“Sounds good,” Lois said, wriggling on the seat, and then turning to Rick for his comment.
“Yes,” Rick said, “it sounds very good. I think they’ll like it.”
“I hope so,” Josh said. He sighed heavily and then said, “You get off here, don’t you, Rick?”
“This is it,” Rick said.
“Oh, so soon?” Lois said. She faced Rick and smiled, and Rick smiled back wearily. Josh pulled the car over to the curb and Rick opened the door and stepped out into the snow.
“Someday we ought to all go for a drink together,” Lois said, looking at Rick steadily. “All three of us.”
“Sure,” Rick said. “Someday.” He smiled, waved, and said, “See you all tomorrow.” And then he closed the door. Lois waved at him, but he spotted the bus and turned his back on her, running to catch it because Anne was waiting and he didn’t want to be late.
7
The day Rick had his brief encounter with Arthur Francis West was, coincidentally, the same day that Joshua Edwards brought his record collection to school. It started like any ordinary day starts, except that Rick had grown wary of ordinary days, knowing that the students of North Manual Trades had a peculiar knack for turning the ordinary into the extraordinary within a matter of minutes. It was this peculiar ability to twist the mundane into the grotesque that made the job so difficult. Rick thought. You could never really plan because you never knew exactly how your plans were going to work out.
It wasn’t like working in an office somewhere. It wasn’t like consulting a rigid schedule: call Andrews at 11:00 to close deal, lunch with Mrs. Mahaffey at 12:30 to discuss Bigelow account, interview prospective stenogs at 3:00, get memo off to Frisco office re delinquent payments. Nothing like that. Because, barring the small office annoyances that came up, it was usually possible to call Andrews at eleven, or wine and dine Mrs. Mahaffey at 12:30, or hire the stenogs, or get off your memos.
It wasn’t like that at Manual Trades. Rick spent a good part of every evening planning his lessons. The lessons all looked good on paper. They were the same kind of lessons which had garnered A after A in his education courses at Hunter. There was only one hitch: they didn’t work. Because if he started out to show the difference between “shall” and “will,” he invariably wound up trying to make himself heard over the roar of a class that preferred discussing the coming Election Day holiday, or the damage they would wreak on Hallowe’en. And if he started out to teach the correct form for a friendly letter, he almost always wound up giving the class a test to keep them quiet and busy. Or sometimes he just gave up and sat there, telling them they’d get a test the next day on the material they should have covered today, and then watching the kids complain and fuss and fidget into silence, only to burst into disorder again when they discovered he’d really meant what he’d said.
So on this very ordinary day, with its very ordinary beginning, the loins of Richard Dadier were girded for whatever surprises the students of North Manual Trades had up their collective sleeves.
The first surprise came in 55-206, and that was no surprise because 55-206 was just full of surprises. It would, in fact, have been surprising if 55-206 had come up with no surprise.
There was something peculiar about the class on that day. Rick noticed it when he was taking the attendance, flipping over the Delaney cards of those boys who were absent. He didn’t know quite what the difference was until he came to Miller’s seat, and then he realized what had changed.
Miller was absent.
“Well,” Rick said aloud. He was truly surprised because Miller had attended his class religiously, even when the other boys were indulging in wholesale cutting. Miller’s appearance at each class had in itself been a surprise, and Rick couldn’t quite understand the boy’s motivation. If someone disliked something so intensely, you’d imagine he’d want to avoid it as much as possible. It was almost as though Miller had formulated a strict set of rules for the playing of the game, though. Those rules included strict attendance at each and every class Rick taught. He had also seemed to have drawn an arbitrary line over which he would not step. It was true that the line seemed to advance a few inches each day, with Miller growing bolder and bolder, but it seemed that once the line had been set for any particular day. Miller observed it as the law, and would not tread beyond it no matter how far he was provoked. His observance of the line extended to holding back anyone else who attempted to cross it. It was as if he said, “This is as far as we’ll go today, and don’t you forget it.”
His absence, therefore, was almost shocking in that Rick had come to understand the rules that governed the game they played, and this was a distinct breach of the rules. When he looked at Miller’s vacant seat and exclaimed, “Well,” there was honest surprise on his face, and West promptly supplied, “Greg ain’t here today.”
“I gathered,” Rick said dryly.
“He ain’t cutting neither,” West said.
“We’ll find out about that when I send a list of absentees down to the office,” Rick answered.
“Go ahead,” West said. “He ain’t cutting. His sister’s in the hospital.”
“Oh?” Rick said. “Nothing serious, I hope.”
“Naw,” West answered. “She got knocked up, that’s all.” He smiled and stared at Rick. “You know what ‘knocked up’ means, teach?”
“I, ah, think I’ve heard the expression before,” Rick said, a bored look on his face.
“Yeah, well she got knocked up. At a grind session.” West smiled again. “You know what a grind session is, teach?”
“You know what a jam session is, West?” he asked, suddenly annoyed with all this nonsense. The boys automatically assumed that an English teacher was some sort of sexless, neuter, unthinking, unfeeling, unaware person who knew only his textbooks. He had upheld this misconception up to now, but he was all at once disturbed by it. He didn’t like West’s intimation that expressions like “knocked up” and “grind session” were foreign to him. He’d been a kid, too, and he’d flopped in whore houses from Panama to Tokyo, and his manhood was somehow offended by West’s implication. He realized this was all a matter of masculine pride, but he could not control the urge to show West that he knew a few things about life, too, perhaps a little more than West with his goddamned wise-guy smirk would ever know.
“A jam session ain’t a grind session, teach,” West said knowingly.
“No kidding? Is that right, West? Tell me, West, do you know what a dream session is? You ever been inside a shooting gallery, West? You know what mootah is, West? You dig a monkey scratching at your back, West? You know what a twist is? You ever flop into some cat’s pad, West? You know what screech trumpet is? Are you hip or from nowhere? What do you say, West?”
West stared at Rick, plainly confused. “You don’t fool me,” he said. “You’re a square.”
“Like a bear,” Rick snapped. “But tell me, West, do you know what H is? Or C? Or M? Do you know what a fix means? Have you ever met The Man, West? Tell me, West, has your experience included names like Cat Andrews or Thelonious Sphere Monk or Vido Musso or Cozy Cole? Come on, West, talk. You want to talk, don’t you?”
“I heard of them guys,” West said, frowning.
“Well good, boy. Fine. Then you know what smoke is, huh, West? You dig a high on smoke, boy? You hip to the art of a water mix? You ever dance fish, West? You ever swap spit? Or are you just all talk and no cojones? You ever read Hemingway, West?”
“Who’s he?” West asked.
“He plays drums with Gillespie, West. He beats a wild skin. He beats a wine skin, too. But you’ve been to Spain, haven’t you, West? A man of your wide experience. A man who knows what ‘knocked up’ means, and ‘grind session.’ You also know what planked means, don’t you? You know what a dry run is, huh boy? Or do you go for crime jargon, West? Is that your speed? You a heel and toe boy? A grifter? A fish? What are you, West? A con man? Come on, West.”