The Crazy School (13 page)

“Let’s wait and see if he gets us busted for smoking fi rst.

That’s about all the risk I can handle right now.”

“You’re going to feel really stupid when it turns out I’m right about him.”

“That’s a stupidity I’d welcome.”

“You mean it?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “I
want
him to prove me wrong by turning out to be a decent guy. But just in case he doesn’t, don’t let’s give him any more turn-ins than we have already, okay? Especially not about the kids. Pete needs a little more seasoning before we teach him the secret handshake.”

“You’re right,” she agreed, “but I wish you weren’t.”

“Are you sweet on this guy?” I asked.

“A little, maybe,” she said.

“A little,
maybe
?” I said. “Hey, can you smell that?”

“Smell what?”

“The smoke from your pants being on fi re,” I replied, laughing.

“Shut
up
!” She grabbed a dish towel to thwack me with, but I’d made her blush.

“Let me get the plates out,” I said. “I think food would help at this point.”

At about ten, Dean and I walked them down to our building’s parking lot.

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“So check out Lulu’s car, it’s totally Methodist Blue,” I said, that being Dean’s nickname for the powdery shade his own farming parents always chose.

“Little bit paler than you’d see around Syracuse. You sure you’re not one of those Presbyterians?” said Dean, opening the driver’s door for Lulu, while I walked Pete to the other side.

“I just want you to know that was the best night I’ve had in months,” said Pete and gave me a hug, adding, “You and Dean are friends I hope to spend a lot more time with.”

“It would be our pleasure,” I said.

Lulu started up the Methodist-mobile and cruised out of the lot onto North Street. Dean and I waved our fi nal goodbyes after them and started back inside.

While we waited for the elevator, he turned to me and said,

“That guy Pete? Talk about a candyass.”

“I felt bad for him, didn’t you?”

“Sure,” he said. “But I still wouldn’t trust him for half a heartbeat. He’s Santangelo’s lapdog, ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice on the off chance he’ll get to hump the man’s leg.”

“Well,
duh
, but Lulu seems to think we can do a little deprogramming.”

“No way in hell. It’s a goddamn miracle he didn’t show up tonight in saffron robes, waving a tambourine,” said Dean.

The elevator dinged, and the doors peeled wide in front of us.

“Hare Krishna,” said Dean, climbing aboard.

“He’s not
that
bad.”

“He’s Hare freakin’
Rama
bad, Bunny. Mark my words.”

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Part III

“I almost think we’re all of us Ghosts . . . It’s not only what
we have invited from our father and mother that walks in
us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so
forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same,
and we can’t get rid of them . . . There must be Ghosts all the
country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are,
one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”

—
Henrik Ibsen

Ghosts

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18

Monday we had parent-teacher conferences, as promised.

All classes were canceled, and lunch was far more edible than usual—roast beef and au gratin potatoes and green beans that had been harvested sometime after the Korean War for a change. They even trotted out real coffee in rented urns, which looked all shiny and spiffy atop the rented table linens.

Meds, meanwhile, were distributed offstage.

It wasn’t a happy occasion for anyone. I’d say only half the families showed up, if that. I wanted to believe the other half were too strapped for cash to venture across the country, in light of Santangelo’s hefty tuition.

I spent most of the day in my classroom, staring out the window while ticking off the no-shows with the passage of each fi fteen-minute chunk.

Wiesner’s people gave it a miss. So did Forchetti’s and Sitzman’s.

Fay’s parents wandered in, confused—her impeccably blonded mother in head-to-toe size-four Chanel, her father 1 2 1

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sporting bespoke duds up the wazoo. I redirected them to Lulu, next door.

Mr. and Mrs. Gonzaga, parents of chair-tossing Patti, cowered in the doorway until I stood up to welcome them in. They seemed so tired and sad, clutching each other’s hands on the other side of my desk, that I didn’t have the heart to say anything true about their little girl.

“Patti’s awfully shy, as I’m sure you know,” I said, smiling at them. “But she’s sweet as can be all the same. A consistent pleasure to have in class.”

They wanted to believe me, but it was a stretch for all of us.

“Is she,” said her mother, “is she keeping up with her studies?”

“Oh, yes,” I assured her. “And she contributes especially fi ne work whenever we have free writing.”

Patti’s entire free-writing output consisted of fi ve crumpled binder-paper sheets, one for each week since the start of the term—the words “THIS SCHOOL SUCKS! THIS SCHOOL

SUCKS! THIS SCHOOL SUCKS!” scrawled thick and black down all of them, both sides, with respect to neither margin nor rule.

“And she hasn’t,” said her father, “thrown anything?” He coughed.

“Thrown anything?” I asked, the picture of innocence.

“At
you?” murmured Mrs. Gonzaga.

“Patti?” I said. “Oh my goodness, no!”

Her father coughed again. “It’s just that she . . . sometimes . . .”

“Chairs, you know,” said her mother, “at us . . .”

“The occasional plate or bowl,” he added.

“Well, then, she’s made tremendous improvement,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t be struck by lightning on account of that 1 2 2

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blatant falsehood. Hoping, too, that they wouldn’t credit Santangelo—who probably remembered their daughter’s existence only when he had occasion to cash their checks.

Mr. Gonzaga shook my hand when the bell rang. His wife was about to do the same but then stepped closer, to hug me instead.

I knew they hadn’t believed a word.

They shuffl ed to the door, and I heard Mrs. Gonzaga break down out in the hallway.

“There, there, my dear,” her husband murmured. “It won’t be long until we have our little girl home again.”

Patti’s mother didn’t answer, but she managed to cry more quietly until they got to the doors at the end of the hall.

It just about killed me, hearing that, so I was relieved when Mooney’s parents showed up ten minutes late.

Mr. and Mrs. LeChance wanted to be anywhere but in that classroom. They were good-looking people, tanned and fi t. If they’d been birds, a naturalist would have noted the female’s brighter plumage.

“Mooney’s turned in all his work on time this term,” I told them. “We’re just fi nishing up our unit on the Second World War, and he’s made a real contribution to the classroom discussion.”

Mrs. LeChance was fi dgety.

“Your son is just terrifi c,” I said, catching her eye.

“Oh, honey he’s not
mine,” she said.

Mr. LeChance had the decency to blush at that. “My fi rst wife died several years ago. Beebe is Mooney’s stepmother.”

Beebe patted her husband’s knee, making damn sure he got an eyeful of trophy cleavage. “Poor ol’ Sally. Such a tragic loss—

and then the lawsuit dragged on, of course.”

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“I’m so very sorry,” I said.

“That Mooney’s been out of control ever since,” she said, tossing a hand to wave away my concern. “Spoiled rotten, what with all the money we got for the settlement.”

“Isn’t that right, honey?” said Beebe stroking her husband’s knee again.

Oblivious to any response from Mooney’s dad, she turned back to me, swinging her crossed leg making the diamonds in her ankle bracelet fl ash against that golden tan. “Place like this is the very best thing for him. Thank the Lord we’re well enough off to afford it.”

Mr. LeChance cleared his throat.

“We best be going now,” she said. “Wouldn’t want to miss our fl ight,” she said leaning over to straighten his collar.

Mr. LeChance looked at his watch. “I just want to catch a few minutes with my son before we leave.”

“We’re not allowed, remember?” she chided. “Seeing as how Mooney’s got himself in trouble. Again.”

Standing up, Beebe pushed her hair back, and I was over-joyed to spot the scars from her face-lift.

“Get a move on, Bucky-boy,” she said, clapping her hands.

“Antigua waits for no man.”

She turned to wink at me as they reached the door. “Y’all keep up the good work, now, hear?”

Wiesner and Sitzman wandered in moments later, interrupting my prayers that a sudden loss of cabin pressure over the Caribbean would make Beebe’s implants blow up.

As such, the sharp crack of a small but defi nite actual explo-sion made me jump about three feet.

It had gone off somewhere in the building—not enough con-cussion to damage the windows, but my eardrums ached.

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“What the hell was that?” I asked.

Sitzman looked at Wiesner.

Wiesner shook his head in denial, then sniffed the air.

I followed suit and caught an acrid hit of nail polish remover.

“Peroxyacetone,” Wiesner said. “Made by some total amateur.”

“Yeah, right,” said Sitzman, “with absolutely no help from you.”

“Dude, I’ve been with you all morning,” Wiesner replied.

“Whatever,” said Sitzman. “I still totally know you did it.”

“I wouldn’t cook a batch of that shit if you paid me,” insisted Wiesner as Sitzman and I traded doubting smirks.

“Seriously, this friend of mine, Stevie, put a few grams in his front pocket a couple of years ago, and then he stood up too fast at the end of French class,” said Wiesner, bowing his head with mock sadness. “Now we call him One-Nut.”

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19

Tuesday afternoon it was cold as shit outside, wind pushing bits of everything around under a low brow of sky.

Forchetti was back in class, freed from the Farm, so that made four of us—him, me, Wiesner, and Sitzman.

“You guys really want to talk about the sixties?” I asked.

“Like out of the textbook or real stuff ?” asked Wiesner.

“We could do real stuff,” I said. “With maybe some pictures out of the textbook.”

“I want to hear about what it was like for you,” said Sitzman.

Forchetti snorted. “She was a little kid back then. What the hell does she know about it?”

“I was born in ’63, Forchetti,” I countered, “but I remember the last few years pretty well. And a lot of what you guys think of as the sixties kind of leaked into the fi rst chunk of the seventies—at least until the war was over.”

“What, like tie-dye and all that shit?” said Forchetti.

“Tie-dye was the least of it,” I said.

“Ooooo,” he said, his head wobbling as he made peace signs 1 2 6

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with both hands. “Flower power with granola on top. Let’s all go pick daisies and talk about
love
.”

“Shut
up,
Foreskin,” said Wiesner. “You wanna sit here listening to crap about that McCarthy guy? At least maybe this won’t be totally boring.”

“Fine,” whined Forchetti, slumping down in his chair like he knew full well I could bore him to sleep even if Godzilla suddenly bashed through the wall with a truckload of free tequila and strippers.

“Well,” I started, “I remember the time somebody sent us two keys of dope from Maui in this welded-shut mailbox. I think that was around when we were hiding the guy who went AWOL right before he was supposed to ship out for Vietnam.

We used to dress him up in my mom’s clothes and put sun-glasses and this big Afro wig on him to take him grocery shopping if he got bored of hanging around the house.”

“What happened to him?” asked Wiesner.

“Somebody drove him to Canada, I think. Nice guy. I got the grown-ups to do the Stoned Balloon on his last night, for good luck.”

“What’s a Stoned Balloon?”asked Forchetti, before he could cover up the fact that I’d gotten him interested.

“You take a dry-cleaning bag and twist it up into a rope until it doubles back on itself, then you put it on a wire hanger and hook it on a chandelier or whatever and light the end of it on fi re.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Well, it just looks cool, you know?” I said. “You have to turn off all the lights and put a big bowl of water under it.

And then these chunks of burning plastic drip off the bottom slowly. They make this zip noise, and there’s a streak of blue 1 2 7

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fl ame until they hit the water. It goes faster and faster near the end—zip-zip-zip-zip, with the blue streak getting so bright it just glows solid—and then the last one hesitates, balanced on the hanger, until it tips off and kind of pops and whines down and sizzles out in the water, and there’s just total darkness and silence. The grown-ups thought it was cool that we could get into it, even though we weren’t high.”

“What would you do after that?” asked Wiesner.

“Listen to Hendrix or Donovan and bitch about Nixon, mostly, while passing around a bowl of Screaming Yellow Zonkers. By then it was usually my bedtime,” I said.

“Just you and your parents and this army guy?” asked Forchetti.