15
In the fall of his junior year, Todd played varsity tailback for the Santa Donate Cougars
and was named All-Conference. And in the second quarter of that year, the quarter which
ended in late January of 1977, he won the American Legion Patriotic Essay Contest This
contest was open to all city high school students who were taking American history
courses. Todd’s piece was called ‘An American’s Responsibility’. During the baseball
season in that confused year (the Shah of Iran had been ousted and gasoline prices were
on the rise again) he was the school’s star pitcher, winning four and losing none. His
batting average was .361. At the awards assembly in June he was named Athlete of the
Year and given a plaque by Coach Haines (Coach Haines, who had once taken him aside
and told him to keep practising his curve ‘because none of these niggers can throw a
curve-ball, Bowden, not one of them’). Monica Bowden burst into tears when Todd called
her from school and told her he was going to get the award. Dick Bowden strutted around
his office for two weeks following the ceremony, trying not to boast That summer they
rented a cabin in Big Sur and stayed there for two weeks and Todd snorkled his brains
out. During that same year Todd killed four derelicts. He stabbed two of them and
bludgeoned two of them. He had taken to wearing two pairs of pants on what he now
acknowledged to be hunting expeditions. Sometimes he rode the city buses, looking for
likely spots. The best two, he found, were the Santo Donato Mission for the Indigent on
Douglas Street, and around the corner from the Salvation Army on Euclid. He would
walk slowly through both of these neighbourhoods, waiting to be panhandled. When a
wino approached him, Todd would tell him that he, Todd, wanted a bottle of whiskey,
and if the wino would buy it, Todd would share the bottle. He knew a place, he said,
where they could go. It was a different place every time, of course. He resisted a strong
urge to go back either to the trainyards or to the culvert behind the vacant lot on Cienaga
Way. Revisiting the scene of a previous crime would have been unwise.
During the same year Dussander smoked sparingly, drank Ancient Age bourbon, and
watched TV. Todd came by once in a while, but their conversations became increasingly
arid. They were growing apart Dussander celebrated his seventy-eighth birthday that year,
which was also the year Todd turned sixteen. Dussander remarked that sixteen was the
best year of a young man’s life, forty-one the best year of a middle-aged man’s, and
seventy-eight the best of an old man’s. Todd nodded politely. Dussander had been quite
drunk and cackled in a way that made Todd distinctly uneasy.
Dussander had dispatched two winos during Todd’s academic years of 1976-77. The
second had been livelier than he looked; even after Dussander had gotten the man
soddenly drunk he had tottered around the kitchen with the haft of a steak-knife jutting
from the base of his neck, gushing blood down the front of his shirt and onto the floor.
The wino had re-discovered the front hall after two staggering circuits of the kitchen and
had almost escaped the house.
Dussander had stood in the kitchen, eyes wide with shocked unbelief, watching the
wino grunt and puff his way towards the door, rebounding from one side of the hall to the
other and knocking cheap Currier & Ives reproductions to the floor. His paralysis had not
broken until the wino was actually groping for the doorknob. Then Dussander had bolted
across the room, jerked open the utility drawer, and pulled out his meat-fork. He ran
down the hall with the meat-fork held out in front of him and drove it into the wine’s
back.
Dussander had stood over him, panting, his old heart racing in a frightening way …
racing like that of a heart-attack victim on that Saturday night TV programme he enjoyed,
Emergency. But at last it had slowed back into a normal rhythm and he knew he was
going to be all right.
There had been a great deal of blood to clean up.
That had been four months ago, and since then he had not made his offer at the
downtown bus-stop. He was frightened of the way he had almost bungled the last one …
but when he remembered the way he had handled things at the last moment, pride rose in
his heart. In the end the wino had never made it out the door, and that was the important
thing.
16
In the fall of 1977, during the first quarter of his senior year, Todd joined the rifle club.
By June of 1978 he had qualified as a marksman. He made All-Conference in football
again, won five and lost one during the baseball season (the loss coming as the result of
two errors and one unearned run), and made the third highest Merit Scholarship score in
the school’s history. He applied at Berkeley and was promptly accepted. By April he knew
he would either be valedictorian or salutatorian on graduation night. He very badly
wanted to be valedictorian.
During the latter half of his senior year, an odd impulse came on him – one which was
as frightening to Todd as it was irrational. He seemed to be clearly and firmly in control
of it, and that at least was comforting, but that such a thought should have occurred at all was scary. He had made an arrangement with life. He had worked things out. His life was
much like his mother’s bright and sunshiny kitchen, where all the surfaces were dressed in
chrome, Formica, or stainless steel – a place where everything worked when you pressed
the buttons. There were deep and dark cupboards in this kitchen, of course, but many
things could be stored in them and their doors still be closed.
This new impulse reminded him of the dream in which he had come home to discover
the dead and bleeding wino in his mother’s clean, well-lighted place. It was as if, in the
bright and careful arrangement he had made, in that a-place-for-everything-and-
everything-in-its-place kitchen of his mind, a dark and bloody intruder now lurched and
shambled, coking for a place to die conspicuously …
A quarter of a mile from the Bowden house was the freeway, running eight lanes wide.
A steep and brushy bank led down to it. There was plenty of good cover on the bank. His
father had given him a Winchester .30-.30 for Christmas, and it had a removable
telescopic sight. During rush hour, when all eight lanes were jammed, he could pick a
spot on that bank and … why, he could easily …
Do what?
Commit suicide…
Destroy everything he had worked for these last five years?
Say what!
No sir, no ma’am, no way.
It is, as they say, to laugh.
Sure it was … but the impulse remained.
One Saturday a few weeks before his high school graduation, Todd cased the .30-.30
after carefully emptying the magazine. He put the rifle in the back seat of his father’s new
toy – a used Porsche. He drove to the spot where the brushy dope dropped steeply down to
the freeway. His mother and father had taken the station wagon and had driven to LA for
the weekend. Dick, now a full partner, would be holding discussions with the Hyatt
people about a new Reno hotel.
Todd’s heart bumped in his chest and his mouth was full of sour, electric spit as he worked his way down the grade with the cased rifle in his arms. He came to a fallen tree
and sat cross-legged behind it. He uncased the rifle and laid it on the dead tree’s smooth
trunk. A branch jutting off at an angle made a nice rest for the barrel. He snugged the
buttplate into the hollow of his right shoulder and peered into the telescopic sight.
Stupid! his mind screamed at him. Boy, this is really stupid! If someone sees you, it’s not going to matter if the gun’s loaded or not! You’ll get in plenty of trouble, maybe even
end up with some Chippie shooting at you!
It was midmorning and the Saturday traffic was light. He settled the crosshairs on a
woman behind the wheel of a blue Toyota. The woman’s window was half open and the
round collar of her sleeveless blouse was fluttering. Todd centred the crosshairs on her
temple and dry-fired. It was bad for the firing-pin, but what the fuck.
‘Pow,’ he whispered as the Toyota disappeared beneath the underpass half a mile up
from the slope where Todd sat. He swallowed around a lump that tasted like a stuck-
together mass of pennies.
Here came a man behind the wheel of a Subaru Brat pickup truck. This man had a