Different Seasons

After hours of studying under Dussander’s eye, Todd rides his bicycle home. It seems impossible to him that he could recover his lost ground in the five weeks remaining in the school year. He spots a crippled blue jay on the sidewalk and deliberately crushes it. The smile never leaves his face.

April, 1975.

Dussander takes to killing dogs. Todd passes his first algebra test since Dussander began forcing him to study. Todd’s parents have a conversation: Monica is concerned that Todd is pale and has lost weight, and he has nightmares. She mentions something that her grandmother told her about driving a person insane if you wake them in the middle of the bad dream. Dick Bowden refers to Monica’s grandmother as “the Polack.” Monica reminds him that her grandmother was also Jewish. Later in the conversation, he describes one of his business partners as having an affair with his secretary and uses a racial slur to describe her.

Monica wonders aloud if Mr. Dussander has something to do with Todd’s nightmares, but Dick says that, actually, he thinks that Todd’s friendship with Mr. Dussander is a good sign. When Dick was growing up, he had been annoyed with his father, a grocer, who often extended credit to his customers. Dick describes the customers using several more racist and other offensive slurs. Dick had resented his father giving store credit while Dick sometimes had to wear secondhand clothes.

Years later, Dick learned that, because of his father’s generosity, the entire neighborhood had banded together to save his father’s business when he became ill. After that, Dick began to wonder if he shouldn’t say something to Todd about there being more to life than money. Todd’s relationship with Mr. Dussander reassures Dick that Todd has managed to learn that lesson. Todd goes every day and (supposedly) reads to the old man with no expectation of reward.

Todd and Dussander continue to butt heads. Todd fights the necessity of studying, but Dussander keeps reminding him of the consequences if he fails his classes.

Todd begins having wet dreams full of sexual sadism. He is in the Patin concentration camp being directed by Kurt Dussander to torture women. Waking in mixed pleasure, horror, and disgust, Todd decides that the only way to free himself from Dussander is to kill him—then everything that Dussander has put into his mind will disappear. He makes a plan to kill Dussander as soon as Todd is sure that he is passing his classes.

May, 1975.

Mid-semester comes and Todd is passing all of his classes so far. Now that there is no danger of his parents being contacted by the school, Todd no longer needs Dussander. He plans to murder Dussander, but Dussander tells Todd that he has written a letter and put it in a safe-deposit box to be opened if he dies. In it, he has written a full account of his and Todd’s relationship. If it is opened and read, Todd’s life will be ruined. Now they are mutually trapped. Dussander gives Todd a glass—a small jelly glass with cartoon characters around it—of bourbon to drink to the special occasion and long life to them both.

About a week later, Todd is in the old train yard contemplating whether he should kill Dussander anyway and get the suspense over with. He hears something under the platform: a filthy old man who has obviously been living there. The old man asks him for money. Todd has an urge to stab the man with the Swiss Army knife in his pocket. Fighting the urge, he pulls the money from his pocket, throws it at the man and flees.

Todd is 14 now, having known Dussander for a year. He lets himself into Dussander’s house with his key and shows Dussander his report card–all As and Bs. He reluctantly thanks Dussander for forcing him to study and tells Dussander that he won’t be around much anymore. He suggests to Dussander that they might both get their extortion letters back from where they have been hidden and burn them. Dussander points out that neither of them could ever be sure that the other hadn’t made copies. Todd chokes out that he can’t live with that threat hanging over his head, but Dussander tells him coldly that he has no choice. That night, they both dream of murder and wake feeling both thrilled and terrified.

Shortly before the Bowdens are scheduled to fly to Hawaii on vacation, Todd goes back to the train yard carrying a butcher knife. He finds another man under the mail platform and stabs him 37 times. While the Bowdens are in Hawaii, Dussander encounters the same man whom Todd met the first time under the mail platform. He invites the man home for a meal. He kills the man and buries him under the dirt floor of his cellar with the dogs and cats that he has already killed. In his own mind, Todd thinks of his victims as “stewbums.” Dussander thinks of them merely as “it.”

During the following year, Todd visits Dussander from time to time, but they no longer talk about Dussander’s past. Dussander kills three more men. Todd kills one more. Both think that the murders make them feel more alive. Todd excels at school and in baseball and kills four more men. Dussander kills two. Todd joins the rifle club and the football team. During his senior year, he begins having a recurrent impulse to go to a freeway overpass and start shooting. He goes so far as to find a shooting blind near the freeway and dry fire at passing cars.

Dussander is digging a hole in his cellar floor to bury yet another victim when he feels the first pangs of a heart attack. He manages to telephone Todd. He orders Todd to tell his parents that Dussander has received an important letter that he needs Todd to read to him.

Todd walks into Dussander’s kitchen and sees all the blood from Dussander’s latest victim. In the basement, he finds the dead man. Todd buries him. Then he has to clean Dussander’s bloodstained kitchen. Finally, Todd calls for an ambulance. Following that, he calls his father to come over and sit with him as any normal kid his age would do. Then he remembers that he told his parents that he was reading a letter for Mr. Denker. Dussander tells him to take an old letter from a wooden box in his dresser. Todd breaks the box open and removes a letter. He gets it downstairs just as his father and the ambulance are arriving. The medics commend Todd for his quick action and take Dussander away.