JR (7 page)

—I don't think he can see a thing, Anne. But it wasn't on the mantel this morning.

—That one sticks, Mister Cohen. You'd best use the side.

—It's the side that sticks, Julia. He'd better use the back.
Out
through the kitchen Mister Cohen…

—And Mister Cohen… ? Once you're out there if you'll just take a look? in the back? for the trees?

—And he might listen, Julia… pursued him through the presence of potatoes and green beans with strings like packing thread disintegrating with a smoked pork butt on the kitchen stove since near dawn, followed him as far as the corner of the house where a hanging gutter streaked clapboards and glass whenever it rained.

—I don't think he's paid us any attention. Just see him out there, my! He is in a hurry.

Avoiding an apple tree, its entire top blown out the year before, which redeemed itself now with a bumper crop of tasteless fruit in brave colors and curious shapes, —he looks like someone's chasing him.

—He was certainly full of gossip, for a perfect stranger.

—I do wonder what James will have to say.

—James will say what he's always said. He knows I've never believed it, for one.

—But even if you are right, Julia. If they weren't married till Edward was born, he's been Edward's father all these years.

—You remember what Father used to say, the devil paying the piper for all the good tunes.

—Yes. There he goes now… The car crept up the drive past trees which appeared to stagger without even provocation of a breeze, rearing their splintered amputations in all directions, an atmosphere of calamity tempered, to the south, by a brooding bank of oak, by several high locusts serenely distinct against the sky in the west. —It was naughty of James.

—I hope he gets out through the hedge all right.

—Did you hear that crash last night? and the sirens? It's a wonder they aren't all killed.

—Listen… !

To the squeal of brakes, the car burst out into the world trailing a festoon of privet, swerved at the immediate prospect of open acres flowered in funereal abundance to regain the pavement and lose it again in a brief threat to the candy wrappers and beer cans nestled along the hedge line up the highway, that quickly out of sight to the windows' half-shaded stare from the roof pitches frowning over the hedge to where it ended, and a yellow barn took up, and was gone in

a swerving miss for the pepperidge tree towering ahead, past shadeless windows in a naked farmhouse sprawl at the corner where the road trimmed neatly into the suburban labyrinth and things came scaled down to wieldy size, dogwood, then barberry, becomingly streaked

blood-red for fall.

Past the firehouse, where once black crêpe had been laboriously strung in such commemoration as that advertised today on the sign OUR dear DEPARTED MEMBER easy to hang and store as a soft drink poster, past the crumbling eyesore dedicated within recent memory as the Marine Memorial, past the graveled vacancy of a parking lot where a house, ravined by gingerbread, had held out till scarcely a week before, and through the center of town where all allusion to permanence had disappeared or was being slain within earshot by shrieking electric saws, and the glint of chrome that streaked the glass bank front across the resident image of bank furniture itself apparently designed to pick up and flee at a moment's notice doors or no doors, opened, as they were now, to dispense the soft music hovering aimlessly about a man pasteled to match the furniture, crowding the high-bosomed brunette at the curb with —something, Mrs Joubert, something I'd meant to ask you but, oh wait a moment, there's Mister Best, or Bast is it? Mister Bast… ? He's music appreciation, you know.

—He?

—What? Oh there, coming out? No, no that's Vogel. Coach Vogel. You know him, the coach? Coach? Good morning…

—Good what? Oh, Whiteback. Good morning, didn't see you. I just robbed your bank.

—I didn't see you, called Mister Whiteback, and waved. —He what did he do? The sun in my eyes … It caught him flat across the lenses, erasing any life behind them in a flash of inner vacancy as he returned to —here, this young man coming here is Bast, you could probably tell he's in the arts, can't you. Mister Bast? I was just telling Mrs Joubert here, if she thinks she's pressed for space you've had to rehearse all the way over to the Jewish temple since we had to take the cafeteria over for the driver training, right? Mister Bast is helping out Miss Flesch on her Ring to have it ready for Friday, the Foundation is sending out a team to give our whole in-school television program the once over and giving them a look at Miss Flesch's Ring will give a real boost to the cultural aspect of, things. Not to slight your efforts Mrs Joubert. She has the new television course in, is it sixth grade social studies Miss Joubert? What's in the paper bag, you haven't robbed the bank, Mrs Joubert?

—This? No, it's just money, she said, and shook the paper sack. —Not mine, my class. It's what they've saved to buy a share in America. We're taking a field trip in to the Stock Exchange to buy a share of stock. The boys and girls will follow its ups and downs and learn how our system works, that's why we call it our share…

—In what.

—In America, yes, because actually owning it themselves they'll feel…

—No, I mean what stock.

—That's our studio lesson today deciding which one, if you want to look in on our channel. We have a resource film from the Exchange

itself, too.

—Teaching our boys and girls what America is all about…

—Stick 'em up!

Bast's elbow caught Mrs Joubert a reeling blow in the breast, she dropped the sack of coins and he stood for an instant poised with raised hand posed in pursuit of that injury before the flush that spread from her face to his sent him stooping to recover the sack by the top, spilling the coins from its burst bottom into the unmown strip of grass, and left him kneeling down where the wind moved her skirt.

—Poor child, why they let him run around loose…

—It's the testing… Mister Whiteback withdrew a foot where his clocked ankle was nudged in pursuit of a dime, glancing down as it prospered to a quarter under Mrs Joubert's expensively shod instep, and his voice was sheared off by an inhuman scream.

—What was that! … oh Mister Bast, I'm sorry, I didn't hurt you… ? She withdrew her heel from the back of his left hand as Bast got the nickel with his right, looking up from her flexed knee to start to speak.

—Those saws, they're doing the trees in the next block, widening Burgoyne Street, said Mister Whiteback above. —I'll drop you, if … Mister Bast? he retired in the box step of the rhumba now spilling from the bank out across the walk and into the grass where Bast was going at it as though finding money lost by someone else, —if you can just pick the rest of it up and drop it off for Mrs Joubert's studio lesson?

—It was twenty-four dollars…

—And still get to your rehearsal, Mister Bast. To have it ready for Friday, we want to show this Foundation team how we're motivating this cultural drive in our youngsters, it's all in preparation for the cultural festival next spring you know, Miss Joubert… watch his hand there yes, to show we can make this cultural drive pay off like never before in mass consumers, mass distribution, mass publicity, just like automobiles and bathing suits…

—And sixty-three cents, Mrs Joubert finished, a gentle bulge rippling from her knee as she shifted her weight in departure to disappear in the swirl of her skirt as the quarter bounding from the billowing trouser cuff drew Bast in a headlong lunge after the exhaust of Whiteback's car shearing from the curb, rounding the corner into Burgoyne Street to course through the shrieks of saws and limbs dangling in unanesthetized aerial surgery, turning at last into the faculty parking lot and into Gibbs' limited vista from a second floor classroom window watching Mrs Joubert alight and come toward the portal beneath him, knuckles gone white where he grasped the cold radiator staring down into the loose fullness of her approach till it was

gone beneath the sill, and he turned back to the darkened classroom to face the talking face in flattened animation on the screen itself until

the tension of watching without listening broke the surface in a slight twitch of his own lip and turned him back to the window looking down, now into the wide eye of a camera aimed up at himself and the

frieze of teachers similarly abandoned in windows surmounting the dedication of the school hewn over the entrance.

—EBΦM ΣAOH AΘΘΦBP …

—Oh, can you read it? asked the young man with the camera, lowering it to join the congregation of cameras, meters, and accessories strung from what convenient protrusions his lank figure afforded.

—Not exactly read it, said his companion, a scrap of paper spread on the back of a heavy book in the crook of his arm. —But I thought I'd copy it down, it might make a good epigraph for the book when I find out what it means. And get some of those blank faces. There, the one at that window having a smoke in the boys' washroom while his class is being taught by television, speaking of technological unemployment.

—I don't think that's a point the Foundation wants you to stress, particularly. But it's your book.

—But you're paying for it.

The camera snapped and joined the others, swinging to their stride as they passed in beneath the sill and out of the view of Mister Gibbs, molested from behind by words,

From a basement door Mister Leroy rose into the sunlight bearing a pail and his smile, intimate even at the distance turned directly up to Gibbs before there was chance to evade it, as he glided over the gravel in the silence of the boxing shoes laced tightly to the image of nonviolence his passage insisted everywhere he went.

—Turn that off…

—But wait Mister Gibbs it's not over, that's our studio lesson we'll be tested on …

—All right let's have order here, order… ! he'd reached the set himself and snapped it into darkness. —Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it's exactly

the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…

—But we didn't have any of this, you…

—That's why you're having it now! Just once, if you could, if somebody in this class could stop fighting off the idea of trying to think. All right, it all comes back to this question of energy doesn't it, a concept that can't be understood without a grasp of the second law of, yes? Can't you hear me in the back there?

—This wasn't in the reading assignment and that…

—And that… he paused to align pencils on his desk all pointing in the same direction before he looked up to her far in the back bunched high and girlish by a princess waist, bangs shading the face pancaked into concert with her classmates in the shadowless vacancy of youth, — that is why I am telling it to you now. Now, the concept we were discussing yesterday, first a definition… ?

—The tendency of a body which when it is at rest to …

—Never mind, next… ?

—And which when it is in motion to re …

—I said never mind! No one… ? Does anyone dare try to spell it then… ? He turned reaching high enough on the board to pull up his jacket for a glimpse of blue drawers through a hole in the trouser seat, wrote e and waited.

-E?

—Yes e, obviously. What comes next.

—N?

Gibbs repeated —n, and wrote it.

—D? as the bell rang.

—Correct, t, r, o, p, y, he finished the word and broke the chalk in emphatic underline, turning past the toss of blonde hair repeated in the thighs as she stood up and joined the surge of disorder at his back, his lower lip now caught between his teeth in a way that seemed to dam his spirit as he regained the window and the open parking lot below where now, all continent and unaware of fragmentation in another mind's eye, Mister diCephalis came carrying a child's umbrella in the congruous fashion it feigned here in the small, rolled, black, its handle a curve of simulated birch hooked on his wrist as he passed under the inscribed lintel and pushed at the glass door that never yet had opened in and did not now, stopped to unlimber the umbrella, pulled the door open, and moved at home through crowd and noise toward a door of wood and thick as his wrist which swung lightly closed behind him, not for being well hung but because its hollow core reduced it to a swinging sign for the word Principal and a sounding board diffusing the racket in the hall into the presence of moderation and benign achievement themselves diffused, along with the Horatio Alger award and fifty-six honorary degrees when hung, high in the confines of a single face framed cheaply on the wall in witness "that confidence, a belief in ourselves, individually and collectively, is a very important feature in the degree of activity you normally anticipate in our economy," resolve that "if we have the courage, if we have got, you might say, the widely held determination to move courageously, there is no question in my mind but that it would be helpful," only the eyes tinged with alert vexation over "whether or not a campaign for bringing about this kind of confidence is the best thing, I haven't thought of that as a public relations problem that has yet come to me

…"

—The fear psychology, the drills, all that stuff and junk, came the voice of Miss Flesch hacking through the diffusion that bore him on toward the inner office, eyes lowered from initial confrontation where she'd look at him, at anyone, her own eyes wide and wild as though she'd been touched privately or slapped. —It's not the kids, they think the drills are a game, crawling under their desks and everything, they have a ball. It's the parents that make the trouble, she concluded through bread, the gone bite in her seed roll smeared with lipstick like the coffee cup at her knee on the desk, and the cigarette, raised quivering now her contact lenses were in focus and she looked at him with neither that precipitate outrage nor, in fact, much interest at all, as he surreptitiously rid himself of the umbrella, hooked it on the rim of a metal school wastebasket, before advancing to shake hands.