The Centaur (6 page)

A paper airplane shot into the air, wobbled, and sharply fell; it struck the floor of the middle aisle and became an
open-faced white flower whose baby-like yowling continued throughout the remainder of the class. Pale fluid dropped from its injured leaf and Caldwell mentally apologized to the janitors.

“Leptothrix,” he said, “is a microscopic fleck of life, whose name in Greek means ‘small hair.’ This bacteria could extract from ferric salt a granule of pure iron and, fantastic as it seems, existed in such numbers that it laid down all the deposits of iron ore which man presently mines. The Mesabi Range in Minnesota was originally put there by American citizens of which thousands would fit on a pinhead. Then, to win World War Two, we gouged all those battleships and tanks and Jeeps and Coke machines out of it and left the poor old Mesabi Range like an old carcass the jackals had chewed. I feel awful about it. When I was a kid in Passaic they used to talk about the Mesabi Range as if she were a beautiful orange-haired lady lying up there by the Lakes.”

Not content with pencil-tickling, Deifendorf had put his hands around the Davis girl’s throat and with his thumbs was caressing the underside of her chin. Her face was growing smaller and smaller in sensual ecstasy. “Third,” Caldwell called—the undercurrent of noise in the class was rising to his lips—“the volvox, of these early citizens in the kingdom of life, interests us because he invented death. There is no reason intrinsic in the plasmic substance why life should ever end. Amoebas never die; and those male sperm cells which enjoy success become the cornerstone of new life that continues beyond the father. But the volvox, a rolling sphere of flagellating algae organized into somatic and reproductive cells, neither plant nor animal—under a microscope it looks just like a Christmas ball—by pioneering this new idea of
coöperation
, rolled life into the kingdom of certain—as opposed to
accidental—death. For—hold tight kids, just seven more minutes of torture—while each cell is potentially immortal, by volunteering for a specialized function within an organized society of cells, it enters a compromised environment. The strain eventually wears it out and kills it. It dies sacrificially, for the good of the whole. These first cells who got tired of sitting around forever in a blue-green scum and said, ‘Let’s get together and make a volvox,’ were the first altruists. The first do-gooders. If I had a hat on, I’d take it off to ’em.”

He pantomimed doffing his cap and the class screamed. Mark Youngerman jumped up and his acne leaped to the wall; the paint began to burn, blistering in slowly spreading blotches above the side blackboard. Fists, claws, cocked elbows blurred in patch-colored panic above the scarred and varnished desktops; in the whole mad mass the only still bodies were those of Zimmerman and Iris Osgood. At some point, Zimmerman had slipped across the aisle and sat on the same seat with the girl. He had his arm around her shoulders and beamed forward proudly. Iris in his hug was tranquil and inert, her eyes downcast and her dull cheeks lightly flushed.

Caldwell looked at the clock. Five minutes left, and the main part of the story all before him. “Around three-thirty this morning,” he said, “while you were still asleep in your trundle-beds, all the larger phyla except the Chordata appear in advanced form. As far as the fossils tell, it happened like
that
.” He snapped his fingers. “Up until dawn, the most important animal in the world, spreading on the ocean floor everywhere, was an ugly thing called the trilobite.”

A boy over by the windows had sneaked a paper grocery bag into class and now, nudged by another boy, he tumbled its contents, a clot of living trilobites, onto the floor. Most were just an inch or two long; a few were over a foot in length.
They looked like magnified wood lice, only they were reddish. The bigger ones wore on their ruddy cephalic shields partially unrolled condoms, like rubber party hats. As they scuttered among the scrolling iron desk-legs, their brainless heads and swishing glabellae brushed the ankles of girls who squealed and kicked up their feet so high that white thighs and gray underpants flashed. In terror some of the trilobites curled into segmented balls. As a sport the boys began to drop their heavy textbooks on these primitive arthropods; one of the girls, a huge purple parrot feathered with mud, swiftly ducked her head and plucked a small one up. Its little biramous legs fluttered in upside-down protest. She crunched it in her painted beak and methodically chewed.

Caldwell calculated that this late in the game there was nothing to do but ride the rumpus out to the bell. “By seven o’clock this morning,” he explained, and a few smeared faces seemed to be listening, “the first vertebrate fishes appeared. The Earth’s crust buckled. The oceans of the Ordovician Age dwindled.” Fats Frymoyer leaned over and shoved little Billy Schupp off his seat; the boy, a frail diabetic, fell to the floor with a bump. When he tried to rise, an anonymous hand appeared on his head and pushed him down again. “At seven-thirty, the first plants began to grow on land. In swampy pools, lungfish learned to breathe and drag themselves across the mud. By eight o’clock, the amphibians were here. The earth was warm. There were marshlands in Antarctica. Lush forests of giant ferns rose and fell and laid down the coal deposits of our own state, for which this age is named. So when you say ‘Pennsylvanian,’ you can mean either a dumb Dutchman or a stretch of Paleozoic time.”

Betty Jean Shilling had been chewing bubble-gum; now a ping-pong-ball-sized bubble, a triumph, a prodigy, issued
from her tongue and lips. Her eyes crossed strenuously and nearly popped themselves in effortful concentration. But the marvellous bubble collapsed, coating her chin with a strip of pink scum.

“Insects appeared and diversified; some dragonflies had thirty-inch wings. The world grew cold again. Some amphibians went back to the sea; others began to lay their eggs on land. These were reptiles, and for two hours, from nine o’clock to eleven o’clock, as the earth grew warm again, they dominated life. Fifty-foot plesiosaurs roamed the sea, pterosaurs flapped through the air like broken umbrellas. On land, gigantic morons made the earth shake.” By prearranged signal all of the boys in the room began to hum. No one’s mouth moved; their eyes shifted here and there innocently; but the air was filled with a hovering honey of insolence. Caldwell could only swim on. “The brontosaurus had a thirty-ton body and a two-ounce brain. The anatosaurus had two thousand teeth. Triceratops had a helmet of frilled bone seven feet long. Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms and teeth like six-inch razors and it was elected President. It ate everything—dead meat, living meat, old bones—”

The first bell rang. The monitors stampeded out of the class; one of them stepped on the anemone in the aisle and the flower shrilly whimpered. Two boys bumped in the doorway and, thrashing, stabbed each other with pencils. Their teeth gnashed; phlegm poured through their nostrils. Somehow Zimmerman had slipped Iris Osgood’s blouse and bra off and her breasts showed above her desk like two calm edible moons rising side by side.

“Two minutes left,” Caldwell shouted. His voice had grown higher in pitch, as if a peg in his head were being turned. “Keep your seats. We’ll have to take up the extinct mammals
and the ice ages next period. To make a long story short, one hour ago, spreading in the wake of the flowering plants and the grasses, our faithful friends the mammals took over the Earth, and one minute ago,
one minute ago—
”

Deifendorf had pulled the Davis girl out into the aisle and she was giggling and struggling in his long hair-speckled arms.

“—one minute ago,” Caldwell called the third time, and a handful of BBs was flung into his face. He winced and put up his right hand as a shield and thanked God his eyes hadn’t been hit. You won’t be given another pair.
. His stomach griped sympathetically with his leg. “—evolved from a tiny tree shrew, his depth-perceptive binocular vision, thumb-opposed grasping hands, and highly elaborated cerebral cortex developed in response to the special conditions of arboreal existence, evolved from a tiny tree shrew such as are presently found in Java—”

The girl’s mussed skirt was up around her waist. She was bent face down over the desk and Deifendorf’s hooves shuffled in agitation in the narrow aisle. From his sleepy careful grin he was covering her; the whole room smelled like a stable: Caldwell saw red. He picked the shining arrow-shaft from the top of his desk, strode forward through the sickening confusion of books being slammed shut, and once, twice, whipped,
whipped
the bastard beast’s bare back.
You broke my grille
. Two white stripes glowed across the meat of Deifendorf’s shoulders. As Caldwell in horror watched, these stripes slowly blushed. There would be welts. The couple fell apart like a broken blossom. Deifendorf looked up with small brown eyes shelled in tears; the girl with pointed composure refluffed her hair. Zimmerman’s hand scribbled furiously in the corner of Caldwell’s eye.

The teacher, stunned, returned to the front of the class. Jesus, he hadn’t meant to hit the kid so hard. He placed the steel shaft in the chalk trough. He turned, and closed his eyes, and the pain unfolded its wet wings in the red darkness. He opened his mouth; his very blood loathed the story he had told. “One minute ago, flint-chipping, fire-kindling, death-foreseeing, a tragic animal appeared—” The buzzer rasped; halls rumbled throughout the vast building; faintness swooped at Caldwell but he held himself upright, having vowed to finish. “—called Man.”

M
Y FATHER AND
my mother were talking. I wake now often to silence, beside you, with a pang of fear, after dreams that leave a sour wash of atheism in my stomach (last night I dreamt that Hitler, a white-haired crazy man with a protruding tongue, was found alive in Argentina). But in those days I always awoke to the sound of my parents talking, voices which even in agreement were contentious and full of life. I had been dreaming of a tree, and through the sound of their words I seemed to twist from an upright trunk into a boy lying in bed. I was fifteen and it was 1947. This morning their subject seemed to be new; I could not make out its form, only feel within myself, as if in my sleep I had swallowed something living that now woke within me, its restless weight of dread. “Don’t feel bad, Cassie,” my father said. His voice had a shy sound, as if he had turned his back. “I’ve been lucky to live this long.”

“George, if you’re just trying to frighten me, it’s not funny,” my mother answered. Her voice was so often expressive of what I wanted to hear that my own brain sometimes thought in her voice; indeed, as I grow older, now and then, usually in instances of exclamation, I hear her voice issue from my mouth.

I seemed now to know the subject: my father thought he was ill.

“Cassie,” he said, “don’t be frightened. I don’t want you to be frightened. I’m not frightened.” His voice blanched in repetition.

“You
are
frightened,” she said. “I wondered why you kept getting out of bed.” Her voice was white too.

“I can feel the damn thing,” he said. “I can feel it in me like a clot of poison. I can’t pass it.”

This detail seemed to balk her. “You can’t feel such things,” she said at last, in a voice abruptly small, like a chastened little girl’s.

His voice gathered size. “I can feel it in me like a poison snake wrapped around my bowels.
Brooo!
”

Lying in bed, I pictured my father making this noise—his head shaken so abruptly his jowls wagged, his lips a vehement blur. The picture was so vivid I smiled. Their conversation, as if they knew I had awakened, was closing up; the tone of their voices darkened. The little pale piteous bit, like a snowflake at the center of their marriage, which I had glimpsed, still half a tree, in first light, retreated behind the familiar opacities of clownish quarreling. I turned my head, as sleep’s heaviness lifted from it, and looked through the window. A few frost-ferns had sprouted from the lower corners of the upper panes. The early sun lay tan on the stubble of the big field beyond the dirt road. The road was pink. The bare trees took white on their sun side; a curious ruddiness was caught in their
twigs. Everything looked frozen; the two strands of telephone wire looked locked into place in the sky’s blue ice. It was January and Monday. I began to understand. After every weekend, my father had to gather his nerve to go back to teaching. During the Christmas vacation he became slack and in a fury of screw-turning had to retighten himself. “The long haul,” he called the stretch between Christmas and Easter. Last week, the first week of the new year, something had happened that had frightened him. He had struck a boy with Zimmerman in the room: he had told us that much.

“Don’t be dramatic, George,” my mother said. “What does it feel like?”

“I know where I got it.” He had a way of not speaking to her, but performing in front of her, as if there were an invisible audience at her side. “The damn kids. I’ve caught their damn hate and I feel it like a spider in my big intestine.”

“It’s not hate, George,” she said, “it’s love.”