hand and strolled a few paces away without looking back.
The bum stood undecided as the headlights of the local swept over the rise. He was
still standing and frowning down at the quarter when the old faggot got on the bus
without looking back. The bum began to walk away and then – at the last second – he
reversed direction and boarded the bus just before the doors folded closed. He put the
quarter into the fare-box with the expression of a man putting a hundred dollars down on
a long shot. He passed Dussander without doing more than glancing at him and sat at the
back of the bus. He dozed off a little, and when he woke up, the rich old faggot was gone.
He got off at the next stop, not knowing if it was the right one or not, and not really
caring.
He walked back two blocks and saw a dim shape under the streetlight. It was the old
faggot, all right. The faggot was watching him approach, and he was standing as if at
attention.
For just a moment the bum felt a chill of apprehension, an urge to just turn away and
forget the whole thing.
Then the old man was gripping him by the arm … and his grip was surprisingly firm.
‘Good,’ the old man said. ‘I’m very glad you came. My house is down here. It’s not far.’
‘Maybe even ten,’ the bum said, allowing himself to be led.
‘Maybe even ten,’ the old faggot agreed, and then laughed. ‘Who knows?’
14
The Bi-Centennial year arrived.
Todd came by to see Dussander half a dozen times between his return from Hawaii in
the summer of 1975 and the trip he and his parents took to Rome just as all the drum-
thumping, flag-waving, and Tall Ships-watching was approaching its climax. Todd got
special permission to leave school early, on 1 June, and they were back three days before
the Bi-Centennial 4th.
These visits to Dussander were low-key and in no way unpleasant; the two of them
found they could pass the time civilly enough. They spoke more in silences than they did
in words, and their actual conversations would have put an FBI agent to sleep. Todd told
the old man that he had been seeing a girl named Angela Farrow off and on. He wasn’t
nuts about her, but she was the daughter of one of his mother’s friends. The old man told
Todd he had taken up braiding rugs because he had read such an activity was good for
arthritis. He showed Todd several samples of his work, and Todd dutifully admired them.
The boy had grown quite a bit, had he not? (Well, two inches.) Had Dussander given
up smoking? (No, but he had been forced to cut down; they made him cough too much
now.) How had his schoolwork been? (Challenging but exciting; he had made all As and
Bs, had gone to the state finals with his Science Fair project on solar power, and was now
thinking of majoring in anthropology instead of history when he got to college.) Who was
mowing Dussander’s lawn this year? (Randy Chambers from just down the street — a
good boy, but rather fat and slow.)
During that year Dussander had put an end to three winos in his kitchen. He had been
approached at the downtown bus stop some twenty times, had made the drink-dinner-
bath-and-bed offer seven times. He had been turned down twice, and on two other
occasions the winos had simply walked off with the quarters Dussander gave them for the
fare-box. After some thought, he had worked out a way around this; he simply bought a
bus-pass. They were two dollars and fifty cents, good for fifteen rides, and non-negotiable
at the local liquor stores.
On very warm days just lately, Dussander had noticed an unpleasant smell drifting up from his cellar. He kept his doors and windows firmly shut on these days.
Todd Bowden had found a wino sleeping it off in an abandoned drainage culvert
behind a vacant lot on Cienaga Way – this had been in December, during the Christmas
vacation. He had stood there for some time, hands stuffed into his pockets, looking at the
wino and trembling. He had returned to the lot six times over a period of five weeks,
always wearing his light jacket, zipped halfway up to conceal the Craftsman hammer
tucked into his belt. At last he had come upon the wino again – that one or some other,
and who really gave a fuck – on the first day of March. He had begun with the hammer
end of the tool, and then at some point (he didn’t really remember when; everything had
been swimming in a red haze) he had switched to the claw end, obliterating the wino’s
face.
For Kurt Dussander, the winos were a half-cynical propitiation of gods he had finally
recognized … or re-recognized. And the winos were fun. They made him feel alive. He
was beginning to feel that the years he had spent in Santa Donato – the years before the
boy had turned up on his doorstep with his big blue eyes and his wide American grin –
had been years spent being old before his time. He had been only sixty-eight when he
came here. And he felt much younger than that now.
The idea of propitiating gods would have startled Todd at first … but it might have
gained eventual acceptance. After stabbing the wino under the train platform, he had
expected his nightmares to intensify … to perhaps even drive him crazy. He had expected
waves of paralyzing guilt that might well end with a blurted confession or the taking of
his own life.
Instead of any of those things, he had gone to Hawaii with his parents and enjoyed
the best vacation of his life.
He had begun high school last September feeling oddly new and refreshed, as if a
different person had jumped into his Todd Bowden skin. Things that had made no
particular impression on him since earliest childhood – the sunlight just after dawn, the
look of the ocean off the Fish Pier, the sight of people hurrying on a downtown street at
just that moment of dusk when the streetlights come on — these things now imprinted
themselves on his mind again in a series of bright cameos, in images so clear they seemed
electroplated. He tasted life on his tongue like a draught of wine straight from the bottle.
After he had seen the stewbum in the culvert, the nightmares had begun again.
The most common one involved the wino he had stabbed to death in the abandoned
trainyards. Home from school, he burst into the house, a cheery Hi, Monica-baby! on his
lips. It died there as he saw the dead wino in the raised breakfast nook. He was sitting
slumped over their butcher-block table in his puke-smelling shirt and pants. Blood had
streaked across the bright tiled floor; it was drying on the stainless steel counters. There
were bloody handprints on the natural pine cupboards.
Clipped to the note-board by the fridge was a message from his mother: Todd – Gone
to the store. Back by 3.30. The hands of the stylish sunburst clock over the Jenn-Aire
range stood at 3.20 and the drunk was sprawled dead up there in the nook like some
horrid oozing relic from the subcellar of a junkshpp and there was blood everywhere, and
Todd began trying to clean it up, wiping every exposed surface, all the time screaming at
the dead wino that he had to go, had to leave him alone, and the wino just lolled there and stayed dead, grinning up at the ceiling, and the freshets of blood kept pouring from the
stab-wounds in his dirty skin. Todd grabbed the O-Cedar mop from the closet and began
to slide it madly back and forth across the floor, aware that he was not really getting the
blood up but only diluting it, spreading it around, but unable to stop. And just as he heard
his mother’s Town and Country wagon turn into the driveway, he realized the wino was
Dussander. He woke from these dreams sweating and gasping, clutching double handfuls
of the bedclothes.
But after he finally found the wino in the culvert again -that wino or some other – and
used the hammer on him, these dreams went away. He supposed he might have to kill
again, and maybe more than once. It was too bad, but of course their time of usefulness as human creatures was over. Except their usefulness to Todd, of course. And Todd, like
everyone else he knew, was only tailoring his lifestyle to fit his own particular needs as
he grew older. Really, he was no different than anybody. You had to make your own way
in the world; if you were going to get along, you had to do it by yourself.