Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“Jesus Christ,” Tineke muttered. She got up and went into the kitchen with the empty Wedgwood platter. They could hear her give the deep-frier basket a hardhanded shake. Sigerius shoved back his chair, still har-harring, both hands on his belly, which filled his polo shirt like a strong nor’wester.

“Dad,” said Joni. “Just cut it out.” Her neck was covered with red splotches, all the way into the graceful V-neck of her blouse. But Sigerius appeared not to hear, he just kept on braying, and Aaron noticed that his sensation of triumph was beginning to evaporate. There was something going on here that he had no part in.

Tineke returned to the sunroom with the platter of sizzling potato croquettes and looked at her husband. Her puffy face, framed by ash-blond curls, seemed expressionless, as fat people’s faces often do. Maybe that is why the bang of the platter on the table came as such a shock. “Siem— stop it .”

Silence.

Sigerius looked at her, silently and sadly. His face was instantly transformed into an abandoned warehouse.

“Tell them the truth then, damn it, instead of that juvenile giggling.”

“What truth?”

“Come on. Don’t play the fool. Go on and tell them, if you know so much about it.”

“Guys,” Janis hushed.

Her mother did not hear her. “If you’re a real man, Siem Sigerius, then you’ll tell them who called last Saturday. Which piece of scum.”

“Tien, spare me this. Spare us this. What does Saturday have to do with this? For God’s sake.”

“Plenty. Everything. And you damn well know it. Tell them. Or I will.”

Sigerius did not move a muscle. Although on his rector’s skull, under that cropped, slightly graying hair, one little one did. An unseen, uneasy muscle. “You’re ruining everyone’s evening,” he said, “and you damn well know that .”

“Then I’ll tell them.” She looked across the table at Joni and Janis. “Sweethearts,” she said, “don’t be alarmed. Wilbert called. Our very own scumbag rang up. Saturday night, especially for you two. Wilbert Sigerius. Wondering if you survived the explosion.”

He was cold. He was so caught up with himself — with his own mendacity, with Sigerius’s response, with his revenge on Joni and her beaus — that he didn’t understand what had just happened. He couldn’t make rhyme or reason of it. Apparently he was not the focus of his own act, but had hammed his way through a one-man show while the main performance was taking place not onstage but in the stalls. There were so many things he didn’t get: he didn’t get why no one was relieved at Sigerius’s spectacular mood boost, he didn’t get why Tineke started in on that telephone call while her husband was dead set against it, he didn’t get the antipathy between Joni and Sigerius. And worst of all: how could he not have realized it was not about Manus Pitte at all, but in fact about Wilbert Sigerius?

He of all people, who thought he knew something about the IJmuiden Basher and the family over which he cast his ragged shadow. Ever since that evening long ago in the canteen of the campus gym, when Sigerius acquainted him with the résumé of the family’s very own lowlife, it had become a research project. It fascinated him. He had started with Joni, using all the tact he could muster up, and barraged her with questions: what did she know about Wilbert, aside from the shreds of information she’d already given him? Not much, apparently. Even less than her father had already confided in him. Yes, he was doing time, that much she knew, but no details. She clearly didn’t like talking about it; in fact, no one else in that family did either, they’d sooner bite off their tongue than mention that goddamn jailbird. Figuring he understood that, he undertook to find things out for himself. One morning he cycled to the public library and delved into the newspaper archives for court reports of Wilbert’s case. The conviction was handed down in 1993, Sigerius had said so, at the Haarlem courthouse. That was all he had to go on. But he had time. Since the Enschede library did not save past copies of the Haarlemse Dagblad he installed himself at the oval reading table across from the coffee automats and perused, without success, every copy of the Amsterdam Parool from 1993, after which he had them bring up a stack of Telegraafs from the depot, and what do you know: just as he was about to lose hope, his eye fell upon a dry little item. Further in the section he found an extensive article, its blocks of text in boldface, containing details that would occupy his thoughts for the rest of the day.

Wilbert S. appeared before the court on November 16, 1993, for beating to death one Barry Harselaar, fifty-two, process manager at the Hoogovens steelworks, in a blind rage with a four-kilo sledgehammer. Thanks to prior mediation by North Holland Probation Services, Aaron read, the “revolving-door criminal S.” worked the morning shift as an odd-job man in the factory complex of hot rolling mill 2. Things went well for a few weeks, until his foreman — Harselaar — noticed that Wilbert S., who had done time earlier for sexual intimidation, had been making unwelcome advances to a forty-one-year-old canteen employee. After the woman had complained to Harselaar about “boob-grabbing,” he decided to teach the newbie a “sympathetic” lesson. According to two eyewitnesses, Harselaar was leaning against a sledgehammer next to an empty iron barrel, about a meter high, when he called Wilbert S. over. “Listen, pal, my pack of shag’s lying at the bottom. You should be able to reach it with those sticky fingers of yours.” When Wilbert S. leaned into the barrel, his waist folded over the iron rim, Harselaar picked up the sledgehammer and gave the side of the barrel a massive wallop. That’ll teach him and his filthy paws. What Harselaar did not know is that Wilbert S. had already taken lessons: Aggression Management Training, offered by the National Parole Board for easily inflamed individuals. “Have a short fuse,” Aaron read the blurb on the Parole Board’s website, “but not sure where it comes from? Aggression maintenance begins by finding the causes. Self-control ultimately leads to inner calm.”

“S.” clambered out of the barrel, his ears ringing, and screamed as he set upon his foreman, taking him by the throat. According to bystanders, after a short skirmish he grabbed the sledgehammer, promptly raised it above his head and brought it down with a splitting smack between Harselaar’s neck and left shoulder. The foreman collapsed. Intervention was impossible: one of the two witnesses, twenty-one-year-old Ronald de H., attempted to intercede, which earned him a broken pelvis from a well-placed backswing. What they saw happen under their very noses in the next thirty seconds must have been traumatic. Wilbert S. beat Barry Harselaar with the hammer, shouting “fucking prick” at least fifteen times, until the man had been turned into a mangled, bleeding bale of flesh and bone. The autopsy determined that Harselaar’s body suffered no fewer than twenty-six broken bones. The only thing that was still intact was his organ donor card.

Having spent his aggression, Wilbert S. flung the sledgehammer against a wall and fled through the 600-meter-long rolling mill, out an emergency exit and into the steelworks complex. An hour and a half later he was arrested in a storage depot behind one of the coke plants.

Because S. was a recidivist (twice earlier convicted of assault and battery), because it was not a matter of self-defense or undue provocation by the victim, and considering the brutality of the crime, the Haarlem District Attorney demanded ten years’ imprisonment plus mandatory psychiatric treatment. Although the judge shared the DA’s revulsion at “S.’s uncontrolled rage,” his verdict was eight years in prison minus four months’ prior detention on remand. Mandatory psychiatric treatment was out of the question, because S., according to the psychiatrists at the Pieter Baan clinic, was entirely compos mentis .