“Hi, Todd. Long time no see.”
Todd leaned the rifle against the side of the bench and offered his wide and winsome grin. “Hi, Mr. French. What are you doing out here on the wild side of town?”
“Are your folks home?”
“Gee, no. Did you want them for something?”
“No,” Ed French said after a long, thoughtful pause. “No, I guess not. I guess maybe it would be better if just you and
I talked. For starters, anyway. You may be able to offer a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. Although God knows I doubt it.”
He reached into his hip pocket and brought out a newsclipping. Todd knew what it was even before Rubber Ed passed it to him, and for the second time that day he was looking at the side-by-side pictures of Dussander. The one the street photographer had taken had been circled in black ink. The meaning was clear enough to Todd; French had recognized Todd’s “grandfather.” And now he wanted to tell everyone in the world all about it. He wanted to midwife the good news. Good old Rubber Ed, with his jive talk and his motherfucking sneakers.
The police would be very interested—but, of course, they already were. He knew that now. The sinking feeling had begun about thirty minutes after Richler left. It was as if he had been riding high in a balloon filled with happy-gas. Then a cold steel arrow had ripped through the balloon’s fabric, and now it was sinking steadily.
The phone calls, that was the biggie. Richler had trotted that out just as slick as warm owlshit.
Sure,
he had said, practically breaking his neck to rush into the trap.
He gets one or two calls a week.
Let them go ranting all over southern California looking for geriatric ex-Nazis. Fine. Except maybe they had gotten a different story from Ma Bell. Todd didn’t know if the phone company could tell how much your phone got used . . . but there had been a look in Richler’s eyes . . .
Then there was the letter. He had inadvertently told Richler that the house hadn’t been burgled, and Richler had no doubt gone away thinking that the only way Todd could have known that was if he had been back . . . as he had been, not just once but three times, first to get the letter and twice more looking for anything incriminating. There had been nothing; even the SS uniform was gone, disposed of by Dussander sometime during the last four years.
And then there were the bodies. Richler had never mentioned the bodies.
At first Todd had thought that was good. Let them hunt a little longer while he got his own head—not to mention his story—straight. No fear about the dirt that had gotten on his clothes burying the body; they had all been cleaned later that same night. He ran them through the washer-dryer himself, perfectly aware that Dussander might die and then everything might come out. You can’t be too careful, boy, as Dussander himself would have said.
Then, little by little, he had realized it was not good. The weather had been warm, and the warm weather always made the cellar smell worse; on his last trip to Dussander’s house it had been a rank presence. Surely the police would have been interested in that smell, and would have tracked it to its source. So why had Richler withheld the information? Was he saving it for later? Saving it for a nasty little surprise? And if Richler was into planning nasty little surprises, it could only mean that he suspected.
Todd looked up from the clipping and saw that Rubber Ed had half-turned away from him. He was looking into the street, although not much was happening out there. Richler could suspect, but suspicion was the best he could do.
Unless there was some sort of concrete evidence binding Todd to the old man.
Exactly the sort of evidence Rubber Ed French could give. Ridiculous man in a pair of ridiculous sneakers. Such a ridiculous man hardly deserved to live. Todd touched the barrel of the .30-.30.
Yes, Rubber Ed was a link they didn’t have. They could
never
prove that Todd had been an accessory to one of Dussander’s murders. But with Rubber Ed’s testimony they could prove conspiracy. And would even
that
end it? Oh, no. They would get his high school graduation picture next and start showing it to the stewbums down in the Mission district. A long shot, but one Richler could ill afford not to play. If we can’t pin one bunch of winos on him, maybe we can get him for the other bunch.
What next? Court next.
His father would get him a wonderful bunch of lawyers, of course. And the lawyers would get him off, of course. Too much circumstantial evidence. He would make too favorable an impression on the jury. But by then his life would be ruined anyway, just as Dussander had said it would be. It would be all dragged through the newspapers, dug up and brought into the light like the half-decayed bodies in Dussander’s cellar.
“The man in that picture is the man who came to my office when you were in the ninth grade,” Ed told him abruptly, turning to Todd again. “He purported to be your grandfather. Now it turns out he was a wanted war criminal.”
“Yes,” Todd said. His face had gone oddly blank. It was the face of a department-store dummy. All the healthiness, life, and vivacity had drained from it. What was left was frightening in its vacuous emptiness.
“How did it happen?” Ed asked, and perhaps he intended his question as a thundering accusation, but it came out sounding plaintive and lost and somehow cheated. “How did this happen, Todd?”
“Oh, one thing just followed another,” Todd said, and picked up the .30-.30. “That’s really how it happened. One thing just . . . followed another.” He pushed the safety catch to the off position with his thumb and pointed the rifle at Rubber Ed. “As stupid as it sounds, that’s just what happened. That’s all there was to it.”
“Todd,” Ed said, his eyes widening. He took a step backwards. “Todd, you don’t want to ... please, Todd. We can talk this over. We can disc—”
“You and the fucking kraut can discuss it down in hell,” Todd said, and pulled the trigger.
The sound of the shot rolled away in the hot and windless quiet of the afternoon. Ed French was flung back against his Saab. His hand groped behind him and tore off a windshield wiper. He stared at it foolishly as blood spread on his blue turtleneck, and then he dropped it and looked at Todd.
“Norma,” he whispered.
“Okay,” Todd said. “Whatever you say, champ.” He shot Rubber Ed again and roughly half of his head disappeared in a spray of blood and bone.
Ed turned drunkenly and began to grope toward the driver’s-side door, speaking his daughter’s name over and over again in a choked and failing voice. Todd shot him again, aiming for the base of the spine, and Ed fell down. His feet drummed briefly on the gravel and then were still.
Sure did die hard for a guidance counsellor,
Todd thought, and brief laughter escaped him. At the same moment a burst of pain as sharp as an icepick drove into his brain and he closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, he felt better than he had in months—maybe better than he had felt in years. Everything was fine. Everything was together. The blankness left his face and a kind of wild beauty filled it.
He went back into the garage and got all the shells he had, better than four hundred rounds. He put them in his old knapsack and shouldered it. When he came back out into the sunshine he was smiling excitedly, his eyes dancing—it was the way boys smile on their birthdays, on Christmas, on the Fourth of July. It was a smile that betokened skyrockets, treehouses, secret signs and secret meeting-places, the aftermath of the triumphal big game when the players are carried out of the stadium and into town on the shoulders of the exultant fans. The ecstatic smile of tow-headed boys going off to war in coal-scuttle helmets.
“
I’m king of the world!
” he shouted mightily at the high blue sky, and raised the rifle two-handed over his head for a moment. Then, switching it to his right hand, he started toward that place above the freeway where the land fell away and where the dead tree would give him shelter.
It was five hours later and almost dark before they took him down.
FALL FROM INNOCENCE
For George McLeod
The Body
1
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.
I was twelve going on thirteen when I first saw a dead human being. It happened in 1960, a long time ago . . . although sometimes it doesn’t seem that long to me. Especially on the nights I wake up from dreams where the hail falls into his open eyes.
2
We had a treehouse in a big elm which overhung a vacant lot in Castle Rock. There’s a moving company on that lot today, and the elm is gone. Progress. It was a sort of social club, although it had no name. There were five, maybe six steady guys and some other wet ends who just hung around. We’d let them come up when there was a card game and we needed some fresh blood. The game was usually blackjack and we played for pennies, nickel limit. But you got double money on blackjack and five-card-under ...
triple
money on six-card-under, although Teddy was the only guy crazy enough to go for that.
The sides of the treehouse were planks scavenged from the shitpile behind Mackey Lumber & Building Supply on Carbine Road—they were splintery and full of knotholes we plugged with either toilet paper or paper towels. The roof was a corrugated tin sheet we hawked from the dump, looking over our shoulders all the time we were hustling it out of there, because the dump custodian’s dog was supposed to be a real kid-eating monster. We found a screen door out there on the same day. It was flyproof but really rusty—I mean, that rust was
extreme.
No matter what time of day you looked out that screen door, it looked like sunset.
Besides playing cards, the club was a good place to go and smoke cigarettes and look at girly books. There were half a dozen battered tin ashtrays that said CAMELS on the bottom, a lot of centerfolds tacked to the splintery walls, twenty or thirty dog-eared packs of Bike cards (Teddy got them from his uncle, who ran the Castle Rock Stationery Shoppe—when Teddy’s unc asked him one day what kind of cards we played, Teddy said we had cribbage tournaments and Teddy’s unc thought that was just fine), a set of plastic poker chips, and a pile of ancient
Master Detective
murder magazines to leaf through if there was nothing else shaking. We also built a 12” x 10” secret compartment under the floor to hide most of this stuff in on the rare occasions when some kid’s father decided it was time to do the we’re-really-good-pals routine. When it rained, being in the club was like being inside a Jamaican steel drum ... but that summer there had been no rain.
It had been the driest and hottest since 1907—or so the newspapers said, and on that Friday preceding the Labor Day weekend and the start of another school year, even the goldenrod in the fields and the ditches beside the backroads looked parched and poorly. Nobody’s garden had done doodly-squat that year, and the big displays of canning stuff in the Castle Rock Red & White were still there, gathering dust. No one had anything to put up that summer, except maybe dandelion wine.
Teddy and Chris and I were up in the club on that Friday morning, glooming to each other about school being so near and playing cards and swapping the same old traveling salesman jokes and frenchman jokes. How do you know when a frenchman’s been in your back yard? Well, your garbage cans are empty and your dog is pregnant. Teddy would try to look offended, but he was the first one to bring in a joke as soon as he heard it, only switching frenchman to polack.
The elm gave good shade, but we already had our shirts off so we wouldn’t sweat them up too bad. We were playing three-penny-scat, the dullest card-game ever invented, but it was too hot to think about anything more complicated. We’d had a pretty fair scratch ballteam until the middle of August and then a lot of kids just drifted away. Too hot.
I was down to my ride and building spades. I’d started with thirteen, gotten an eight to make twenty-one, and nothing had happened since then. Chris knocked. I took my last draw and got nothing helpful.
“Twenty-nine,” Chris said, laying down diamonds.
“Twenty-two,” Teddy said, looking disgusted.
“Piss up a rope,” I said, and tossed my cards onto the table face down.
“Gordie’s out, ole Gordie just bit the bag and stepped out the door,” Teddy bugled, and then gave out with his patented Teddy Duchamp laugh—
Eeee-eee-eee,
like a rusty nail being slowly hauled out of a rotten board. Well, he was weird; we all knew it. He was close to being thirteen like the rest of us, but the thick glasses and the hearing aid he wore sometimes made him look like an old man. Kids were always trying to cadge smokes off him on the street, but the bugle in his shirt was just his hearing-aid battery.
In spite of the glasses and the flesh-colored button always screwed into his ear, Teddy couldn’t see very well and often misunderstood the things people said to him. In baseball you had to have him play the fences, way beyond Chris in left field and Billy Greer in right. You just hoped no one would hit one that far because Teddy would go grimly after it, see it or not. Every now and then he got bonked a good one, and once he went out cold when he ran full-tilt-boogie into the fence by the treehouse. He lay there on his back with his eyes showing whites for almost five minutes, and I got scared. Then he woke up and walked around with a bloody nose and a huge purple lump rising on his forehead, trying to claim that the ball was foul.