Different Seasons(73)
From beneath him came a fuzzy snort.
Todd jumped to his feet, dropping a 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-desac 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 gray 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 licked them with a tongue which nicotine had turned a permanent dismal yellow. “Got a dime, kid?”
Todd looked at him expressionlessly.
“Gotta get to L.A. 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 like 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 if 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 what was in it until he opened it. Two quarters. Two nickles. A 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 L.A. Times was on the bottom step; he picked it up. He looked at the bell, below which the neat legends ARTHURDENKER 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 gray 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 grayish-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?”