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