by Stephen King
Today, he thought. Today is your day, old man.
• • •
“And so,” Dussander said, pouring bourbon into his cup as Todd entered the kitchen, “the accused returns from the dock. How said they, prisoner?” He was wearing his bathrobe and a pair of hairy wool socks that climbed halfway up his shins. Socks like that, Todd thought, would be easy to slip in. He glanced at the bottle of Ancient Age Dussander was currently working. It was down to the last three fingers.
“No D’s, no F’s, no Flunk Cards,” Todd said. “I’ll still have to change some of my grades in June, but maybe just the averages. I’ll be getting all A’s and B’s this quarter if I keep up my work.”
“Oh, you’ll keep it up, all right,” Dussander said. “We will see to it.” He drank and then tipped more bourbon into his cup. “This calls for a celebration.” His speech was slightly blurred—hardly enough to be noticeable, but Todd knew the old fuck was as drunk as he ever got. Yes, today. It would have to be today.
But he was cool.
“Celebrate pigshit,” he told Dussander.
“I’m afraid the delivery boy hasn’t arrived with the beluga and the truffles yet,” Dussander said, ignoring him. “Help is so unreliable these days. What about a few Ritz crackers and some Velveeta while we wait?”
“Okay,” Todd said. “What the hell.”
Dussander stood up (one knee banged the table, making him wince) and crossed to the refrigerator. He got out the cheese, took a knife from the drawer and a plate from the cupboard, and a box of Ritz crackers from the breadbox.
“All carefully injected with prussic acid,” he told Todd as he set the cheese and crackers down on the table. He grinned, and Todd saw that he had left out his false teeth again today. Nevertheless, Todd smiled back.
“So quiet today!” Dussander exclaimed. “I would have expected you to turn handsprings all the way up the hall.” He emptied the last of the bourbon into his cup, sipped, smacked his lips.
“I guess I’m still numb,” Todd said. He bit into a cracker. He had stopped refusing Dussander’s food a long time ago. Dussander thought there was a letter with one of Todd’s friends—there was not, of course; he had friends, but none he trusted that much. He supposed Dussander had guessed that long ago, but he knew Dussander didn’t quite dare put his guess to such an extreme test as murder.
“What shall we talk about today?” Dussander enquired, tossing off the last shot. “I give you the day off from studying, how’s that? Uh? Uh?” When he drank, his accent became thicker. It was an accent Todd had come to hate. Now he felt okay about the accent; he felt okay about everything. He felt very cool all over. He looked at his hands, the hands which would give the push, and they looked just as they always did. They were not trembling; they were cool.
“I don’t care,” he said. “Anything you want.”
“Shall I tell you about the special soap we made? Our experiments with enforced homosexuality? Or perhaps you would like to hear how I escaped Berlin after I had been foolish enough to go back. That was a close one, I can tell you.” He pantomimed shaving one stubby cheek and laughed.
“Anything,” Todd said. “Really.” He watched Dussander examine the empty bottle and then get up with it in one hand. Dussander took it to the wastebasket and dropped it in.
“No, none of those, I think,” Dussander said. “You don’t seem to be in the mood.” He stood reflectively by the wastebasket for a moment and then crossed the kitchen to the cellar door. His wool socks whispered on the hilly linoleum. “I think today I will instead tell you the story of an old man who was afraid.”
Dussander opened the cellar door. His back was now to the table. Todd stood up quietly.
“He was afraid,” Dussander went on, “of a certain young boy who was, in a queer way, his friend. A smart boy. His mother called this boy ‘apt pupil,’ and the old man had already discovered he was an apt pupil . . . although perhaps not in the way his mother thought.”
Dussander fumbled with the old-fashioned electrical switch on the wall, trying to turn it with his bunched and clumsy fingers. Todd walked—almost glided—across the linoleum, not stepping on any of the places where it squeaked or creaked. He knew this kitchen as well as his own, now. Maybe better.
“At first, the boy was not the old man’s friend,” Dussander said. He managed to turn the switch at last. He descended the first step with a veteran drunk’s care. “At first the old man disliked the boy a great deal. Then he grew to . . . to enjoy his company, although there was still a strong element of dislike there.” He was looking at the shelf now but still holding the railing. Todd, cool—no, now he was cold—stepped behind him and calculated the chances of one strong push dislodging Dussander’s hold on the railing. He decided to wait until Dussander leaned forward.
“Part of the old man’s enjoyment came from a feeling of equality,” Dussander went on thoughtfully. “You see, the boy and the old man had each other in mutual deathgrips. Each knew something the other wanted kept secret. And then . . . ah, then it became apparent to the old man that things were changing. Yes. He was losing his hold—some of it or all of it, depending on how desperate the boy might be, and how clever. It occurred to this old man on one long and sleepless night that it might be well for him to acquire a new hold on the boy. For his own safety.”
Now Dussander let go of the railing and leaned out over the steep cellar stairs, but Todd remained perfectly still. The bone-deep cold was melting out of him, being replaced by a rosy flush of anger and confusion. As Dussander grasped his fresh bottle, Todd thought viciously that the old man had the stinkiest cellar in town, oil or no oil. It smelled as if something had died down there.
“So the old man got out of his bed right then. What is sleep to an old man? Very little. And he sat at his small desk, thinking about how cleverly he had enmeshed the boy in the very crimes the boy was holding over his own head. He sat thinking about how hard the boy had worked, how very hard, to bring his school marks back up. And how, when they were back up, he would have no further need for the old man alive. And if the old man were dead, the boy could be free.”
He turned around now, holding the fresh bottle of Ancient Age by the neck.
“I heard you, you know,” he said, almost gently. “From the moment you pushed your chair back and stood up. You are not as quiet as you imagine, boy. At least not yet.”
Todd said nothing.
“So!” Dussander exclaimed, stepping back into the kitchen and closing the cellar door firmly behind him. “The old man wrote everything down, nicht wahr? From first word to last he wrote it down. When he was finally finished it was almost dawn and his hand was singing from the arthritis—the verdammt arthritis—but he felt good for the first times in weeks. He felt safe. He got back into his bed and slept until mid-afternoon. In fact, if he had slept any longer, he would have missed his favorite—General Hospital.”
He had regained his rocker now. He sat down, produced a worn jackknife with a yellow ivory handle, and began to cut painstakingly around the seal covering the top of the bourbon bottle.
“On the following day the old man dressed in his best suit and went down to the bank where he kept his little checking and savings accounts. He spoke to one of the bank officers, who was able to answer all the old man’s questions most satisfactorily. He rented a safety deposit box. The bank officer explained to the old man that he would have a key and the bank would have a key. To open the box, both keys would be needed. No one but the old man could use the old man’s key without a signed, notarized letter of permission from the old man himself. With one exception.”
Dussander smiled toothlessly into Todd Bowden’s white, set face.
“That exception is made in the event of the box-holder’s death,” he said. Still looking at Todd, still smiling, Dussander put his jackknife back into the pocket of his robe, unscrewed the cap of the bourbon bottle, and poured a fresh jolt into his cup.
“What happens then?” Todd as
ked hoarsely.
“Then the box is opened in the presence of a bank official and a representative of the Internal Revenue Service. The contents of the box are inventoried. In this case they will find only a twelve-page document. Non-taxable . . . but highly interesting.”
The fingers of Todd’s hands crept toward each other and locked tightly. “You can’t do that,” he said in a stunned and unbelieving voice. It was the voice of a person who observes another person walking on the ceiling. “You can’t. . . can’t do that.”
“My boy,” Dussander said kindly, “I have.”
“But . . . I . . . you . . .” His voice suddenly rose to an agonized howl. “You’re old! Don’t you know that you’re old? You could die! You could die anytime!”
Dussander got up. He went to one of the kitchen cabinets and took down a small glass. This glass had once held jelly. Cartoon characters danced around the rim. Todd recognized them all—Fred and Wilma Flintstone, Barney and Betty Rubble, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm. He had grown up with them. He watched as Dussander wiped this jelly-glass almost ceremonially with a dishtowel. He watched as Dussander set it in front of him. He watched as Dussander poured a finger of bourbon into it.
“What’s that for?” Todd muttered. “I don’t drink. Drinking’s for cheap stewbums like you.”
“Lift your glass, boy. It is a special occasion. Today you drink.”
Todd looked at him for a long moment, then picked up the glass. Dussander clicked his cheap ceramic cup smartly against it.
“I make a toast, boy—long life! Long life to both of us! Prosit!” He tossed his bourbon off at a gulp and then began to laugh. He rocked back and forth, stockinged feet hitting the linoleum, laughing, and Todd thought he had never looked so much like a vulture, a vulture in a bathrobe, a noisome beast of carrion.
“I hate you,” he whispered, and then Dussander began to choke on his own laughter. His face turned a dull brick color; it sounded as if he were coughing, laughing, and strangling, all at the same time. Todd, scared, got up quickly and clapped him on the back until the coughing fit had passed.
“Danke schön,” he said. “Drink your drink. It will do you good.”
Todd drank it. It tasted like very bad cold-medicine and lit a fire in his gut.
“I can’t believe you drink this shit all day,” he said, putting the glass back on the table and shuddering. “You ought to quit it. Quit drinking and smoking.”
“Your concern for my health is touching,” Dussander said. He produced a crumpled pack of cigarettes from the same bathrobe pocket into which the jackknife had disappeared. “And I am equally solicitous of your own welfare, boy. Almost every day I read in the paper where a cyclist has been killed at a busy intersection. You should give it up. You should walk. Or ride the bus, like me.”
“Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” Todd burst out.
“My boy,” Dussander said, pouring more bourbon and beginning to laugh again, “we are fucking each other—didn’t you know that?”
• • •
One day about a week later, Todd was sitting on a disused mail platform down in the old trainyard. He chucked cinders out across the rusty, weed-infested tracks one at a time.
Why shouldn’t I kill him anyway?
Because he was a logical boy, the logical answer came first. No reason at all. Sooner or later Dussander was going to die, and given Dussander’s habits, it would probably be sooner. Whether he killed the old man or whether Dussander died of a heart attack in his bathtub, it was all going to come out. At least he could have the pleasure of wringing the old vulture’s neck.
Sooner or later—that phrase defied logic.
Maybe it’ll be later, Todd thought. Cigarettes or not, booze or not, he’s a tough old bastard. He’s lasted this long, so . . . so maybe it’ll be later.
From beneath him came a fuzzy snort.
Todd jumped to his feet, dropping a handful of cinders he had been holding. That snorting sound came again.
He paused, on the verge of running, but the snort didn’t recur. Nine hundred yards away, an eight-lane freeway swept across the horizon above this weed- and junk-strewn cul-de-sac with its deserted buildings, rusty Cyclone fences, and splintery, warped platforms. The cars up on the freeway glistened in the sun like exotic hard-shelled beetles. Eight lanes of traffic up there, nothing down here but Todd, a few birds . . . and whatever had snorted.
Cautiously, he bent down with his hands on his knees and peered under the mail platform. There was a wino lying up in there among the yellow weeds and empty cans and dusty old bottles. It was impossible to tell his age; Todd put him at somewhere between thirty and four hundred. He was wearing a strappy tee-shirt that was caked with dried vomit, green pants that were far too big for him, and gray leather workshoes cracked in a hundred places. The cracks gaped like agonized mouths. Todd thought he smelled like Dussander’s cellar.
The wino’s red-laced eyes opened slowly and stared at Todd with a bleary lack of wonder. As they did, Todd thought of the Swiss Army knife in his pocket, the Angler model. He had purchased it at a sporting goods store in Redondo Beach almost a year ago. He could hear the clerk that had waited on him in his mind: You couldn’t pick a better knife than that one, son—a knife like that could save your life someday. We sell fifteen hundred Swiss knives every damn year.
Fifteen hundred a year.
He put his hand in his pocket and gripped the knife. In his mind’s eye he saw Dussander’s jackknife working slowly around the neck of the bourbon bottle, slitting the seal. A moment later he became aware that he had an erection.
Cold terror stole into him.
The wino swiped a hand over his cracked lips and then licked them with a tongue which nicotine had turned a permanent dismal yellow. “Got a dime, kid?”
Todd looked at him expressionlessly.
“Gotta get to L.A. Need another dime for the bus. I got a pointment, me. Got a job offertunity. Nice kid like you must have a dime. Maybe you got a quarter.”
Yessir, you could clean out a damn bluegill with a knife like that . . . hell, you could clean out a damn marlin with it if you had to. We sell fifteen hundred of those a year. Every sporting goods store and Army-Navy Surplus in America sells them, and if you decided to use this one to clean out some dirty, shitty old wino, nobody could trace it back to you, absolutely NOBODY.
The wino’s voice dropped; it became a confidential, tenebrous whisper. “For a buck I’d do you a blowjob, you never had a better. You’d come your brains out, kid, you’d—”
Todd pulled his hand out of his pocket. He wasn’t sure what was in it until he opened it. Two quarters. Two nickles. A dime. Some pennies. He threw them at the wino and fled.
12
June, 1975.
Todd Bowden, now fourteen, came biking up Dussander’s walk and parked his bike on the kickstand. The L.A. Times was on the bottom step; he picked it up. He looked at the bell, below which the neat legends ARTHUR DENKER and NO SOLICITORS, NO PEDDLERS, NO SALESMEN still kept their places. He didn’t bother with the bell now, of course; he had his key.
Somewhere close by was the popping, burping sound of a Lawn-Boy. He looked at Dussander’s grass and saw it could use a cutting; he would have to tell the old man to find a boy with a mower. Dussander forgot little things like that more often now. Maybe it was senility; maybe it was just the pickling influence of Ancient Age on his brains. That was an adult thought for a boy of fourteen to have, but such thoughts no longer struck Todd as singular. He had many adult thoughts these days. Most of them were not so great.
He let himself in.
He had his usual instant of cold terror as he entered the kitchen and saw Dussander slumped slightly sideways in his rocker, the cup on the table, a half-empty bottle of bourbon beside it. A cigarette had burned its entire length down to lacy gray ash in a mayonnaise cover where several other butts had been mashed out. Dussander’s mouth hung open. His face was yellow. His big hands dangled limply over the rocker�
�s arms. He didn’t seem to be breathing.
“Dussander,” he said, a little too harshly. “Rise and shine, Dussander.”
He felt a wave of relief as the old man twitched, blinked, and finally sat up.
“Is it you? And so early?”
“They let us out early on the last day of school,” Todd said. He pointed to the remains of the cigarette in the mayonnaise cover. “Someday you’ll burn down the house doing that.”
“Maybe,” Dussander said indifferently. He fumbled out his cigarettes, shot one from the pack (it almost rolled off the edge of the table before Dussander was able to catch it), and at last got it going. A protracted fit of coughing followed, and Todd winced in disgust. When the old man really got going, Todd half-expected him to start spitting out grayish-black chunks of lung-tissue onto the table . . . and he’d probably grin as he did it.
At last the coughing eased enough for Dussander to say, “What have you got there?”
“Report card.”
Dussander took it, opened it, and held it away from him at arm’s length so he could read it. “English . . . A. American History . . . A. Earth Science . . . B-plus. Your Community and You . . . A. Primary French . . . B-minus. Beginning Algebra . . . B.” He put it down. “Very good. What is the slang? We have saved your bacon, boy. Will you have to change any of these averages in the last column?”
“French and algebra, but no more than eight or nine points in all. I don’t think any of this is ever going to come out. And I guess I owe that to you. I’m not proud of it, but it’s the truth. So, thanks.”
“What a touching speech,” Dussander said, and began to cough again.
“I guess I won’t be seeing you around too much from now on,” Todd said, and Dussander abruptly stopped coughing.
“No?” he said, politely enough.
“No,” Todd said. “We’re going to Hawaii for a month starting on June twenty-fifth. In September I’ll be going to school across town. It’s this bussing thing.”