“No?”
“No.”
“You jus’ pure-white innocent, that’s all,” Miller said.
“But what about our talk the other day, Miller? I thought we...”
“Mr. Dad-yay,” Miller said, “s’pose we jus’ forget that li’l snowjob, okay?”
“I wasn’t snowing you,” Rick lied. All right, he had snowed Miller. That was before he knew. This was different now.
“Man,” Miller said, “the snow was knee-deep.”
Rick stared at the boy, feeling curiously like the fellow who’d cried wolf. He’d tried to capture Miller’s loyalty on a false peg Monday. The peg had turned out to be a true enough one, and now Miller had turned the tables. He hadn’t believed Rick then, and he wasn’t buying anything Rick sold from now on.
“I mean it, Miller,” Rick said fervently.
“Man, you know that li’l poem, don’t choo?” Miller asked.
“What poem?”
Miller smiled. “The wind blew, and the crap flew, and for days the vision was bad.” He paused and studied Rick’s face, still smiling.
“I don’t see the point,” Rick said slowly.
“You don’t, huh? Well, what I mean, Chief, the vision is jus’ now beginnin’ to clear up a little. I can see fine now.”
“You are a leader,” Rick said, almost desperately this time, the realization overwhelming.
“I got a class now,” Miller said. “Mind if I go, Chief?”
He walked across the room and hesitated at the door, seemingly about to say something further. Then he smiled, shrugged, and left Rick sitting at his desk with an Unassigned period.
The remainder of Rick’s teaching day was almost a repetition of what went on in his fifth-period English class. He could not, of course, know whether or not Miller had engineered the silences which persisted in both his seventh-term classes. Perhaps he had, or perhaps the boys had hit upon this method of treatment on their own initiative.
They were silent. They were as silent as Death. They volunteered nothing. When he called on an individual directly, the boy would answer tersely and sullenly. The ball was all his own, and they sure as hell weren’t helping him carry it. Any interference they ran was all in the opposite direction.
He gave them all he could give them, and then went into some written drills in an attempt to crack the silence that way. The silence remained silent, and Rick felt his anger rising, and he controlled himself only with the greatest effort. He learned on that Thursday of his first week at Manual Trades that there is a vast difference between an orderly classroom and an ostracizing one.
By the end of the day, he was as jumpy as a toad. He gathered up his books and papers and stuffed them into his briefcase viciously. Then he went to his closet at the back of the room, unlocked it, and took out his topper, slinging it over his arm. He was leaving the room when he noticed all the windows were open. Angrily, he dumped his briefcase and topper on his desk, and then went around closing each window, using the long window pole and almost breaking a pane of glass on one window. He put the pole back into its corner, gathered up his briefcase and topper again, locked the door to Room 206, and headed down for the General Office.
Lois Hammond was standing by the time clock when he got there. She inserted her card, punched out, and then slipped the card into its identically-numbered slot in the rack near the clock. She turned then and spotted Rick.
“Oh, hello,” she said.
“Hello,” Rick said briefly. He did not mean to be intentionally rude, but his mind was occupied with Miller and the treatment he’d received from his classes, and he could not exactly discount Lois Hammond’s role in the sequence of events.
She was smiling now, her pale lipstick almost dark against her delicate face. She had good teeth, Rick noticed, the better to eat you with. Grandma. There were lines of weariness around her eyes and her sensuous mouth, and he suddenly wondered what kind of hell she’d been going through, and this softened his attitude a little.
“I’ve... I’ve been wanting to thank you,” she said in a low voice. She lowered her eyes momentarily, and then lifted them suddenly in a turning-full-power-of-brown-eyes-on gesture. He noticed this, and he wondered if she were being artful or coy, and then he decided she was not. There seemed to be an aura of innocence about this one, a naïveté that gave the lie to the woman’s body beneath the loosely tailored suit. He realized abruptly that she had no more desired the attempted rape than he had, and he smiled.
“I guess we’ve just been missing each other,” he said. “It can get pretty busy the first week.”
“Yes,” she said. She took her lower lip between her teeth, nibbled at it, and then dropped it. “Well, now that I’ve cornered you... thanks.”
“Now that you’ve cornered me,” he said, “you’re welcome.”
Lois Hammond hesitated. “I hope... I hope this hasn’t hindered you in any way. With your classes, I mean. I’d hate to think...”
“No,” he lied hastily. “If anything, it’s helped. Made me a notorious figure.”
“Well, that’s good,” she said uneasily.
“And... you?”
“Oh, it’s been fine,” she said. “I teach two senior classes and two freshmen classes. My official class is a senior group. They all want to graduate, you know, and I think they’re frightened by what happened to Murray. I haven’t had any trouble with them at all. And the freshmen, of course... well, they’re not too aware.” She smiled knowingly, and said, “I mean, they’re just little boys, really.”
“I understand,” Rick said.
“So it hasn’t been bad at all. I was just worried that you might have suffered for it. It’s been bothering me.”
“Nope,” Rick said with manufactured nonchalance, “no pain at all.”
“Well, I’m truly happy about that. And thanks, really, I don’t know what got into that boy. He just...” She shrugged her shoulders, as if she honestly could not understand what had provoked lust. But in shrugging, her breasts moved, and Rick wondered for the second time if she were being artful, exhibiting her femininity while denying it. She seemed unaware of her breasts, though, like a little girl visiting a mature woman’s body, living in it for a while, but not really getting used to all the furniture.
Rick smiled and said, “Well, tomorrow is Friday. I think the hardest part will be over once this week is gone.”
“I hope so,” she said. She sighed. “I think I’ll celebrate its passing.”
“Have a good time,” Rick said, still smiling.
“I’ve got to run now,” she said, She extended her hand, and when Rick took it, she tightened her fingers. “Thanks again. Very much.”
“Don’t mention it,” Rick said.
“Good-by.”
He nodded and watched her leave the office. When she was gone, he took his card from the rack, inserted it into the clock and punched out.
It was 4:05, and he was tired and anxious to get home.
5
At 3:45 the next day Rick was just as tired, and perhaps just as anxious to get home. With his last period class dismissed, he sat at his desk without budging, staring out over the empty seats, relaxing completely for the first time that day.
The silence had persisted. It had reached almost gruesome proportions. He had fought it tenaciously, but the battle was a one-sided one, a struggle in which he was forced to take the offensive while all of his classes sat behind their calm defenses and watched.
He savored this other silence now, this silence that was a normal one, the silence of an empty classroom. It was a good silence. He appreciated it. He sat at his desk and let it swirl around him, like the warm currents of a tropical lake. He rose finally, and lazily began stuffing his briefcase. This was Friday, the end of the week. There was no rush. Tomorrow was Saturday, and the next day was Sunday, and by Monday he’d have figured something out.