Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“Is this all true?” I asked. He sat there dishing me up a sexual fantasy, he was inventing it on the spot, one of his jailhouse wet dreams. “I don’t buy it. You’re making this up.”

He smirked at me, pulled his T-shirt out of his trousers and wiped the spit from his mouth. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m a born liar. I make things sound better than they are, that’s me. Trying to spare you some, see. She doesn’t believe me. And the face? The ear infection? D’you believe that ?” He pinched his rubbery cheek and tugged it back and forth. “That crap about my ear, that you believe, but not this.” He shook his head pityingly. “This here”—he tapped his right temple—“this was a present from this black dude I sold smack to. Diluted heroin, complete junk. The fuckin’ jungle bunny. Guy always paid too late, see. Constant shit with him, so I give him shit back. One day Sambo’s waiting for me at my car. This and that, y’know. Wants his money back. Go fuck yourself, I say. Bam, he goes and smashes my windshield with a claw hammer. So I jump over the hood and grab him by the neck. But yeah, the fucker slams me on the head with the hammer.”

And sure enough, there’s a red half-moon on his right temple. He suddenly looked terrible.

“Broken temporal bone. When I came to I was lying in an ambulance.”

I wanted to say something, but Wilbert said: “Shhh.” He leaned back with a look of contentment. “OK, so months later I’m walking my dogs on the beach, Zandvoort, see, and who do I see but that same guy. Dude’s walking along the empty beach eating fish nuggets. So what do I do, I sneak up behind him, let out a scream, and grab him by his moss head and drag him into the ocean. The dude totally doesn’t know what hit him. I give him a few head-butts and hold his head under water. Kept doing it until he’s half drowned, see.” He looked at me, satisfied. “ That’s what I do with dudes who fuck with me.”

See, y’know, see — I’d had about enough, see. I was through here. I didn’t want to spend another minute in a room with Wilbert and his see . I got up, could’ve just walked out the door. But instead I went over to the window. Behind me I heard him scuff his chair.

There were two small framed pictures on the windowsill, I picked up the first one, a black-and-white photo of a laughing young woman. She had tufted-up dark hair and was standing in a yard with a white fence. Must be Wilbert’s mother. Without realizing it, I’d started crying, silently, calmly. In the other frame, I saw through my tears, was the same woman. Margriet, years older, sitting on a plaid sofa in an eighties living room, pixie haircut, her face unnaturally thin. Next to her: Wilbert. About eleven years old, square buck teeth, shaggy hair, cheerful and serious at the same time. Man of the house. So this is what he looked like while the people who dumped him were living in America. I had to sit this out. Grant him this .

Maybe he read my mind, because he said: “It was a Thursday. I knew you had that job at the stables on Monday and Thursday nights — you went, no matter what. That last stretch through the woods and fields, pitch-dark, no houses, for a kilometer or so. Your route that night. No doubt about it.”

God, he was right — I never ever missed it. Never. If I stayed home sick from school, I’d make sure I was back in shape before it was time to go to the stables. I saddled up horses, broke in newcomers, hosed down the troughs. At fifteen, nothing could beat this.

“Out before nine, back after eleven. And that’s when I was gonna drag you off your bike. I hung around in Almelo until after dark. In the library, in the V&D, in a restaurant right near that fucking courthouse. I blew a hundred bucks on food, see.” He chuckled and said he’d taken a taxi “with his pants undone” to Enschede and had the driver drop him at the wooded bit between the campus and town. He chose a gentle curve with high bushes to hide in. Still had a few hours so he walked into the fields out back. Hard beds of gray sand, dead roots on the ground. In the distance, frozen water, and next to a dock there was a small shed. “All sorts of junk in there, including a rubber inflatable boat. So I blew it up, lay there a bit, see. Maybe an hour. I was totally … horny .”

He’d taken the tape and knives out of the gym bag and walked back to the curve. Bike lamps visible from afar, but whether it was me or not, he couldn’t tell. Then he recognized me, blond hair sticking out of my winter cap. “How you lean over your handlebars when you bike, see.”

I went back to my chair, sat down and sniffed. “You’re crazy,” I said. “You’re completely crazy.”

His breathing became agitated, his fingers clawed at the loose leather of his chair. “You were just a few meters away from me, bitch.” The difference between the right and left side of his face was greater than ever. It was impossible to say how he looked at me. “And then I saw somebody cycling behind you. Some fat bitch without a lamp. I hesitated.”

“You hesitated ?” I said. “You’re fantasizing. You’re talking crap, Wilbert. Nothing like this ever happened. Who do you think you’re kidding? You can’t even come up with a decent ending.”

Yeah, that’s how it went. I’d forgotten how angry he got. He jumped out of his armchair with such force that it fell over backward with a huge crash, iron legs up in the air. “Bitch!” he shouted. “ Bitch! Fucking bitch! I should’ve slashed you to ribbons — god damn it to hell, what a bitch you are. I should have fuck ing slashed you to ribbons when I had the chance. I smelled you, your Judas-smell. I got a whiff of that goody-two-shoes, your loyalty to Daddy, loyalty to your safe little nest, your—”

“Siem and I don’t see each other anymore,” I screamed above his tirade. I surprised myself. I’d jumped up too, we were standing face-to-face, four shins against a rattan coffee table. I hated myself. Hadn’t I resolved not to let it get out of hand? “I’ll never see him again, ever , d’you hear me?” I barked. But why? Why did I say that? To impress him? It was just like back then, him taunting me for being a daddy’s girl, and my need to disprove it. I could see Wilbert prick up his ears, he pursed the good half of his mouth.

“Oh yeah?” His voice was calm, as though he hadn’t just lost his temper. He extended his arm, put a hand on my shoulder and let it glide off with a vague stroking motion. “Let’s hear it.”

I slumped back into my chair. “I’m not as … goody-goody as you think.”

“So what’s that got to do with him?”

Catharsis. Just the simple fact of telling it out loud, relating the drama that had taken place on the Vluchtestraat, the still-fresh horrors I’d been feverishly keeping to myself for days, putting into words what we had been up to for four years like a pair of counterspies — that alone provided me with a strange, intense sense of relief. But the real pleasure came from the amazement on Wilbert’s face, the mouth-watering awe, he even seemed shocked, he called it “bizarre and pretty gross.” He’d put his chair back upright and sat listening to me with his hands in his lap. “You loaded, bitch?”

“Nah.”

“Course you are.”

“Really, I’m not.”

“OK. So tell me what he’s got to do with it. I tell you stuff too, see.”

The acuity of his argument. Maybe I was just relieved he’d stopped asking about money, maybe I realized he did have a point. I told him the straight story: the vacation, us coming home early. The sliding glass door.

“ What? So he knows everything?”