Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“A little scared,” he said to Janis. “But anyway I say to this trailer trash, because that’s what he was, of course, trailer trash, I say: ‘Oh yes, just now you stood out there alongside my taxi. You demolished my window.’ The guy glances around and says: ‘I’m gonna eat. So quit talkin crap. I’m going to sit down and have a peaceful bite to eat,’ and he slides his tray a little farther. All this in coarse, Venlo trailer trash lingo.”

“Now that’s a fact,” Joni said drily. “Trailer trash, there’s a lingo for you.”

Aaron had arrived at the heroic portion of the story. Not only had he appropriated his brother’s heroism, but he also jazzed it up a bit. “I bend over that sweaty neck of his,” he said, “and whisper into his ear: ‘You’re gonna pay.’ The guy whirls around. ‘You know who you’re talking to, asshole?’ he screams. Like a banshee. The whole cafeteria goes dead quiet. ‘Manus Pitte’—again at megaphone volume. OK, I got the picture. The Pittes are a notorious Venlo family, and not because of the smell of their cooking. A whole clan of hooligans. Half of them are behind bars — violence, drugs, prostitution, the works.”

“We know just what you mean.” Sigerius.

“Speak for yourself.” Joni.

“Joni also knows exactly what you mean.”

Tineke’s chair squeaked. Aaron looked at her. She leaned back and observed him with distant, chilly eyes.

“Before I could respond, this Pitte guy shoves his tray aside, one of the half-liter beers crashes to the floor, bang , glass everywhere.”

“Beer in a hospital?” Joni.

“Take it up with Customer Service. Pitte leans over sixty degrees, not forward, but sideways, from his waist — despite all those deep-fried meat snacks and satay hot dogs, the guy’s nothing but muscle — and while he stands there like a gymnast (he only stood like that for a second, but it’s a pose I’ll never forget) he grabs my pant leg with one hand, just above the knee, and my chauffeur’s jacket with the other hand. He starts dragging me toward the door. ‘Ousside,’ he yells, ‘ousside. Gonna bust on ya.’ He kept yelling it, all the way through the dead-quiet foyer. ‘Ousside. Bust on ya.’ ”

“Outside. Beat you up.” Joni Sigerius, interpreter, twenty-five years old, unmarried.

“You just said you can spot a scumbag a mile off,” Sigerius said. “I can too, whether it’s Rotterdam or Shanghai. Always could. Africans, Russians, Asians, doesn’t matter — I could always tell. But how? Even if a guy is stark naked, I can still see it on him. You?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen riffraff naked.”

Sigerius grinned. “I have. For nearly a year, every day.”

“Siem.” Tineke. She seldom called him by his first name. Sigerius clapped the air with his right hand as though it were someone’s back. “Don’t interfere,” he said.

Joni got up from the table. “I think I need to pee. I can’t take this.”

Retrospectively, in light of the scene’s disastrous ending, he would identify this moment as the turning point. He recalled clearly that Sigerius paid no attention, he completely ignored his elder daughter. Instead he picked up his napkin, slid off its copper-colored ring, and then slammed it onto the table between him and Aaron. His mouth had an imperative look, his eyes were dark and fanatical. “Imagine this Pitte naked,” he said. “Would you see it then?”

He answered that he thought so, it seemed to him something innate. “Yeah. In his look. They have a look that’s stupid and aggressive at the same time. No … smart and stupid. Is that possible?”

“A person’s look is a matter of breeding,” Sigerius said. “Right, Aaron? We’ve come that far a century after Lombroso. It’s all about the nature-nurture ratio. You can nudge a born criminal in the right direction.”

Joni was back surprisingly soon; it was hard to believe she’d actually been to the toilet. It seemed more likely that she had been eavesdropping from behind one of the ferns. “But you can’t,” she said as she glided past Aaron’s back on the way to her chair.

Huh? Had he heard that right? This was a frontal assault, although he wasn’t sure whose front was hit or what with, or why. But such a rebuke. Why now? Was he missing something? Yet more astonishing than Joni’s sneer was Sigerius’s reaction, namely none . His concentrated face rippled ever so slightly, a barely noticeable twitch. He set down his knife and fork, silver with heavy handgrips, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hairy hand.

“Aaron, I want you to tell Joni as precisely as possible what happened. Don’t skip a single detail. I want you to tell us how you taught that punk a lesson.”

No. Of course Aaron Bever had not taught Manus Pitte a lesson. He had never seen this Manus Pitte guy, never smelled him — he’d almost forgotten this himself. And if Pitte had parked his Escort on the side of the road in order to sock Aaron Bever in the kisser, then Aaron Bever would not have hesitated for a second before tearing out of there — beat it, burn rubber, before that pleb, that roughneck, that lout, even came anywhere near his minivan. Get out and start swinging? He wouldn’t stand a chance, just like his brother didn’t stand a chance. If Pitte had dragged Sebastian through the revolving door, then he’d have knocked out all his teeth and flattened him like a tube of toothpaste in no time. Back at the trailer park, Pitte would have stuffed him with horsehair and old newspapers, propping him up in the back of the trailer between the karaoke set and Grandpa’s stuffed sheepdog.

“Luckily it didn’t come to that,” he said. “He dragged me as far as the revolving door; I went to grab the doorframe, but suddenly he let go. We both fell over backward. Pitte had seen something that gave him a real shock. And when I saw it, I got a shock too. But Pitte was more shocked, Pitte nearly shat himself. Out of the revolving door came a man, probably for the outpatient clinic, or maybe he came to have himself euthanized. It was a terrible sight. Pitte and I, sprawled on the floor tugging at each other, look at him at the same time, we see him at the same time. Together we see a monster. The Elephant Man. They weren’t burn wounds, it was something else, an alien landscape, the dark side of the moon; a single eye looked at us from that mass of flesh, the other one was overgrown with some gross protuberance, an orgy of pulpy flesh, a riot of warts and boils …”

Joni spat a piece of beef onto her plate. Cud. “Aaron, give me a break .”

“You give me a break.” Sigerius. “Go on.”

Aaron took a gulp of wine. “Well, OK, our hero scrambles up and starts shuffling backward into the hospital. Funnily enough, he picks up his tray and goes into the foyer without paying for the sausage rolls, looking back a couple of times.”

“And you?”

“Followed him, naturally.”

Aaron’s description of his pursuit, stairs up, stairs down, elevator in, elevator out, released an avalanche of pleasure. With his cell phone to his ear (that bit about the cell phone was a sudden brainwave, no one at the table was alert enough to realize cell phones didn’t exist back then, in reality his brother had asked the hospital personnel to call the police), he trailed his suspect: a manhunt! “Pitte abandoned his tray in front of the elevator.” Sigerius’s face went purple and his head fell back in hilarity when Aaron told him he helped himself to the sausage rolls.

“And what, you bite into his sausage roll?”—the final words dissolving into a guffaw that bellowed forth from deep within Sigerius’s throat, like an eruption of magma. But the women at the table did not laugh with him. Joni’s irate face swung from Aaron to her wet-eyed father, and Janis dragged a cooled-off potato croquette through the gravy with her fork.