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.
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