Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel (13 page)

“Higher.”

“Here?”

“Up more.”

“Here?”

“
Higher.
” She came and held the target against the tree while I delicately tapped in narrow finishing brads meant for fiberboard or plaster, for hanging light pictures. I’d gotten the nails from the tool cabinet in the basement. They were short, soft, inadequate.

“Pete, can we talk? About those fifth- and sixth-grade bio electives I was going to teach? Seeing as, so far, there aren’t any fifth- or sixth-graders? I mean, there’s Susy Jordan, she’s smart enough for bio, she’s smart enough for physics I’ll bet, but you know, she’s only second grade. I thought I might take the opportunity to switch over from science, and do an elective in religion.”

“Religion?” It seemed like trouble, tackling religion at the elementary level, though what kind of trouble, and for whom, I wasn’t sure. Meanwhile the nails were bending; it was as if they were made of putty.

“Pete, I feel like I don’t know anymore what’s up and what’s down. It might help me to teach a course in spiritual doubt,” biting her lower lip, brushing away from her face, with one hand, a hovering green bug. Meredith’s abrupt movement shook free a couple of imperfectly pounded nails, which trembled from their ragged holes and dropped to the ground. No way this crummy cardboard bull’s-eye was going to withstand arrow impact. I chucked the remaining picture nails and Frisbeed the cardboard over the pit; it winged spinning in an upward arc, planing skyward, six, eight, ten feet. In higher air it paused—the illusion of rest at the peak of ascent—before plunging to rest atop a triangle of nautical spear tips.

“Touchy.”

“Sorry.”

“What’s bugging you, Pete?”

I clutched the hammer. The sun was directly overhead and the air cool. There was a distant sound of splashing water—the Kinsey kids, no doubt, performing elaborate nose dives, cannonballs and can openers and watermelons and such, in their shallow aboveground vinyl pool. This mid-afternoon country club clamor of pre-adolescent recreation reminded me to take a stroll around the block and pay a courtesy visit to Delia and Hiram Kinsey, who most likely would voice no objection to sending their kids to school by way of a couple of backyards, provided right of passage could be obtained from the McElroys, which might be difficult considering Pat McElroy’s staunch isolationism, a position echoed all too clearly in the menacing advertisements posted on trees and the picket fence wrapping the McElroys’ quarter-acre lot:
BACK OFF
.

“Karen Kinsey is twelve. That’s sixth grade exactly,” I told Meredith matter-of-factly.

“What are you saying? I should hold bio lab for one pupil? You know, Pete, I’m having a hard time getting on board with this whole school idea. I know you want to help. I believe you want to do the right thing as a teacher. I believe you believe in education. But I don’t get it. Here we are out in the yard tacking up a bow-and-arrow target on a tree, and there’s a hole full of stakes three feet away, and I guess I don’t get it.”

“What’s to get? Archery as a phys-ed elective? Come on, it’ll be great. The target range is well away from the trench. Look, I’ll show you,” dropping the hammer and walking to pit’s edge and bending down, carefully, kneeling in the soft muck, one hand on the ground for balance, the other reaching over the tops of Meredith’s pretty bamboo spears (a narwhal and an inverted “pop art” snow cone cup), in order to retrieve the fallen target; and, target in hand, pacing off steps, toe to heel to toe, from pit to tree. “Right. The target range isn’t
three
feet, as you say, from the pit, it’s, well, let’s see here, it’s about, what? Seven? I fail to see the problem.”

“Seems dangerous is all.”

“Kids, Meredith. Kids. What are they going to do? And if you or I come out here and coach safe shooting, that’s a plus, as I see it.”

“How so?”

“Proper coaching inspires respect for weaponry and helps define the concept of sport.”

“Why do you think you have to do everything, Pete? This isn’t our responsibility. Other people’s children, Pete. They’re not our children! They’re not our responsibility!”

Such exquisite distress. But what, exactly, about? Was I being condescending? Was I lecturing? It’s a problem of mine, I’ll admit it, a tendency to become insistent to the point of excluding other people’s viewpoints. It’s something a lot of teachers probably struggle with in their personal lives: the adamant vocal style appropriate for driving home a lesson, and yet so hurtful among friends or at home.

Meredith shook her head and gave me a look it seemed best, in the spirit of marital harmony and academic diplomacy, to overlook. I said, “Do you suppose we might get a spare set of encyclopedias and dictionaries from one of the libraries? Hon?”

“I can check with Rita, but I think all the oversized volumes already went to Abe.”

“Abe?”

“He and Jerry and the other guys liked your idea of throwing books at the land mines in the park. They loaded up Abe’s van this morning. I forgot to tell you. They’re over there now.”

“At the park?”

There was no time to waste. I grabbed wallet and keys and hopped in the car and fastened my seat belt and backed out of the drive and sped off hurriedly through moderate downtown shopping traffic. On Water Street I got nothing but green lights all the way to Hyacinth; it was as if God were clearing a path. Explosions sounded from the direction of the park, dull concussive rumbles like construction site dynamite, audibly and subaudibly vibrating the hard and elastic surfaces of things: steering wheel, gas pedal, the car seat headrest, my head. Along the way, on Main Street, I noticed a bright sign in the window of Dick Morton’s clothing store,
BIG WEEKEND CLEARANCE SALE! ALL MENSWEAR HALF PRICE! EVERYTHING MUST GO!
and I made a mental note to stop in there later, to see about purchasing some presentable new dress shirts and a snappy bow tie to start off the teaching year.

At the park, things looked wild and dark. There is, of course, no auto access to the grounds, so I pulled up on the street outside, right behind Abe de Leon’s Dodge van and Tom Thompson’s Mazda. I shut off the engine, got out and locked the car door, then walked along the sidewalk, searching for a gap in the bushes, a route into the hammock. Everything was quiet, not even birds called. Presumably all the forest creatures were tensed up, waiting for bombs to go off. Overhead, twisted hardwoods draped leaf-heavy branches over thickets of briar and thorn that clogged the park’s walkways and nature trails, strangling smaller botanicals and forming a natural barrier between the roadway and the interior. It was impossible to see more than a few feet into that savage foliage. Finally I plunged on in, stepping lightly, pausing occasionally to orient myself, and to remove thorns snagging my clothes, brittle green points anchoring in the fabric’s weave, biting through to draw blood. Was Ben Webster still combing these woods for his vanished father? Or had son and dad reunited and gone home to a hot meal and comfortable beds? And Ray!—it grieved me to imagine a smart, personable guy like Conover, running berserk in swampy public hammocks, rending his clothes.

Too bad I hadn’t brought along Jim’s liver. This was just the place for it. The liver filters bodily impurities, it’s a giant sieve, a living trap for waste and virulent matter. These bushes growing everywhere, blocking passage, making headway into the park arduous and painful, were malignant floral impurities, invading and infesting a once pristine family recreation spot. Gone were the sun-dappled company picnics and barbecues, the Frisbee tosses and touch football matches. Now vigilantes gathered here to detonate explosive charges, using literature. And wasn’t this, in a broad cultural sense, impure behavior? In which case, mightn’t the ritual burial of a liver—and it needn’t even be buried, it could be unwrapped and tossed frozen into a patch of weeds, as a figurative, multipurpose cultural antitoxin/herbicide—mightn’t throwing Jim’s liver into the bushes act as a corrective to the strife and neglect that had lately transformed this serene leisure space into a grotto of death?

“Pete!”

It was Abe himself, hollering from the deep cover of a mountainous shrub:

“Duck!”

From the skies it came, a gargantuan blue tome, one of those Compact Editions of the
Oxford English Dictionary,
end over end hurtling in projectile descent, pages fluttering and tearing in the wind, a screaming index of printed and bound lexical data, half a language heavy with gravity and gathering velocity. I dove for turf and covered my head as the
OED
cruised thumping to the earth.

When I opened my eyes I saw that it was the P–Z volume. A–O was lying nearby, loose pages from it papering the ground. The Supplement text was nowhere to be seen. Buried in some leaves? Already blown apart? Waiting, still, to be launched?

Here came the men. First Abe, followed by Bill Nixon and Tom Thompson and, taking up the rear, Jerry. They walked single file, like a ghastly family of four on an outing. They wore identical radiant orange hunting caps and Day-Glo pack vests over camouflage safari shirts. Each sported a hand-tied white armband that appeared to have been ripped from a bedsheet. Sure enough, Tom carried the
OED,
Supplement. He also wore a backpack. Bill, true to form, clutched a beer can in one hand, and in the other—this not at all typical of the man—a
Webster’s.

“Hi, guys,” followed by handshakes all around:

“Pete.”

“Tom.”

“Teach, how’re you doing?”

“Okay, Bill. You?”

“Fair enough.”

“Hello, Jerry.”

“Mr. Scrivener, good to see you.”

“You too. How’s Rita?”

“Rita’s doing fine.”

“Say hi for me.”

“Will do.”

“Hi, Abe.”

“Almost clocked you there, Pete.” Abe offered me a strip of white sheeting. “Put this around your arm. It identifies you as a neutral party.”

I tied on the armband as Jerry explained the procedure: “Okay, first one of us throws his book, and the others try to get theirs close to that one, like in horseshoes. We want to saturate any area where a mine might be planted. We cover some territory, collect the books, and move on in a straight line. Slow and safe, no one gets hurt. Got it?”

I wasn’t sure I did. “Yeah, sure.”

Abe, crouching among the scattered A–O pages of the
OED,
shoveling up a thick handful of unglued papers, said to Tom, “Tom, my man, this one’s shot.”

Tom lowered his pack, reached inside, and brought out a
Crowell’s Handbook of Classical Mythology.
He handed it to Abe and reached in again, this time bringing out a
Roget’s Thesaurus,
which he offered my way. “Pete?”

“I could use another brew,” Bill said.

These, as well, were in the backpack. I took the
Roget’s Thesaurus
from Tom, who dispensed a round of semicold ones. In unison we pulled back our pop tabs, a chorus of fizzing metallic clicks echoing like strange insects in the birdless forest silence. We raised our cans to our mouths and drank. The beer tasted wonderful to me, numbing my throat and warming my heart. Abe said, “Why don’t you give that thesaurus the heave-ho, Pete.”

“Me?”

“Show us your arm.”

“It’s not much of an arm, I’m afraid.”

“Send it over there, Pete,” suggested Bill, gesturing vaguely with his beer can.

Was this something I could reasonably do? Throw a book at potential oblivion? I know it had been my idea, I was responsible for all this. But I never actually believed, back at the Clam Castle town meeting, that anything like it would ever come to pass. It was one of those ideas designed to lead to a modified version of itself. Ideally we’d be hurling something like those miniature bowling balls found at certain lanes, the kind of ball you hold in your palm. These books were valuable. Maybe not the
Roget’s.
I generally warn the kids away from the thesaurus because I believe they become reliant on it, when they should be working to build their own vocabularies through memorization. The
Roget’s Thesaurus
could, in all fairness, go.

“Where?” I inquired.

“Wherever,” answered Bill, raising and spreading his arms in a grand gesture of encompassment, taking in the world. He was crocked. He crumpled his can in his meaty hand and dropped it to the forest floor, then went immediately for another in Tom’s backpack as Jerry, ever the diplomat, added, “We were headed south toward the gazebo. How about over by that big old oak, Pete.”

I wasn’t sure I could pitch a thesaurus, even an abridged version, which this was, all the way to the oak tree.

“Hold it like this,” said Abe. The tall, bearded tax consultant clasped his
Crowell’s Handbook
by the boards, fingers spread for good grip, palm over page fronts rather than the spine. “If you grip it by the spine it’ll come open and you’ll get a lot of drag.” Abe feinted back and raised his arm, cocking for the throw like a pro quarterback; he let fly and the volume spun upward without opening or fluttering, the literary equivalent of a perfect spiral. As if on cue, we all hunkered down, backs to the possible blast. But the
Handbook of Classical Mythology
landed without event in a patch of wildflowers twenty yards away.

My turn. Abe’s toss would be hard to beat. I faded back, set my feet, and let go with everything I had. The thesaurus flapped open, caught wind, and dropped like a shot bird. Ten yards.

“Nice try, Pete. You’ll get the hang of it.” Jerry smiled encouragement, pitched his book. The real estate developer threw sidearm, a modified discus-style spin toss using a full-revolution windup, complete with manly grunt at the instant of release, sending the great blue lexicon a surprisingly long way—short of Abe’s, but not by much—thumping dully into the weeds. Next up was Tom, also hurling sidearm, though minus Jerry’s grace. It was clear who’d been on the track squad. Still, Tom’s
OED
Supplement toss was respectable, particularly compared to Bill’s overhand
Birds of Prey Illustrated
“fastball pitch,” which rocketed wild and crashed into a clump of aloe plants. “Fuck,” Nixon said as Abe came up and made it look so very easy, lofting another of his beautiful play-action “long ball” heaves into the trees. Then it was my turn again, this time with a bound volume of a year’s worth of experimental sociology abstracts. The abstracts were incredibly heavy. I said, “Tom, may I?” and fished around in the backpack for something lighter and not so fat, coming up, after much testing of bulks and widths, with
Biological Aspects of Mental Disorder.
There were many books in Tom’s backpack, and one by one we delivered them all into the dirt and the grass, each time exclaiming things like “Looking good, looking good,” or “Too high, too high,” before ducking and bracing for the thud of an explosion. Between tosses Jerry filled me in on the direct-hit detonations back around the boathouse, the various types of trees and shrubs decimated, radii and depths of crater holes, pages flying like parade confetti. One blast, Jerry claimed—and this was verified by the others—one blast left a perfect, minute, cannonball aperture in the center of
The Darwin Reader.