Bonita Avenue

  “Wilbert,” I interrupted, my head spinning from his declaration of hate, “I wish you knew how sorry I am, I—”

  “Just listen,” he said. “Don’t talk.” He waited awhile before continuing.

  “So I told Ronnie I hated you. ‘You want to even the score,’ he said, ‘you want to get out of here so you can even the score with your stepsister.’ He was right about that, I got all sweaty and jittery at the thought of it. He told me there was 17,000 guilders buried in the woods near Zwolle. He thinks about that money every minute of the day, sometimes out of desperation he tries to count to 17,000, he says, that’s how much those Gs are on his mind, this guy was dumb. He believed he had to get to those woods before he turned eighteen, otherwise the stash would be gone, see. ‘We’re gonna help each other out,’ he said, ‘and I already know how.’ ”

  Their outdoor exercise space, Wilbert told me, was surrounded by a four-meter-high steel fence, untakable without a pole vault, but there was a sort of bus stop shelter up against it for when it rained. If Wilbert were to give Ronnie a boost, he’d pull Wilbert up onto the roof. “This hombre had the meanest arms, see. You hadda see what that guy pumped in the gym. We’d go to the woods near Zwolle together, and I’d get a thousand smackers from him.”

  “Why on earth would you want to escape?” I asked. “Ten months, weren’t you already, like, halfway? I don’t get it—really, I don’t.”

  He laughed noiselessly. “You have no idea of time. You’ve never been mad for more than an hour. You have no idea of anger. What it’s like to be eaten up by anger for a week, a month, three months. You should just keep your trap shut. For weeks I lay awake till dawn”—he made a pistol with his hand—“it got light outside and I stuck this here in your mouth … Bang.”

  So one freezing-cold January evening he and his hulking friend smashed a bathroom window and within three minutes they were standing on the other side of that fence. They sprinted down the Berg en Dalseweg and got on the train, without a ticket, to Zwolle. He had cut his shoulder pretty badly but did not feel it. Revenge, see.

  “But you—”

  He shot me a sharp look.

  But you weren’t entirely innocent. You are a dangerous lunatic—goddammit man, didn’t you molest Vivianne? Didn’t you bash a guy to death? The sentences forced their way up to my molars, but I sent them back. As I stared at him they transformed themselves into something more dangerous, a deeper thought. How was I supposed to explain what came over me when our father, long ago, had retreated to the men’s room in the Bastille in order to get a grip on himself? What was my reasoning? I only half understood it myself. In my five minutes alone at that stiffly set table I made a hasty decision. I decided to betray Wilbert. My father came back and sat down as an old man. Without batting an eye, I said: “You’re right, Dad. It’s true. Wilbert’s been hassling me.” Why did I say that? Why?

  “But I what?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Go on.”

  “So me and Ronnie, we hike out of Zwolle from the station. Only reached the woods in the middle of the night, see. And him searching, searching, searching. For hours! Behind every damn tree in those woods. It drove me crazy, it drove him crazy. It was freezing. He starts punching trees with his bare hands. ‘Easy, big fella, relax,’ I say to him, ‘we’ll just wait until daylight.’ ”

  Why? Had that fuss in the bathroom shocked me more than I cared to admit? Or was my concern tinged with jealousy? His attention to Vivianne? Could that be it?

  “And guess what, next morning that jerk-off just walks up to it. As though he’d been raised by wolves. Ronnie digs a leather handbag out of the cold earth, unzips it, voilà, 17 Gs. And whaddya know, he gives me one. ‘For you,’ he says, ‘cuz we’re comrades. And now we’re gonna go to Enschede. You’re gonna take it out on your stepsister, I know it, man. I want it too.’ ”

  He paused and looked at me.

  “Why’re you stopping?” I said, while trying not to listen. Maybe the answer was much simpler, that it had everything to do with the sight of my father walking off. The defeated exhaustion of a man who, before Wilbert showed up, used to amaze us with his vitality. It started back in America, on Bonita Avenue, when in the morning I’d leap out of the bed Siem had tucked me into the night before, tingling with a zest for life that echoed my new dad. Despite reaching his mathematical apex in Berkeley, you’d sooner think he spent his days somewhere on that campus hooked up to an enormous battery-charger. Siem was incredible. In the weeks before Christmas he waited until Janis and I were in bed, and knocked together and painted a dollhouse using my mother’s tools. On Sundays he cooked spaghetti with red sauce. He could construct a kite out of a garbage bag and plywood strips in less than an hour. Once we were back in the Netherlands and newly installed in the farmhouse, he built a chicken run in the backyard for five Leghorns, and a rabbit hutch that he disinfected with Dettol and boiling water every Saturday, humming all the while. We watched breathlessly as he fetched a trailer full of old bricks from a demolished youth center behind Boekelo, marched them around the back of the house and—again, humming—built a huge planter using homemade mortar. By the end of 1989 there wasn’t a drop of fuel left over in him. Burned up on Wilbert—I think that was what hit me when my father returned from the men’s room, and sat back down across from me like an empty, dented oil drum. That kid had to go.

  “Ronnie could go to hell,” Wilbert continued. “No way did I want that monkey tagging along, see. So I say ‘no way,’ and he says ‘yes way,’ and I say ‘fuck you,’ and he grabs me by my throat, pins me to the ground and says ‘money back, asshole,’ so I say, ‘OK, you can come too, but it’ll cost you an extra grand.’ So he lets me go and gives me another G. God, he was stupid.”

  And slow, says Wilbert. A sluggish hulk whom he had easily outrun in the Cooper tests at the detention center, and so he stepped it up, walking toward the highway they had come down the night before. When he got to the bike path he intentionally took a wrong turn, not back toward Zwolle Station, but away from town, and Ronnie stood there shouting: “Man! You’re going the wrong way!” And then Wilbert broke into a run, a jog actually, at a good clip, farther and farther until ol’ Schwarzenegger gave up and gradually became a dot on the bike path. At the first town he got to he broke one of the thousands at a supermarket and took a taxi to Almelo—not the train, he was afraid Randy Ronnie would get the same idea. Once in Almelo he killed time in the freezing cold until the shops opened. He bought some clothes at the V&D department store, and a heavy coat he kept on. At the hardware store he got some rope, a box cutter, a kind of machete, “half a sword, man,” a roll of wide black plastic tape. At the sporting goods outlet he bought a gym bag into which he deposited his purchases.

  “Is this all true?” I asked. He sat there dishing me up a sexual fantasy, he was inventing it on the spot, one of his jailhouse wet dreams. “I don’t buy it. You’re making this up.”

  He smirked at me, pulled his T-shirt out of his trousers and wiped the spit from his mouth. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m a born liar. I make things sound better than they are, that’s me. Trying to spare you some, see. She doesn’t believe me. And the face? The ear infection? D’you believe that?” He pinched his rubbery cheek and tugged it back and forth. “That crap about my ear, that you believe, but not this.” He shook his head pityingly. “This here”—he tapped his right temple—“this was a present from this black dude I sold smack to. Diluted heroin, complete junk. The fuckin’ jungle bunny. Guy always paid too late, see. Constant shit with him, so I give him shit back. One day Sambo’s waiting for me at my car. This and that, y’know. Wants his money back. Go fuck yourself, I say. Bam, he goes and smashes my windshield with a claw hammer. So I jump over the hood and grab him by the neck. But yeah, the fucker slams me on the head with the hammer.”

  And sure enough, there’s a red half-moon on his right temple. He suddenly looked terrible.

  “Broken temporal bone. When I came to I was lying in an am
bulance.”

  I wanted to say something, but Wilbert said: “Shhh.” He leaned back with a look of contentment. “OK, so months later I’m walking my dogs on the beach, Zandvoort, see, and who do I see but that same guy. Dude’s walking along the empty beach eating fish nuggets. So what do I do, I sneak up behind him, let out a scream, and grab him by his moss head and drag him into the ocean. The dude totally doesn’t know what hit him. I give him a few head-butts and hold his head under water. Kept doing it until he’s half drowned, see.” He looked at me, satisfied. “That’s what I do with dudes who fuck with me.”

  See, y’know, see—I’d had about enough, see. I was through here. I didn’t want to spend another minute in a room with Wilbert and his see. I got up, could’ve just walked out the door. But instead I went over to the window. Behind me I heard him scuff his chair.

  There were two small framed pictures on the windowsill, I picked up the first one, a black-and-white photo of a laughing young woman. She had tufted-up dark hair and was standing in a yard with a white fence. Must be Wilbert’s mother. Without realizing it, I’d started crying, silently, calmly. In the other frame, I saw through my tears, was the same woman. Margriet, years older, sitting on a plaid sofa in an eighties living room, pixie haircut, her face unnaturally thin. Next to her: Wilbert. About eleven years old, square buck teeth, shaggy hair, cheerful and serious at the same time. Man of the house. So this is what he looked like while the people who dumped him were living in America. I had to sit this out. Grant him this.

  Maybe he read my mind, because he said: “It was a Thursday. I knew you had that job at the stables on Monday and Thursday nights—you went, no matter what. That last stretch through the woods and fields, pitch-dark, no houses, for a kilometer or so. Your route that night. No doubt about it.”

  God, he was right—I never ever missed it. Never. If I stayed home sick from school, I’d make sure I was back in shape before it was time to go to the stables. I saddled up horses, broke in newcomers, hosed down the troughs. At fifteen, nothing could beat this.

  “Out before nine, back after eleven. And that’s when I was gonna drag you off your bike. I hung around in Almelo until after dark. In the library, in the V&D, in a restaurant right near that fucking courthouse. I blew a hundred bucks on food, see.” He chuckled and said he’d taken a taxi “with his pants undone” to Enschede and had the driver drop him at the wooded bit between the campus and town. He chose a gentle curve with high bushes to hide in. Still had a few hours so he walked into the fields out back. Hard beds of gray sand, dead roots on the ground. In the distance, frozen water, and next to a dock there was a small shed. “All sorts of junk in there, including a rubber inflatable boat. So I blew it up, lay there a bit, see. Maybe an hour. I was totally … horny.”

  He’d taken the tape and knives out of the gym bag and walked back to the curve. Bike lamps visible from afar, but whether it was me or not, he couldn’t tell. Then he recognized me, blond hair sticking out of my winter cap. “How you lean over your handlebars when you bike, see.”

  I went back to my chair, sat down and sniffed. “You’re crazy,” I said. “You’re completely crazy.”

  His breathing became agitated, his fingers clawed at the loose leather of his chair. “You were just a few meters away from me, bitch.” The difference between the right and left side of his face was greater than ever. It was impossible to say how he looked at me. “And then I saw somebody cycling behind you. Some fat bitch without a lamp. I hesitated.”

  “You hesitated?” I said. “You’re fantasizing. You’re talking crap, Wilbert. Nothing like this ever happened. Who do you think you’re kidding? You can’t even come up with a decent ending.”

  Yeah, that’s how it went. I’d forgotten how angry he got. He jumped out of his armchair with such force that it fell over backward with a huge crash, iron legs up in the air. “Bitch!” he shouted. “Bitch! Fucking bitch! I should’ve slashed you to ribbons—god damn it to hell, what a bitch you are. I should have fucking slashed you to ribbons when I had the chance. I smelled you, your Judas-smell. I got a whiff of that goody-two-shoes, your loyalty to Daddy, loyalty to your safe little nest, your—”

  “Siem and I don’t see each other anymore,” I screamed above his tirade. I surprised myself. I’d jumped up too, we were standing face-to-face, four shins against a rattan coffee table. I hated myself. Hadn’t I resolved not to let it get out of hand? “I’ll never see him again, ever, d’you hear me?” I barked. But why? Why did I say that? To impress him? It was just like back then, him taunting me for being a daddy’s girl, and my need to disprove it. I could see Wilbert prick up his ears, he pursed the good half of his mouth.

  “Oh yeah?” His voice was calm, as though he hadn’t just lost his temper. He extended his arm, put a hand on my shoulder and let it glide off with a vague stroking motion. “Let’s hear it.”

  I slumped back into my chair. “I’m not as … goody-goody as you think.”

  “So what’s that got to do with him?”

  Catharsis. Just the simple fact of telling it out loud, relating the drama that had taken place on the Vluchtestraat, the still-fresh horrors I’d been feverishly keeping to myself for days, putting into words what we had been up to for four years like a pair of counterspies—that alone provided me with a strange, intense sense of relief. But the real pleasure came from the amazement on Wilbert’s face, the mouth-watering awe, he even seemed shocked, he called it “bizarre and pretty gross.” He’d put his chair back upright and sat listening to me with his hands in his lap. “You loaded, bitch?”

  “Nah.”

  “Course you are.”

  “Really, I’m not.”

  “OK. So tell me what he’s got to do with it. I tell you stuff too, see.”

  The acuity of his argument. Maybe I was just relieved he’d stopped asking about money, maybe I realized he did have a point. I told him the straight story: the vacation, us coming home early. The sliding glass door.

  “What? So he knows everything?”

  “Yup. What I’m telling you is two weeks old, you get it? We come home earlier than planned and there he is. And I realize right away: he knows everything.”

  “Why you telling me this?”

  “And then he walked straight through the window,” I said. “And now I’m going to America. He just marched straight through it, bam, straight through the glass.”

  “But bitch—why are you telling me this?”

  14

  He’s bleeding like a pig. Vague throbbing under his left foot, tingling in his hip and lower arms, if he lays his chin on his right shoulder blade he can see the gash that runs diagonally over the ball of his shoulder—but he feels almost nothing. His physical pain is smothered by a much broader malaise. Why did he get undressed, why didn’t he just leave? The regret that descends upon him feels like a chronic condition. He pushes his back flat against the blind brick wall behind which Joni and Aaron are, must stay. He prays they won’t come after him. His brain is a bazaar after a bombing, thoughts are ripped-off limbs. His nakedness is infinite. From the blood prints on the gray paving stones he sees that he walked a little way into the alley, then back again. His entire existence is reduced to this alley, with the Vluchtestraat on one side, the Lasondersingel on the other. In his initial panic he almost ran out onto the boulevard, a powerful flight reflex. Not long ago he helped lead the town in a silent march through these streets, now he is standing stark naked in this alley. Naked in an alley with his ass in his daughter’s panties. Please let this be a nightmare. He shuffles along in that procession and sees himself emerge from the alley without any clothes, through pairs of 100,000 eyes he looks at himself: a raving lunatic. His clothes are lying on the attic floor, but going back in there is out of the question. He keeps seeing himself standing in the living room, sees his nakedness through her eyes. Where did they come from? The recurring image of Joni collapsing to the floor in shock. Think for a moment. You must get out of here. But you can’t.
The brick wall is making his back itch. Just think of one thing at a time. Wait for it to get dark. And as though someone is reading his thoughts, the light dims, he looks that way: a silhouette at the Vluchtestraat end of the alley. He is briefly glued to the wall, a sculpture in a ludicrous place. The echoes of a bouncing soccer ball, it is a child, it runs for a few steps, picks up the ball, and looks. He jerks into motion, drags himself through the alley, the sole of his left foot suddenly on fire, after a few meters the brick walls become a green wall of conifers. He can only think of one thing: without hesitating he wriggles between two man-sized conifers at the edge of Aaron’s neighbor’s yard, for the second time this evening he squeezes himself among countless pricking fingers, the grainy sand sucks itself deeper into the hole in the sole of his foot. Stay standing in the narrowest spot. Make yourself small. The sand wants to suck him dry, the itching of the branches in his ears, between his buttocks, in his navel, the intense smell of sap. He turns his head toward the backyard, the branches scrape, he sees a terrace, the back door is open. Automatically he shifts slightly back into the alley, and listens. Footsteps, the echo of the bouncing ball, every sound wave ricochets ten times up and down between the walls, the child is approaching. He squeezes his eyes shut, listens, himself a conifer, all he hears is the rushing of his blood. The echo recedes, the steps become slow, almost inaudible. Wounds throbbing in unison. When he opens his eyes and looks through the dark-green tangle of branches, he sees the child, it’s standing in front of him, it’s orange, it’s wearing a Holland jersey. It stares wide-eyed in front of him—at his chest?

  “Go away,” he whispers.

  It cowers, it is a little boy, he sees, he drops his ball in fright, grabs it as it bounces away and sprints with hollow footsteps toward the Lasondersingel. He remains stock-still, waits before exhaling, a trembling sigh. Slowly his hearing sharpens again, he hears a bus drive by, he hears soccer coming from the houses, the voice of a commentator, fans. God bless football. Keep my alley clear. He allows his tension to ebb slightly—but then stiffens again. He’s overestimating his invisibility. These people only have to walk into their backyard. And Aaron and Joni? He’s still bleeding like crazy, a tepid stream trickles down his biceps. He needs to think more clearly. He can’t stay here. But then what? A sudden roar rushes sweat to his skin. Shouting inside the house, cheering from all the backyards: the hordes are coming to get him. A goal. He realizes he’s still clamping the nylon stocking in his fist, he shakes it loose as though it’s a rattlesnake. The branches are armies of ants. What can he do? The streets are abandoned, emptier than this it will never get. He tries to control his breathing, shifts his feet and visualizes the Vluchtestraat. Maybe he can ring somebody’s bell. Say he’s been robbed. The thought of himself on a garden path in these panties. But he can’t very well take them off. Everything is ruined. He is humiliated, she is humiliated. Is she really? Must get out of here.