begin with, was now gaunt… although, Todd thought, he was nowhere near as gaunt as the inmates who had once been delivered into his hands.
Todd’s left hand had been behind his back when Dussander came to the door. Now he brought it out and handed a wrapped package to Dussander. ‘Merry Christmas!’ he yelled.
Dussander had cringed from the box; now he took it with no expression of pleasure or surprise. He handled it gingerly, as if it might contain explosive. Beyond the porch, it was raining. It had been raining off and on for almost a week, and Todd had carried the box inside his coat. It was wrapped in gay foil and ribbon.
‘What is it?’ Dussander asked without enthusiasm as they went to the kitchen.
‘Open it and see.’
Todd took a can of Coke from his jacket pocket and put it on the red and white checked oilcloth that covered the kitchen table. ‘Better pull down the shades,’ he said confidentially.
Distrust immediately leaked onto Dussander’s face. ‘Oh? Why?’
‘Well… you can never tell who’s looking,’ Todd said, smiling. ‘Isn’t that how you got along all those years? By seeing the people who might be looking before they saw you?’
Dussander pulled down the kitchen shades. Then he poured himself a glass of bourbon. Then he pulled the bow off the package. Todd had wrapped it the way boys so often wrap Christmas packages — boys who have more important things on their minds, things like football and street hockey and the Friday Nite Creature Feature you’ll watch with a friend who’s sleeping over, the two of you wrapped in a blanket and crammed together on one end of the couch, laughing. There were a lot of ragged corners, a lot of uneven seams, a lot of Scotch tape. It spoke of impatience with such a womanly thing.