by Stephen King
“It’s impossible,” Todd said. “You don’t get it, man. It’s impossible. I’m at least five weeks behind in science and history. In algebra it’s more like ten.”
“Nevertheless,” Dussander said. He poured more bourbon.
“You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” Todd shouted at him. “Well, I don’t take orders from you. The days when you gave orders are long over. Do you get it?” He lowered his voice abruptly. “The most lethal thing you’ve got around the house these days is a Shell No-Pest Strip. You’re nothing but a broken-down old man who farts rotten eggs if he eats a taco. I bet you even pee in your bed.”
“Listen to me, snotnose,” Dussander said quietly.
Todd’s head jerked angrily around at that.
“Before today,” Dussander said carefully, “it was possible, just barely possible, that you could have denounced me and come out clean yourself. I don’t believe you would have been up to the job with your nerves in their present state, but never mind that. It would have been technically possible. But now things have changed. Today I impersonated your grandfather, one Victor Bowden. No one can have the slightest doubt that I did it with . . . how is the word? . . . your connivance. If it comes out now, boy, you will look blacker than ever. And you will have no defense. I took care of that today.”
“I wish—”
“You wish! You wish!” Dussander roared. “Never mind your wishes, your wishes make me sick, your wishes are no more than little piles of dogshit in the gutter! All I want from you is to know if you understand the situation we are in!”
“I understand it,” Todd muttered. His fists had been tightly clenched while Dussander shouted at him—he was not used to being shouted at. Now he opened his hands and dully observed that he had dug bleeding half-moons into his palms. The cuts would have been worse, he supposed, but in the last four months or so he had taken up biting his nails.
“Good. Then you will make your sweet apologies, and you will study. In your free time at school you will study. During your lunch hours you will study. After school you will come here and study, and on your weekends you will come here and do more of the same.”
“Not here,” Todd said quickly. “At home.”
“No. At home you will dawdle and daydream as you have all along. If you are here I can stand over you if I have to and watch you. I can protect my own interests in this matter. I can quiz you. I can listen to your lessons.”
“If I don’t want to come here, you can’t make me.”
Dussander drank. “That is true. Things will then go on as they have. You will fail. This guidance person, French, will expect me to make good on my promise. When I don’t, he will call your parents. They will find out that kindly Mr. Denker impersonated your grandfather at your request. They will find out about the altered grades. They—”
“Oh, shut up. I’ll come.”
“You’re already here. Begin with algebra.”
“No way! It’s Friday afternoon!”
“You study every afternoon now,” Dussander said softly. “Begin with algebra.”
Todd stared at him—only for a moment before dropping his eyes and fumbling his algebra text out of his bookbag—and Dussander saw murder in the boy’s eyes. Not figurative murder; literal murder. It had been years since he had seen that dark, burning, speculative glance, but one never forgot it. He supposed he would have seen it in his own eyes if there had been a mirror at hand on the day he had looked at the white and defenseless nape of the boy’s neck.
I must protect myself, he thought with some amazement. One underestimates at one’s own risk.
He drank his bourbon and rocked and watched the boy study.
• • •
It was nearly five o’clock when Todd biked home. He felt washed out, hot-eyed, drained, impotently angry. Every time his eyes had wandered from the printed page—from the maddening, incomprehensible, fucking stupid world of sets, subsets, ordered pairs, and Cartesian co-ordinates—Dussander’s sharp old man’s voice had spoken. Otherwise he had remained completely silent . . . except for the maddening bump of his slippers on the floor and the squeak of the rocker. He sat there like a vulture waiting for its prey to expire. Why had he ever gotten into this? How had he gotten into it? This was a mess, a terrible mess. He had picked up some ground this afternoon—some of the set theory that had stumped him so badly just before the Christmas break had fallen into place with an almost audible click—but it was impossible to think he could pick up enough to scrape through next week’s algebra test with even a D.
It was four weeks until the end of the world.
On the corner he saw a bluejay lying on the sidewalk, its beak slowly opening and closing. It was trying vainly to get onto its birdy-feet and hop away. One of its wings had been crushed, and Todd supposed a passing car had hit it and flipped it up onto the sidewalk like a tiddlywink. One of its beady eyes stared up at him.
Todd looked at it for a long time, holding the grips of his bike’s apehanger handlebars lightly. Some of the warmth had gone out of the day and the air felt almost chilly. He supposed his friends had spent the afternoon goofing off down at the Babe Ruth diamond on Walnut Street, maybe playing a little scrub, more likely playing pepper or three-flies-six-grounders or rolly-bat. It was the time of year when you started working your way up to baseball. There was some talk about getting up their own sandlot team this year to compete in the informal city league; there were dads enough willing to shlepp them around to games. Todd, of course, would pitch. He had been a Little League pitching star until he had grown out of the Senior Little League division last year. Would have pitched.
So what? He’d just have to tell them no. He’d just have to tell them: Guys, I got mixed up with this war criminal. I got him right by the balls, and then—ha-ha, this’ll killya, guys—then I found out he was holding my balls as tight as I was holding his. I started having funny dreams and the cold sweats. My grades went to hell and I changed them on my report card so my folks wouldn’t find out and now I’ve got to hit the books really hard for the first time in my life. I’m not afraid of getting grounded, though. I’m afraid of going to the reformatory. And that’s why I can’t play any sandlot with you guys this year. You see how it is, guys.
A thin smile, much like Dussander’s and not at all like his former broad grin, touched his lips. There was no sunshine in it; it was a shady smile. There was no fun in it; no confidence. It merely said: You see how it is, guys.
He rolled his bike forward over the jay with exquisite slowness, hearing the newspaper crackle of its feathers and the crunch of its small hollow bones as they fractured inside it. He reversed, rolling over it again. It was still twitching. He rolled over it again, a single bloody feather stuck to his front tire, revolving up and down, up and down. By then the bird had stopped moving, the bird had kicked the bucket, the bird had punched out, the bird had gone to that great aviary in the sky, but Todd kept going forwards and backwards across its mashed body just the same. He did it for almost five minutes, and that thin smile never left his face. You see how it is, guys.
10
April, 1975.
The old man stood halfway down the compound’s aisle, smiling broadly, as Dave Klingerman walked up to meet him. The frenzied barking that filled the air didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest, or the smells of fur and urine, or the hundred different strays yapping and howling in their cages, dashing back and forth, leaping against the mesh. Klingerman pegged the old guy as a dog-lover right off the bat. His smile was sweet and pleasant. He offered Dave a swollen, arthritis-bunched hand carefully, and Klingerman shook it in the same spirit.
“Hello, sir!” he said, speaking up. “Noisy as hell, isn’t it?”
“I don’t mind,” the old man said. “Not at all. My name is Arthur Denker.”
“Klingerman. Dave Klingerman.”
“I am pleased to meet you, sir. I read in the paper—I could not believe it—that you give dogs away here. Perhaps I
misunderstood. In fact, I think I must have misunderstood.”
“No, we give em away, all right,” Dave said. “If we can’t, we have to destroy em. Sixty days, that’s what the State gives us. Shame. Come on in the office here. Quieter. Smells better, too.”
In the office, Dave heard a story that was familiar (but nonetheless affecting): Arthur Denker was in his seventies. He had come to California when his wife died. He was not rich, but he tended what he did have with great care. He was lonely. His only friend was the boy who sometimes came to his house and read to him. In Germany he had owned a beautiful Saint Bernard. Now, in Santo Donato, he had a house with a good-sized back yard. The yard was fenced. And he had read in the paper . . . would it be possible that he could . . .
“Well, we don’t have any Bernards,” Dave said. “They go fast because they’re so good with kids—”
“Oh, I understand. I didn’t mean that—”
“—but I do have a half-grown shepherd pup. How would that be?”
Mr. Denker’s eyes grew bright, as if he might be on the verge of tears. “Perfect,” he said. “That would be perfect.”
“The dog itself is free, but there are a few other charges. Distemper and rabies shots. A city dog license. All of it goes about twenty-five bucks for most people, but the State pays half if you’re over sixty-five—part of the California Golden Ager program.”
“Golden Ager . . . is that what I am?” Mr. Denker said, and laughed. For just a moment—it was silly—Dave felt a kind of chill.
“Uh . . . I guess so, sir.”
“It is very reasonable.”
“Sure, we think so. The same dog would cost you a hundred and twenty-five dollars in a pet shop. But people go to those places instead of here. They are paying for a set of papers, of course, not the dog.” Dave shook his head. “If they only understood how many fine animals are abandoned every year.”
“And if you can’t find a suitable home for them within sixty days, they are destroyed?”
“We put them to sleep, yes.”
“Put them to . . . ? I’m sorry, my English—”
“It’s a city ordinance,” Dave said. “Can’t have dog-packs running the streets.”
“You shoot them.”
“No, we give them gas. It’s very humane. They don’t feel a thing.”
“No,” Mr. Denker said. “I am sure they don’t.”
• • •
Todd’s seat in Beginning Algebra was four desks down in the second row. He sat there, trying to keep his face expressionless, as Mr. Storrman passed back the exams. But his ragged fingernails were digging into his palms again, and his entire body seemed to be running with a slow and caustic sweat.
Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t be such a goddam chump. There’s no way you could have passed. You know you didn’t pass.
Nevertheless, he could not completely squash the foolish hope. It had been the first algebra exam in weeks that looked as if it had been written in something other than Greek. He was sure that in his nervousness (nervousness? no, call it what it had really been: outright terror) he had not done that well, but maybe . . . well, if it had been anyone else but Storrman, who had a Yale padlock for a heart . . .
STOP IT! he commanded himself, and for a moment, a coldly horrible moment, he was positive he had screamed those two words aloud in the classroom. You flunked, you know you did, not a thing in the world is going to change it.
Storrman handed him his paper expressionlessly and moved on. Todd laid it face down on his initial-scarred desk. For a moment he didn’t think he possessed sufficient will to even turn it over and know. At last he flipped it with such convulsive suddenness that the exam sheet tore. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth as he stared at it. His heart seemed to stop for a moment.
The number 83 was written in a circle at the top of the sheet. Below it was a letter-grade: C+. Below the letter-grade was a brief notation: Good improvement! I think I’m twice as relieved as you should be. Check errors carefully. At least three of them are arithmetical rather than conceptual.
His heartbeat began again, at triple-time. Relief washed over him, but it was not cool—it was hot and complicated and strange. He closed his eyes, not hearing the class as it buzzed over the exam and began the pre-ordained fight for an extra point here or there. Todd saw redness behind his eyes. It pulsed like flowing blood with the rhythm of his heartbeat. In that instant he hated Dussander more than he ever had before. His hands snapped shut into fists and he only wished, wished, wished, that Dussander’s scrawny chicken neck could have been between them.
• • •
Dick and Monica Bowden had twin beds, separated by a nightstand with a pretty imitation Tiffany lamp standing on it. Their room was done in genuine redwood, and the walls were comfortably lined with books. Across the room, nestled between two ivory bookends (bull elephants on their hind legs), was a round Sony TV. Dick was watching Johnny Carson with the earplug in while Monica read the new Michael Crichton that had come from the book club that day.
“Dick?” She put a bookmark (THIS IS WHERE I FELL ASLEEP, it said) into the Crichton and closed it.
On the TV, Buddy Hackett had just broken everyone up. Dick smiled.
“Dick?” she said more loudly.
He pulled the earplug out. “What?”
“Do you think Todd’s all right?”
He looked at her for a moment, frowning, then shook his head a little. “Je ne comprends pas, chérie.” His limping French was a joke between them. His father had sent him an extra two hundred dollars to hire a tutor when he was flunking French. He had gotten Monica Darrow, picking her name at random from the cards tacked up on the Union bulletin board. By Christmas she had been wearing his pin . . . and he had managed a C in French.
“Well . . . he’s lost weight.”
“He looks a little scrawny, sure,” Dick said. He put the TV earplug in his lap, where it emitted tiny squawking sounds. “He’s growing up, Monica.”
“So soon?” she asked uneasily.
He laughed. “So soon. I shot up seven inches as a teenager—from a five-foot-six shrimp at twelve to the beautiful six-foot-one mass of muscle you see before you today. My mother said that when I was fourteen you could hear me growing in the night.”
“Good thing not all of you grew that much.”
“It’s all in how you use it.”
“Want to use it tonight?”
“The wench grows bold,” Dick Bowden said, and threw the earplug across the room.
• • •
After, as he was drifting off to sleep:
“Dick, he’s having bad dreams, too.”
“Nightmares?” he muttered.
“Nightmares. I’ve heard him moaning in his sleep two or three times when I’ve gone down to use the bathroom in the night. I didn’t want to wake him up. It’s silly, but my grandmother used to say you could drive a person insane if you woke them up in the middle of a bad dream.”
“She was the Polack, wasn’t she?”
“The Polack, yeah, the Polack. Nice talk!”
“You know what I mean. Why don’t you just use the upstairs john?” He had put it in himself two years ago.
“You know the flush always wakes you up,” she said.
“So don’t flush it.”
“Dick, that’s nasty.”
He sighed.
“Sometimes when I go in, he’s sweating. And the sheets are damp.”
He grinned in the dark. “I bet.”
“What’s that . . . oh.” She slapped him lightly. “That’s nasty, too. Besides, he’s only thirteen.”
“Fourteen next month. He’s not too young. A little precocious, maybe, but not too young.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen or fifteen. I don’t remember exactly. But I remember I woke up thinking I’d died and gone to heaven.”
“But you were older than Todd is now.”
“All that stuff’s happeni
ng younger. It must be the milk . . . or the fluoride. Do you know they have sanitary napkin dispensers in all the girls’ rooms of the school we built in Jackson Park last year? And that’s a grammar school. Now your average sixth-grader is only eleven. How old were you when you started?”
“I don’t remember,” she said. “All I know is Todd’s dreams don’t sound like . . . like he died and went to heaven.”
“Have you asked him about them?”
“Once. About six weeks ago. You were off playing golf with that horrible Ernie Jacobs.”
“That horrible Ernie Jacobs is going to make me a full partner by 1977, if he doesn’t screw himself to death with that high-yellow secretary of his before then. Besides, he always pays the greens fees. What did Todd say?”
“That he didn’t remember. But a sort of . . . shadow crossed his face. I think he did remember.”
“Monica, I don’t remember everything from my dear dead youth, but one thing I do remember is that wet dreams are not always pleasant. In fact, they can be downright unpleasant.”
“How can that be?”
“Guilt. All kinds of guilt. Some of it maybe all the way from babyhood, when it was made very clear to him that wetting the bed was wrong. Then there’s the sex thing. Who knows what brings a wet dream on? Copping a feel on the bus? Looking up a girl’s skirt in study hall? I don’t know. The only one I can really remember was going off the high board at the YMCA pool on co-ed day and losing my trunks when I hit the water.”
“You got off on that?” she asked, giggling a little.
“Yeah. So if the kid doesn’t want to talk to you about his John Thomas problems, don’t force him.”
“We did our damn best to raise him without all those needless guilts.”
“You can’t escape them. He brings them home from school like the colds he used to pick up in the first grade. From his friends, or the way his teachers mince around certain subjects. He probably got it from my dad, too. ‘Don’t touch it in the night, Todd, or your hands’ll grow hair and you’ll go blind and you’ll start to lose your memory, and after awhile your thing will turn black and rot off. So be careful, Todd.’ ”