The Wednesday Wars (21 page)

This was frightening. It was the kind of stuff that makes you hope that you are never alone in the locker room with the other guys on your team.

And there wasn't much help from anyone in Mrs. Baker's class.

"I wonder why Holling had the fastest time," said Danny after the announcements—a whole lot louder than he had to. "Could it be because he was running away from two rats who were trying to eat him?"

"That might have had a little to do with it," I said.

"A little!" said Danny.

"A little!" said Meryl Lee.

"A little!" said Mai Thi.

"A very little," I said, and everyone in the class ripped out a piece of paper from their notebooks, scrunched it up, and threw it at me—which was unfair, since you can't stop twenty-two pieces of scrunched-up paper at the same time.

You pretty much know from what I just told you that Mrs. Baker wasn't in the room. She'd been called down to the office for a phone call before Morning Announcements, and she'd had Mr. Vendleri stay with us while she was gone.

Which was why balls of scrunched-up paper surrounded my desk by the time Mrs. Baker came back, and since generally the person who is surrounded by balls of scrunched-up paper will be the person blamed for all the balls of scrunched-up paper, I figured I would be the one who had to pick them all up. That's how it is in the world.

But not this time.

Because the phone call in the office was from the United States Army. The Vietcong had abandoned Khesanh, and 20,000 American troops were marching to relieve the marines—and to find missing American soldiers. Like Lieutenant Baker. "It will be called," Mrs. Baker told us, "Operation Pegasus. Now, someone tell me the meaning of the classical allusion."

She never did say anything about all the balls of scrunched-up paper around my desk.

You may have noticed, too, that it was Mrs. Sidman who read the Morning Announcements over the P.A. instead of Mr. Guareschi. That was because Mr. Guareschi was gone. Mrs. Baker had told us he had "received an administrative reassignment," but that only meant that he was gone. And Mrs. Sidman was our new principal. Really. I suppose the school board figured that if Mrs. Sidman could pick up two huge rats by the scruff of their necks and carry them through the halls, she could certainly handle middle schoolers. Which was probably true.

No one saw Mr. Guareschi leave, still looking for a small country to be dictator of.

But everyone saw Mrs. Sidman on the first day she was principal. She stood in the main lobby and watched us come in. She already knew almost all of our names, and she must have said "Good morning" three hundred times. She stood straight, with her arms folded across her chest—which, as any teacher coach will tell you, isn't good for teachers but probably isn't bad for principals.

I heard that she even stared down Doug Swieteck's brother.

While Mrs. Sidman was starting up her new job at Camillo Junior High, President Lyndon B. Johnson was giving up his old one at the White House. Walter Cronkite carried the announcement the last day of March: President Johnson said that he did not want to be distracted by partisan politics "with America's sons in the fields far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home." He had decided that he would not run for the presidency again. His whole face seemed to sag down as he said this.

"He doesn't want to be humiliated," said my sister at the first commercial that night. "He knows he can't win against Bobby Kennedy."

"He knows he can't win against Richard Nixon," said my father. "Not with the whole war on his back."

"Either way, he's getting out because he doesn't want to lose, not because he cares about America's future."

My father sighed a loud sigh. "So is that how all flower children make their judgments—so quick and easy?"

"When they're quick and easy to make," said my sister.

Only the end of the commercial stopped what could have gotten a whole lot louder.

I seemed to see President Johnson's sagging face through the rest of the news. Banquo's face probably looked a whole lot like that just before Macbeth had him killed, when he suddenly realized that everything that he had hoped for was crashing down.

And then, on top of that, we found out after the
CBS Evening News
that President Johnson wasn't the only one giving up his job.

"Kowalski's finished, too," said my father.

We all looked at him.

"What do you mean?" said my mother.

"Finished," said my father. "Done. Over. Washed up. Kaput. I told you he couldn't play for keeps. They'll announce it in a couple of weeks or so. No more Kowalski and Associates. We'll be the only architectural firm in town that matters." He looked at me. "I told you we'd be going places if we got the junior high job, didn't I?"

I nodded. He had told me.

"What about the Kowalskis?" I asked.

My father shrugged. "Architecture is a blood sport," he said.

So at lunch recess the next day, Meryl Lee and I spent a lot of time not saying anything—until Meryl Lee said it for us.

"I might be moving," she said.

I looked at her.

"I'll probably be moving."

"Where?" I said.

"To my grandmother's house. In Kingston."

I nodded.

Another minute or so of not saying anything went by.

I knew I should say something. I guess after reading all that Shakespeare I should know what to say. But I didn't have a single word.

So Meryl Lee said it for us again.

"Toads, beetles, bats," she said. And that was exactly right.

Meryl Lee didn't know how long she had left. Maybe just two or three weeks. So we decided to pretend that it was forever, and we didn't talk about it, and we tried not to think about it. But there were those moments when one of us would look at the other, and we knew what we were thinking, even though we wouldn't say it. Probably sort of how it was between Romeo and Juliet.

It helped to run hard, so hard that you can't think about much of anything else because your arteries are all opened out as far as they can be, looking for some oxygen, any oxygen, because you can't pull enough air into your lungs and there's this coach who has invented an entirely new vocabulary to wrap around the word "faster," a vocabulary that even Caliban would have blushed at. We ran for more miles a day than most commuters drive. We ran through neighborhoods that I don't think are even in Nassau County. We ran past other junior high schools and got jeered at by baseball players who warmed up with a couple of sprints and then shagged balls the rest of the afternoon. We ran past the red tulips in front of Saint Adelbert's and the white lilacs in front of Temple Beth-El. We ran past Goldman's Best Bakery and smelled the latest batch of cream puffs sending their scent through the open windows. One day we ran all the way to Jones Beach, and if Mrs. Sidman hadn't sent a bus after us, I think we would have collapsed on the boardwalk and died.

But I was getting faster. Really. Even though I stayed at the back of the pack of eighth graders.

Let me tell you, when you're in the seventh grade, it isn't healthy to run at the front of a pack of eighth graders. I did it once, and they pulled my shorts down to my ankles in midstride.

You don't let something like that happen twice.

You stay at the back of the pack. And you learn the telltale signs of someone ahead of you who is about to spit off to the side.

Danny understood this, too, since he ran behind the eighth graders on the junior varsity team, and they were angry eighth graders. Angry eighth graders with plenty of spit.

Mrs. Baker did not understand why I was running behind anyone. She decided to give me a month off Shakespeare to coach me, since developing the body as well as the mind, she said, was a humane and educational activity. Every Wednesday, she timed a three-mile run, and I was dropping a couple of minutes with each one. (This didn't include the time I made when Sycorax and Caliban were chasing me, when I think I might have beaten Jesse Owens.) My lean was better, Mrs. Baker said, and my arms a lot looser. But she still wanted to work on my breathing, and so after the three miles we did wind sprints until I almost threw up—which makes you want to get your breathing better in a hurry.

Mrs. Baker didn't care that I had regular practice on Wednesday afternoons, after school, with Coach Quatrini. "If you want to get better, you run," she said. "You can't possibly run too much"—which I do not think is true but probably is some sort of teacher strategy.

Meryl Lee didn't understand why I was running at all, since it meant I wasn't working on the "California Gold Rush and You" project, and she'd already written all the notes for our report and started on the contour map.

"Don't think a rose and a Coke are going to get you out of this," she said.

Which I already knew. Remember, I'm not a jerk like Romeo.

And that was why one afternoon I was in Meryl Lee's kitchen, working on making the California Gold Rush relevant to You, when Mr. Kowalski came home and told us what he had heard on the car radio: that Martin Luther King, Jr., who was in Memphis helping striking sanitation workers, had been shot and killed. He died, Mr. Kowalski said, just after he had asked a friend to play "Precious Lord, Take My Hand."

Meryl Lee took my hand and we went into the living room, where Walter Cronkite was just finishing the news. He told us that it was all horribly true. I thought he was shaking.

"Nothing will ever be the same," said Mr. Kowalski.

Meryl Lee squeezed my hand. Hard.

That night, my sister would not come down to supper. And my father did not call her down. He sat with a face as grim as President Johnson's. Every so often he would look up the stairs to my sister's room, then back down at his lima beans. "How could this happen?" he said.

The next day, there were riots in Chicago, in Savannah, in Washington, in Toledo, in Detroit, in Pittsburgh, and in New York. "We are coming apart," my father said.

And on Tuesday, while everyone at Camillo Junior High watched on a television in the gym, my father stayed home from Hoodhood and Associates to watch on our television two Georgia mules draw the old green farm wagon that carried the body of Martin Luther King, Jr., through the streets of Atlanta. He didn't say a thing at supper. Neither did my sister.

Just before I went to bed that night, I reminded my father that the next day was Opening Day at Yankee Stadium—you probably remember how we got the tickets—and he had promised to drive me there to meet Danny and his father, and Doug and his father, and to write a note to get me out of Coach Quatrini's cross-country practice for that day and to let me leave before school ended.

"Isn't there enough happening in the world that you shouldn't have to go into the city for a baseball game?" he said.

"It's Opening Day," I said.

He shook his head. He never did write the note. So I wrote it myself and got him to sign it in the morning. I told him that he needed to pick me up at 12:00 noon sharp since the game began at 2:00. "Sure, sure," he said—which were the same words that Coach Quatrini used when I showed him the note.

"You expect me to believe that your father wrote this?" he said.

"I wrote the note. He signed it," I said.

"Did he read it before he signed it?"

No, you pied ninny, you blind mole, I wanted to say. He didn't read it. He just signs whatever I ask him to sign. Like blank checks with lots of numbers to the left of the decimal point.

"Yes," I said.

Coach Quatrini scrunched the paper in a ball and threw it at me. "I won't go easy on you at the next practice," he said.

As if this was something I hadn't already counted on.

Mrs. Baker figured that since I was leaving early, I should do the whole day's work in the morning. When I pointed out that neither Danny nor Doug was even in class and that they were probably taking the whole day off and maybe they were sitting in Yankee Stadium already, watching batting practice with Horace Clarke and Joe Pepitone hitting them out a mile, Mrs. Baker pointed out that run-on sentences were improper and I would do well to get started on the nonrestrictive-clauses worksheet. Which I did, since the prospect of Opening Day at Yankee Stadium made even nonrestrictive clauses bearable. (And it probably helped that Danny and Doug would have to do all the work the next day anyway.)

By the time noon came, my hands were blue with the fresh ditto ink, but I had finished every nonrestrictive-clause exercise, and done the reading comprehension, and even done more to make the California Gold Rush relevant to You by pointing out the perils of the love of money in a brilliantly worded argument for Mr. Petrelli, which I handed Mrs. Baker while everyone went out to lunch recess.

"Why don't you take this down to his room?" she said. "By that time, your father will be here." So I did, and Mr. Pertrelli made me stand there by his desk as he read it over, as he pointed out the powerful use of nonrestrictive clauses, as he advised against the use of clichés, and as he identified more than one historical inaccuracy, and as I squirmed, imagining my father standing in his three-piece suit by Mrs. Baker's desk, large and important, the Chamber of Commerce Businessman of 1967—and probably 1968, too.

When Mr. Petrelli finished, I hurried back to Mrs. Baker's room, since I wasn't sure that I wanted my father to be standing there being large and important.

But I didn't need to hurry, since when I got to the room, my father wasn't standing by Mrs. Baker's desk.

We both looked up at the clock.

12:11.

Eleven lousy minutes after 12:00, and he wasn't here yet.

I ran down to the Main Administrative Office and called Hoodhood and Associates. "I'm sorry," said his secretary. "Mr. Hoodhood has been out at the site of the new junior high school all day, and he isn't expected back until two thirty."

"He has a baseball game at two o'clock," I said.

"No, he has an important meeting with the Chamber of Commerce scheduled for four thirty. He wouldn't miss a Chamber of Commerce meeting for a baseball game."