At the Jim Bridger: Stories (11 page)

“Because we have language arts in 202,” I told him, lugging my books up behind him.

“Rick. Oh, Rick. This would be the wrong answer,” he said, a phrase I knew by heart. “We are communicating.”

“Are we going up to language arts?” I asked.

“If that happens,” he said, “so be it. But we are moving upward to say something to the ages.” His right hand was clamped on the top of his head and his left under his chin, his hands free because he had given his books to me. “I’m glad you’re here to see this.” It’s what he said later that year when he went a week without closing his mouth and when he went two days, school days, without speaking. That time he told me, “You don’t need to talk. It’s a luxury. Listen to me right now; I’m enjoying this, but I don’t need to do it.”

In February of that year, a certain girl came into Evil Eye’s sights, a girl everyone else had already seen in that she was the most beautiful girl on dry land anywhere, a girl who was so popular and confident and finished, she seemed already above it all, a girl renowned for her snobbery and style, who every good soul in our school knew^ not to greet because there would be no greeting in return. She was self-contained, sealed shut with her abundant talents, and moving on a straight, graceful line through high school like a first-class car on the express rail. Her name was Janey Morrow. Evil Eye Allen was astounded at her carriage, her posture, her every manner, and he made it his mission to
cross into her perimeter.
Those are his words, not mine.

He began speaking to her. It was a picture: my tall friend standing on one leg or leaning his forehead against the wall by her locker as she did everything she could with her shoulder,
books, and hands to let him know he should
go away now.

“She has never once looked at me, made eye contact, or spoken in a complete sentence,” he told me after the first week. “I don’t mean even once, and it has been nine days. Is that magnificent or what?” He brought his hands up in a ball, squeezing his fists together and then springing them open. “She is
there.
She is together. We’re not going to see something like this again.” Now he took my shirt in both of his gigantic hands and whispered along the side of my face, “I’m going to get to her. Evil Eye Allen is going to
humanize
this angel.”

In trigonometry, my teacher, Mr. Trachtenberg, bathed Miss Morrow, as he called her, in the soft fostering light of his appreciation. He assumed a stark hostility toward me. I needed a B; it said so in my college application. Trachtenberg had heard that I was Evil Eye Allen’s assistant, and he was a man who was going to single-handedly use trigonometry to turn around the foolishness that was eroding the decade.

He discovered my alter ego as a result of our first flyer. We had produced a red-and black announcement that offered the services of:

Evil Eye Allen and his able assistant, Igor, for Parties of Every Kind and Magnitude including Wedding Receptions, Bar Mitzvahs, Fertility Rites, Seances, Exorcisms, Arbor Day Festivities, Presidents’ Day Celebrations, and Any Occasion Where Something Strange and the Presence of Mysterious Objects Would Make a Worthy Contribution and Amplify the Pleasure of Your Friends. “Beware the Power of the Evil Eye.” Reasonable Rates.

Mr. Trachtenberg peeled one of these bold goodies off his classroom floor and was not amused to read what appeared to
him to be a handbill from the devil. Mr. Trachtenberg’s Christianity was famous. His religious zeal protruded from every axiom he scratched on the blackboard. “It is mathematics,” he’d say, “which will finally defeat Satan.” Last year a kid named Kenny Albright had quipped, “Well then, Mr. T., which is better against the devil, a crucifix or the quadratic equation?” Mr. Trachtenberg stopped at the board, frozen for ten complete seconds it was said, and then he turned, his black eyebrows already crashing together over his flashing eyes, and he whispered through his gnashing teeth, “Neither is going to save you, Mr. Albright.” Kenny Albright, who was a sophomore about to be sixteen, started crying. He transferred into consumer math.

What Evil Eye hadn’t told me, his able assistant, was that Mr. Trachtenberg’s first name was Igor. And Mr. Trachten-berg made it clear, very clear, that there was room for only one Igor in fourth-period trigonometry. “Is this amusing, Mr. Wesson?” he asked me, waving the flyer before the class. “This, this appeal to the puerile, the ungodly, the evil? Is it?” He wasn’t really asking, and he had the class’s attention. Everyone was waiting to see if I was going to cry. I needed trig; consumer math wasn’t going to get me into college. “I haven’t seen the mark of the beast in your work. It’s been haphazard and a bit tentative but not flagitious or depraved. Are you depraved, Mr. Wesson? Or is it
Igor?
Do you think in the hot center of your logical mind, Mr. Igor Wesson, that it would be a good idea for the impotent ant to mock the iron heel of my boot?”

No one moved. Everyone had heard that word,
impotent.
Everyone was waiting for me to gasp and begin sobbing. And the gasp was right there in my throat waiting to break. I could feel the impeccable presence of Janey Morrow at the desk next to mine. I steadied myself and spoke. “No, sir. It would be a bad idea to mock…” I could not go on.

“What, Mr. Wesson?”

“I need this class, Mr. Trachtenberg,” I whispered. The edges of a hot tear seared the rim of my eye.

“Well, Igor. We’ll see how badly you need it.” He turned to the board. And so began the hardest ride in mathematics in the history of Orkney High School. I received that afternoon from the hand of Mr. Trachtenberg the supplemental text I would complete before June, a thick maroon hardback called
Advanced Concepts in Trigonometry.

Evil Eye and I had several jobs right after our flyer appeared—house parties, a birthday—and after we did the half hour intermission at the junior prom, our calendar filled into the summer. Suddenly, for the first time since my paper route, there was money; we charged forty dollars and then fifty (and there were tips). When Evil Eye would hand me my half, he’d say, “You’re going to college.”

Our act opened with me coming out in my red vest and white dress shirt buttoned to the collar, setting up our card table and covering it with a black tablecloth. Then Τ would light the fat black candle in the center and place the Mysterious Objects around it, showing each object to the crowd first. I would hold up some aviator sunglasses and set them down, a pink plastic shoehorn, a bucket handle, a pair of brass door knobs. Sometimes there were other objects.

“What are these for?” I asked him the first time we practiced.

“These are the Mysterious Objects.”

“What are the Mysterious Objects for?”

“That’s right.” He was busy tugging at; the sleeves of his cape. It was an old graduation robe he’d found at the thrift shop and then gone at with a pair of pinking shears. “They’re Mysterious Objects, which means there is no answer to your earnest question. The Objects have mystery.”

“Do you know the mystery? I thought you got these things down at the Salvation Army.”

Here he stopped hauling at the heavy garment and turned to me. “Mystery,” he said. “Mystery.” He wanted the word to be its own explanation. When I just looked at him dumb as the doorknob before us, he went on. “Igor. There are things beyond our knowing.” He rolled his head in a big slow circle and brought it back to bear on me: “Do you know what we’re doing?”

“No,” I said.

Evil Eye crouched down and then rose onto his toes, framing his face in his hands, to announce: “I don’t either.” He put one hand over his eyes and waved the other in the air. “Do you think the unknown has power?”

“I guess,” I said.

“Then,” he said, looking at me, his hands now on guard for everything, “this room is full of power, because I don’t know what any of this junk means, either. We’re going to put on a show and try to find some things out!”

I sat down on the couch. “All I have to do is put out the stuff and stand behind you and hand you something if you need it, right?”

“Right. That and look worried. Look worried all the time.”

Well, that wasn’t hard. 1 was worried all the time. I was worried about Mr. Igor Trachtenberg and passing trigonometry, and thereby high school; I was worried about getting admitted to college and how I would afford it; I was worried about something else, some unnamed thing, which hovers about me still as a worrying person, and I was particularly worried twice a week about wearing a red vest over my long-sleeved white oxford cloth dress shirt and placing the Mysterious Objects on a card table in front of thirty people in somebody’s living room.

The house parties were the worst for worry, because every one was so close. At the junior prom, for which we received two hundred dollars, there were four hundred people and I couldn’t see one of them out there in the dark. I stood at the edge of the spotlight, set out the Mysterious Objects, and looked worried the whole time, but it was easier than standing in front of eighteen people in Eddie Noble’s living room or Harriet Middleton’s den. But to Evil Eye it was all the same. It didn’t matter. He didn’t have to set out the Mysterious Objects and then look worried. He had to come out in his hefty gown and wait until the audience, big or small, grew nervous, tittered, and then after a good long dose of silence, he would begin with his routine for the Evil Eye.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he would start. “No one here, not you, not me, not my able assistant Igor, knows what the next few minutes will bring. Do you understand? No one knows what is about to happen. I’m serious.” With that sentence,
Fm serious
, he could make everyone sit up a little; it was clear that he meant it. “I,” he’d continue, “am sometimes called the Evil Eye, because of what my look can engender…” And then it would all begin. He would cruise, drift, float the perimeter of the stage whether it was a forty-foot circle, as it was at the junior prom, or the width of three folding chairs, as it was at Harriet Middleton’s birthday party. From where I stood I always saw the audience sit up and grow still and then imperceptibly at first begin to sway with Evil Eye as he floated, drifted, cruised back and forth before them. When he would stab a foot down and stop and stand straight up like a snake about to strike, I could see the audience sit up, lean back, prepare for the worst. He’d hop backward sometimes and I could see heads bob; and when he spun, everyone flinched; and when he stopped, the shadow of the spell was spilled over us all.

When the room was changed that way, sometimes a boy or
sometimes a girl would rise and step forward, standing by the Mysterious Objects, and then the rest would happen in a flurry Evil Eye would hand them one of the Mysterious Objects, the doorknobs, or the sunglasses, and make a request: “What do you feel?” or “Tell us what it’s like.” And that was really it. Just the picture of the two of them—some stunned boy standing there in a madras shirt with Evil Eye in his monstrous robe—was the climax of the act. Everyone would be leaning forward. And when the boy said, “I’m glad I got my car running,” or “This is weird,” or “I can be scared and happy at the same time,” it would have taken on a layer of danger and importance that made it amazing, and that’s what people were really,
amazed,
and they applauded wildly and the subject would sit down and as the evening was retold in the weeks to corne, the things the subject said would grow into dire predictions and ponderous epigrams, which only magnified Evil Eye’s reputation. After every show, more kids called him Evil Eye, but his name was not carved in stone yet.

Mr. Igor Trachtenberg, the only thing between me and college, continued to try to drum me out of trig. I was doing double assignments anyway, our homework
and
ongoing chapters in
Advanced Concepts in Trigonometry
, and he would hand back my papers with a little pencil check at the bottom. A check. When I asked him what it meant, he said, “Are you still roving about doing the devil’s handiwork?”

“No, sir,” I told him, because I’m fairly sure that was the only answer to that question. “I’m doing problems in trigonometry three hours every night. I’m keeping the devil at bay.”

Mr. Trachten berg looked at me, his eyebrows in a dark, threatening arch. “Γ11 be the judge of that.” Then he took my paper and drew a quick circle around the check and put two lines under that and handed my homework back to me. That was all the explanation I was going to get. Check, circle,
underlines. It looked like his secret code for F. It looked like an evil eye.

Then Janey Morrow’s dad called. “I didn’t even know she had a dad,” Evil Eye told me. “He wants to give Janey a birthday party.”

“I hope this isn’t anything but a nice birthday party for the most beautiful girl either of us will ever see on earth,” I said.

“Meaning?”

“I hope this isn’t some special way of incinerating two teenage idiots in a fire of their own design. I hope she’s not out to get us.”

“I am Evil Eye,” he said to me. “It’s way too late to get me, and you’re a writer, so you’re always safe.”

Regardless, now charging eighty dollars for parties, we went out to Janey Morrow’s for her seventeenth birthday party, the party that became the most retold of all of Evil Eye’s outings, and the one that gave him his name once and for all because something else happened there that was permanent. If everyone who has told of the night at the little house on Concord Lane had actually been there, it would have been by far our largest crowd, but in fact there were only a dozen people. These were all the kids from school who dis tinguished themselves by knowing how to dress and knowing the first names of the faculty. I mean, one of the guys wore a sweater vest. These were kids who when they put their hands in the pockets of their slacks to lean against a cornice for a photograph, they felt a fifty-dollar bill. It was this small group that stood around in Mr. Morrow’s kitchen about twilight on the day Janey turned seventeen.

It was as odd a gathering as you might imagine. I mean, this was another kind of girl, a girl above and distant from us, and this was her party. She moved quietly among the girls and boys while we all talked to Mr. Morrow in the kitchen as
he set out paper cups and a bowl of punch and a small tray of crackers. He was glad we had come. He was happy to meet Janey’s classmates. He worked at the Texaco refinery. On and on he talked. I realized that he wasn’t used to talking, that this was all a kind of spillage brought on by the clear relief that anyone at all had come to Janey’s party. This was fun, he said. A party. With the famous Evil Eye! He smiled. He was proud of Janey, her schoolwork; after all, she worked so hard, and being without a mom and all, and he was glad, well, to meet her classmates. We all nodded at him and finally the girls came and got the tray of crackers and poured everyone a cup of the red punch and it was enough to shake everybody up and have them go into the little living room, and when the girls had sat down in the chairs, and the boys had piled in on the floor, and Mr. Morrow had come into the doorway with his glass of punch, someone turned off all the lights but one, a desk lamp under which Janey Morrow must have been doing her trigonometry homework for the first eon of her life without knowing the next was about to begin. When all these things were accomplished, I came forward, looking worried, and unfolded our little table before the assemblage, shook out the tablecloth, and set out the Mysterious Objects.