Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“I imagined you all having breakfast in the farmhouse. Your mom in her bathrobe, your dad counting scoops of coffee, you and Janis — fuck, I hated you all. I was dangerous.” He slurped saliva, and shook his head, grinning.

“But among all those retards I had one friend, see. Big ol’ blond dude I sat next to in those classes they made us take. Manners, something with emotions, whatever. Ronnie. Ronnie Raamsdonk. Seventeen, armed robbery. Says he’s a nephew of Pedro van Raamsdonk, this and that, but what happened to the ‘van,’ I ask. He looks at me like I’ve said something really comical. ‘Where’s the “van” then, pal? Your name’s Raamsdonk, right?’ Well, he didn’t know, that’s just how it was. Anyway, I told him how you fucked me around. You have to talk, you—”

“Wilbert,” I interrupted, my head spinning from his declaration of hate, “I wish you knew how sorry I am, I—”

“Just listen,” he said. “Don’t talk.” He waited awhile before continuing.

“So I told Ronnie I hated you. ‘You want to even the score,’ he said, ‘you want to get out of here so you can even the score with your stepsister.’ He was right about that, I got all sweaty and jittery at the thought of it. He told me there was 17,000 guilders buried in the woods near Zwolle. He thinks about that money every minute of the day, sometimes out of desperation he tries to count to 17,000, he says, that’s how much those Gs are on his mind, this guy was dumb . He believed he had to get to those woods before he turned eighteen, otherwise the stash would be gone, see. ‘We’re gonna help each other out,’ he said, ‘and I already know how.’ ”

Their outdoor exercise space, Wilbert told me, was surrounded by a four-meter-high steel fence, untakable without a pole vault, but there was a sort of bus stop shelter up against it for when it rained. If Wilbert were to give Ronnie a boost, he’d pull Wilbert up onto the roof. “This hombre had the meanest arms, see. You hadda see what that guy pumped in the gym. We’d go to the woods near Zwolle together, and I’d get a thousand smackers from him.”

“Why on earth would you want to escape?” I asked. “Ten months, weren’t you already, like, halfway? I don’t get it — really, I don’t.”

He laughed noiselessly. “You have no idea of time. You’ve never been mad for more than an hour. You have no idea of anger. What it’s like to be eaten up by anger for a week, a month, three months. You should just keep your trap shut. For weeks I lay awake till dawn”—he made a pistol with his hand—“it got light outside and I stuck this here in your mouth … Bang .”

So one freezing-cold January evening he and his hulking friend smashed a bathroom window and within three minutes they were standing on the other side of that fence. They sprinted down the Berg en Dalseweg and got on the train, without a ticket, to Zwolle. He had cut his shoulder pretty badly but did not feel it. Revenge, see.

“But you—”

He shot me a sharp look.

But you weren’t entirely innocent . You are a dangerous lunatic — goddammit man, didn’t you molest Vivianne? Didn’t you bash a guy to death? The sentences forced their way up to my molars, but I sent them back. As I stared at him they transformed themselves into something more dangerous, a deeper thought. How was I supposed to explain what came over me when our father, long ago, had retreated to the men’s room in the Bastille in order to get a grip on himself? What was my reasoning? I only half understood it myself. In my five minutes alone at that stiffly set table I made a hasty decision. I decided to betray Wilbert. My father came back and sat down as an old man. Without batting an eye, I said: “You’re right, Dad. It’s true. Wilbert’s been hassling me.” Why did I say that? Why?

“But I what?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Go on.”

“So me and Ronnie, we hike out of Zwolle from the station. Only reached the woods in the middle of the night, see. And him searching, searching, searching. For hours! Behind every damn tree in those woods. It drove me crazy, it drove him crazy. It was freez ing. He starts punching trees with his bare hands. ‘Easy, big fella, relax,’ I say to him, ‘we’ll just wait until daylight.’ ”

Why? Had that fuss in the bathroom shocked me more than I cared to admit? Or was my concern tinged with jealousy? His attention to Vivianne? Could that be it?

“And guess what, next morning that jerk-off just walks up to it. As though he’d been raised by wolves. Ronnie digs a leather handbag out of the cold earth, unzips it, voilà, 17 Gs. And whaddya know, he gives me one. ‘For you,’ he says, ‘cuz we’re comrades. And now we’re gonna go to Enschede. You’re gonna take it out on your stepsister, I know it, man. I want it too.’ ”

He paused and looked at me.

“Why’re you stopping?” I said, while trying not to listen. Maybe the answer was much simpler, that it had everything to do with the sight of my father walking off. The defeated exhaustion of a man who, before Wilbert showed up, used to amaze us with his vitality. It started back in America, on Bonita Avenue, when in the morning I’d leap out of the bed Siem had tucked me into the night before, tingling with a zest for life that echoed my new dad. Despite reaching his mathematical apex in Berkeley, you’d sooner think he spent his days somewhere on that campus hooked up to an enormous battery-charger. Siem was incredible. In the weeks before Christmas he waited until Janis and I were in bed, and knocked together and painted a dollhouse using my mother’s tools. On Sundays he cooked spaghetti with red sauce. He could construct a kite out of a garbage bag and plywood strips in less than an hour. Once we were back in the Netherlands and newly installed in the farmhouse, he built a chicken run in the backyard for five Leghorns, and a rabbit hutch that he disinfected with Dettol and boiling water every Saturday, humming all the while. We watched breathlessly as he fetched a trailer full of old bricks from a demolished youth center behind Boekelo, marched them around the back of the house and — again, humming — built a huge planter using homemade mortar. By the end of 1989 there wasn’t a drop of fuel left over in him. Burned up on Wilbert — I think that was what hit me when my father returned from the men’s room, and sat back down across from me like an empty, dented oil drum. That kid had to go.

“Ronnie could go to hell,” Wilbert continued. “No way did I want that monkey tagging along, see. So I say ‘no way,’ and he says ‘yes way,’ and I say ‘fuck you,’ and he grabs me by my throat, pins me to the ground and says ‘money back, asshole,’ so I say, ‘OK, you can come too, but it’ll cost you an extra grand.’ So he lets me go and gives me another G. God, he was stupid.”

And slow, says Wilbert. A sluggish hulk whom he had easily outrun in the Cooper tests at the detention center, and so he stepped it up, walking toward the highway they had come down the night before. When he got to the bike path he intentionally took a wrong turn, not back toward Zwolle Station, but away from town, and Ronnie stood there shouting: “Man! You’re going the wrong way!” And then Wilbert broke into a run, a jog actually, at a good clip, farther and farther until ol’ Schwarzenegger gave up and gradually became a dot on the bike path. At the first town he got to he broke one of the thousands at a supermarket and took a taxi to Almelo — not the train, he was afraid Randy Ronnie would get the same idea. Once in Almelo he killed time in the freezing cold until the shops opened. He bought some clothes at the V&D department store, and a heavy coat he kept on. At the hardware store he got some rope, a box cutter, a kind of machete, “half a sword, man,” a roll of wide black plastic tape. At the sporting goods outlet he bought a gym bag into which he deposited his purchases.