Different Seasons(77)
He turned, on his guard—even in Santo 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 loafers 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 L.A., me. Got a job offertunity. I need just a dime more for the express bus. I wudn’t ask if it wadn’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. I’ll 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 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.
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 A’s and B’s, 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 book of coupons. 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 f**k—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.