Truants (3 page)
At ten, Steele and I would take a break together and stroll up and down the gravel lands of the carnival, listening to the come-ons of the con men who wanted you to throw something: a dart, a baseball, a hoop. As you walked by their booths they’d implore, challenge, and then insult you as you passed. After the first week, and they knew us, they ignored us, which is the only kind of affection I ever saw exchanged at the fair. I couldn’t blame them. Many were old enough to be our fathers, and they had to admit this was what they did for a living. Steele would kid with the whores here and there, but that was harder, too, after they saw us night after night. He was trying to get a bargain, like everyone else.
We’d pause and watch girls on the rides. It gave Steele a charge to see girls scream, he told me, as we watched three high school girls in one car of the Octopus one night. Everything smelled of popcorn and hydraulic oil, and the ride operator plied the levers with a vengeance, his eye on the trio also. When they stopped, Steele introduced himself as the director of the fair and offered them all ice cream. They looked us over and fled into the gravel dust of the carnival night. The ride operator laughed, and Steele spat: “Eat it, you rapist!”
He chased us for a while, but we’d both been chased worse, and we separated and met again at the Game and Fish Building snack bar. By the time I arrived, Steele was leaning on the counter flirting with Connie, a girl of about twenty, our favorite girl since she slipped us free tacos and Coke. He pointed instructions as she inserted the various ingredients.
“Collin, Collin,” she said when she saw me. “Steele says you’ve caused another row on the midway.” She winked.
“Oh, Collin, you mustn’t toy with girls, didn’t your father ever tell you that? A girl’s heart is different; be careful!”
“My father never told me anything except ‘get more ice’—You can put onions on mine.”
She handed Steele a fat taco and commenced stuffing mine with the works. She wore one of those pink jumpers with a white blouse rolled to the elbows. Her name tag read: “Coca-Cola: Constance.”
“You look like a nurse,” Steele said, chewing. “When are you coming over to our house and make us better?”
“Come on, Collin, follow it up: Now you ask what time I get off work.” Behind her, through the Game and Fish Building window I could see antlers shift in the yellow light.
“What time do you get off work?” I said.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Christ, I don’t know, Connie, you said to ask. Give me a Coke. Let’s talk about the weather.”
“Some partner you’ve got, Raymond.” She placed her warm hand along my chin. “A woman killer.” I pulled my head away and Steele laughed.
“I know,” he said. “But I’m teaching him.”
I held up the remnant of my taco. “As long as I get the food, that’s woman killing enough for me,” I said. “Besides, Connie, a woman’s place is in the snack bar.”
We waltzed away as she made to throw a sugar container. “I love you, boys. Come again.”
“Bye, Connie,” Steele said, and he belched, “and keep up the good work! Barn number 2, remember.”
“Go on!”
Then Steele and I would go back to work until midnight when Ring Holz would come on again, and we’d stand outside the barn with our shovels and watch him start the machine. The girl would board the bar below and up they’d roar, slowly, in a ferocity of light.
“Jesus, he should tune that thing.”
“I think he likes it the way it is; sounds more dangerous,” I said.
At the top, Ring would jump up, standing on the seat and then quickly slip into a headstand, wringing the handle for noise, while the girl held still for everything. The spotlight was often misaimed and would clip only the front wheel of the cycle or only him, or sometimes—eerily—only her. It was on her tonight, and she sat alone in the sky in a silver suit, the universe black with noise.
“How’d you like some of that?” Steele inquired. “How would you like some of that right there, right up there on the trapeze?” He aimed his shovel like a rifle. I looked at him, wondering if someday I, too, would measure all phenomena by its potential for sexual intercourse.
“Not with all that noise,” I said.
***********
At twelve-thirty we walked out back through the fair, the darkened and settling midway, to a shack by the racetrack where the night-shift clean-up crew would be flopped out drinking coffee. Three men sat in Ramirez’—the foreman’s—truck drinking something out of paper cups. Steele and I and Motor Rawlins climbed in the Home van which was the old Chevrolet station wagon. We sat in silence for the hour it took Hall to drive us out to the Noble Canyon Home for Wayward Girls.
We had tried to talk to Mr. Hall the first few drives back to the Home, but he was useless. He still hated us from last year when we’d tried to electrocute him in woodshop-technical drawing, the course he taught at the Home, and the conversations would die of ill will and inertia, and Rawlins would always mutter, “Well, another day another dollar.”
I always felt dry and wasted on the ride, leached of any moisture, my mind an old piece of bread. I would watch the luminous green freeway signs rise in the windshield:
Camelback, Indian School, Bethany Home;
and then later:
Thunderbird, Greenway, Bell
. I remember those rides as silence, the only silence in our last fall together. Rawlins and Steele were the same age; they were up against it and knew it. This fair thing was the last job the juvenile division lined up for them, and they were both out at the end of September when the fair closed. On their own. Steele faced it with false bravado, and Rawlins didn’t really care. And as odd as they were, and as the times were, those guys were my only friends.
Motor Rawlins, whose real name was Mike, worked heavy maintenance at the fair, erecting bleachers for ceremonies. He could have lifted tractors while tires were changed. He was capable of doing things singlehanded.
Whereas my father had lodged me in the Home, Rawlins’s mother did the trick. He had been in the facilities the longest. What got him was that he was adopted. His mother had sued the adoption agency for bad goods. She filed the suit during the late part of a recent decade when this type of litigation was first recourse, not last resort,
and
she had won damages as well as part of the social security payments it took to keep Mike in the center. He had been in the lower facilities, and now he was in the upper facilities. Next year, he and Steele would graduate from the facilities.
I found Rawlins silly only at times. He was not significantly short of marbles or loose on screws. I knew he could eat dominoes. I knew he was a bear to wake up in the mornings. In kindergarten he had eaten things: the hands off paper-plate clocks, crayons, edible things really. But his mother did not like that, and she hated that his genes were not her own (she was into genes), and she really hated her husband for not giving her a child. Rawlins said he had no memory of arguments or fights with his mother. She simply picked him up from school one day, and without a word, deposited him at the Home. He was six, and people of that age take what is given.
It was strange: his papers read the same as mine: “ungovernable” and “incorrigible.” I didn’t feel “incorrigible”; I felt “corrigible,” if anything. Actually, I felt “lost most of the time,” but that wasn’t one of the choices. Luckily for us, Rawlins took all of the events in his life calmly, as if he were moving down a sad, endless cafeteria line, the food not bad, not good, but platefuls anyhow. He was not a rancorous delinquent.
I wasn’t either. Raymond Steele was a rancorous delinquent. His memory was like a stone tablet of wins, losses, and ties; he was not forgetting a thing, and he was for getting even. In the time I knew him, he had recounted each violent interview he’d ever had with his father the way a sportscaster would. His father had beaten him up casually and regularly since Steele had been six years old. Steele had just waited, his rancor building, his memory a series of bitter debts, until he grew big enough to collect. When he was fourteen, he waited for his father for the last time. Steele had stood behind the door in the family den, waiting an hour and a half, which was not long after the eight and a half years it had taken him to grow to a wiry five foot eleven. When his father entered the room, he was carrying a beer. Steele stepped halfway out, and, with his left hand gripping the edge of the door for leverage, he stroked his father in the face with his right fist as hard as he could. It must have been quite a punch. Anyway, Steele’s father went straight through a stack of T.V. trays, his head leaving a greasy bruise on the wall. Steele himself salvaged what he could of the old man’s beer, sipped the foam, and turned on the television. He said the punch, while great, had not totally evened the score, but sitting there he couldn’t bring himself to get up and kick the comatose, even if it was his father.
When his mother came home at eleven, Johnny Carson was on, and Mr. Steele was still out.
“And here I am,” Steele would say, smiling, his nose a crooked—though handsome—reference to his relationship with his father. “And I feel better. It’s just too bad June stayed with the bastard.” He said the word “bastard” as an ordinary fact, his rancor only showing in the thin line his teeth made in the truculent smile.
*********
Electrocution as a way of life
The night desert was luminous as is its way in the fall; the ground gathers light and heat all day and gives it off all the darkness long. When Hall pulled the van into the double-fenced gate of the Home at 1:10
A.M.
, it was still eighty-four degrees. Hall let us off without a word in front of our wing, and he drove off to the row of small modern ranch houses built for the faculty.
“Refugee!” Steele said after the car. The students at Noble Canyon called the faculty “refugees.” It was a pretty accurate word in my distant opinion. They were the teachers from throughout the state who, for a variety of reasons, had worked their twisted ways to the bottom of the totem pole, but not yet off. They were too pathetic to fire.
Hall had taught industrial arts in Kingman, Arizona, for four years before coming to Noble Canyon Home for Wayward Girls. At Kingman there had been seven serious accidents in the woodshop, and Hall himself was thrown by a lathe. He caught his apron in a lathe and was launched out of most of his clothes, through the windows, and he landed on the roadway where he was hit by a motorcyclist who thought the naked Hall was the first part of the second coming. It was too much for the Board of Education and down he went, down, down; and now he taught technical drawing, shop, and American history at the Home. Oh, yes, we had the newspaper accounts of the accident in our room. Hall had arrived when Steele was in the eighth grade, and Steele had framed the article and had it featured along with other bad news on his wall. Hall complained every year, but the rules didn’t allow anything except pornography to be removed from “students’” rooms. Theirs, then, was a significant and mutual hatred.
Hall resented that we had electrocuted him. He resented a lot of things because he had a high dish-it-out to take-it ratio. His favorite thing was to send the eighth graders in his class into the high school shop class to retrieve the “hole-mover” or the “left-handed coping saw.” Ha Ha Ha. The kids would come back empty handed and red-eyed, trembling in astonishment that adults would create jokes with kids as characters. And the kids, always the younger kids, would stand back by the huge desk-size vise in the metal shop, thinking they were hidden, crying tears onto the varnished concrete floor.
In architectural-tech drawing we were drawing schematics of the famous Arc de Triomphe, one of the larger victory symbols in the world, and Hall would yell at us: “It is not a circle, you dolts; it is an arc!”—as if that made the distinction clear, and then he’d send someone over to the high school class to retrieve the “seven pencil compass.”
The other joke Hall became skilled at was wiring his own metal vise to a large battery he’d hidden in a drawer, and when someone had a question, Hall would beckon them up to the desk. The student had to lean on the vise in order to get his word in, and as the student jumped back suddenly, shaking his hand and trying to close his eyes, Hall would start with the laughter. He had a low even rattle of a laugh that sounded overtly carnivorous.
So it was quite simple for Steele to rewire the vise to the 220-volt wall plug while I asked Hall, out back, what he meant by an arc. I asked the question so stupidly that Hall was again inspired to one of his moving berations of the class. I could see his mouth already forming the word “dolts,” when he let his white wrist descend to the metal vise. The electric bite of the connection lifted Hall’s eyes open to a new world in a resonating flicker, and his mouth opened in a bionic drool: Haahhhh! The class was finally paying attention to the teacher, as he unplugged his arm using the other, and began the post-electrocution hippety-hop, making a face right out of the annals of gastric hyperacidity. When the b-b’s in the puzzle of his eyes settled and his mouth flattened to a line that only rippled every ten seconds or so like an electrocardiogram, we all buried our faces in the Arc with a new sense of the victory symbolism potential in all architecture.
His animosity toward Steele and me was, of course, recharged, but there was little he could do but keep on giving everyone the hard ride he thought education was meant to be.
I don’t think Hall was a bad man; he had just spent a life around people and machines that didn’t, for various reasons, cooperate with his visions.
The other teachers were not as explicitly malevolent as Hall, but none were really whole. My Latin teacher, Mr. Salmon, had in fact been fired even from Noble Canyon, but he was so disoriented that he kept coming back. I think he taught a year and a half without pay. He’d insult us in Latin, making fun of everyone’s names and the hidden Latin meanings, until someone found out that Salmon meant “to leap.” I will just say that a phrase like that in the hands of abused juvenile delinquents can spawn ten thousand jokes. I called him “our leaping visionary” and let it go at that.