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THE CELLAR

I DO NOT REMEMBER MY MOTHER. I do not remember my father. I do not remember anyone from back before when I killed Steven Adinoff in Andy Lieblich’s sandbox. What I remember is the sandbox, and anybody who had anything to do with the sandbox, or who I, in my way, as a child, thought did. Which is why I remember the nanny, and why I remember the colored man, and why 1 remember Miss Donnelly, who was my teacher when it was then.

I cannot tell you what 1 thought about the other people, about almost all of the other people. 1 cannot even tell you who most of the people were, except to give you certain highlights of them when I think of them. But I don’t think there is going to be anything which I can tell you about either one of Andy Lieblich’s parents, or anything about what it was like inside of their place once you were actually inside of it, aside from the fact that there was a maid who always lived inside of it—not that I myself ever actually saw her other than through a screen door, or other than through a storm door, and that we ourselves, that my particular parents, that our house never had either one of those kinds of doors, that we never had a screen door or had a storm door for any door, that the only kind of special door which our house had was the door which you went down to get into the cellar of it.

There is nothing which I will not tell you if I can think of it—Steven Adinoff is not even the half of it, Steven Adinoff is not even a smidgen of it. For instance, for instance—speaking of the cellar, for instance—I once, or maybe twice, went down to our cellar with their dog once—I once went down into our cellar with Iris Lieblich and with her dog once—I went down there with her and with Sir once.

I wanted to be different things.

I wanted to be something nice.

I wanted to be just like the way he was—have hair which had the smell which his hair had, have hair which had the smell which Andy Lieblich’s had, not have hair which had the smell of Kreml or of Wildroot. Or be a girl who had a place like Iris Lieblich’s. Or be a lady-in-waiting and have one like a lady-in-waiting did. I mean, have a place which they could look at through gossamer, not one where you had to get off your underpants for them to see what it was.

I wanted to be Miss Donnelly’s hankie, Miss Donnelly’s lilac, Miss Donnelly’s bodice—or just be gossamer or just be Miss Donnelly or just be Miss Donnelly when she came to a page with a picture on it.

I wanted to be able to sit on the toilet and really do something. I wanted to never have to get down off of the toilet and go downstairs and have to talk to Mrs. Adinoff when she came over to my house to make my mother make me get down off of the toilet and go downstairs and have a good talk with her and let her get a good look at me and ask me the question of what kind of a boy I think it took for him to go ahead and kill a person.

Here is a good question for us—namely, which room of our house was it, the living room or the kitchen? And another thing—did I or didn’t I have my shoes and socks off—and if I did, then did I go get them and put them back on again, or did I just pick them up and carry them back home with me—or maybe did I do neither one of those two things but just instead just left them where they were, left them there where Steven Adinoff was, plus Andy Lieblich and the nanny?

That is, if my shoes and socks had ever been actually off of me to begin with.

I was dead wrong about the colored man. The colored man didn’t really have anything to do with any of it—the colored man didn’t actually have the first thing to do with anything which had to do with the sandbox. It was only in my way as a child that I thought he did. I thought it was the colored man and the nanny together, that there was some way in which the pair of them were in charge of it together. However, in all reality, the colored man really didn’t have anything to do with anything at the Lieblichs’, except for looking out for the Lieblichs’ Buick, except for whisk brooming out the Lieblichs’ Buick and for washing it and for waxing it. But in my mind it was all of it different. In my mind, the colored man was a big part of everything which went on in the sandbox—in my mind, he was just as big a part of it as the nanny herself was, even though I really knew he actually wasn’t, even though I really knew I was just making all of this up.

But I don’t know where the thought came to me from, or why I wanted it to. The colored man was just a colored man who went around and washed the cars which people had in their garages and who sometimes kept on going and gave them Simonize jobs. He was just the colored man that you told the maid to make come over if you had the money for it and actually had a car for him to work for you on.

It was just the nanny. When it came to who had the say about the sandbox, I don’t think there was anybody who had as much of it as the nanny all by herself had, not probably even any of the Lieblichs.

The nanny made up all of the rules. All of the rules which went for the sandbox the nanny said were all of her own doing. Even as to the question of who was going to be allowed to come over and play in it, the nanny was the only one who had the say even about any of this, either.

The nanny said it didn’t matter what anybody else said—that it didn’t matter to her what Mr. Lieblich said, or Mrs. Lieblich, or what Andy Lieblich said, or what Iris Lieblich did. The nanny said it wasn’t any of them who had anything to say about who was going to get to play in the sandbox and who wasn’t, or about how you were supposed to play in it if you were the one who was going to be allowed to come over and play in it. The nanny said it was all of it up to her, that the whole question of anything which had to do with the sandbox was all of it up to her, that the whole thing of the sandbox was nobody’s but her own personal private business—and that if anybody didn’t like it like that, then that they could go lump it, then that they could go whistle a merry tune, go fly a kite, jump in the lake, mind their own Ps and Qs, tend to their own knitting.

It wasn’t the colored man at all—it was all all of it all the nanny all by herself. She was the only one who could tell you if you could come over and what time you could and when you had to clean everything up and put everything away, plus whether or not if you were playing nicely enough for you not to have to go home right away, plus even which were the games you could play—namely, the one of Gardener or of Farmer or of Builder, and then once you picked one, once you picked the game, the nanny always gave you a pail and said “Shovel, hoe, or rake?”

I really can’t begin to remember about some of the other things. About what the nanny looked like, for instance—I can’t think of it. But I can think of the rubber bands, her wrist, of the nanny’s wrist, of the wristwatch.

I was a child.

As such, I was a child in and of myself.

I tell you, when you live next door to someone richer, there is no end to what will enter your thoughts.

It made me crazy, I admit it.

The colored man, for instance, I had the feeling that when I was in the sandbox that it was my job to be in it in a certain way which made me in it in place of him. However, in all actuality, I don’t need for anyone to tell me that the colored man did not really know anything about me, or think anything about me, or that he probably did not even know where I actually lived, that it was just next door to the Lieblichs and that we had to have a landlord and that I was six just like Andy Lieblich was.

The colored man, he only came there for the Buick.

If it wasn’t rainy or wasn’t snowy or wasn’t blowy, that is. But in my memory of what it was like before we had to move away from next door to the Lieblichs, it was always weather in general like summer, like August in particular, back before the particular August when I used a toy hoe to kill a boy whose name was Steven Adinoff back in Woodmere when I was six.

IT WAS ALWAYS OKAY WITH MY MOTHER. I didn’t ever have to have any permission from her—I didn’t have to go get any permission from my mother to ever go play over at Andy Lieblich’s or to go over there to watch the colored man wash the car. I didn’t have to have her permission for anything, I don’t think, except for the thing of going across the street or of going on past where the Aaronsons’ property came to a stop on the other side of the Lieblichs’. Not that either one of those were things that I myself would ever have asked my mother for her permission for, since I just took it for granted that if you went out there to those particular places, you were out there where the Christians were.

But as to the question of whether you could go out or not go, it was always okay with my mother for you always to go out. I think she thought it was good for your health—or else that she just did not have the time to think about the question at all. Whereas the nanny had a whole different approach to the subject of the weather—because so far as the nanny was concerned, there were all kinds of times when the outdoors was absolute poison, time after time when it did not pay for you to go outside, times when you were probably taking your life into your hands if you were stupid enough for you to go do it, times when to get fresh air was definitely out of the question for you, when in all honesty and sincerity it was the better part of valor for boys to stay indoors and keep a careful vigil—especially if you yourself were actually a delicate boy, which is what the nanny said what Andy Lieblich was.

This is what I wanted.

I wanted to be a boy who was delicate like Andy Lieblich was—I wanted to be a boy who was every bit as delicate as that boy was. That’s the kind of boy I wanted to be. The kind of boy I wanted to be would be a boy who could not keep any fried foods down or miss his nap or not get his bath in a bathtub or ever have to get a sandwich off the kitchen counter and not be served his meat pattie when it was high time for lunch or for him to have to have his milk without the chill off.

But even if it was nice out, even if the weather was absolutely totally perfect out, then you still could not just go ahead and say that that just automatically meant that you could come over and play in the sandbox with Andy Lieblich, even if he himself, even if the nanny said that Andy Lieblich was actually going to be coming out any minute to play in it. What I mean is that there was always no end of things which might have to make the nanny make up her mind that she was just not going to be able to give you her complete and total permission at this particular juncture yet—namely, if it looked to her, for instance, like you were coming down with something, or like you had the first signs of some other thing, or that even if you did not look to her like you were actually getting anything, then it maybe looked to her like this was going to be a day when you could not be trusted, like this was going to be one of those days when no matter how much you might want to promise the nanny to the contrary, you just could not help yourself, you just could not help but not play nicely, not even if your life depended on it—or maybe she just said that it was a matter of horizons, that a boy like Andy Lieblich had to keep stretching his horizons and for him play the field whenever it was humanly possible.

There were lots of times when I was not the one who got to come over. There were lots of times when the nanny had to say to me that she herself was not God, that she alone could not just wave a wand, that there were some things which were beyond the powers of anyone to control them, that she did not have the strength to move heaven and earth even if this is what I and everyone else thought she did.

But if there were other boys, if Andy Lieblich actually had over other boys, I myself never saw them—Steven Adinoff being the sole exception, Steven Adinoff being the first and last exception, Steven Adinoff being the single solitary exception—but after him there were probably lots of them.

Never more than two at a time in the sandbox, never more than two boys in the sandbox at a time, this was one of the nanny’s strictest regulations—whereas my idea was this—that I was the boy who lived next door to Andy Lieblich, which was supposed to give me the first chance to be the boy who was the second one. But what the nanny said was that things like this were the very reason why it had to come out just exactly the opposite—that the first shall be last and also vice versa.

I always knew what the nanny was saying.

I always knew what everybody was saying.

I never didn’t understand anybody saying anything.

Even the colored man when he said things, even though the colored man almost never said actually anything.

He said chamois, for one thing.

And then there were the things which he said I should eat, the things he said which I should go home and tell my mother to get busy and start cooking for me for me to eat—he had all of these different things, he had all of these different things—they were greens, they were leafy greens, a total of eight of these different kinds of leafy greens, I think, and I’ll bet I could tell you the name of every last one of them, even though the colored man only told me once when in fact he finally got around to actually telling.

I always wanted to kiss the colored man. I always felt like I was going to have to kiss the colored man. I always felt like I wasn’t going to be able to help myself or stop myself or do anything to be able to keep myself from falling toward his lips and kissing the colored man.

But I didn’t. I never did it. I saw how pink his palms got, I saw how when he got them wet how pink his palms got, and I never did do it, even though there were times when his back was not always facing me.

But he was mostly working on the Buick if he was at the Lieblichs’, so his back was in general always facing me because, as such, he had to face the Buick, unless it was one of the times when he went into the garage for changing shirts and for getting things or for putting things back.

In all truth, it is true he did not speak—it’s true that the colored man mainly did not speak—but if you watched him the way I watched him, if you really kept your eye on him the way I did, then you never ended up feeling that the colored man didn’t let you in on what kinds of things he thought. But this was probably all in my head. I was probably just making all of this up in my head—thinking, for instance, that you could look at him doing things and then get ideas about him from that—from the way he flattened out the chamois cloth, for instance, or just folded up a rag. Even the way he shook out the Old Dutch Cleanser onto the scrub brush the maid always left for him for brushing up the white-walls, even the way the colored man did a thing like that, just tapping the side of the can with just one finger instead of actually turning it over and shaking it upside-down, even a thing as little as this looked to me like it was something which only the colored man did—and that if he did it for me, if he did it in front of me, then the thought I had from that was that the colored man specifically wanted it to mean something to me, that it was like a statement which the colored man had actually gone ahead and decided to make for my own personal benefit—just things like getting the lid of the Simonize can back on again by just pressing it down with his thumb, or things like the way he let the water from the hose run out over the back of the hand he used for washing the car with the sponge, just the way he made the water come out and gush out over the back of his hand, just things like that made me feel that the colored man was behaving that way, was doing things like that only because he could tell that I liked him to, only because he could tell that the boy who was standing just in back of him and who was watching him, who was watching his every single little move, could not have been paying any closer attention to every single little bit of it—and make no mistake of it, I couldn’t have, I couldn’t have!—the way the water streamed over the veins which were in the back of his hand, the way the water ran out over it and then broke itself up into different streams that just as quickly streamed away and were all gone away—but then there was a fresh gush of water and then it started and ended all over again, his veins, his hand.

Even if he didn’t actually say it, I think we can say he theoretically said it—the statement of what I stood to gain, of what kind of a future I would stand to have as a man, from getting my mother to feed me the eight greens which the colored man said to me he ate.

I loved watching the colored man—but it wasn’t anything like the love, it didn’t come anywhere close to the love which I had for the times when I was actually with Andy Lieblich in his sandbox. This was the single best feeling in the world—this was the single best thing in the whole wide world—there wasn’t a sadness that I myself could ever have thought of which just being in the sandbox with Andy Lieblich could not have totally but totally got rid of, especially if I stopped to think to myself, especially if right in the middle of doing something, of getting sand and filling up a pail with sand to make a building, for instance, or of packing it down to get it to really have the best chance of sticking together when it finally came back out of the pail, for instance, when I finally turned the pail over and tapped it and got it to come back out, the sand, especially if I said to myself that the colored man was taking all of this in, even if it actually happened to be a day when the colored man wasn’t even there at the Lieblichs’ in the first place, or even if it was a day when he was—either way, could he see around the house from the front of the Lieblichs’ property to the back of the Lieblichs’ property and see me doing things? Of course not, of course not—no one had to tell me that the colored man could not actually in fact do this, of course—but even so, even so, it still felt to me like he could—or it felt good to me when I thought that he could, even if I really knew otherwise, even if I knew that the colored man was probably just a big man and a strong man and was not any of the other things I thought he was.

I was always the boy who was winning.

Whichever one the game was, whichever game Andy Lieblich and I were playing, whether it be Builder or Gardener or Farmer, I was always head and shoulders above Andy Lieblich when it came to who would come out winning it, to who would be the one who would come out being better at it, even if he himself always had the shovel—and make no mistake of it, even if nobody actually said it was a game, even if nobody had gone ahead and said it was a game to begin with, set it up that way as a game to begin with, still and all, there was always a winner, there was always a winner, and the loser knew it just as much as the winner did, just as the nanny always herself did, just as she herself from just sitting there did.

The chair she sat in was a slatted chair. By this I mean that it was a chair which was made out of wooden slats like slats of wood, which I think, I have the idea, that this was a pretty common kind of a chair for the out-of-doors back in those days, which were the days of 1938 and 1939 and 1940.

His muscles were so amazing to me—the muscles that I could see in his back when the colored man had his back facing me, I could see them even though he didn’t have his shirt off, even though he always had a shirt on, except for when he went into the garage to do his changing into one and then, later on after that, out of one—you could always see the colored man’s muscles through his clothes because he had so many of them and they were so big.

I tell you, it was so amazing to me, it all was so amazing to me, how wide his wrists were, how thick his wrists were, or how the way the back of his hand looked when he kept the water from the hose always running over it so that there always would be fresh clean water in the sponge and so the dirt wouldn’t get rubbed back on all over the Buick again after the colored man had got it all washed off.

You know what was amazing to me?

The way the colored man turned over the sponge.

It made me tremble. It made me almost tremble when the colored man lifted the sponge up off of the Buick just a little ways and then flopped it back down over on the other side of it—and then some of the soppiness in it flounced out, flushed out, flooded out, before the colored man mashed his hand again back down on it.

Fluffed out—that’s the way it looked—I am trying to really say the way all of these things actually looked.

You could really make a list of favorite things. You can’t do it anymore, you can’t do it now—but you could have done it every day of your life when you were six—Andy Lieblich and the sandbox first, the colored man after that, the colored man next, the colored man and the Buick after Andy Lieblich and the sandbox, then Miss Donnelly and the storybooks coming third.

Other things which I can think of are these—namely, seeing Iris Lieblich’s place, or actually her seeing my place, Iris Lieblich seeing my place—and then the rest would be things I smelled or hearing the corduroy or just looking at the house where the Lieblichs lived.

I almost forgot.

Mah-jongg—I almost forgot.

When the ladies came over to my house to play mah-jongg with my mother—talk about favorite things, talk about favorite things—the sound of them doing it and the things they said, to me this was one of the greatest things in the world—plus the fact that it usually worked out to me getting at least one whole handful of All Sorts, which was another one of my favorite things.

Killing Steven Adinoff—there is no sense in not saying so, there is no reason for me not to say so—killing Steven Adinoff was one of the best of these things.

Not that there were not times when the colored man must have seen me in the sandbox. Because it stands to reason that when he came out back to hook up the hose, or to get it back off of the spigot, that the colored man could have seen me doing different things in Andy Lieblich’s sandbox, he could have looked up and seen me in the middle of doing something which not just any boy could.

The nanny, however, there was not an instant when she herself was not always there, keeping an eye out for us as regards our behavior, keeping an eye out in relation to how we were playing, to the whole question of if whether we were behaving ourselves and playing nicely enough and not letting any of the sand get out of the sandbox and get out into any of the Lieblichs’ grass back there, and meanwhile keeping herself busy with the thing she always had of rolling up and down a wristfiil of rubber bands on her wrist, actually rolling them up and down over her wristwatch, so that the rubber bands kept rolling over on themselves, kept twisting, kept winding up too much and then untwisting and making all of these sounds of unwinding and snapping, which you could hear, which you heard going on all of the time when you were playing something in the sandbox.

I’ll tell you one of the worst things in my life. This is one of the worst things in my life—a day when the nanny said that I couldn’t come over and play but one when she went ahead and changed her mind later on and said that I could actually do it—and then it started raining just a little bit after she’d said it, like just instants, just instants after she had given me her blessing—and then for the whole rest of the day, all the rest of that day after Andy Lieblich went in and the nanny went in with him, I sat down inside of our garage and kept feeling funny and out of the ordinary, like as if I was in some kind of trouble and that certain things which I did not exactly know about yet were probably dangerously unfinished, lying lopsided somewhere and being dangerous, and it made me feel a terrible wildness, this strange feeling, it made me feel like as if I had to feel the wildness if I was ever going to get rid of the strange feeling, which I think, to my way of thinking as a child, was the worse one, the feeling before the feeling of wildness, the feeling of incompletion and of chaos, a feeling of things getting started and of never getting them over with, of parts of them being impossible for you to ever get them totally taken care of yourself.

In a halfway sense, I think I can say that the day I killed Steven Adinoff, that it, that that particular day—but only in this halfway sense of things which I have mentioned—was a day like that. On the other hand, now that I have said that, I think it is only fair for me to say that I have the feeling that I am making too much out of the thing, that I am probably not really remembering anything.

I should be skipping the feelings and be sticking to other things, anyway. To what I remember because I actually heard it or saw it or so forth and so on—I should be sticking to things like this before things start getting too mixed up.

I heard the water going.

The whole time I was killing him I heard the water getting out of where the colored man had it hooked up to the Lieblichs’ spigot—the water he was using for the Buick, the whole time the other thing was happening, the water for the Buick was sizzling or was crackling or hissing from where the fit between the hose, on the one hand, and the spigot, on the other, was a little bit loose, even though it was the colored man who had hooked it up and who—next to me, next to me—was the world’s most watchful human being in the whole wide world.

Even afterwards, even when I was going home, it was still going then, the tiny hissing was, like a sizzle, like the way a frying pan with some drops of water in it will sizzle, or make a sizzle, or sound like it’s sizzling.

The nanny saw it. Andy Lieblich saw it. So did Steven Adinoff himself. We all saw it. We all watched. Steven Adinoff watched just as much as anybody else.

That’s the thing about it—you watch.

That’s the unbelievable thing about it—that you watch it even if it’s you yourself that’s getting killed.

He watched himself get chopped up.

To me it looked like he was interested in just lying there and watching it. Because isn’t it interesting to watch it even if it’s happening to you? That you’re the one who’s getting it doesn’t make any difference. Actually, if my own personal experience can be counted for anything, that part of it—my opinion is that that part of it is the part of it which just makes you all the more interested in it.

But maybe he did not understand what was going on anymore, what connection there was between him getting killed and the hoe anymore, between what was happening to him and what I myself was doing to him with the hoe anymore. Maybe the thing was that Steven Adinoff was probably thinking of something else.

I don’t know. Maybe that’s what you do—you think of something else. Maybe you can’t even help it. Maybe you can’t even stop yourself from just going ahead and thinking of something which doesn’t have anything to do with the thing that is happening to you, except I myself don’t think that’s it, that that explains it, no.

But I don’t know what does, what would. I can’t even begin to guess, except for the fact that I think it’s got something to do with a nice feeling, with having a nice dreamy sleepy very special, very sleepy new feeling.

Or else I am overdoing it or am anyway just wrong. Maybe he just wanted to see how getting killed looked. Maybe it didn’t matter to him who was getting killed. Because for a lot of the time he just lay there watching instead of trying to get up and fight back and try to kill me back—and then he finally did, finally did get up—except by then he was almost dead, except by then I think he was almost dead, even though he wasn’t actually acting dead, even though he just got up and started acting baffled and shocked instead of being sorrowful or mad at me. But I don’t think it was so much on account of someone having almost killed him as it was on account of his realizing how he’d missed the boat on this thing by getting distracted, by letting himself get distracted, and by not paying enough attention to it, or at least not to the part of it which really counted, until it was just too late and you felt silly for more or less being the center of attention of what’s going on but the last one to be informed as to what it is all about and means. I mean, I’ll bet it’s like finding out that you are the last one to get in on a secret which turns out to have been much more about you than you ever dreamed it was, ever could have, ever could have, in your wildest dreams, dreamed of or thought or anything.

To my mind, Steven Adinoff was just woolgathering and then caught himself at it and went ahead and woke himself up and then noticed he was almost dead.

Except that it was just probably only a gesture by then.

There were pieces of his face—there were all of these cuts which were deep in his head.

Not that he couldn’t actually get up when he tried. He got right back up on his feet again and went and got the rake again and then he walked around for a while, then he walked in and out around the sandbox for a while, stepping up to get in it and then stepping down to get out of it, and meanwhile saying these different things and looking in his pockets almost all of this time, but some of it, some of the time, looking at me again and trying to get me with the rake again before I myself got ready to really buckle down to business again and kill him again and then he fell over again almost as soon as I got busy on him again and really dug in.

Anybody could tell that this time it was for good. It didn’t matter if you were just a six-year-old boy.

Any six-year-old could have killed Steven Adinoff.

WE JUST HAD THE STRENGTH OF CHILDREN. We were not strong—believe you me, we really weren’t. As boys in general go, or as they went in those particular times, or in that town at that particular time, that is, in the town of Woodmere, we were not what you would have called the sturdy kind of boy or the rough-and-ready kind of boy, the boy who is by nature husky in his body and hardy in his habits. You did not get muscles from the kinds of things which boys like us did, or just have them from the type of bodies which we were born with to begin with. We ourselves were not boys like that. We were actually the other kind of boy—the almost opposite kind of boy. We did not climb things, for instance, or go to any kind of camp, or run or do things which could make you fall down, or ever lift anything which was heavy up. There was no getting, you couldn’t get built up from the things we did—you couldn’t get a good start at developing a good physique.

Not that I myself was anywhere near as weak or as dainty or as delicate as was Andy Lieblich himself. In all actuality, I was even on the stocky side, or at least on the solid side, by comparison with him. Even if his skin, even if Andy Lieblich’s skin looked to me like as if it was not strong enough to do the job of just holding him in, it was on the other hand, it was always nice-looking and always smelled nice—very pale and very clean. He could even get his skin dirty, Andy Lieblich could even get himself absolutely filthy dirty from playing in the sandbox, and yet when you looked at his skin in comparison with looking at my skin, his skin looked much cleaner than mine did, even if I had actually gone out of my way to keep mine looking clean—whereas the bad thing about having skin like his is this—you probably could just almost touch it with something and it would just automatically split open or break or tear or turn black or start getting itchy-feeling.

For instance, the nanny always put citronella on him—she always had to always put citronella on him—she said she always had to coat him with it from head to toe even if he was only coming out for all of only a few minutes.

I thought that’s what rich skin was like, that it was skin like Andy Lieblich’s skin.

You want to know something?

It really is.

I am a father myself now, and I can tell you that there is no question about it—it really and truly is.

Plus the fact that it just costs more to have skin like this—just for the plain and simple reason that you need more things to keep it this way and to take care of it.

A nanny, for instance—if you had skin like this, you probably couldn’t have gotten along without a nanny to look after it for you, even if just to give it the time which would be necessary if you yourself were too busy, if you, the mother or the father of the child, were just too worn out from other things and too busy. If I had a boy who had skin like Andy Lieblich’s, I would spend the money on it, I can tell you—Florence and I, I can tell you that we would not hesitate for one instant. Skin like this, in later life, it’s a calling card, and don’t you think it isn’t.

I can’t tell you, I can’t even begin to tell you, what kind of skin Steven Adinoff had. In all honesty and sincerity, I didn’t actually pay that much attention to much other than just to his lip and to his buttons and then, later on, after it got going, to what the hoe itself was doing to him.

He was really a complete mystery to me. I hadn’t even seen him before the day when I actually killed him. There were certain things about him which I never concentrated on. Once he picked the rake up, this was the only main thing—and if you asked me what I chiefly had on my mind about him before this, then I would definitely but definitely have to say to you that it was his lip, his lip—whereas afterwards, whereas when it was actually happening, by this time it was entirely a question of only mainly three things—namely, where the trench was opening up, how his cheek looked on account of more and more of it which was coming away from his face, and the whole general question of why he seemed to be really interested in all of this and actually doing his best to probably give in to it.

I didn’t even know if he was the kind of a boy who had played rough games before this, or done things which were strictly out of bounds for boys like Andy Lieblich and me. On the other hand, I really did not know really the first thing about Steven Adinoff—and, in all frankness, I still don’t.

For one thing, he wasn’t from the block, he wasn’t from our block—and for another thing, I don’t know where it was that Steven Adinoff came from—he just showed up in the Lieblichs’ Buick is all I actually know—and I don’t even really even know even this—because I didn’t even really see him come in it—I was just putting two and two together when I thought it, this all being on the day in August when I saw the Buick come back and then later on, after lunch, Andy Lieblich coming out with Steven Adinoff right with him—not that it matters the least little bit one way or another, how Steven Adinoff got over to Andy Lieblich’s. The only point I really want to make is that Steven Adinoff wasn’t from our block, one, and that, two, when I first saw him, he was a brand-new boy to me, even though there was something about Steven Adinoff which made me think that there was an important way in which he wasn’t.

He could have been from Cedarhurst or from Hewlett or from Lynbrook or Lawrence or Inwood or from any one of the towns which were around there then.

I just realized something—namely, that I could not tell you where the nanny was from, either—in the sense of where the nanny used to live before she started living at the Lieblichs’. All I can tell you is the idea which she gave me specifically, that where it was where, that it was a place which was where all of the boys were stronger boys than we were, and were Christian ones, Christian.

She said that they were wild Indians, that they were rascals, that they were ruffians and scamps.

She always had her uniform on. I never saw her without her uniform on—or without those rubber bands which she always had on over the wristwatch on her wrist. You know what I can say about the nanny which will give you the exact feeling I had about her? I can say that she always felt like she was there even when I was just thinking about her.

King of the Mountain, Hide and Seek, Tag—maybe Steven Adinoff was used to playing games like those games. I don’t know. Builder or Gardener or Farmer—he could have thought these were just sissy games. In all honesty and sincerity, the nanny herself, maybe even she thought that, maybe all of the times when she was sitting there in the chair for her to keep an eye on us in the sandbox, maybe that’s what the nanny was really thinking of to herself, that we were playing a game which just a sissy would play, even though she was the one who more or less set the game up that way herself, who said, who always said, which three games she was going to give us to pick from, and then, and who then, after we did it, after we picked, who would not ever let us switch to something different, to another game, no matter what.

Right this instant I could vomit from just reminding myself of how he talked—right this very instant I think I almost could, although I suppose that this is just an exaggeration from me feeling so involved in the whole question of discussing all of this at all, or at least from just the feeling which you have when you finally actually start.

We didn’t even play games like Button, Button, Who’s Got The Button? Or the game of London Bridge.

She said the thing she had to always watch out for with us was somebody getting too overexcited or getting too overheated or getting too worked up, and then, before you knew it, before you know it, it is all at sixes and sevens and somebody has to pay the piper. She said that this was why there had to be rules—that the reason was to keep things from getting to be all at sixes and sevens for everybody.

I’ll tell you one of the things the nanny said the most.

She said, “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” This is something I agreed with then—and now that I am a man of fifty years of age, all I can say to you is experience has taught me to agree with it even more.

I think this was one of the reasons why Andy Lieblich was so lucky to have her. There were a lot of reasons why Andy Lieblich was lucky to have a nanny, but this one was one of the biggest ones—namely, the reason that the nanny kept her eye on things for you and taught you things which in later life could stand you in good stead, whereas in my particular case I just had a mother for her to do this and not some extra person the way Andy Lieblich did.

To be absolutely truthful with you, I personally liked it when I had the feeling that there was a sense in which I was the nanny’s boy too—in the same way that Andy Lieblich himself was—that is, not her flesh and blood in the strict sense of the term of flesh and blood, but instead her job, the thing she was mainly supposed to be thinking about and looking out for throughout the course of the day.

Right then! Right there!—that’s exactly it, that was exactly it, my almost saying the livelong day, my wanting to say the livelong day—really feeling myself hardly able to stop myself from saying the livelong day—killing Steven Adinoff, it was the same feeling, the thing with like rhyming the sounds, or like rhyming the words!

Or like some, you know, some beat in me or something.

Imagine, what would I do if I had a hoe in my hands?

She probably thought to herself how could boys like this ever hurt each other? On the other hand, it was she herself who said that boys will be boys and that you could never tell a book by its cover.

It was so quiet when I was killing him.

Aside from the water sizzling and aside from her rolling them up and down, her rolling the rubber bands up and down over her wrist and her wristwatch. And make no mistake of it—I for one was listening closely, believe you me, I was a boy who was all ears.

That’s how I can tell you, that’s how I happen to know about it to tell you—about the overall sensation of sogginess.

Here’s the best way to say it—on the inside I was listening to myself, listening to the words—whereas on the outside I was all ears and didn’t miss, did not miss a peep.

Not words—but like words.

When there’s time, if there’s time, I’ll explain.

There was never any yelling or any screaming or even anybody saying “Stop!” or “Don’t!” Even he himself, even Steven Adinoff himself, there was not one time when he said anything like this. But you know what? Now that I know what I know, I can tell you that it all makes perfect sense, perfect sense—that it is not even funny how perfect or perfectly the whole thing fits.

You want to know what he said?

You want to hear what Steven Adinoff actually said?

He said, “You don’t have to kill me.”

He said, “You didn’t have to kill me.”

Outside of the things which he said about his Johnny Mize card, those were all of the things which Steven Adinoff actually said to me without a single sole exception— “You don’t have to kill me,” and “You didn’t have to kill me,” and then of all these other things when he got up and was walking around and checking his pockets and stepping in and out of the sandbox—I mean, all of these other things about a baseball card, about his baseball card, about the baseball card he had when we were still waiting for the nanny to make up her mind and give us her decision.

Oh, but there were lots of different things for you to hear if you are talking about not things like talk and so on but what you would have heard if you were listening to just him—sounds like squishy ones, that’s the best word I can make up to describe them—squishy sounds, squishinesses. But this is leaving out the sounds of when, for instance, the handle of his rake banged into the handle of my hoe or of when somebody hit the side of the sandbox or even hit the sand itself—or hit the grass actually, hit the Lieblichs’ lawn actually—because, if the truth be known, even in their backyard the Lieblichs had a lawn.

Here are some other thoughts that come to mind—or then let’s just say just words which do.

Sluggishness and exhaustion and a kind of dragging-down feeling. I mean the feeling of everything weighing too much and of sinking, the sound of sogginess and the feeling of sogginess and of a tremendous quiet stopping and plunging, everything too heavy to move but also too heavy to stand still and stay put in one spot—all that and words, or just the sounds of the words like drogue, dredge, carborundum, torque. Do you hear what I mean? It’s incredible how those ones are just the right ones as far as words are concerned. Not that it hasn’t taken me forever to come across just the right ones—dredge, drogue, carborundum, torque. And also inside of me, especially when I first felt the feeling of the hoe in my hands when it first actually connected so that you felt you had really connected with something really solid, this is when I really felt what I have to call a buzzy feeling—up deep inside of way up inside of my backside—a small buzziness, small but very tingly, or tingling—this small buzzing or buzziness.

Here is something I am certain about—I had the same sound inside of me when I was looking up at Iris Lieblich looking down at me.

Ask yourself something—ask yourself if you can remember ever having a feeling like this—namely, one where you are so tired that you have to lie right down, but then the instant that you do it, then you feel that you are so tired that you have to get up again that very instant, jump up instantly that very instant, because you are even too tired to bear it to even keep lying down anymore for one more instant. So you do or do not remember this?

But I think the weather had something to do with it.

It was August.

Do you know what I mean when I say August?

As such, were they having meat patties for lunch, is that what they were having for lunch? On the other hand, there is no question of the fact that the nanny said that in weather like this it was poison for someone not to eat light—that it could kill you if you weren’t careful and did not watch out and eat light.

But maybe eating something broiled was always okay. Maybe no matter what the weather was like, a nice fresh broiled meat pattie was always theoretically okay—whereas when I saw the Buick coming down past the Woodmere Academy, it wasn’t bologna but was leftover meat loaf, the sandwich I had, the sandwich I was sitting there eating, it was positively a sandwich of leftover meat loaf.

I’ll bet none of these things were ever questions which came up in Steven Adinoff’s mind—the difference, for instance, between getting things broiled or getting them fried, or having to eat a boiled frankfurter when you knew that Andy Lieblich was eating a soft-boiled egg in an eggcup—or was having himself, or was himself eating a shirred or coddled or poached one.

Not that I am saying that I think that Steven Adinoff did not know things. Far from it, in fact. Thinking back on it, reviewing the whole thing of it in the light of what I saw the night before Henry finally took off for camp, I would have to say that Steven Adinoff knew the deepest thing of all, just like we all would probably prove we do if we suddenly ended up in the same setup as he did with me—plus as those men did with each other in Peru on the roof.

IT WASN’T THAT I EVER EXPECTED to go in and eat inside of there, it wasn’t that I ever expected this. It wasn’t that I ever even thought that I would get invited in to eat or to play inside of the Lieblichs’ house, or even to just look around for a little while and see how it all was, what it all looked like, like even just the things they had downstairs, even just the things downstairs inside. If there were boys who did go inside of there, boys who actually did get invited in, or who had permission to sometimes go in, then I myself do not know who they were, aside, of course, setting aside, of course, the one exception of Steven Adinoff, of course—or also why they themselves did and I myself didn’t. Unless it was a question, unless the whole thing was really just a question of who went to the Woodmere Academy and who didn’t, if this in itself was the whole thing of the reason. But even if this is really the case, I for one don’t think I can believe that Steven Adinoff did. I mean, it’s just a sense I have, or a sense which I had at the time when I killed him, which is that to look at Steven Adinoff, you could just see for yourself the boy was not Woodmere Academy material.

The time he got me a good one in the head, on the other hand, this was interesting. I mean, in the sense in which we both of us worked together to get the rake unstuck—it was almost like a question of being well-mannered, of having good manners, of him pulling up while I myself was pulling down—until it finally, the rake, with the both of us doing this, came loose and came out.

Maybe I was just totally but totally all off about the thing of Steven Adinoff versus the Woodmere Academy—maybe the whole thing he came from was actually better than I think—except I do not think his mother would have talked like she talked about her bust being all bound up if the fact is, if the fact was that Steven Adinoff s position was anything on a par with Andy Lieblich’s.

It wasn’t really stuck in me that long, I don’t think. But the general time span of all of this, of from when he first got the rake picked up to when I either got my shoes and socks and went home with them or already had them on and did, plus the time of certain parts of it in particular, as to these questions, there is no way in the world where I could ever come anywhere close to stating exact figures to you in relation to this or that particular—to how long, for instance, the rake was still stuck in my forehead until Steven Adinoff and I actually got together in the sense of teamwork and got it worked out, or worked it back out.