“No,” Ash pleaded, tears starting in his eyes.
“And Jeremy?” Danny went on, “What did Jeremy do to deserve death?”
“He kept you from me,” Ash sighed, “But I never meant to kill Jeremy, I just wanted to scare him away. And it worked at first, but then he came back. So I had to scare him again.”
“That sword would have killed him, Ash.”
“No, I watched you in rehearsal, I knew where you’d stab him, right here,” Ash reassured him, pressing his finger into Danny’s abdomen just under his ribs, “It would go through him, but not hit any vital organs.”
“How could you be sure I’d hit him right excactly there?” Danny didn’t believe him.
“You hit him in exactly the same place every time,” Ash pointed out, “I watched you. You are always exact, always perfect.”
“And how did you know that running his car off the road wouldn’t kill him?” Danny demanded.
“It didn’t kill him.”
“But it nearly did. His airbags didn’t deploy. He was only prevented from going into the river by a fluke. Jeremy is a sweet, kind, talented boy, and you might have killed him for no better reason than because he stood in your way.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Ash wept.
“And what about that poor horse?” Danny suddenly realized it was Ash who’d killed the big black Arabian; the horse that had his name, with which Danny’s mother had humiliated him, “Ashtaroth wasn’t even in your way.”
“I was angry,” the boy lay down beside Danny, his head over Danny’s heart, where he could feel the hot tears dripping onto his skin, “It was cruel of me. I led that horse up to the oleander tree and fed the leaves and flowers to him. He made the most horrible noises, it sounded like screaming. I am so sorry.”
“Ash, you have to understand that killing is bad, no matter what. It doesn’t punish anybody, it doesn’t set anybody free. It’s just death, it’s destruction. Killing me, killing yourself, it’s the worse thing you could possibly do.”
“But it would be so beautiful,” Ash wailed, curling against Danny.
“No, Ash, it wouldn’t,” Danny knew he’d stopped the boy, that Ash wouldn’t hurt him now, and wanted to comfort him, “I know what you wanted, and your dream was beautiful, your pictures are so beautiful. But we can’t have that, it isn’t real.”
“It should be real.”
“Yes, love, but it’s not. We have to accept and live with what’s real.”
“I don’t want to,” the boy wept like a child.
“Will you untie me, Ash?” Danny asked quietly after a bit, “And put down the gun?”
Ash pulled back and looked into Danny’s eyes, his broken heart plain on his face, and nodded. He got a knife from one of his supply boxes and sawed through the silk scarves that he’d used to tie Danny up. As soon as his hands and legs were free, Danny sat up and pulled Ash into his arms, stroking his hair and rocking him as he cried.
They were curled up naked together like that when Officer Kelly kicked in the door and leaped into the room, his gun drawn. Danny held Ash tighter so he wouldn’t be afraid, wouldn’t be frightened into doing something stupid, and held out his hand to the policeman, gesturing for him to put away his gun.
“Ash,” Danny crooned to the sobbing boy, pulling his face up to look into his eyes, “Officer Kelly has to arrest you. It’s his duty. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Ash agreed, sniffling and nodding, looking up at Danny with complete trust, “Do you think it will be hard in prison? For someone like me?”
“Oh, I don’t think you’ll go to prison, love,” Danny kissed him on the forehead, “You’ll go to a hospital where they can help you sort everything out.”
“You think so?” the boy looked hopeful.
“I’ll do everything in my power to make sure,” Danny promised him, “But you have to go with Officer Kelly now. He’s going to have to handcuff you, it’s procedure; but I’ll come with you, OK? Everything is going to be all right.”
Officer Kelly stood stock still for a moment, marveling at the scene. When Danny gestured to him to take Ash away, he took the cue and was very gentle, helping the unresisting boy get dressed before putting the cuffs on, and wrapping a comforting arm around his shoulders to lead him out of the little cabin and back to the police car that he’d called as backup.
Danny got dressed, took a long last look around the little cabin with all its pictures of him, and swallowed his own terror in order to help the boy who’d nearly killed him; he shook his head at the irony of that, but decided the distraction was a welcome one — he’d have time later to let the fear he’d experienced work itself out.
23
“Hey, sleepy,” Danny said when Jeremy opened his eyes.
“Hey, you,” Jeremy started to smile, but winced when the smile disturbed the bandage on his face, “Do I look like I feel?”
“That depends. Do you feel like Boris Karloff in The Mummy?”
“Who’s Boris Karloff?”
“‘Who’s Boris Karloff,’ he says,” Danny shook his head in mock seriousness, “I’m going to have to take your education in hand. Your knowledge of classic cinema is deplorable.”
“I’ve got a DVD player here,” Jeremy closed his eyes again, squirming in the hospital bed to get more comfortable, but stopping with a little squeak of pain when his squirming disrupted his collarbone and ribs, “I’m going to be in bed forever, you might as well bore me with your old movies while I can’t move.”
Danny laughed and took Jeremy’s hand in his, and started talking to him about people at school, a subject of which Jeremy never seemed to tire. He also told him about various celebrities who were being featured on the internet, though he’d had to do hours of research to learn the comings and goings of the new famous, who had never really interested Danny.
And all the time he sat there chatting, he was riddled with pain and regret. Jeremy’s face was going to be scarred, his sweet prettiness marred forever — not enough to disfigure him, but it was a mark that would always be there, a long jagged line running from his left eyebrow almost to his jaw. Danny grieved over it considerably more than Jeremy himself, who thought it would make him look mysterious and dangerous.
Danny felt incredibly guilty about Jeremy’s injuries, knowing that Ash had done what he did on Danny’s account — calling Jeremy from a payphone claiming that Danny had been hurt and was asking for him, then hauling a deer carcass into the road and waiting in the shoulder until Jeremy’s car came around a bend and swerved to avoid the deer, then laboriously hauling the deer back into the woods and burying it as soon as Jeremy’s car went over the side.
He acknowledged that he wasn’t responsible for Ash’s insane actions, understood that nothing he could have done would have changed the boy from the paths he’d taken; he nevertheless still felt remorse for what Ash had done, because it was for Danny that he’d done it. That knowledge made him sad, just as knowing how Ash was suffering made him sad, seeing the boy struggling with his own remorse, his only relief the long spells of complete disconnect from reality that he experienced regularly.
In the weeks following, Danny split his free time between Ash and Jeremy, though he wasn’t allowed to spend all that much time with Ash, who was confined to the County hospital in Redding; and after the first two weeks, Ash’s doctor asked Danny to stop visiting, as it seemed to trigger the boy’s episodes.
When he was arraigned, Ash pleaded ‘no contest’ to the charges of murder, attempted murder, and destruction of property and animal cruelty. He was remanded to a correctional psychiatric facility at Susanville, on the other side of the state near the Nevada border. Mrs. Phillips was able to get a job with the Lassen County sheriffs, and moved to Susanville so she could be near her son.
Danny kept in touch with Ash through his mother, whom he called twice a week; she reported that Ash was surprisingly happy in the “nut hut” (as she called it), he had access to ar
t supplies and was encouraged to draw and paint. He still suffered delusions about himself and Danny, but they did not last very long and never featured violence of any kind.
Danny was seeing a psychotherapist regularly on his own account, working through his tangled feelings about Ash and his actions, but also managing to work through a lot of tangled feelings about his parents, his sex-life, and his self-esteem.
It helped his self-esteem even more when he moved out of his parents’ house and took up residence with the Aunt Ems for the rest of the school year. They gave him a different room, at his request; he was given a large empty space on the third floor with a tiny bathroom down the hall, which had once been a dormitory for the housemaids.
He was allowed to furnish and decorate it to his own taste without disturbing the museum-like stasis of the rest of the house; he had the walls covered in dark green damask and stained the duckboard wainscots himself to a dark walnut color, then commandeered discarded odds and ends from the storage rooms in the attic and put together an exquisite ‘shabby-chic’ jewel-box of a room.
Danny and Jeremy broke up shortly after Easter, realizing that they didn’t love each other sufficiently to justify ongoing mutual exclusiveness. Danny had realized when he was arguing with Ash for his life and said that he wanted to ‘fall in love,’ that he loved but wasn’t in love with Jeremy; and Jeremy realized the same thing during his long convalescence, having a great deal of time in which to think.
They remained friends afterward, though, and Jeremy started dating Derrick, the blond trumpeter, with whom he did fall very deeply in love; Danny went back to his promiscuous ways, more comfortable with new conquests and casual fuck-buddies than with serious monogamy.
But for the rest of the school year, Danny was infected by a sense of artificiality. None of his life seemed quite real, except for the sex. Living with the Aunt Ems, studying and participating in committees and sports at school, hanging out with his friends, none of it seemed like a genuine and authentic experience.
What did seem real was planning for college: Danny realized, as he made the arrangements for his living quarters, transportation, and classes at Stanford that he had, in a very deep way, already said goodbye to his life in Vandervere when he was tied to that bed in Ash’s studio with a gun nestled under his chin. The rest of the year was just an awkward period of delay, such as at a party when you have already taken leave of your hosts and are just waiting for your date to do the same so you can go.
Danny Vandervere’s childhood was over. He was only waiting for life to begin.
The Math Teacher Is Dead Page 18