Then I saw the shorts and the T-shirt I had been wearing when Casper taught me how to swim. My mother, distracted with worry, had left them draped wet over the footboard of my bed. They were still damp and smelled of pond water and the promise of mildew. They had already left a ghostly white stain on the varnished wood of the footboard. With time and polish it faded, but the mark Casper left on me was indelible.
When I got downstairs, my mother was scrambling eggs. My sisters were setting the breakfast table. Willy was talking to a policeman I hadn’t seen before who was sitting on the back steps. I thought the fact that he wasn’t holding a shotgun in his lap meant that things had gotten less scary. Strange but true, learning to swim had made an optimist out of me.
My parents had showered and changed clothes, but they had not gone to bed. My father was on the phone to Neutch, the police sergeant from Hamden, who had driven up to Townsend at my father’s request. Neutch was a lieutenant now. The opening pages of Casper’s prologue, stolen by the wind when he leapt from the library window, had just been found. Neutch didn’t have them in front of him; he promised to send them on and paraphrased. “He made up all this B.S. about stuff you do to patients, and then he ends, if you’ll pardon my French, by writing ‘fuck him’ about fifty times.”
“I see,” was what my father said to Neutch. But he didn’t. What was frighteningly unclear was why Casper had not begun his revenge with me. My father and mother both knew Casper had reason, opportunity, and motive. They had traded insights and accusations all night, trying to make sense of it. Sometime between 3:00 and 4:00 A.M. my father put forth the theory that Casper had intended to drown me but had changed his mind, returned me unharmed, to send a message: “You are my prisoner now. I can hurt you any time I want to.”
In my father’s mind, there was no question. As the night’s second pot of coffee boiled over, he announced, “Casper’s demonstrating his power over me, prolonging his euphoric delusions of omnipotence that we are at his mercy, that we are . . .”
My mother interrupted him. “We are at his mercy.”
“Nora, they’ll catch him.”
“What happens the next time he escapes? He’ll never forgive you.”
“Goddamnit, I’ve done nothing that needs forgiving.” He knew that wasn’t true. And having to face that fact across the kitchen table made him at that moment hate her. “I tried to help him.”
“I believe that.”
“But you blame me.”
“It’s my fault, too. If I had let him kill himself that day at Sleeping Giant, Jack wouldn’t be dead. And we wouldn’t be . . . what we have become.” She did not want to put that into words.
What was resolved between them in whispers as the sun rose over Greenwood was not shared with any of us. Likewise, my parents did not discuss the details of Casper’s escape from Townsend and subsequent arrival at my lemonade stand. That was so mysterious, it bordered on the impossible.
The cab driver who’d picked Casper up at the front gate at nine said they made two stops. The first was at the Townsend Theological Seminary Library. Casper was inside for about ten minutes. After that they went directly to the Townsend train station. Casper had paid with a crisp twenty-dollar bill; a New York–bound train had arrived approximately five minutes later. Logic would indicate that Casper had boarded. But the conductors could not remember taking a ticket from anyone matching Casper’s photograph. And, more important, if he had traveled to New Jersey by train, he wouldn’t have arrived until 4:20 in the afternoon; Casper had appeared in front of my lemonade stand just after noon.
Though no black Cadillac or any other dark-colored sedan had been reported stolen in the Townsend area, even if he had hot-wired a car whose owner might not have reported it missing for what was now over forty-eight hours, if Casper had driven south, at the very earliest he would have arrived three hours after he had. The only explanation was that he flew. Prop plane, helicopter, broom . . . New Jersey and Connecticut police were at that moment checking local airports and charter services.
A mental patient who could walk out the front gate of a hospital for the criminally insane, hail a cab, stop at a library, hop a plane, and acquire a late-model Cadillac was not omnipotent, but he was a force to be reckoned with and frightened by.
All of which in hindsight makes my parents’ behavior that morning doubly strange. When I came back from swimming the night before, my father’s phone calls to the men who were trying to help him were spiked with threats and obscenities. He told my mother to shut up and promised a state policeman, “If you don’t find this creep, I will make it my life’s work fucking your life up.” I had never heard him say the F word before. And even though he used his soft, warm, patient voice on me, I felt burned by the rage that boiled beneath his self-control. Overnight, something had changed. And that morning he was full of “thank-yous” and “I appreciate it” and small talk about Lieutenant Neutch’s wife and children.
Most surprising of all, when we sat down to breakfast, my father took my mother’s hand and announced, “I am not going to let a man I tried to help deny my life. We are not going to let him defeat us.”
“What if they don’t catch him? He’ll wait a year or two years and come back and . . .” Lucy blubbered what Willy and Fiona were thinking.
“Even if they catch him, he’s smart, he went to Yale, he can escape again, you’re not God.” Fiona gave my father a look that told him she was talking about Joel as well as Casper.
“I’m not God, but by God I’m not powerless. Casper Gedsic is going to be dealt with. I’m not promising, I’m telling you.” The others didn’t believe him, but I did. I was the only one at the table who wasn’t scared of Casper. It was my father who frightened me now. He made me think of a movie Willy had taken me to called The Vikings. My father wasn’t wearing a helmet or carrying a battle-ax, but he was making a blood oath.
He wasn’t finished surprising us. “We are not only going to continue with our lives, we are going to make the most of them. Your mother and I are going to Philadelphia to attend a psychological conference where I’m scheduled to read a paper.”
“You’re going to leave us here alone?” Willy spit egg out of his mouth in my father’s direction.
My mother took over. “Of course not. You children are going to stay with Lazlo for a few days in New York.”
“What if he follows us to New York?”
“He won’t, Lucy.”
“But what if he does?”
“Slavo will shoot him.” Lazlo stood in the kitchen door. “Which will cost extra, but my pleasure.” Slavo was one of two Yugoslavian licensed bodyguards Lazlo had hired.
Six foot six and three hundred pounds of muscled fat, Slavo hunkered behind Lazlo, casting a shadow across the breakfast table. When he bent down to shake my father’s hand, I saw a revolver in a shoulder holster. Later, I’d notice he had another pistol, so small it didn’t look real, strapped to his ankle.
Willy must have seen the guns, because he stopped being scared and started to complain. “What are we going to do in New York?” Willy didn’t like Lazlo, mostly because I did.
“You’ll see the sights, go to museums.” My mother pushed Willy’s hair out of his eyes.
“I hate museums.”
“Do you like television?” Slavo lit Lazlo’s cigarette. “I have three sets. One color.”
Willy was happy. Fiona was thrilled. Lazlo lived in Greenwich Village. Joel the wrestler and she had been planning on sneaking in to see the Kingston Trio at the Bitter End. Lucy cheered up when she looked out the window and saw the other bodyguard leaning up against the side of the limousine Lazlo had rented for our rescue. He looked like Bill Holden in the movie Picnic, only with better cheekbones. Lucy, at fifteen still a sucker for fairy tales, had fantasized what it would be like to ride away from Greenwood in a limousine.
Suddenly, suitcases were being pulled out from under beds. We were packing clothes and toiletries and changes of underwear as
if we were going on a holiday, not running away from the shadow in the pricker bushes.
All of Greenwood knew about Casper now. The police had circulated a photograph of him sent by teletype, told our neighbors to be on the lookout, cautioned them to remember to lock their doors and bolt their windows. When I had first disappeared from my lemonade stand the day before, the Lutzes and the Murphys and the Goodmans had organized search parties and yelled themselves hoarse calling my name into the evening. But when I showed up unharmed and they found out what my father’s ex-patient had done to Dr. Winton back in Hamden, their goodwill evaporated into outrage.
How dare my father not tell them, warn them he had a homicidal maniac on his trail? How dare he bring a killer to Harrison Street? And most galling and inexcusable of all, how could my parents send us off to New York in a limousine and take off to Philadelphia so my father could play the big shot at a medical convention, leaving them to face our nightmare?
Now that they knew why we were so weird, they thought even less of us. What if Casper came back and, finding us not at home, kidnapped one of their children for a swimming lesson? Put a bullet hole in their necks? Gave them a beating with a field hockey stick that left them wearing diapers in a wheelchair?
They stood on the porches and peered over their hedges as we carried our bags to Lazlo’s rented limousine. Their eyes narrowed at our gall, their jaws set with contempt. Children darted into the road, eager to try out the backseat of the limousine and ask me questions about my maniac. But before they got to our side of the street, their parents called them back and ordered them inside, like what we had was catchable.
What did they expect my father to do? Would they have respected him more if he took his revolver out of the bedside table and patrolled the yard, waiting for Casper to return? I didn’t want my father to hurt Casper, but at the same time, I did not want Dad to run away. It was okay for me to do that to keep from drowning, but not my father. He didn’t sound like a coward over breakfast, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were doing something that wasn’t right.
My father was oblivious to the neighbors’ disdain. My mother lined us up and they kissed and hugged us, one by one, and put us in the limousine. The policeman said, “Don’t worry, everything’ll be back to normal in a couple days.” I didn’t believe him.
As we drove away, I looked back for one last wave. My parents had already turned their backs on us.
I had been to New York before, the Museum of Natural History, the Bronx Zoo, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grand Central Station. It was a place where it wasn’t safe to go to the men’s room without my father, a place where my mother embarrassed me by insisting on holding my hand and constantly warning us, “Don’t wander off or you’ll get lost.” In short, it was the last place in the world you’d go to be safe.
None of it made any sense to me. If they waited until I was four and a half to tell me I had a brother who’d drowned in a birdbath, waited until I was seven to let me know there was a killer after us, what else hadn’t they told me? If I couldn’t trust my parents or Fiona or Willy or even Lucy (who liked me enough to share her last Tootsie Roll with me, even when she had to take it out of her mouth to do it) to tell me the truth, who could I trust? Lazlo? Sure, he came to my birthdays, gave me cool presents, but he hadn’t warned me. If I knew someone wanted to hurt Lazlo, if his name was on a death list, I’d have told him. My seven-year-old mind boggled at the deception of life.
As Willy and Lucy fought over command of the electric windows, I turned around in the backseat and stared out the rear window, looking for Casper.
We got to New York just in time to see the city get out of work: 5:05 P.M., and suddenly they scurried and ran and tripped and bolted out of office buildings and skyscrapers, hitting the summer streets in a frenzy, as if they had just been sprung from a giant trap. I don’t know how the others saw it that day, but it made me think of a nature show on TV called Wild Kingdom, hosted by Marlin Perkins. Anyway, he was always catching wild animals in the wilderness only to put metal bracelets on their paws or radio collars around their necks, so that when they were set free, they’d think they were free, but really weren’t.
The sidewalks were a grim, haphazard migration. I’d never known there were so many different kinds of people in the world. Only when I looked at them all at once, they didn’t seem like people. The way they pushed and jostled each other, some running for cabs, others charging, heads bowed, toward the subway, some thundering east, others stampeding west, all anxious in their hurrying, as if they were being stalked by a predator they could smell but not identify.
It made me lonely to think of people like wildebeests. So I tried to concentrate on faces, pick out individuals to focus on who were heading in our direction as the limousine inched its way east, crosstown on Forty-second Street. The trouble was, when I looked at them one at a time, people looked even more like animals. A little woman in a blue-and-white polka-dotted suit clutched her pocketbook to her breast with both hands and darted through the crowd like a mouse who feared she might be mistaken for a piece of cheese. A tall woman made taller by a blond beehive and high heels bounded into traffic to escape in a taxi like an albino gazelle. A lion with a briefcase, a jackal sipping a paper-bagged beer waited for his moment in the cool shadow of a marquee.
Not wanting to be any more scared of the migration we were on than I already was, I made myself stop thinking of a wild kingdom and concentrated on the familiar—a businessman whose seersucker suit rumpled just like my dad’s, a mother with four children had the same distracted smile my mother wore when she couldn’t hold everyone’s hand in a crowd—yes, they looked normal, safe and human. But so had Casper.
The scariest thing of all about this first inkling of the wild wideness of the world around me was that none of the people I was watching had any idea I was thinking about them. And because they didn’t know I was alive, they would not know I was dead. Unless they read about it in the papers. Which made me think of Casper again.
I’d been quiet for a long time. Lazlo asked me to push in the lighter and inquired, not unlike my father would have, “What are you thinking about, Zach?”
“Our dogs.” Fiona was reading The Scarlet Letter. Lucy sat in the jump seat and leaned through the divider and made small talk about Yugoslavia with the bodyguard who looked like Bill Holden. Willy was eating Oreos.
“What about them?”
“Who’s taking care of them?”
“Your father checked them into a pet motel . . . what do you call it . . . ?” Lazlo inhaled a filterless Lucky and searched for the word “kennel.” Suddenly his nostrils flared so wide you could see the hairs in his nose. “Scheisse, what is that stink?”
Lucy interrupted her conversation with Stane (that was the Yugo Bill Holden’s name) long enough to bellow, “Jeez Louise, Willy, put your sneakers back on.”
“I can’t help it, I have athlete’s foot.”
Fiona punctuated the command by smacking Willy on the back of the head with the flat of her book.
Lazlo sniffed the air and grimaced. “No athlete’s foot smells that foul. Is like the shit of a dog that eats cat shit.” Everybody thought that was a scream. It had been a long drive.
“What’s scheisse mean?” I asked.
“How you say ‘shit’ in German.”
“How do you say ‘shit’ in Yugoslavian, Stane?” If my parents had been in the car, they would have stopped the limousine to wash Lucy’s mouth out with soap.
“No such language. In Serb, ‘shit’ is govno.” Suddenly, even though we were being chased, we felt free.
“Or sranje, which is a dirtier kind of shit.” The way Slavo said it, you could almost smell it.
“In French, it’s merde.” Fiona thought it was juvenile to talk about shit, but she couldn’t resist an opportunity to flex her French.
“What’s it in Czech, Lazlo?”
“Hovno. The Hungarians have a wonderful word for it: székés. ”
Willy rolled down the window. “Hey hovno-head! Go eat székés!” It actually was funny the way he said it. Everybody laughed. Willy could be a real card. And so, as we made our way downtown through the canyons of the city, Lazlo taught us how to say “shit” in every language of the free world.
Home for Lazlo was a townhouse on Horatio Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. He had four floors all to himself. From the outside, I expected something ye olde, but when Lazlo opened the door, it was like stepping into the Jetsons’ living room.
The staircase was just boards sticking out of a wall. And all the furniture was curvy and backless and shaped like amoebas, and there was a see-through, kidney-shaped bar that made the bottles and glasses look like they were floating in midair. And everything was white, even the floors. And instead of rugs, there were zebra skins. And coolest of all to a seven-year-old who had no idea Lazlo had stolen the aesthetic from Hugh Hefner, there was a remote-control panel built into the coffee table that, at the push of a button, lowered the shades, dimmed the lights, and made the stereo play Frank Sinatra, “Life’s a wonderful thing, as long as I hold the string.”
In short, it was the most ill-designed house possible for children. Without my parents there, I was free to spin myself around on the bar stools and run up and down the railingless stairs without my mother tripping up my enthusiasm by shouting, “Stop that before you fall and break your neck.” Which was always the surest way to make me fall.
“Does everybody in New York live like this?” I was trying out a chair that looked like a giant egg.
“Just short, ugly men who want girls to like them.” Lazlo ordered Slavo to stand guard on the front steps. Stane took a bottle of Coca-Cola and his revolver out behind the house. We hadn’t forgotten about Casper; we just weren’t talking about him.
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