Rook & Tooth and Claw
Read Rook & Tooth and Claw Online
Authors: Graham Masterton
Rook & Tooth and Claw
Graham Masterton
© Graham Masterton 1996 and 1997 *
*Indicates the year of first publication.
He heard shouting and whooping in the corridor a second before Muffy came bursting into the classroom, her eyes wild, saying, “They’re killing each other! Mr Rook! They’re killing each other!”
Jim dropped his felt-tip pen and threw back his chair. He strode to the door and Muffy clutched hold of his sleeve. “You have to stop them, Mr Rook! They’re going crazy!”
He ran down the corridor, past the lockers to the boys’ washrooms. A crowd of twenty or thirty pupils had gathered outside, chanting and yelling and beating on the locker doors with their fists. “Tee
Jay
! Tee
Jay
!”
Jim yelled, “Get out of the way!” and pushed past them into the toilets.
At the far end of the washroom, two seventeen-year-old black boys were fighting. One of them – tall, and heavily built – had forced the other right back against the basins, and was knocking his head against the mirrors. Both of them had nosebleeds, and blood was spraying up the walls like graffiti.
Jim grabbed the bigger boy by the scruff of his T-shirt, and swung him around.
The boy’s face was like a mask: sweaty, spattered with blood, with bulging eyes. He was so hyped up that he couldn’t speak anything but gibberish. “Let go of me,
man – I gotta – let
go
of me, man, I’m going to kill him – he diss me so bad – you don’t even—”
“
Tee Jay
!” Jim yelled at him. Tee Jay tried to wrench himself free, but Jim twisted the neck of his T-shirt even tighter so that it was almost throttling him. Jim forced him back against the tiles and stared into his face with all the ferocity that he could muster. “Tee Jay, what in God’s name has gotten into you?”
“He diss me – he
diss
me – I’m going to kill him for that – I’m going to murder that mother – don’t try to stop me – ’cause you can’t – you
can’t,
you hear me?”
Jim kept Tee Jay pinned back against the wall. He turned to the other boy, Elvin, who was leaning over the basins with blood streaming from his mouth and nose. “Elvin, you okay? Elvin, can you hear me? You okay?”
Elvin coughed and nodded. Jim pointed to a tall fair-haired boy standing by the washroom door. “Jason! You and Philip take Elvin along to the infirmary! The rest of you, get the hell out of here! This isn’t a goddamned cabaret!”
He turned back to Tee Jay. Tee Jay was still quaking with adrenaline, and he didn’t take his eyes off Jim for a second, sniffing and shuffling and twitching his head. Jim could hardly recognise him. He was usually so quiet, and together, and funny, too. He was the tallest boy in the class, good-looking apart from a smattering of acne scars on his cheeks; a great basketball player. He wasn’t especially bright, because none of the students in Jim Rook’s class were especially bright. But he was always willing to learn – and he had never been obsessed with ‘disrespect’. Not until now, anyway.
“All right,” Jim demanded. “Are you going to chill out, or what?”
Tee Jay tried to pull himself away again, and the seam
of his T-shirt tore. “I’m never going to –
never
! – that mother—”
“Tee Jay, for Christ’s sake! Listen to me, will you? I could have you arrested!”
Tee Jay quietened down. He attempted to jerk himself free one more time, but then he turned his face away and obstinately stared at the toilet doors.
Jim said, “Tee Jay? Come on, Tee Jay?” and when Tee Jay looked back again his eyes were crowded with tears.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was just what Elvin said to me, man. I couldn’t—”
“What
did
Elvin say?” Jim demanded. “What could anybody say to you that provokes you into attacking them like that?”
“Nothing, man. He didn’t say nothing.”
“So you just started beating up on him for the hell of it?”
Tee Jay wiped the blood away from his nose with the back of his hand. “Look, I’ve said I’m sorry, okay?”
“You think it’s okay?
I
don’t think it’s okay. I think it stinks. I have enough of a hard job defending you guys without you behaving like mad dogs. I’m going to have to haul your ass up in front of Dr Ehrlichman when he comes back this afternoon; and Dr Ehrlichman will have to decide whether we’re going to allow you to stay on here, or whether we’re going to ask you to leave.”
“It was a
fight,
man, that’s all.”
“You don’t solve any problem by fighting, Tee Jay. I thought you had enough brains to know that.”
“If I had any brains I wouldn’t be in Special II, would I?”
Jim let go of his T-shirt and stepped away from him. “There,” he said. “You’re free to go. You think it’s
demeaning to be in Special II, then clear out your locker and go home. I don’t want anybody in my class who thinks that arguments are settled by hitting people. And I don’t want anybody in my class who isn’t proud to be in it.”
He waited, and watched Tee Jay sniffing. Then he furiously banged his fist against the toilet door. “Jesus, Tee Jay! Think what you’re risking! Elvin dissed you? So what? Don’t tell me you’re
that
goddamned sensitive. You want to sit with the girls?”
“You can’t talk to me like that, man!” Tee Jay warned.
“Oh, no? So what the hell’s going on? You’ve made more progress this semester than anybody else in the class. When you came to me, you didn’t even know who Shakespeare was. You could hardly read. You couldn’t add up. Christ, you thought that President Washington’s first name was Denzel. Think how far you’ve come. But now you’re ready to throw away everything you’ve done,
snap,
just like that, for the sake of what? Your
vanity
? And you think you deserve respect?”
Tee Jay instantly flared up again. “That’s it! You
always
doing that! Bringing people down! Making them look like a fool when they ain’t! You walk around your schoolroom pretending to be friends but all the time you laughing behind your hand, man. You
laughing
!”
“I’m not laughing now, Tee Jay. Get yourself cleaned up. Then report back to class.”
Tee Jay shuffled over and stood over him. “I could take you, man.”
“Is this the first time that’s occurred to you?” Jim asked him. He held his ground. He couldn’t count how many times a rebellious teenager had loomed over him and warned him that, “I could take you, man,” or words to that effect. In seven years of remedial teaching he had
suffered one stab wound (screwdriver, upper shoulder muscle) and two missing teeth. But since he had taught over two-and-a-half thousand disturbed, disruptive and dyslexic boys and girls, he reckoned that he had probably gotten off lightly. His predecessor had been shot in the lung.
There was a moment of extreme tension – made all the tenser because Tee Jay had never challenged him like this before, and there was no predictable agenda.
But then Tee Jay said, “Ah, shit,” and shook his head as if he couldn’t be bothered, and slouched out of the washrooms with his hands in his pockets.
Jim watched him go, and then looked around at the blood-spattered mirrors. Behind the loops and squiggles of crimson, he could see himself, standing alone. A lean, dark-haired man of thirty-four, with eyes the colour of hazy green glass pebbles and a six-o’-clock shadow (even though it was only 9.20 in the morning.) His features were angular, slightly haunted-looking, as if he slept badly and never got quite enough to eat. He wore a short-sleeved denim shirt and a red-and-green necktie with palm trees and hula girls on it. His arms were thin and his wrist-watch looked too big for him.
Sometimes he looked at himself and wondered what the hell he was doing, trying to teach the unteachable, especially when it came to violence, like today. You could work for months on a student like Tee Jay – months of inch-by-inch progress, months of sweat and stuttering and tightly-clutched pencils – and then it could all explode, in an instant, for the stupidest of reasons, and you would be back with the swaggering, bad-mouthing streetwise numbskull that you first started out with.
Respect,
he thought.
Don’t make me laugh.
Just as he was about to leave the washrooms he thought
he saw a very tall man passing the entrance. It was only a fleeting glimpse, like a shadow crossing a wall, because the man was walking along the corridor very quickly and very quietly, even though the floor was covered in polished thermoplastic tiles, which usually set up a hard rapping (stiletto heels) or a tortured squeaking (sneakers.)
Jim came out of the washrooms and looked down the corridor after him. The man was silhouetted against the sun-bright windows at the far end – even taller than he had seemed at first glance, wearing a baggy black suit with flapping trousers and a black, wide-brimmed hat, low in the crown like an old-fashioned preacher’s hat, the sort that Elmer Gantry wore.
“Hey, can I help you?” he called out, but the man took no notice. “Pardon me, sir, can I help you?” he repeated. Still the man ignored him, and turned the bend at the end of the corridor and disappeared.
Jim went jogging after him. As he reached the corner, however, he almost collided with Susan Randall, the geography teacher, carrying a huge disorderly heap of books. She tipped most of them on to the floor in a flapping, slapping cascade.
“What are you doing, rushing about like a pig in a china shop?” she shrilled at him.
“Hey, Susan, I’m real sorry,” he said. What made their collision all the more embarrassing was that he liked her, a lot; although she was still very suspicious of him. She had short brunette hair and pouty lips and a figure that could have won her a walk-by rôle in
Baywatch,
and today she was wearing his favourite yellow ribbed sweater. Even the boys used to whistle at her.
He knelt down and helped her to gather up the books, very conscious of the way her putty-coloured skirt had ridden up as she hunkered down next to him. He looked
over her shoulder but the corridor was empty now. No sign of the man in the Elmer Gantry hat.
“Did you, uh,
see
anybody, just before we bumped into each other?” he asked.
“What do you mean
see
anybody? Who?”
God, that perfume. He had taken the trouble to find out what it was:
Je Reviens
; pretty expensive for a woman on a teacher’s salary. “There was a tall guy in a black suit and a big hat. You couldn’t have missed him.”
“I didn’t see any tall guy in a black suit and a big hat. I didn’t see any guy at all.”
“You must have done.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Jim, but I didn’t. Now do you mind if I get back to my class? I’m ten minutes late already. They’ll be trashing the place.”
He caught her arm, and frowned at her. “You really didn’t see anybody? For real?”
“No, Jim. I really for real didn’t. Now, please.”
“Okay, then,” he said, genuinely mystified. He stood and watched her as she tap-tapped her way toward her classroom. “By the way,” he called after her. “It’s bull.”
She stopped in her tracks. “What do you mean? It wasn’t bull at all. I really didn’t see anybody. For real.”
“I meant in a china shop. It isn’t pig. It’s bull.”
She laughed; and Jim smiled, too. But when she had gone he couldn’t stop himself from looking along the empty corridor, and wondering how the man in the Elmer Gantry hat had managed to disappear. It seemed
cold
in the corridor, although he couldn’t think why; and there was a strange aromatic smell that wasn’t
Je Reviens.
It was more like incense.
He gave an involuntary shiver, and then went to tell the janitor to clean up the blood.
* * *
By the time he returned to Special Class II, both Tee Jay and Elvin were back in their places, looking sullen and bruised. Elvin’s lip was split and Tee Jay’s left eye was beginning to close. The rest of the class were buzzing and twittering with curiosity and excitement, like a murmuration of starlings on a rooftop. When Jim walked in they all stood up, but the gossiping continued. Jim ignored them. Without a word, he went to the window, hoisted up a window-pole, and noisily opened it. Then he went to his desk and sat down, tilting his chair back, and clasping his hands behind his head.
He sat looking at them for a long time, and still he said nothing.
Little by little, the class began to quieten down. His silence was making them uneasy. Usually he came storming into the room and started talking right away – posturing, dramatising, gesticulating – working his class like an actor working his audience. This morning, though, he sat silent, in the same posture that
they
always adopted, chair tilted back, hands laced behind his head, eyes heavily lidded in a deliberate attempt to look disinterested and totally cool.
After two or three minutes there was complete silence. Mark Foley giggled; and his buddy Ricky Herman gave an adenoidal snort, but otherwise everybody was quiet.
Jim got up at last and walked around his desk. He looked at Tee Jay and he looked at Elvin, and then he looked at each one of his class in turn, slowly and deliberately studying their faces. There were nineteen of them in all: from Titus Greenspan III in the front, with his fishbowl glasses and his freckles, to Sue-Robin Caufield in the back with her mountains of blonde hair and her tight cerise T-shirt. There was John Ng from South Viet Nam – polite, shy and barely able to understand
a word that anybody said to him; Beattie McCordic with her cropped hair and her tattoo and her fierce feminist agenda, not to mention her anomia, a chronic inability to remember what things were called. She couldn’t say “hammer”. She couldn’t remember it. She’d have to say, “that piece of metal on a stick you use for hitting nails.”
There was David Littwin, who was stringy and tall and almost handsome, apart from his protruding ears, but who stuttered so badly that every sentence seemed to take forever, and the rest of the class would start making loud snoring noises and look at their watches. Rita Munoz, dark-eyed and dark-haired, with lips as scarlet as a blossoming tropical flower. Rita argued with everything her teachers said to her, simply to disguise the fact that she didn’t really know what they meant.