Different Seasons(74)

“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 June twenty-fifth. In September I’ll be going to school across town. It’s this bussing thing.”

“Oh yes, the Schwarzen,” Dussander said, idly watching a fly as it trundled across the red and white check of the oilcloth. “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 in his stomach. Terror, hate, and a desire to do something so awful it 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 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 hand 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 any more 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 nickle anyone can make a photocopy. For a dollar, you could post a copy of my death-warrant on every streetcorner for twenty blocks. Two 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. All of a sudden his skin felt too warm, and for no reason at all he found himself remembering something that had happened when he was seven or eight. He and a friend of his had been crawling through a culvert which ran beneath the old Freight Bypass Road just out of town. The friend, skinnier than Todd, had had no problem ... but Todd had gotten stuck. He had become suddenly aware of the feet of rock and earth over his head, all that dark weight, and when an L.A.-bound semi passed above, shaking the earth and making the corrugated pipe vibrate with a low, tuneless, and somehow sinister note, he had begun to cry and to struggle witlessly, throwing himself forward, pistoning with his legs, yelling for help. At last he had gotten moving again, and when he finally struggled out of the pipe, he had fainted.

Dussander had just outlined a piece of duplicity so fundamental that it had never even crossed his mind. He could feel his skin getting hotter, and he thought: I won’t cry.

“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?”

Trapped. I’m trapped just like in the pipe that time and who are you going to yell for now?