Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

… he lifted him up and cuddled him, a dry, ribbed chin against his sweaty forehead, then the man whom he didn’t know carried him to the edge of the spongy mat. He lay on his back, deep in the mat, other boys were standing around him, they were silent, only nodded at him, except for one thin, bawling blond boy. He noticed that his own face no longer had its old shape, he felt it, he was swollen all over, small warm tomatoes, everywhere, it felt hot and gigantic. “Don’t fetch my wife,” he wailed. “Oh yes,” said Mr. Vloet, who, he saw now, was an aged version of a neighbor, their elderly neighbor from the Antonius Matthaeuslaan, who walked across the dojo that changed into his office in Zoetermeer, only larger, emptier—

He woke to a metallic clatter. Where am I? Until he saw his own reflection he swirled aimlessly through a pitch-black universe. He rubbed his hands over his face. The carving knife had fallen to the slate floor. His muscles felt tense from the cold when he retrieved it and grasped it in his fist; skittishly he scanned the terrace. His short leg was asleep. The night was still black, but paler. The face was still there, it seemed to have turned slightly, for a moment he thought the eyes were open, he rubbed his own eyes to clear them.

The breathing had stopped .

He stayed put. For at least a quarter of an hour, he guessed, he sat in that chair as if frozen himself, staring at the immobile body in the snow. Non-thinking was not out of the question, every incipient thought burst into a garland of triumph and guilt, he allowed the confusion to blossom, as though it were not his own … So you’re a murderer. You’re both murderers, but you’re alive and on the run, the one who got off scot-free … He stood up and opened the sliding glass door, it was sticking, like the lubricant was frozen. No, don’t prettify it, don’t call him a murderer … His feet sinking into the snow, he walked over to the body, stood close to it and looked. Mustn’t kill him, mustn’t slander him either, he wasn’t convicted of murder … Blood had leaked through the jacket, the snow under his left side had become a slushy brown. Manslaughter, fifteen hysterical blows, fifteen death blows within a minute, but it wasn’t murder, you must be precise about it. You’re the murderer in this family, you murdered him … Was he really dead? He inhaled, held the cold air in his lungs, nudged the right shoulder with the rounded toe of his hiking shoes, cautiously at first, then harder. No reaction. He gave the thigh a kick. His knees cracked when he sank to his haunches. He took a deep breath and rammed the point of the knife into the palm of the outstretched hand.

He gets out of the car. The slam of the door thunders through the frozen silence of the surrounding woods. He opens the rear hatch, wavers for a moment between the backpack and the tent bag, in the end lugs the tent bag out of the trunk. He clamps the load under his right arm while he locks the car. The canvas is frozen, and yet he knows it’s thawing outside, and in his head as well: something is changing up there; what he was able to do all morning, in fact all night — cold-blooded reasoning, followed by cold-blooded action — is becoming increasingly difficult. He looks around again and walks into the woods, the bag clamped to his chest. It’s rough going, there is no path, here and there he has to wriggle between drooping branches. The snow on the ground is thin and hard, he continually stumbles over roots, his ungainly coat keeps getting caught on the bristly thicket. There are no birds to be heard. Crackling branches and needles under his hiking shoes, the occasional rustle of unseen forest animals, but most of all: his own heavy breathing. The thirty, maybe forty kilos in his arms want to sag, he’s got a poor grip on the bag — this is bad. And again he thinks of the face, his hands begin to perspire, he has to stop. Replace it with another gruesome thought . The elbow, think of the elbow cracking. The resistance in the wrist; bending, struggling cells; the moment of capitulation, the snap . And keep walking.

He had damn near just driven off. After he knew for sure that Wilbert was dead he had simply turned around, picked his skis up out of the snow, and loaded them in the car. Just leave him there: he died like he died. From the one moment to the next he was high on testosterone, he felt a victory flush that almost made him afraid of himself. I’ll just say I was sleeping. Like any normal person I went to bed at night, and while I slept the bastard froze to death — that’s how it goes. Drunkards freeze to death when no one sees them. And the next morning I got up and left for my skiing vacation. I didn’t see a thing, it’s as simple as that. He was already turning off lights, the radiators and underfloor heating were already set to anti-freeze mode, when it occurred to him that it wasn’t as simple as that. There is nothing simple about a dead body in your backyard. How could he not have seen Wilbert lying there? The footprints on the terrace — the snow was crisscrossed with footprints leading to that body, his footprints. And even on the outside chance that they’d melt in time, that bastard wouldn’t melt. Never.

Dog-tired and desperate, he lay facedown on the sofa. He no longer needed to close his eyes in order to picture himself on the ski slopes when the detective called: Mr. Sigerius, we’ve found a corpse in your backyard; he could see the red-and-white-striped barrier tape around their farmhouse at the end of a killing homeward drive. He began to shiver like someone with a bad fever, an unstoppable tremor of something, fatigue, grief, fear .

Yes, he was afraid. From hightailing it out of there he catapulted to the other extreme: report it. Contain the damage and go to the police at once. Enschede police headquarters, have them write up an acceptable version of the events. I caught my criminal son as he tried to break into my own house, we got into a fight, a life-or-death struggle, and then he buggered off. And just now, as I’m about to leave for my skiing vacation, there he is, lying on my terrace, under the snow: dead, frozen. For a moment he considered this a lucid, plausible story. He stood in the living room with the phone in his hand, had already dialed the number, when he thought: but why didn’t you phone right away? You wanted to go skiing ? After an incident like that? Why didn’t you call the cops right away? Sir, that was hours ago — why only call now? It is the first question they will ask him, a question that begs answering. And what is he supposed to answer?

As he lies half asleep on the sofa, he is startled by a soft motorized sound. A scooter? The paperboy’s scooter — it approaches, stops, pulls out again and fades away. Was it that time already? The world will be getting up in a few hours, in a few hours his neighbors will be getting up . The Teeuwen girl, she’s coming for the cats, she was going to take care of them. He could already picture her in the yard, dumbstruck, hand over her mouth.

Get rid of that body . Breathing rapidly, he stood up, went to the utility room, put on a duffel coat from a couple of winters ago, and slid his hands into a pair of woolen gloves. The starless cold bit into his face. He walked past the corpse without looking at it, farther into the crunching darkness of the downward-sloping backyard. He cursed the snow into which his hiking shoes sank; he was doomed to leave a trail behind. At the back of the yard he slipped, banging his knee hard against the massive table on the terrace next to the workshop. He groped his way to the padlock on the wooden door, undid the bolt, felt around for a light switch. He surveyed the suddenly brightly lit space: islets of sawdust on the concrete floor, the professional tools hanging on their pegboard racks, the machines oblivious to the cold. He could stash the body behind the veneer press.