face turned a dull brick colour; it sounded as if he were coughing, laughing, and
strangling, all at the same time. Todd, scared, got up quickly and clapped him on the back
until the coughing fit had passed.
‘Danke schon,’ he said. ‘Drink your drink. It will do you good.’
Todd drank it. It tasted like very bad cold-medicine and lit a fire in his gut.
‘I can’t believe you drink this shit all day,’ he said, putting the glass back on the table
and shuddering. ‘You ought to quit it. Quit drinking and smoking.’
‘Your concern for my health is touching,’ Dussander said. He produced a crumpled
pack of cigarettes from the same bathrobe pocket into which the jackknife had
disappeared. ‘And I am equally solicitous of your own welfare, boy. Almost every day I
read in the paper where a cyclist has been killed at a busy intersection. You should give it
up. You should walk. Or ride the bus, like me.’
‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself?’ Todd burst out.
‘My boy,” Dussander said, pouring more bourbon and beginning to laugh again, ‘we are
fucking each other – didn’t vou know that?’
One day about a week later, Todd was sitting on a disused mail platform down in the
old trainyard. He chucked cinders out across the rusty, weed-infested tracks one at a time.
Why shouldn’t I kill him anyway?
Because he was a logical boy, the logical answer came first. No reason at all. Sooner or
later Dussander was going to die, and given Dussander’s habits, it would probably be
sooner. Whether he killed the old man or whether Dussander died of a heart attack in his
bathtub, it was all going to come out. At least he could have the pleasure of wringing the
old vulture’s neck.
Sooner or later – that phrase defied logic.
Maybe it’ll be later, Todd thought. Cigarettes or not, booze or not, he’s a tough old bastard. He’s lasted this long, so … so maybe it’ll be later.
From beneath him came a fuzzy snort.
Todd jumped to his feet, dropping the handful of cinders he had been holding. That
snorting sound came again.
He paused, on the verge of running, but the snort didn’t recur. Nine hundred yards
away, an eight-lane freeway swept across the horizon above this weed- and junk-strewn
cul-de-sac with its deserted buildings, rusty cyclone fences, and splintery, warped
platforms. The cars up on the freeway glistened in the sun like exotic hard-shelled
beetles. Eight lanes of traffic up there, nothing down here but Todd, a few birds … and
whatever had snorted.
Cautiously, he bent down with his hands on his knees and peered under the mail
platform. There was a wino lying up in there among the yellow weeds and empty cans
and dusty old bottles. It was impossible to tell his age; Todd put him at somewhere
between thirty and four hundred. He was wearing a strappy tee-shirt that was caked with
dried vomit, green pants that were far too big for him, and grey leather workshoes
cracked in a hundred places. The cracks gaped like agonized mouths. Todd thought he
smelled like Dussander’s cellar.
The wino’s red-laced eyes opened slowly and stared at Todd with a bleary lack of
wonder. As they did, Todd thought of the Swiss Army knife in his pocket, the Angler
model. He had purchased it at a sporting goods store in Redondo Beach almost a year
ago. He could hear the clerk that had waited on him in his mind: You couldn’t pick a
better knife than that one, son – a knife like that could save your life someday. We sell
fifteen hundred Swiss knives every damn year.
Fifteen hundred a year.
He put his hand in his pocket and gripped the knife. In his mind’s eye he saw
Dussander’s jackknife working slowly around the neck of the bourbon bottle, slitting the
seal. A moment later he became aware that he had an erection.
Cold terror stole into him.
The wino swiped a hand over his cracked lips and then ticked them with a tongue
which nicotine had turned a permanent dismal yellow. ‘Got a dime, kid?’
Todd looked at him expressionlessly.
‘Gotta get to LA. Need another dime for the bus. I got a pointment, me. Got a job offertunity. Nice kid like you must have a dime. Maybe you got a quarter.’
Yessir, you could clean out a damn bluegill with a knife tike that… hell, you could
clean out a damn marlin with it if you had to. We sell fifteen hundred of those a year.
Every sporting goods store and Army-Navy Surplus in America sells them, and (f you
decided to use this one to clean out some dirty, shitty old wino, nobody could trace it back to you, absolutely NOBODY.
The wino’s voice dropped; it became a confidential, tenebrous whisper. ‘For a buck I’d
do you a blowjob, you never had a better. You’d come your brains out, kid, you’d -‘
Todd pulled his hand out of his pocket. He wasn’t sure hit was in it until he opened it.
Two quarters. Two nickels. – dime. Some pennies. He threw them at the wino and fled.
12
June, 1975.
Todd Bowden, now fourteen, came biking up Dussander’s walk and parked his bike on
the kickstand. The LA Times was on the bottom step; he picked it up. He looked at the
bell, below which the neat legends ARTHUR DENKER and NO SOLICITORS, NO
PEDDLERS, NO SALESMEN still kept their places. He didn’t bother with the bell now,
of course; he had his key.
Somewhere close by was the popping, burping sound of a Lawn Boy. He looked at
Dussander’s grass and saw it could use a cutting; he would have to tell the old man to find
a boy with a mower. Dussander forgot little things like that more often now. Maybe it
was senility; maybe it was just the pickling influence of Ancient Age on his brains. That
was an adult thought for a boy of fourteen to have, but such thoughts no longer struck
Todd as singular. He had many adult thoughts these days. Most of them were not so great.
He let himself in.
He had his usual instant of cold terror as he entered the kitchen and saw Dussander
slumped slightly sideways in his rocker, the cup on the table, a half-empty bottle of
bourbon beside it. A cigarette had burned its entire length down to lacy grey ash in a
mayonnaise cover where several other butts had been mashed out. Dussander’s mouth
hung open. His face was yellow. His big hands dangled limply over the rocker’s arms. He
didn’t seem to be breathing.
‘Dussander,’ he said, a little too harshly. ‘Rise and shine, Dussander.’
He felt a wave of relief as the old man twitched, blinked, and finally sat up.
‘Is it you? And so early?’
They let us out early on the last day of school,’ Todd said. He pointed to the remains
of the cigarette in the mayonnaise cover. ‘Someday you’ll burn down the house doing
that.’
‘Maybe,’ Dussander said indifferently. He fumbled out his cigarettes, shot one from
the pack (it almost rolled off the edge of the table before Dussander was able to catch
it), and at last got it going. A protracted fit of coughing followed, and Todd winced in
disgust. When the old man really got going, Todd half-expected him to start spitting
out greyish-black chunks of lung-tissue onto the table … and he’d probably grin as he
did it.
At last the coughing eased enough for Dussander to say, ‘What have you got there?’
‘Report-card.’
Dussander took it, opened it, and held it away from him at arm’s length so he could
read it. ‘English … A. American History … A. Earth Science … B Plus. Your Community
and You … A. Primary French … B Minus. Beginning Algebra … B.’ He put it down.
‘Very good. What is the slang? We have saved your bacon, boy. Will you have to change any of these averages in the last column?’
‘French and Algebra, but no more than eight or nine points in all. I don’t think any of
this is ever going to come out. And I guess I owe that to you. I’m not proud of it, but it’s
the truth. So, thanks.’
‘What a touching speech,’ Dussander said, and began to cough again.
‘I guess I won’t be seeing you around too much from now on,’ Todd said, and
Dussander abruptly stopped coughing.
‘No?’ he said, politely enough.
‘No,’ Todd said. ‘We’re going to Hawaii for a month starting on 25 June. In September
I’ll be going to school across town. It’s this bussing thing.’
‘Oh yes, the Schwarzen,’ Dussander said, idly watching a by as it trundled across the
red and white check of the tablecloth. ‘For twenty years this country has worried and
whined about the Schwarzen. But we know the solution … don’t we, boy?’ He smiled