Racing the Rain (2 page)

Mrs. Chickering, whose elaborately rhinestoned eyeglasses lent wings to her pretty dark eyes, was going on and on about the exports of Paraguay. She stopped in midsentence, marking her place with a forefinger and lowering her book. She focused her lovely eyes on Cassidy with ill-concealed exasperation.

“Quenton, do you need the hall pass?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Then will you please stop squirming?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

The class tittered, as it always did when someone got in trouble. Mrs. Chickering went back to discussing “hardwoods,” a mystery to Cassidy. It seemed to him that wood in general was hard (his satanic desk seat being a case in point), and if it wasn't, then what good was it anyway? What use could possibly be made of soft wood?

Such are the diversions of a lively child stunned by humidity and boredom. Trying to take his mind from his inflamed backside, he surreptitiously kept track of the relentless bee.

At long last Mrs. Chickering put her book away and picked up a mimeographed sheet from her desk.

“All right, children, we have art after lunch, so Miss Baskind will be here. I expect that you will be well-behaved ladies and gentlemen and that no one will have to come fetch me from the teachers' lounge,” she said. An excited murmur swept through the room. Everyone liked art.

“All right, settle down. In a few minutes we will be heading to assembly. As always, there will be no talking once we are in line, and no talking while we are marching to the auditorium. Does everyone understand that? Carl Wagner? Olivia Lattermore? Quenton Cassidy?”

The class chatterboxes dutifully muttered assent, but Mrs. Chickering paused for an interminable few seconds to emphasize her point. Not before everyone was suitably uncomfortable did she continue reading from the sheet.

“This morning in the auditorium we will see a movie from the United States Office of Civil Defense featuring Bert, the civil defense turtle. After assembly we will spend fifteen minutes practicing the duck-and-cover drills that we learn about in the movie.”

More murmuring now. This was shaping up to be a pretty good day. Any event that broke the monotony of memorizing the exports of South American countries was entirely welcome. No one really knew what civil defense was, but Bert was apparently a cartoon turtle of some kind, and anything having to do with cartoons, even a government turtle, was good.

It was the most natural thing in the world to Quenton Cassidy, his classmates, and everyone he knew, to be living in a booming, vaguely militarized postwar America that went to bed dreaming not only of Amana freezers and Mohawk carpeting, but also of mushroom clouds and foreign paratroopers.

The current boogeyman was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, commonly referred to as “the Russians,” a theoretically Marxist operation that in actuality was an entire society organized around the guiding principles of the United States Post Office.

The Soviets couldn't for the life of them produce a decent pair of Levi's or a grade of toilet paper that didn't actually draw blood, but they at least knew how to make big old scary rockets, and so that's exactly what they did.

Their counterparts on our side did likewise, and so, thanks to the world's grown-ups, Cassidy and his classmates were obliged to drill for the apocalypse.

The eerie wail of the air-raid siren would send them scrunching up under their desktops and placing their tiny hands on top of their barely closed fontanels, ostensibly safe now from instant incineration, shock wave trauma, and a general hosing down with gamma rays.

From this position Cassidy once spotted Ed Demski across the row, arms folded dutifully over his asymmetrical noggin, eyes bulging from either terror or strain, Cassidy couldn't tell which. When he was sure he had Ed's eye, Cassidy widened his eyes and placed the tips of his index fingers into his ears and made the universal kid noise for a massive explosion.

Ed immediately went into head-thumping paroxysms under his desk, silenced only by the sudden upside-down appearance of a narrowed pair of winged eyes belonging to a very cross Mrs. Chickering. The two were unceremoniously dispatched to Principal Fravel's office in the care of a smirking hall monitor.

Mr. Fravel tried to make himself seem appropriately stern and authoritarian but understood at some deep and fundamental level that it was something of a miracle these two waifs were even capable of mocking one of the most fundamental and sacrosanct principles of education in mid-twentieth-century America: that there was to be no talking or horseplay during a nuclear holocaust.

S
chool desks were one thing, but church pews seemed ever harder to small children with no personal padding where it counted. Surely they were made from a kind of hardwood Paraguay would be proud to export. Thus, some of Cassidy's most torturous and mind-numbing moments on earth were spent on the rock-hard pews of the un-air-conditioned Reeves Memorial Methodist Church. This was despite his mother furiously fanning them both with a wooden stick–handled cardboard oval displaying an advertisement for Anderson's Dry Cleaners on South Orange Blossom Trail (“For Your Sunday Best—and All the Rest!”).

Stiggs went to the same church as Cassidy, but Randleman was—in Stiggs's words—a “half-assed Catholic”—i.e., an Episcopalian, and went to St. Matthew's downtown. Demski was, however, an almost unheard-of real Catholic, and it was on his account—and that of two others—that they all ate fish sticks on Friday.

But every Sunday, pious little Cassidy, suffocating in his clip-on bow tie and starched short-sleeved white shirt, listened dazedly to some deluded or cynical mountebank go on and on about the Annunciation, the Holy Trinity, or the Ascension. Cassidy was besotted for a while by the airy nuances of Protestant theological doubletalk, but then Demski showed up at school one Monday morning spouting authoritatively about “t-t-t-transubstantiation.” Cassidy didn't think the Methodists had any ecclesiastical terms with that many syllables, so for a while he was pretty sure he was a Catholic. Seething at the idea that she had unknowingly raised a little papist under her own roof, his mother bit her tongue for the three Sundays in a row Cassidy attended Mass with the Demskis.

Little Cassidy, though he was truly entranced by the Latin gobbledygook and the profusion of robes, miters, crucifixes, and other fabulous pagan paraphernalia, soon returned to the fold, however, pronouncing that his knees just couldn't take it.

It wasn't until years later, in his freshman comparative religion class, that he read a chapter from a book called
Religion from Tolstoy to Camus
titled “The Dark Side of Religion.” One paragraph read, “The Protestant Calvin burned [at the stake] the scholarly Servetus for holding that Jesus was ‘the eternal son of God,' rather than ‘the son of the eternal God.' ”

It seemed to Cassidy fairly harsh punishment for the misplacement of an adjective, even if the point were granted. Perhaps Servetus had made a typo.

But that, as far as Cassidy was concerned, was just the icing on a frightening cake of apostate immolations, witch torturings, and child sacrifices that Christianity had proudly authored in its early days.

His mother, however, made no exceptions for budding heretics, so he attended church and Sunday school regularly, messed around with Stiggs in the Fellowship Hall, and never missed the potluck suppers. No one ever made baked beans as well as the ladies at Reeves Memorial.

C
assidy lolled in the grass in Carl Wagner's front yard, waiting to fight Reggie Harris.

Now in the sixth grade, he was used to being picked on because of his small size and big mouth, but this animosity from Reggie was a surprise. They had been friends in the second and third grades, trading comic books and playing at each other's houses. They drifted apart but were still more or less friendly. Now all of a sudden it was, “Hey, let's fight.”

“How come?” Cassidy said.

Reggie just shrugged. “See you at Carl Wagner's after school,” he said, going back to his disheveled desk as the bell rang.

So Cassidy sat with Stiggs and Randleman and Stiggs's freckle-faced little brother, Timmy, who was, pound for pound, tougher than all of them, and who was now all but vibrating in anticipation. He would have gladly taken on Reggie Harris by himself.

“You stay out of this or I'll kill you,” Cassidy told him. And to Stiggs: “Watch him, okay?”

“Here they come,” said Stiggs. “I'll go get Carl Wagner.”

“He's in his bedroom working on his P-51. He's putting the decals on today but he said to come get him.”

“Did he get the Revell or the Aurora one?”

“I don't know. The cool British one.”

Carl Wagner had been working on it all week, showing up in Miss Leydon's class every morning with dried Testors cement on his fingertips. The dark-complected Carl Wagner, whose parents were Lebanese immigrants, was an important personage at Fern Creek Elementary because his house was right across the street from the school. Also, both his parents worked, so many important after-school events were staged at his house. No one knew why he was always referred to by both names, never just “Carl” or “Wagner.”

“Tell him Reggie's coming and he's bringing his brothers,” Cassidy said.

Randleman did a rolling back flip to his hands and knees and hopped up as the shirtless Reggie and the two older boys sauntered up. Timmy glowered at the three of them but sat still.

“You ready?” Reggie said.

“I guess,” said Cassidy, climbing to his feet and starting to take his shirt off.

Reggie tackled him around the waist and drove him back to the ground, his buzz-cut brown head buried under Cassidy's sternum. When they hit the ground, it felt like Reggie's thick forehead proceeded on down to tap the inside of Cassidy's spine, forcing every molecule of air out of his body.

Tears of shock welled in his eyes and he tried to push Reggie's head away so he could get his breath back, but Reggie kept flailing at him, keeping him pinned and helpless. He began to panic when he couldn't loosen his diaphragm enough to take a breath. He was vaguely aware of Dickie Harris urging Reggie on, but he also heard Carl Wagner's voice saying, “Let him up, this isn't fair.” Stiggs was already holding his squirming little brother around the waist.

Fairness was a big thing in their world.

They were both undersized, wiry as lynxes, skinned-knee tough and a little on the grimy side even before the fight began. But with Reggie it looked more worked-in, with several layers of kid soil not often disturbed by enforced bathing. He was already showing traces of the deep-seated resentment and sullenness that would almost certainly one day blossom into full-blown sociopathy.

He came by it honestly, however, growing up in a low-income housing area called Sunrise Estates, where he shared a run-down cottage with his cigarette-sneaking brothers and a permanently hair-rollered, TV-obsessed mother. Their father had gone back to upstate New York to paint barns, and their mother's life now centered around
The Guiding Light
, S&H Green Stamps, and the very same comic books her children read.

Some algorithm deep in Reggie Harris's frontal lobes had apparently worked out that he was doomed.

For the time being he was merely nursing a mean streak that Quenton Cassidy suddenly found himself on the business end of. Down the road waiting for Reggie would be a succession of defeated teachers, outmanned social workers, and bored cops who would form the conduit through which Reggie and his mean streak would be processed through the elaborate drainage system of the Republic. Much of this even an innocent like Quenton Cassidy somehow understood on a primal level, but it availed him not a whit at the moment.

In desperation, he began rocking Reggie from side to side until he got him off balance enough to dump him over. Then he got to his hands and knees and tried to draw that impossible first breath. Reggie was instantly on his knees beside him, holding him in a headlock and swinging uppercuts at his rib cage.

The deep, noisy first breath came at long last, ragged and painful but quelling his panic. He might live after all, but he was still so shaky and desperate for air that he was having to will himself not to start bawling out of frustration and self-pity. It would have been, really, the worst thing he could do. His friends would be humiliated and everybody in school would know about it the next day. In their little society there was precious little sympathy for a crybaby.

He began to feel real anger toward Reggie Harris for the first time. This was something new. Most fights were semi-lighthearted scuffles more like his losing wrestling matches with Stiggs and Randleman. This felt different.

“Work the body! Work the body!” cried Donnie Harris. Cassidy wasn't sure what that meant exactly, but it was obvious Reggie was getting more than encouragement from the peanut gallery, and it finally dawned on Cassidy what this was all about: his siblings had been trying to toughen Reggie up for the coming Rat Wars, and the undersized Cassidy must have seemed a good early palooka.

Cassidy looked over at Reggie and saw him winding up to deliver the coup de grâce. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion now, and Cassidy easily ducked under the roundhouse, feeling the air whiffing above him as the blow sailed over.

He realized something else as he scrambled to his feet and turned to face his tormentor: Reggie wasn't that good at this. Cassidy knew that he was not only quicker than Reggie, but he wasn't breathing as hard. Maybe Reggie had already picked up some of his brothers' bad habits.

Now Reggie was huffing and puffing just as Cassidy was getting back to breathing normally again. Yes, he remembered, this is how it goes.

Reggie let go another roundhouse right so far off the mark Cassidy didn't even bother to duck. No wonder Reggie needed his brothers to egg him on. Cassidy felt something almost like pity for him and his squalid little life, but anger still gripped him.