The Schernoff Discoveries (3 page)

He smiled.

I felt a chill up my back. The smile was so flat, so cold-looking. “Poison? Did you put rat poison or something in the cake?”

He shook his head. “Not rat poison. I don’t want to kill them. Well, to be
exactly
honest, perhaps I wouldn’t mind if some of them died but that wasn’t what I did.”

“But you
did
put something in the cake?”

He nodded.

“What?”

“Forty-three boxes of chocolate-flavored laxative.”

I let that sink in, worked at the math for four or five steps. “That’s over a box a person.”

“Yes. I had some concern at first. I didn’t want to put in too little and have them not be affected and I wasn’t sure how much it would take to make it really dramatic.”

I had an uncle with problems who used that kind of laxative. He would take one little square and the effect was very dramatic.

“There are twelve doses per box,” I said.

He nodded.

“You gave thirty-three football players over … let’s see … over four hundred doses of laxative?”

“Five hundred and sixteen,” he said, nodding. “
Exactly
. But the coach will probably eat some as well, which will lessen the dose level slightly.”

“Harold, you could kill them!”

He shook his head. “Hardly. There probably won’t be a football game tonight, and I imagine they will spend an extreme amount of time in the bathroom and no doubt lose some weight. They may even have a strong aversion to chocolate from now on. But that’s only fair.” He took a breath and his eyes grew cold and the smile left him. “After all, they broke my slide rule. Did they expect me to do nothing?”

If the team had found out the cake had been the cause and that Harold had done it I expect they would have used us for blocking practice.

But the coach was mental and was convinced that a spy from the White River team—they were “blood-sworn rivals,” as he put it, who would do anything to beat the Tigers—had put
something in the foot powder in the locker room to make the Tigers forfeit the game, and the players believed him.

Several of the girls had been in on it, but they never told.

“All right, how do I look?”

I studied Harold carefully. This was to be his first date. While it was true that I was hardly the one to judge anybody’s social acceptability—I’d never been on a date myself—I had a raft of research to draw upon. I had read every questionable part of every book then available: Mickey Spillane novels,
God’s Little Acre
and the most dog-eared parts of D. H. Lawrence’s books in the library. Added to this were the stolen moments with magazines in the drugstore, a healthy dose of eavesdropping on the conversations of the
popular boys in the locker room and talk I had heard in bars at night while selling newspapers to drunks.

So I was ready to give advice.

But Harold was almost beyond help. For one thing, hair was very important then, and Harold’s hair resisted being combed in any direction. Right now he’d gotten it to go in a slight wave back by applying extra-heavy grease. His head shone.

“You look great,” I said. “Perfect.”

He smiled—a flash of crooked teeth, an explosion of huge eyes in thick glasses—and nodded. “I felt as much. I just needed some secondary verification to prove the equation. Arlene is, after all, quite an achievement for a first attempt.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Harold had a tendency to talk like the most recent book he was reading. He was studying a book on Madame Curie at the moment and everything was an experiment that needed “secondary verification to prove the equation.” And Arlene
was
a nice girl. I would have dated her myself. Actually I would have dated
anybody
myself—if I had somehow had the courage to ask her (I wasn’t exactly good at speaking directly to girls yet, not even in the
third person) and if she had heard me and had not laughed out loud and if I knew what a date was supposed to be or how one went about conducting one.

I was absolutely flabbergasted that Harold had asked her. He had just stopped by her locker and asked her, right out in the open with me standing next to him wishing the earth would open up and swallow me. I was stunned that she had accepted. Now I was kind of hoping that after the date Harold would tell me what was supposed to happen. Although I couldn’t let him know how little
I
knew.

“Listen.” I straightened his tie—a bow tie, of course—and tugged his pants down, to at least cover the tops of his socks. “No matter what happens you have to stay cool.”

He frowned. “I would find it much easier to do that if I knew exactly what ‘cool’ meant.”

“It’s a way to be. You have to
be
cool.”

“An example, please.”

I thought. “Elvis. Elvis is cool.”

“I need a frame of reference. Who is not cool?”

You, I thought, and of course me. Us. We are not cool people. “Pat. Pat Boone. All that ‘April Love’ stuff is not cool.”

“So how do I do it? How do I become cool?”

“It’s a way you look,” I said. “You have to stand cool and hold your arms cool. Like Elvis. And talk low. You know, like Elvis.”

And so we tried, we really tried. He took a pose that he thought made him look like Elvis. But he was thin and wore clothes too short for him, sports jackets from bygone days, white shirts buttoned at the collar. He looked like a large bird with severe posture problems.

“All right. Maybe we’ll forget the way you stand. How about lowering your voice—try that.”

“Like this?” he croaked.

“So we’ll forget the voice too. You’ll just have to be yourself.”

“Myself?”

“Yeah. You know, just act normal.”

And so the disaster began. Because Harold and I had pretty much evolved away from junior-high society, neither of us knew exactly what
normal
meant. My concept was locked into the get-good-grades-have-parents-who-didn’t-drink-be-great-in-sports-and-have-hair-that-made-a-perfect-flattop way of normalcy—in short, impossible for me to achieve.

Harold’s thoughts on what it was were a mystery to me. I suspected that for him it was somewhere between being the first fourteen-year-old boy to win a Nobel prize by understanding the secrets of the universe, and learning how to dress himself.

At the time Harold merely nodded quietly. I should have known. He was always questioning things, always, and when he became quiet it was never a good sign.

The problem was that the date was still over a week away. This had only been a rehearsal. Had it come sooner things might have been all right, and had it been later perhaps there would have been time for Harold to learn more.

As it happened, there was just enough time for Harold to begin research on the subject, to “gather sufficient data,” as he put it, which made him completely dangerous.

He went to the library, of course, and he took out books on etiquette, romance, love and heaven only knew what else. For the next eight days he immersed himself in reading and when the big day finally came I met him in the hall just before the last bell.

“So—are you ready?” I opened my locker door
carefully, a habit I had adopted since Chimmer and some of his friends had learned my combination and taken to putting things in my locker—dead chickens, buckets of water set to tip, a small fifth-grader.

Harold nodded. “I believe I have accumulated adequate data to make the venture a success.”

“Good. Just remember … well, never mind.” I was going to tell him once more to stay cool but realized it wouldn’t help.

This was on a Friday night and it coincided with the opening weekend of grouse season. I had purchased a new .410 shotgun with money from selling papers and there wasn’t a power in the world that could keep me out of the woods. I hunted all weekend, and on Sunday night after my parents had passed out I made a grouse dinner with a recipe from
Field and Stream
magazine and ate grouse and spit shot half the night.

I was consequently late for school the next morning and did not see Harold until after first period.

“So,” I asked, “how did it go?”

“How did what go?”

“The date, of course.”

“Oh. Well, to be honest, it did not progress as well as I had anticipated.…”

At that moment Arlene passed us in the hall. She took a horrified look at Harold, covered her face with her notebook and hurried by at something close to a dead lope.

I watched her disappear in the distance. “What happened?”

He stared off into space and the bell rang. We had to run to get to class and after that I got the story in snatches, between classes, on the run, whispering at the back of study hall.

“I decided to do research,” he explained. “I read books, lots of books, and decided to begin by utilizing the methods of Raleigh.”

“Who?”

“Sir Walter Raleigh. He was the standard for dating in Elizabethan England.”

“Harold, wasn’t that like back in the old days? Like when Shakespeare and those guys were kicking around?”

“Of course. But there are constants. Men haven’t changed. Women haven’t changed. The equation is still the same—all factors being equal—and Raleigh was supposed to be the best. So I started with him.”

We were in study hall. The basketball coach, who doubled as hall sitter, awakened, so I had to turn around. He dozed off again right away
and I turned to Harold once more. “How did it go?”

He smiled. “At that stage it seemed to be going quite well. We walked to the theater, since I’m not old enough to drive, and once along the way I removed my coat and threw it over a puddle for her to step on.”

“No. Really?”

He nodded. “Yes. And she smiled and stepped on it to cross the puddle and I remember thinking how this was all going to be easier than I’d thought.”

“What happened to change it?”

“Well, I looked a bit silly with muddy water all over my jacket and I noted that she stood a bit away from me—well over four meters—while I bought the tickets and some candy. I ordered Dots, two Hersheys, popcorn in a big bucket and two Cokes and all the while she kept her distance, varying between four and six meters.”

“Not good,” I whispered.

He nodded. “My thoughts
exactly
. So when we took our seats I decided to draw on my research and go to the next level of contact.”

“What level was that?”

He looked puzzled. “You know, I’m not certain what it’s called. It was a book in the romance section. It had a plain cover and there was no author’s name. I thought it was more like a manual. But at one point, before it became more or less medically oriented, it stated that girls like to be touched and they like to have someone blow in their ears and put their tongue there as well and I thought as a way to reestablish closeness …”

I tried to digest what he’d said. “Touched? You
touched
Arlene and put your tongue in her
ear?
”

He leaned back for a moment and looked out the window of the study hall at a bird flying by. Then he sighed and shook his head. “Not
exactly
. After we were seated I worked my left arm gradually up around in back of her on the seat so that parts of my sleeve actually came in contact with her back—it was very close to touching. This caused me to lean nearly fifteen degrees to the left and brought me in range of her ear. I turned sideways during a quiet moment in the movie and blew …”

I cringed and looked away.

“… except that the book was not exactly
clear on the velocity at which one should blow. I apparently did it too hard because her hair seemed to puff out when I blew but I was committed to the course of action and I then stuck my tongue—”

“In her
ear?
”

He shook his head. “No. My excessive blowing startled her—she acted as if no one had ever done it before, can you imagine?—and she jerked her head around. My tongue missed her ear and went into her left nostril.”

“Wait. You stuck your tongue up her
nose?
”

He nodded. “I’m afraid the date went downhill after that. In fact, she left suddenly and I watched the rest of the film alone. It was a film about creatures from another world but it had no basis in scientific fact. They breathed our air, for one thing. Do you have any idea what the odds are that an alien form of life would actually breathe our air?” He looked away for a moment.

No wonder, I thought, that Arlene had covered her face—and her nose—with the notebook.

“You know,” he said, sighing softly, “this dating is really difficult. There are so many random factors—so much can go wrong. I’ll
have to do a lot more research before I ask Arlene out again.”

But I was thinking along different lines. “Where,” I asked, “
exactly
in the library did you find this book?”