In the Dead of Summer (25 page)

And from Woody’s silent, waxy mouth, I heard echoes of him telling me I didn’t understand, that I was seeing only part of the elephant. I could see his eyes begging me to leave him alone, his fear that others would find out about his involvement with April.

Would he? Woody. I hadn’t left him alone.

NO MORE WARNINGS
my hate mail had said.

Would he? Woody. I had asked Miles, asked Woody himself. The only thing I hadn’t done was leave Woody alone.

This had to do with April, with Flora’s mud message.

I hadn’t seen the elephant, I still didn’t. But I hadn’t left Woody alone.

Had I put him in jeopardy? Pushed him toward this?

I felt faint as I watched Woody wheeled out.

I
COULDN’T STOP CRYING. WOODY, THE PARAMEDICS,
and the police were gone. The school was locked up, and Mackenzie and I were in the VW, ready to go back to my house.

Except that he couldn’t drive with his leg, and I couldn’t stop crying.

One reason for remaining optimistic about our personal future was that he didn’t try to make me stop crying and didn’t act as if there weren’t good solid reasons for the tears, useless though they
might be.

I felt overwhelming sorrow, and not only about my own unwitting role. There’d been so many minor and major indignities in the past few weeks, all of them motivated by somebody’s inability to see somebody else as fully human. I felt as if I couldn’t bear it.

The haters polluted the world more effectively than toxic spills because they spread their filth with no sirens and no warnings and precious little outcry. Ordinary poisonous by-products don’t think. The people who splashed paint and trashed Flora’s room and defaced cemeteries and churches and snatched April and sent me threatening notes and sprayed my eyes and crucified Woody and carved their initials in his side were supposed to be able to think and make moral choices. That’s what made us
human.

I cried still more because Woody’s life had been saved—if indeed it had been, if indeed he’d ever completely recuperate—by chance. A whim based on an urge based on a junior high fantasy.

Mackenzie said he understood—not only about happenstance and sexual fantasies, but about the uncommon accumulation of perversity, here and everywhere, which made me even more sorrowful because I knew he really did understand. Consider his work, look at what portion of mankind and mankind’s passions he saw every day.

Then I cried because despite what Mackenzie knew, he was
good
,
so different from the haters. Such a decent person that he didn’t even mention that I was something less than coherent as I snuffled and bawled and blew my swollen nose and wiped my termite eyes and blubbered about things he’d known for too long.

The crying ran its course. “I’m okay now, I think,” I said.

“You always were okay.” His voice was calm and semidetached. “Just less painfully aware of reality, maybe.”

“I liked it better that way.”

“Who wouldn’t? An’ if we’d been born eggplants instead of people, we could have it that way forever. But we weren’t and can’t, so now the big question is—What do you do with the knowing? Wallow in self-pity or terminal bitterness? Go catatonic? Become a survivalist and hide in the hills? Arm yourself? Preach fire and brimstone? Pick a crazy theory to explain everything? Climb up to a bell tower and take out half the city?”

“None of the above. I give up. What’s the answer?”

“Beats me. All I know is mine, which is pathetically simplistic. Balance the scales best as you can, but not with more of the same. Bring the one who unbalanced them to justice, then go home, play good music, drink good wine, be kind to the kitty, and try to readjust the imbalance by adding to the world supply of love, instead of hate.”

“Somehow, I think I’m being led back to that unfulfilled fantasy of yours.”

“Now that you mention it, wasn’t there somethin’ about Johns Hopkins makin’ a university out of two people sittin’ on a log and talkin’? A great schoolteacher can make a classroom out of anyplace she finds herself willing to teach,” he said solemnly.

“Right now, she finds herself in a quandary.”

“A great schoolteacher could make a classroom of a quandary, too. Or a foundry or a laundry or—”

“A quarry? A…?”

“Tannery?”

“That doesn’t work, poet-man. Breaks the meter. A great schoolteacher wouldn’t dare do that.” I felt as sexy as lint. But Mackenzie deserved points for getting me to think, at least for a moment, about something besides the world’s rottenness. Along the way, I even remembered how to drive.

*

I had given the police Woody’s last name. I had his phone number home in my roll book, so I’d told them how to reach Maurice Havermeyer, who could actually extract information from Helga. At least, he was authorized to do so, and I thought she might let him.

“We should be at the hospital,” I said once we were in my house.

“It’d be intrusive on his parents,” Mackenzie said. “They need privacy at a time like this.”

“His father,” I said. “I don’t think his mother’s alive, or at least not around.” His father existed, I knew, because it was he who would have killed him for being with April. I had no idea how close or estranged father and son had been, but I hoped Woody had communicated something of what he feared to someone. “Maybe we should call the hospital.”

“How ’bout we give them a few minutes to reach a decision about his condition before we ask them for it?” he said mildly.

Macavity rubbed my ankle. He considered our return a bonus day, necessitating another feeding. I let him purr and seduce me for a while—made the kitty foreplay last, as it were, then I gave in. “Only a snack,” I told the cat.

“Machine’s blinkin’,” Mackenzie said while I pulled back the tab on a can of food. “Want to play your messages back?”

“I have no secrets. Go ahead.”

I was immediately sorry. I should have secrets, and one of them should be my mother. There was her voice, still heavy on the Philadelphia accent despite years in Florida. Her “A-
man
-da” has a metallic edge like no other’s. Luckily.

“Amanda,” she said, “I was hoping to catch you, but maybe you’re out at one of your meetings?” Overlong pause while she must have wondered whether she was happy or upset about my not being there if it meant I was following her advice.

I wished I had listened. An AA meeting surely beat finding a student nailed up in the gym.

“Well,” she said, “when you have a chance, let me know how the meetings—how
you
are. I certainly hope you’re more comfortable than we’ve been. The air-conditioning conked out yesterday, and I could just about breathe. But it’s back on again, thank heavens.”

Macavity purred like a buzz saw and wrapped himself around my ankle. I reluctantly put a portion of the can in his dish, and with one grateful look for getting what he wanted—wham, bam, he was through with me, just another conquest, like Mom had warned.

“I spoke with your sister,” she went on. I’d have to change my machine so that it cut people off sooner.

“Baby Alexander has two new teeth. Oh, and how could I forget? Daddy hit a hole in one yesterday. It’s made him impossible to live with. The phone didn’t stop ringing last night. I thought maybe we hadn’t heard from you because you were trying to call during all those congratulatory calls.”

I wondered why my mother pushed marriage so resolutely when she made it sound excruciatingly dull. “She makes me want to drink. Maybe that’s part of her plan to get me to AA,” I said when her message finally ended. Mackenzie nodded, and I poured us both wine. I would have poured something stronger if I’d had it in the house. I was functioning on the surface, but when I lifted my wineglass, my hand shook.

“Any theories?” Mackenzie asked.

I shook my head. I was beyond exhaustion, and I still had to go through the day’s papers so that I could coherently continue the lessons tomorrow. I unsnapped my briefcase and dumped its contents onto the kitchen counter, then stared at it blankly. I couldn’t. Simply could not do another thing that involved thought.

“What about that Lowell person—the one that left the building just before we got there?” Mackenzie said.

I was ready to object—he was such a nerd, such a noodle—but on second thought, Lowell with his conspiracy theories, with evil under every stone… Lowell, who protested too much…

“He didn’t turn around when I called. Odd time to be leaving school, don’t you think?”

“Maybe he’d had an assignation with his very own Mrs. Taubman up in his classroom.”

“An’ there was that woman complained about the lights.”

“That was hours earlier.”

“Door wasn’t locked when we arrived, how do you know where anybody was in between? Includin’ your friend Flora and her doggie.”

I shook my head. “It’s physically impossible. No one person could have held somebody as big as Woody down, or up, and done that to him at the same time. Certainly not Aldis, Flora, or Lowell.”

“Any of ’em could give directions,” he said softly. “Be part of a group.”

“I don’t think Flora—” But I did think. I thought about Flora’s grim determination to not take anything from anybody anymore. I thought about her having been in the basement this afternoon when the vandals hit my car and me. Had I been a diversionary tactic? Was it possible that she’d determined that Woody had been the one to trash her room or terrorize her at home, and she’d arranged revenge?

And I thought about Aldis, who reminded me of central casting’s concentration camp guard, female variety. Aldis, with her rigid assurance that whatever she believed was a truism. Had she felt the need to teach Woody a lesson? Punish him?

But why? Why him? For what?

Why any of it? The past weeks had been like an experiment in disorientation. One thing happens, and just as you adjust to it and prepare against its recurrence, another, completely different but not unrelated event takes its place, until the subject loses her handle on reality.

“These things have to be connected,” I said. “Vandalism, nasty phone calls, cryptic notes, the mud, the paint, Woody. All ugly. And April, somehow, because she connects to Woody. And maybe even Vo Van, because he connects to April. And out of school—the cemetery and the church. And things I don’t even know about that have the same mean spirit behind them.” I felt as if I’d seen the ends of a creature, the tips of its tentacles only, but the creature itself was hidden, unknowable.

Despite everything, I had to teach again the next day, and had to get myself at least somewhat organized. I sorted through papers, separating must-do’s from should-do’s from who-cares-if-I-ever-do’s. I had been derailed by the yellow warning note this morning and had never finished going through my mail. I passed the threatening note to Mackenzie. “Maybe it’s students who did that to Woody. Who are doing everything. I hate to think about Miles, but all the same, he seems to know more than he’s saying… This came in my mail this morning. I forgot, after the spray paint. Meant to show you then. The letters were cut out of old school newspapers.”

He sighed. “I don’ like this.”

“I’m not overfond of it, either.”

“You’ll give it to the police?”

“I just did.”

“I wish…”

“I know.” He wished I’d confine my interests to academics and pedagogy and him. He wished I’d make my life—and by extension, his—easier.

He knew that I knew. No need to spell things out. No need to explain that I had no more desire to box in my curiosity, ethics, or intelligence than he did.

I thumbed through the day’s flyers, nervous, but sure that one piece of hate mail per daily delivery sufficed. And it seemed to have. I found one of Helga’s incessant memos, this one entitled “Official Grade Entry Methodology and Spitting Regulations.” There was notice of a fire drill scheduled for the next afternoon. I wondered if it would be canceled as redundant, thanks to me. Notice also of a woman’s sports watch that had been found in the girls’ room. A glossy ad from an encyclopedia that was now available on CD-ROM. “Hey,” I asked. “Have any relatives named Rom?”

“Got a Ron and a Rhonda. Wait—there’s a Romulus somewhere.”

“This is a last name.”

He shook his head.

“Well, there’s a C.D. Rom here, I thought might be related. Named after the same
C
, perhaps.”

“I will not honor that with even a groan.”

I tossed an announcement of a glorious, new, fully illustrated nonsexist collection of scientific essays I assumed had been put into my mailbox by mistake. A gobbledygook notice from Havermeyer about “maximal” security efforts being implemented in response to the lamentable “defacing” and—I nearly choked—“desanitization” of the computer room and the consequent “non-operational condition” of valuable school equipment. He also earnestly requested “immediate notification” by staff at the first sign of further “vandalistic impulses.” His notices made me want to chain him to a heating pipe until he swore to foresake all words of more than one syllable.

And what were those
maximal
security efforts, anyway? On the day the gibberish went out, my car and I were spray-painted, and a few hours later the school’s back lights were systematically smashed and the door left unlocked. And there was surely no evidence or sense of security in that gym. Havermeyer couldn’t distinguish between larded-with-jargon promises and reality.