Before I started the car's engine I slid the passport photo out of my scrubbed-clean ashtray and pressed that tattered little rectangle between my eyes.
The first doctor, an emaciated guy with liver spots on his temples, had told us the blood in her stool was from harmless polyps. Harmless. Then he'd decided months later to send us to the specialist, who'd said, “If only we'd seen you sooner.” That's teamwork.
I held the picture to my face; it had the slightest smell of apricot lip balm. The car's suspension creaked around me.
In the Hoover
High parking lot, I pulled in beside Ken Beckman's white Mustang, some early seventies model. My mom's boss at Alliance Ready-Mix had driven the same car, combing his sideburns in the rearview mirror, though if she'd ever ratted out some of the financial crap he pulled he would've been crying in jail instead of tooling around Knudsen, Nebraska, with his elbow out the window. I would happily put my federal tax dollars toward a roaming arbitrator who travels the country, cracking guys like that across the throatâbut whoever'd have the balls to actually do it?
Anyhow, Ken Beckman wore a red satin Cleveland Indians jacket, taught shop and carried a wad of keys that looked like a medieval mace.
“Your exhaust's looking a little blue.” Ken prodded his nostril with a knuckle as he locked the Mustang, tried the handle, locked it again. “Leave your key and I'll get my auto-shop kids to at least change the oil.”
“No, thanks, Ken. I did notice that. I got it.”
“Yeah, when? It's been running blue since the first time you pulled in here, and when you going to get around to it, with little kids at home and all? Japanese cars don't run on optimism.”
“I prefer to look after it myself.” My hand snaked up to my earlobe, but only for one reassuring pinch. “Thank you anyway.”
“Well, I'm not going to change the oil behind your back, so don't worry about that.” He circled around the Mustang to try his passenger handle too. “Just don't come crying to Mr. Beckman when parts start dropping off.”
Outside my classroom,
Franny Halliday sat beside her locker, changing out of sneakers into a pair of cowboy boots while a swaying rope of red licorice dangled from her teeth. She was on my list for the field trip.
“I don't want to spoil your breakfast,” I said, “but highly processed foods kill you faster than a handgun. They just plain make war on your body's cells.”
She wore a denim skirt, a clunky bead necklace and a big white sweater with a panda down one sideâmy Josie would've called it a dorky outfit, and Josie was eight.
Franny smirked. “What's going on, honky?” she asked through her licorice.
“Why do you call me that?”
Boots tugged on, she sat up straight, smoothing her skirt down her shins.
“Sorry!” Her brown hair was so staticky that it floated above her shoulders. “I'm just excited about Velouriaâthere'll be time to stop at Ye Olde Candy Shoppe on the way in, right? They sell Curly Wurly bars.”
“Why'd you call me honky?” I asked.
More kids dragged themselves around the hallway, so I wanted the conversation to be overâwhat kind of autocrat did I look like, looming over her like that?âbut I also didn't want to spend my day beside a girl whose tongue was not connected to her brain.
“I don't know,” she said. “I just thought that compared to Mr. Reid you're kind of a honky.”
His bearded face looked down at us from a photo on the wall. Some award he'd won.
“Mr. Reid isn't African-American,” I said.
“Nah, German, I think. He fought in the Gulf War!”
“Really? For Germany?” I'd been eleven during the Gulf War, but as a substitute, you can't let them imagine you ignorant on any subject at all. “I don't remember Germany sendingâ”
“No, man, the Americans!”
She picked up her sneakers in one hand and banged them into the bottom of her lockerâgreen Converse, with trailing yellow laces patterned with
jesus
in red letters. There was a ton of religious families in Hoover so I didn't see the need for her to change her footwear just on account of that.
“I don't know if we'll have time to stop the bus,” I said.
“Haw-haw!” A bony shoulder bumped into mineâClint Denham. All in tight denim, the huge red scarf his mother'd knitted him bundled around his neck. “You still around, Mr. G? Taking us over to Velouria after all, hey?”
“I've been telling you for two months that I'm here until Christmas, but every morning you act like seeing me is some big surprise.”
“I'll tell you why that is!” He took a step back in his big leather shoes, nodding solemnly. Brown hair fell in his eyes, and three or four wiry ones poked hopefully from his chin. “It's because every Saturday night I'm sitting at home with my folks, right?
tv
trays and all that, and right at the second when my brother goes down in the basement to play his drumsâthe exact
second
âI think, I bet Mr. Giller's in Hollywood by now. They scooped him up in the Walgreens parking lot.” He looked down at Franny and smacked his lips, then suddenly displayed the same stony grimace as when he'd heard noon-hour improv had been canceled. “Gone to California.”
“See you out at the bus.”
I navigated around a couple of freshmen as I moved to my classroom door.
“We ought to hook up at lunch,” Clint was saying behind me. “With tongue and everything.”
Franny had her legs stretched in front of her, and he tapped his pointy shoe against the sole of her boot. She rolled her eyes.
“We're at the plastic factory at lunch,” she said.
“That's cool. We can do it there. You can't spend the rest of your life wondering what's it like to make out with hot guys, that's pathetic to the point of crisis.”
Franny eyed him like he'd taken a dump between her legs.
“Keep talking like a bitch,” she said, “you'll get noogies 'til your nose bleeds.”
“That's cool anyway. I like short girls with big sunglasses.”
I'd met my
Lydia when
we
were sixteen, working as counselors at Camp Lake Picu in Dundy County. Deb knew the camp's owners, so Lydia was the canoeing instructor while I ran a special cabin for bedwetters.
“I don't do anything in particular.” I tried to sound adult as we sat on the porch of her boat-shed, overlooking the water. “The idea is maybe they'll feel less self-conscious sleeping amid their own kind, so with reduced anxiety maybe they'll quit peeing.”
“How often do you change their sheets?” she asked as she unbraided her hair.
“Every morning whether they need it or not.”
I'd heard it was possible to unhook a bra using only one hand, and she was being very patient with me. She shook her head as two senior campers stood up in their canoe to cannonball into the emerald water.
I threw my
raincoat over the back of the desk chair and took my corduroy sport coat off the hookâLydia's dad had given it to me the Christmas before he died, and it had been my lucky teaching jacket ever since. For all the luck it had brought.
Here was a new arrival: on my desk a one-sheet fax sat propped against the framed photo of George Reid on a canoe trip in the Tetons. Thankfully I love a good list, otherwise it might've occurred to me that George should sit home with his resectioned bowel and let me teach the goddamn class like I was paid to. And seriously, faxing? In 1987 he must've figured it was the future and stuck with it despite history siding against him, like drivers of electric cars after 1908.
Peter, most of
this should be unchanged from previous years (seven and counting) so I thought I'd send it along after (obviously) changing what needed changing.
field trip:
Chemistry
11, Dockside Synthetics, Friday October 21
Good luck!
If we were back at 2:15 that'd be perfect for me to get the kids at four. Otherwise I'd just call ahead to the sitter's house, but what kind of weirdness could possibly befall us between Hoover and Velouria?
“Uh, Mr. Giller?”
Eye-linered Grace Bradford, in her skull-bedecked hoodie, stood between the nearest tables. Her skin was slightly tawny so there might've been Asian blood in her lineage, or Mexican or Pawnee or Arapaho. If I'd ever managed to become a geneticist I probably would've known at a glance. She held out a sheet of white paper.
“I signed a form about your vacation homework,” I said. “For surf camp or whatever it was.”
“This is to put on a school event.” She stared at me down the length of the paper like she was sighting a gun. Her hair had recently become more blue than black. “Mr. Vincent didn't want to, but he said if I could get three teachers to sign maybe he'd change his mind. You're a real teacher, right?”
I unfolded the page.
nbzambi march
, it read.
Any lunch hour, bowling gift certificates for best costumes, signs encouraged to attract media attention. Students have a voice to protest.
Then three empty lines for signatures.
“This looks great for Halloween, why'd Mr. Vincent have a problem?” I felt across my desk for a pen. “How do you say it, ânub-zambi'? What is that?”
“
Nbzambi
's the original Congolese word for a zombie, like the walking dead, and that's how everybody has to dress up.” She hoisted her bum onto a table. Her short nails picked at the crumbly particleboard edge. “And my mom's gone to Taiwan so the surfing's postponed.”
“Hold on, I didn't think about what exactly you're protestingâare you saying we should be
out
of the Congo? Because I don't know if I agree with that.” I clicked the pen a couple of times like it'd help me think. “I'm not a war nut by any stretch, but for the average Congolese it'd be a huge mistake if we pulled out right nowâour men and women are precious, yes, but defending women and children is also their
job
. And you want students to, what, dress up with their arms falling off and stuff?”
If she'd rolled her eyes with more vehemence she'd have damaged herself.
“Not at
all
!” she spat. “I just want, like, Day of the Dead costumes, like with faces painted white or skeletons and stuff. Everybody says, âOh, let's have our arms fall off and blood pour out of our mouths,' but I'm not into that stuff. I've already got the T-shirts made.”
“I can definitely see the value in raising awareness of the human cost without necessarily saying we should pull out, but if you want attention you might as well go gory
and
get
attention.”
“Nobody should stay in the Congo. Even the people who live there should just get out.” She pulled her legs up to sit cross-legged, and picked at a hole in her jeans. “Just no blood and guts, no bones sticking outâtons of people with painted white faces, walking around not saying anything? They'll be freaky!”
Entirely true. But I handed the paper back unsigned.
“It sounds like you want signs to say âEmpty the Congo Entirely,' but that's obviously not practical and I have to watch my step here, right? I've got kids of my own, and for the time being I'm not exactly picking and choosing the work I get.”
She slid down to the floor with a thump. “So put your kids over the rest of the world,” she said to the blackboard. “Nice priorities.”
With that in mind I put extra pens in my jacket's inside pocket, got my clipboard and headed out toward the staff room, because at 8:15 the second pot of coffee was usually pretty fresh, or if it wasn't I'd have time to make a new one.
The white-tiled staff room smelled like dishwasher soap. A dozen women sat with their legs crossed on the couches while the loveable Grey and Dreaper, a couple of oversized math teachers with beards, sat playing canasta with Mahinda, a twig-necked divorcé from Sri Lanka.
“Stay after dismissal today, Peter,” said Mahinda, “and I will teach you to play once and for all. Against two colonials they will never win.”
“Tell me again how I'm a colonial?” I asked.
Cam Vincent, our principal, circled the table to peer down at their hands, sporting a jet-black crewcut like he'd walked straight off an old baseball card.
“Giller, listen.” Cam stretched hairy arms way over his head like he'd been up early digging coal. “Turns out Nella's having her back surgery right around Christmas, George should be back by then, and her blocks are mostly eleventh grade, soâ”
“Oh, yeah, believe me, I want any classes I can get. All these kids are great,” I mostly bullshitted. “Really engaged with the material.”
“Young and motivated,” sneered Dreaper. “Kids'll be the perfect age when we bring back the draft.”
“No, no, if they already had
Doctor
Reid,” said Grey, “then Mensa's got to have helicopters circling overhead. This is Genius School!”