Apt Pupil

12

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 toothlessly at Todd and Todd looked down, feeling the old sickening lift and drop of his stomach. Terror, hate, and a desire to do something so awful : could only be fully contemplated in his dreams.

‘Look, I plan to go to college, in case you didn’t know,’ Todd said. ‘I know that’s a long time off, but I think about it. I even know what I want to major in. History.’

‘Admirable. He who will not learn from the past is—’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Todd said.

Dussander did so, amiably enough. He knew the boy wasn’t done… not yet. He sat with his hands folded, watching him.

‘I could get my letter back from my friend,’ Todd suddenly blurted. ‘You know that? I could let you read it, and then you could watch me burn it. If—’

‘—if I would remove a certain document from my safety deposit box.’

‘Well… yeah.’

Dussander uttered a long, windy, rueful sigh. ‘My boy,’ he said. ‘Still you do not understand the situation. You never have, right from the beginning. Partly because you are only a boy, but not entirely… even then, even in the beginning, you were a very old boy. No, the real villain was and is your absurd American self-confidence that never allowed you to consider the possible consequences of what you were doing… which does not allow it even now.’

Todd began to speak and Dussander raised his hands adamantly, suddenly the world’s oldest traffic cop.

‘No, don’t contradict me. It’s true. Go on if you like. Leave the house, get out of here, never come back. Can I stop you? No. Of course I can’t. Enjoy yourself in Hawaii while I sit in this hot, grease-smelling kitchen and wait to see if the Schwarzen in Watts will decide to start killing policemen and burning their shitty tenements again this year. I can’t stop you anymore than I can stop getting older a day at a time.’

He looked at Todd fixedly, so fixedly that Todd looked away.

‘Down deep inside, I don’t like you. Nothing could make me like you. You forced yourself on me. You are an unbidden guest in my house. You have made me open crypts perhaps better left shut, because I have discovered that some of the corpses were buried alive, and that a few of those still have some wind left in them.

‘You yourself have become enmeshed, but do I pity you because of that? Gott im Himmel! You have made your bed; should I pity you if you sleep badly in it? No… I don’t pity you, and I don’t like you, but I have come to respect you a little bit. So don’t try my patience by asking me to explain this twice. We could obtain our documents and destroy them here in my kitchen. And still it would not be over. We would, in fact, be no better off than we are at this minute.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘No, because you have never studied the consequences of what you have set in motion. But attend me, boy. If we burned our letters here, in this jar cover, how would I know you hadn’t made a copy? Or two? Or three? Down at the library they have a Xerox machine, for a nickel anyone can make a photocopy. For a dollar, you could post a copy of my death-warrant on every streetcorner for twenty blocks. Four miles of death-warrants, boy! Think of it! Can you tell me how I would know you hadn’t done such a thing?’

‘I… well, I… I…’ Todd realized he was floundering and forced himself to shut his mouth. Dussander had just outlined a piece of duplicity so fundamental that it had simply never crossed his mind. He opened his mouth to say so, realized Dussander would not believe him… and that, in fact, was the problem.

He shut his mouth again, this time with a snap.

‘And how would you know I hadn’t made two copies for my safety deposit box… that I had burned one and left the other there?’

Todd was silent and dismayed.

‘Even if there were some impartial third party we could go to, always there would be doubts. The problem is insoluble, boy. Believe it.’

‘Shit,’ Todd said in a very small voice.

Dussander took a deep drink from his cup and looked at Todd over the rim.

‘Now I tell you two more things, boy. First, that if your part in this matter came out, your punishment would be quite small. It is even possible — no, more than that, likely — that it would never come out in the papers at all. I frightened you with reform school once, when I was badly afraid you might crack and tell everything. But do I believe that? No -I used it the way a father will use the "boogeyman" to frighten a child into coming home before dark. I don’t believe that they would send you there, not in this country where they spank killers on the wrist and send them out into the streets to kill again after two years of watching colour TV in a penitentiary.

‘But it might well ruin your life all the same. There are records… and people talk. Always, they talk. Such a juicy scandal is not allowed to wither; it is bottled, like wine. And, of course, as the years pass, your culpability will grow with you. Your silence will grow more damning. If the truth came out today, people would say, "But he is just a child!"… not knowing, as I do, what an old child you are. But what would they say, boy, if the truth about me, coupled with the fact that you knew about me as early as 1974 but kept silent, came out while you are in high school? That would be bad. For it to come out while you are in college would be disaster. As a young man just starting out in business… armageddon. You understand this first thing?’

Todd was silent, but Dussander seemed satisfied. He nodded.

Still nodding, he said: ‘Second, I don’t believe you have a letter.’

Todd strove to keep a poker face, but he was terribly afraid his eyes had widened in shock. Dussander was studying him avidly, and Todd was suddenly, nakedly aware that this old man had interrogated hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. He was an expert. Todd felt that his skull had turned to window-glass and all things were flashing inside in large letters.

‘I asked myself who you would trust so much. Who are your friends… who do you run with? Who does this boy, this self-sufficient, coldly controlled little boy, go to with his loyalty? The answer is, nobody.’

Dussander’s eyes gleamed yellowly.

‘Many times I have studied you and calculated the odds. I know you, and I know much of your character — no, not all, because one human being can never know everything that is in another human being’s heart — but I know so little about what you do and who you see outside of this house. So I think, "Dussander, there is a chance that you are wrong. After all these years, do you want to be captured and maybe killed because you misjudged a boy?" Maybe when I was younger, I would have taken the chance — the odds are good odds, and the chance is a small chance. It is very strange to me, you know — the older one becomes, the less one has to lose in matters of life and death… and yet, one becomes more and more conservative.’

He looked hard into Todd’s face.

‘I have one more thing to say, and then you can go when you want What I have to say is that, while I doubt the existence of your letter, never doubt the existence of mine. The document I have described to you exists. If I die today… tomorrow… everything will come out, Everything,’

‘Then there’s nothing for me,’ Todd said. He uttered a dazed little laugh. ‘Don’t you see that?’

‘But there is. Years will go by. As they pass, your hold on me will become worth less and less, because no matter how important my life and liberty remain to me, the Americans and — yes, even the Israelis — will have less and less interest in taking them away.’

‘Yeah? Then why don’t they let that guy Speer go?’

‘If the Americans had him — the Americans who let killers out with a spank on the wrists — they would have let him go,’ Dussander said. ‘Are the Americans going to allow the Israelis to extradite a ninety-year-old man so they can hang him as they hung Eichmann? I think not. Not in a country where they put photographs of firemen rescuing kittens from trees on the front pages of city newspapers.

‘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.