by Stephen King
• • •
One day later that month the boy came much earlier than usual, long before school usually let out. Dussander was sitting in the kitchen, drinking Ancient Age bourbon from a chipped and discolored cup that had the words HERE’S YER CAWFEE MAW, HAW! HAW! HAW! written around the rim. He had his rocker out in the kitchen now and he was just drinking and rocking, rocking and drinking, bumping his slippers on the faded linoleum. He was pleasantly high. There had been no more bad dreams at all until just last night. Not since the tomcat with the chewed ears. Last night’s had been particularly horrible, though. That could not be denied. They had dragged him down after he had gotten halfway up the hill, and they had begun to do unspeakable things to him before he was able to wake himself up. Yet, after his initial thrashing return to the world of real things, he had been confident. He could end the dreams whenever he wished. Perhaps a cat would not be enough this time. But there was always the dog pound. Yes. Always the pound.
Todd came abruptly into the kitchen, his face pale and shiny and strained. He had lost weight, all right, Dussander thought. And there was a queer white look in his eyes that Dussander did not like at all.
“You’re going to help me,” Todd said suddenly and defiantly.
“Really?” Dussander said mildly, but sudden apprehension leaped inside of him. He didn’t let his face change as Todd slammed his books down on the table with a sudden, vicious overhand stroke. One of them spun-skated across the oilcloth and landed in a tent on the floor by Dussander’s foot.
“Yes, you’re fucking-A right!” Todd said shrilly. “You better believe it! Because this is your fault! All your fault!” Hectic spots of red mounted into his cheeks. “But you’re going to have to help me get out of it, because I’ve got the goods on you! I’ve got you right where I want you!”
“I’ll help you in any way I can,” Dussander said quietly. He saw that he had folded his hands neatly in front of himself without even thinking about it—just as he had once done. He leaned forward in the rocker until his chin was directly over his folded hands—as he had once done. His face was calm and friendly and enquiring; none of his growing apprehension showed. Sitting just so, he could almost imagine a pot of lamb stew simmering on the stove behind him. ‘Tell me what the trouble is.”
“This is the fucking trouble,” Todd said viciously, and threw a folder at Dussander. It bounced off his chest and landed in his lap, and he was momentarily surprised by the heat of the anger which leaped up in him; the urge to rise and backhand the boy smartly. Instead, he kept the mild expression on his face. It was the boy’s school-card, he saw, although the school seemed to be at ridiculous pains to hide the fact. Instead of a school-card, or a Grade Report, it was called a “Quarterly Progress Report.” He grunted at that, and opened the card.
A typed half-sheet of paper fell out. Dussander put it aside for later examination and turned his attention to the boy’s grades first.
“You seem to have fallen on the rocks, my boy,” Dussander said, not without some pleasure. The boy had passed only English and American History. Every other grade was an F.
“It’s not my fault,” Todd hissed venomously. “It’s your fault. All those stories. I have nightmares about them, do you know that? I sit down and open my books and I start thinking about whatever you told me that day and the next thing I know, my mother’s telling me it’s time to go to bed. Well, that’s not my fault! It isn’t! You hear me? It isn’t!”
“I hear you very well,” Dussander said, and read the typed note that had been tucked into Todd’s card.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Bowden,
This note is to suggest that we have a group conference concerning Todd’s second- and third-quarter grades. In light of Todd’s previous good work in this school, his current grades suggest a specific problem which may be affecting his academic performance in a deleterious way. Such a problem can often be solved by a frank and open discussion.
I should point out that although Todd has passed the half-year, his final grades may be failing in some cases unless his work improves radically in the fourth quarter. Failing grades would entail summer school to avoid being kept back and causing a major scheduling problem.
I must also note that Todd is in the college division, and that his work so far this year is far below college acceptance levels. It is also below the level of academic ability assumed by the SAT tests.
Please be assured that I am ready to work out a mutually convenient time for us to meet. In a case such as this, earlier is usually better.
Sincerely yours,
Edward French
“Who is this Edward French?” Dussander asked, slipping the note back inside the card (part of him still marvelled at the American love of jargon; such a rolling missive to inform the parents that their son was flunking out!) and then refolding his hands. His premonition of disaster was stronger than ever, but he refused to give in to it. A year before, he would have done; a year ago he had been ready for disaster. Now he was not, but it seemed that the cursed boy had brought it to him anyway. “Is he your headmaster?”
“Rubber Ed? Hell, no. He’s the guidance counsellor.”
“Guidance counsellor? What is that?”
“You can figure it out,” Todd said. He was nearly hysterical. “You read the goddam note!” He walked rapidly around the room, shooting sharp, quick glances at Dussander. “Well, I’m not going to let any of this shit go down. I’m just not. I’m not going to any summer school. My dad and mom are going to Hawaii this summer and I’m going with them.” He pointed at the card on the table. “Do you know what my dad will do if he sees that?”
Dussander shook his head.
“He’ll get everything out of me. Everything. He’ll know it was you. It couldn’t be anything else, because nothing else has changed. He’ll poke and pry and he’ll get it all out of me. And then . . . then I’ll . . . I’ll be in dutch.”
He stared at Dussander resentfully.
“They’ll watch me. Hell, they might make me see a doctor, I don’t know. How should I know? But I’m not getting in dutch. And I’m not going to any fucking summer school.”
“Or to the reformatory,” Dussander said. He said it very quietly.
Todd stopped circling the room. His face became very still. His cheeks and forehead, already pale, became even whiter. He stared at Dussander, and had to try twice before he could speak. “What? What did you just say?”
“My dear boy,” Dussander said, assuming an air of great patience, “for the last five minutes I have listened to you pule and whine, and what all your puling and whining comes down to is this. You are in trouble. You might be found out. You might find yourself in adverse circumstances.” Seeing that he had the boy’s complete attention—at last—Dussander sipped reflectively from his cup.
“My boy,” he went on, “that is a very dangerous attitude for you to have. And dangerous for me. The potential harm is much greater for me. You worry about your school-card. Pah! This for your school-card.”
He flicked it off the table and onto the floor with one yellow finger.
“I am worried about my life.”
Todd did not reply; he simply went on looking at Dussander with that white-eyed, slightly crazed stare.
“The Israelis will not scruple at the fact that I am seventy-six. The death-penalty is still very much in favor over there, you know, especially when the man in the dock is a Nazi war criminal associated with the camps.”
“You’re a U.S. citizen,” Todd said. “America wouldn’t let them take you. I read up on that. I—”
“You read, but you don’t listen! I am not a U.S. citizen! My papers came from la cosa nostra. I would be deported, and Mossad agents would be waiting for me wherever I deplaned.”
“I wish they would hang you,” Todd muttered, curling his hands into fists and staring down at them. “I was crazy to get mixed up with you in the first place.”
“No doubt,” Dussander said, and smiled thinly.
“But you are mixed up with me. We must live in the present, boy, not in the past of ‘I-should-have-nevers.’ You must realize that your fate and my own are now inextricably entwined. If you ‘blow the horn on me,’ as your saying goes, do you think I will hesitate to blow the horn on you? Seven hundred thousand died at Patin. To the world at large I am a criminal, a monster, even the butcher your scandal-rags would have me. You are an accessory to all of that, my boy. You have criminal knowledge of an illegal alien, but you have not reported it. And if I am caught, I will tell the world all about you. When the reporters put their microphones in my face, it will be your name I’ll repeat over and over again. ‘Todd Bowden, yes, that is his name . . . how long? Almost a year. He wanted to know everything . . . all the gooshy parts. That’s how he put it, yes: “All the gooshy parts.” ’ ”
Todd’s breath had stopped. His skin appeared transparent. Dussander smiled at him. He sipped bourbon.
“I think they will put you in jail. They may call it a reformatory, or a correctional facility—there may be a fancy name for it, like this ‘Quarterly Progress Report’ ”—his lip curled—“but no matter what they call it, there will be bars on the windows.”
Todd wet his lips. “I’d call you a liar. I’d tell them I just found out. They’d believe me, not you. You just better remember that.”
Dussander’s thin smile remained. “I thought you told me your father would get it all out of you.”
Todd spoke slowly, as a person speaks when realization and verbalization occur simultaneously. “Maybe not. Maybe not this time. This isn’t just breaking a window with a rock.”
Dussander winced inwardly. He suspected that the boy’s judgment was right—with so much at stake, he might indeed be able to convince his father. After all, when faced with such an unpleasant truth, what parent would not want to be convinced?
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. But how are you going to explain all those books you had to read to me because poor Mr. Denker is half-blind? My eyes are not what they were, but I can still read fine print with my spectacles. I can prove it.”
“I’d say you fooled me!”
“Will you? And what reason will you be able to give for my fooling?”
“For . . . for friendship. Because you were lonely.”
That, Dussander reflected, was just close enough to the truth to be believable. And once, in the beginning, the boy might have been able to bring it off. But now he was ragged; now he was coming apart in strings like a coat that has reached the end of its useful service. If a child shot off his cap pistol across the street, this boy would jump into the air and scream like a girl.
“Your school-card will also support my side of it,” Dussander said. “It was not Robinson Crusoe that caused your grades to fall down so badly, my boy, was it?”
“Shut up, why don’t you? Just shut up about it!”
“No,” Dussander said. “I won’t shut up about it.” He lit a cigarette, scratching the wooden match alight on the gas oven door. “Not until I make you see the simple truth. We are in this together, sink or swim.” He looked at Todd through the raftering smoke, not smiling, his old, lined face reptilian. “I will drag you down, boy. I promise you that. If anything comes out, everything will come out. That is my promise to you.”
Todd stared at him sullenly and didn’t reply.
“Now,” Dussander said briskly, with the air of a man who has put a necessary unpleasantness behind him, “the question is, what are we going to do about this situation? Have you any ideas?”
“This will fix the report card,” Todd said, and took a new bottle of ink eradicator from his jacket pocket. “About that fucking letter, I don’t know.”
Dussander looked at the ink eradicator approvingly. He had falsified a few reports of his own in his time. When the quotas had gone up to the point of fantasy . . . and far, far beyond. And . . . more like the situation they were now in—there had been the matter of the invoices . . . those which enumerated the spoils of war. Each week he would check the boxes of valuables, all of them to be sent back to Berlin in special train-cars that were like big safes on wheels. On the side of each box was a manila envelope, and inside the envelope there had been a verified invoice of that box’s contents. So many rings, necklaces, chokers, so many grams of gold. Dussander, however, had had his own box of valuables—not very valuable valuables, but not insignificant, either. Jades. Tourmalines. Opals. A few flawed pearls. Industrial diamonds. And when he saw an item invoiced for Berlin that caught his eye or seemed a good investment, he would remove it, replace it with an item from his own box, and use ink eradicator on the invoice, changing their item for his. He had developed into a fairly expert forger . . . a talent that had come in handy more than once after the war was over.
“Good,” he told Todd. “As for this other matter . . .”
Dussander began to rock again, sipping from his cup. Todd pulled a chair up to the table and began to go to work on his report card, which he had picked up from the floor without a word. Dussander’s outward calm had had its effect on him and now he worked silently, his head bent studiously over the card, like any American boy who has set out to do the best by God job he can, whether that job be planting corn, pitching a no-hitter in the Little League World Series, or forging grades on his report card.
Dussander looked at the nape of his neck, lightly tanned and cleanly exposed between the fall of his hair and the round neck of his tee-shirt. His eyes drifted from there to the top counter drawer where he kept the butcher knives. One quick thrust—he knew where to put it—and the boy’s spinal cord would be severed. His lips would be sealed forever. Dussander smiled regretfully. There would be questions asked if the boy disappeared. Too many of them. Some directed at him. Even if there was no letter with a friend, close scrutiny was something he could not afford. Too bad.
“This man French,” he said, tapping the letter. “Does he know your parents in a social way?”
“Him?” Todd edged the word with contempt. “My mom and dad don’t go anywhere that he could even get in.”
“Has he ever met them in his professional capacity? Has he ever had conferences with them before?”
“No. I’ve always been near the top of my classes. Until now.”
“So what does he know about them?” Dussander said, looking dreamily into his cup, which was now nearly empty. “Oh, he knows about you. He no doubt has all the records on you that he can use. Back to the fights you had in the kindergarten play yard. But what does he know about them?”
Todd put his pen and the small bottle of ink eradicator away. “Well, he knows their names. Of course. And their ages. He knows we’re all Methodists. You don’t have to fill that line out, but my folks always do. We don’t go much, but he’d know that’s what we are. He must know what my dad does for a living; that’s on the forms, too. All that stuff they have to fill out every year. And I’m pretty sure that’s all.”
“Would he know if your parents were having troubles at home?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Dussander tossed off the last of the bourbon in his cup. “Squabbles. Fights. Your father sleeping on the couch. Your mother drinking too much.” His eyes gleamed. “A divorce brewing.”
Indignantly, Todd said: “There’s nothing like that going on! No way!”
“I never said there was. But just think, boy. Suppose that things at your house were ‘going to hell in a streetcar,’ as the saying is.”
Todd only looked at him, frowning.
“You would be worried about them,” Dussander said. “Very worried. You would lose your appetite. You would sleep poorly. Saddest of all, your schoolwork would suffer. True? Very sad for the children, when there are troubles in the home.”
Understanding dawned in the boy’s eyes—understanding and something like dumb gratitude. Dussander was gratified.
“Yes, it is an unhappy situation when a family totters on the edge of destruction,” Dussander said grandly, pour
ing more bourbon. He was getting quite drunk. “The daytime television dramas, they make this absolutely clear. There is acrimony. Backbiting and lies. Most of all, there is pain. Pain, my boy. You have no idea of the hell your parents are going through. They are so swallowed up by their own troubles that they have little time for the problems of their own son. His problems seem minor compared to theirs, hein? Someday, when the scars have begun to heal, they will no doubt take a fuller interest in him once again. But now the only concession they can make is to send the boy’s kindly grandfather to Mr. French.”
Todd’s eyes had been gradually brightening to a glow that was nearly fervid. “Might work,” he was muttering. “Might, yeah, might work, might—” He broke off suddenly. His eyes darkened again. “No, it won’t. You don’t look like me, not even a little bit. Rubber Ed will never believe it.”
“Himmel! Gott im Himmel!” Dussander cried, getting to his feet, crossing the kitchen (a bit unsteadily), opening the cellar door, and pulling out a fresh bottle of Ancient Age. He spun off the cap and poured liberally. “For a smart boy, you are such a Dummkopf. When do grandfathers ever look like their grandsons? Huh? I got white hair. Do you have white hair?”
Approaching the table again, he reached out with surprising quickness, snatched an abundant handful of Todd’s blonde hair, and pulled briskly.
“Cut it out!” Todd snapped, but he smiled a little.
“Besides,” Dussander said, settling back into his rocker, “you have yellow hair and blue eyes. My eyes are blue, and before my hair turned white, it was yellow. You can tell me your whole family history. Your aunts and uncles. The people your father works with. Your mother’s little hobbies. I will remember. I will study and remember. Two days later it will all be forgotten again—these days my memory is like a cloth bag filled with water—but I will remember for long enough.” He smiled grimly. “In my time I have stayed ahead of Wiesenthal and pulled the wool over the eyes of Himmler himself. If I cannot fool one American public school teacher, I will pull my winding-shroud around me and crawl down into my grave.”