‘No, your hold over me will weaken even as mine over you grows stronger. No
situation is static. And there will come a time – if I live long enough – when I will decide
what you know no longer matters. Then I will destroy the document.’
‘But so many things could happen to you in between! Accidents, sickness, disease -‘
Dussander shrugged.’ “There will be water if God wills it, and we will find it if God
wills it, and we will drink it if God wills it” What happens is not up to us.’
Todd looked at the old man for a long time – for a very long time. There were flaws in
Dussander’s arguments – there had to be. A way out, an escape hatch either for both of
them or for Todd alone. A way to cry it off… times, guys, I hurt my foot, allee-allee-in-
free. A black knowledge of the years ahead trembled somewhere behind his eyes; he
could feel it there, waiting to be born as conscious thought Everywhere he went,
everything he did …
He thought of a cartoon character with an anvil suspended over its head. By the time
he graduated from high school, Dussander would be eighty, and that would not be the
end; by the time he collected his BA, Dussander would be eighty-four and he would still
feel that he wasn’t old enough; he would finish his master’s thesis and graduate school the
year Dussander turned eighty-six … and Dussander still might not feel safe.
‘No,’ Todd said thickly. ‘What you’re saying … I can’t face that.’
‘My boy,’ Dussander said gently, and Todd heard for the first time and with dawning
horror the slight accent the old man had put on the first word. ‘My boy … you must’
Todd stared at him his tongue swelling and thickening in his mouth until it seemed it
must fill his throat and choke him. Then he wheeled and blundered out of the house.
Dussander watched all of this with no expression at all, and when the door had
slammed shut and the boy’s running footsteps stopped, meaning that he had mounted his
bike, he lit a cigarette. There was, of course, no safe deposit box, no document But the
boy believed those things existed; he had believed utterly. He was safe. It was ended.
But it was not ended.
That night they both dreamed of murder, and both of them awoke in mingled terror
and exhilaration.
Todd awoke with the now familiar stickiness on his lower belly. Dussander, too old
for such things, put on the Gestapo uniform and then lay down again, waiting for his
racing heart to slow. The uniform was cheaply made and already beginning to fray.
In Dussander’s dream he had finally reached the camp at the top of the hill. The wide
gate slid open for him and then rumbled shut on its steel track once he was inside. Both
the gate and the fence surrounding the camp were electrified. His scrawny, naked
pursuers threw themselves against the fence -. wave after wave; Dussander had laughed
at them and he had strutted back and forth, his chest thrown out, his cap cocked at exactly
the right angle. The high, winey smell of burning flesh filled the black air, and he had
awakened in southern California thinking of jack-o’-lanterns and the night when vampires
seek the blue flame.
Two days before the Bowdens were scheduled to fly to Hawaii, Todd went back to the
abandoned trainyard where folks had once boarded trains for San Francisco, Seattle, and
Las Vegas; where other, older folks had once boarded the trolley for Los Angeles.
It was nearly dusk when he got there. On the curve of freeway nine hundred yards
away, most of the cars were now mowing their parking lights. Although it was warm,
Todd was wearing a light jacket. Tucked into his belt under it was a butcher-knife
wrapped in an old hand-towel. He had purchased the knife in a discount department store,
one of the big ones surrounded by acres of parking lot.
He looked under the platform where the wino had been the month before. His mind
turned and turned, but it turned on re-thing; everything inside him at that moment was
shades of black on black.
What he found was the same wino or possibly another; they all looked pretty much the
same.
“Hey!’ Todd said. ‘Hey! You want some money?’
The wino turned over, blinking. He saw Todd’s wide, sunny grin and began to grin
back. A moment later the butcher knife descended, all whicker-snicker and chrome-
white, slicker-slicing through his stubbly right cheek. Blood sprayed. Todd could see the
blade in the wino’s opening mouth … and then its tip caught for a moment in the left
corner of the wino’s lips, pulling his mouth into an insanely cockeyed grin. Then it was
the knife that was making the grin; he was carving the wino like a Halloween pumpkin.
He stabbed the wino thirty-seven times. He kept count. Thirty-seven, counting the first
strike, which went through the wino’s cheek and then turned his tentative smile into a
great grisly grin. The wino stopped trying to scream after the fourth stroke. He stopped
trying to scramble away from Todd after the sixth. Todd then crawled all the way under
the platform and finished the job.
On his way home he threw the knife into the river. His pants were bloodstained. He
tossed them into the washing machine and set it to wash cold. There were still faint stains
on the pants when they came out, but they didn’t concern Todd. They would fade in time.
He found the next day that he could barely lift his right arm to the level of his shoulder.
He told his father he must have strained it throwing pepper with some of the guys in the
park.
‘It’ll get better in Hawaii,’ Dick Bowden said, ruffling Todd’s hair, and it did; by the time they came home, it was as good as new.
13
It was July again.
Dussander, carefully dressed in one of his three suits (not his best), was standing at the
bus stop and waiting for the last local of the day to take him home. It was 10.45 p.m. He
had been to a film, a light and frothy comedy that he had enjoyed a great deal. He had
been in a fine mood ever since the morning mail. There had been a postcard from the boy,
a glossy colour photo of Waikiki Beach with bone-white highrise hotels standing in the
background. There was a brief message on the reverse.
Dear Mr Denker,
Boy this sure is some place. I’ve been swimming every day. My dad caught a big fish
and my mom is catching up on her reading (joke). Tomorrow we’re going to a volcano.
I’ll try not to fall in! Hope you’re okay.
Stay healthy, Todd
He was still smiling faintly at the significance of that last when a hand touched his
elbow.
‘Mister?’
‘Yes?’
He turned, on his guard – even in Santa Donato, muggers were not unknown – and then
winced at the aroma. It seemed to be a combination of beer, halitosis, dried sweat, and
possibly Musterole. It was a bum in baggy pants. He – it – wore a flannel shirt and very old Keds that were currently being held together with dirty bands of adhesive tape. The face
looming above this motley costume looked like the death of God.
‘You got an extra dime, mister? I gotta get to LA, me. Got a job offertunity. I need just
a dime more for the express bus. I wudn’t ask if it wasn’t a big chance for me.’
Dussander had begun to frown, but now his smile reasserted itself.
‘Is it really a bus ride you wish?’
The wino smiled sickly, not understanding.
‘Suppose you ride the bus home with me,’ Dussander proposed. ‘I can offer you a drink,
a meal, a bath, and a bed. .All I ask in return is a little conversation. I am an old man. I
live alone. Company is sometimes very welcome.’
The drunk’s smile abruptly grew more healthy as the situation clarified itself. Here was
a well-to-do old faggot with a taste for slumming.
‘All by yourself! Bitch, innit?’
Dussander answered the broad, insinuating grin with a polite smile. ‘I only ask that you
sit away from me on the bus. You smell rather strongly.’
‘Maybe you don’t want me stinking up your place, then,’ the drunk said with sudden,
tipsy dignity.
‘Come, the bus will be here in a minute. Get off one stop after I do and then walk back
two blocks. Ill wait for you on the corner. In the morning I will see what I can spare.
Perhaps two dollars.’
‘Maybe even five,’ the drunk said brightly. His dignity, tipsy or otherwise, had been
forgotten.
‘Perhaps, perhaps,’ Dussander said impatiently. He could now hear the low diesel drone of the approaching bus. He pressed a quarter, the correct bus fare, into the bum’s grimy