The boys were still holding Belazi and West, but they no longer seemed terribly interested in the troublemakers.
For an instant. Rick felt a twinge of panic. For that brief, terrible instant he imagined that the boys hadn’t really come to his aid at all, that they had simply seen an opportunity for a good fight and had seized upon it. And then he remembered whose voice he had heard first, the voice shouting, “Lee him alone, you goddamn fool!” He looked among the crowd of faces around him, and he found Miller, and their eyes met, but he could read nothing on Miller’s face.
“I... I think I’d better take them down to Mr. Small,” he said. He stared at the boys, trying to read their faces, trying mostly to read Miller’s unsmiling face, searching for something in their eyes that would tell him he had at last reached them, reached them in a different way than “The Fifty-First Dragon” had. He could tell nothing. Their faces were blank, their eyes emotionless.
He wondered if he should thank them. If only he knew. If he could only hit upon the right thing to say, the thing to cement it all.
“I’ll... I’ll take them down. Suppose... you... you all go to lunch now.”
“That sure is a mean cut,” Kruger said, and Miller watched and said nothing.
“Yeah,” Rodriguez agreed.
“You can all go to lunch,” Rick said. “I want to take Belazi and West...”
The boys didn’t move. They stood there with serious faces, solemnly watching Rick.
“... to... the... principal,” Rick finished.
“A hell of a mean cut,” Taglio said.
And then Miller came out of the circle of faces, and he stepped forward, and he chose his words very carefully, and his face was very serious. “Maybe we should jus’ forget the principal, Chief, huh?” he said. “Maybe we should jus’ oughta go to lunch.”
Rick looked at Miller, and again their eyes met. He did not pretend to understand. He knew only that West had stepped over the line Miller had drawn, and Miller had been presented with a choice. He could either step over the line with West, or he could help in shoving West back over that line. He had chosen to help Rick. He had fought for him, and now the fight was over, and through some unfathomable code of his own, he was now turning on Rick again.
Or was he?
There was something strange in Miller’s eyes, and the smile that usually dominated his face was not there now. His eyes were inquisitive and his entire body seemed to strain forward, tensed, waiting. He did not take his eyes from Rick’s face, and those eyes pleaded, pleaded with a mute intensity. Rick stared at him, and he did not understand at first, and then abruptly he realized that Miller had not chosen the easy road when he’d joined the fight against West. Miller had made a choice, and for once that choice had led him down the hard road.
And now there was another choice, and Rick weighed it carefully, and his eyes held Miller’s in the ring of faces around him. It would make things a hell of a lot simpler if he just sent all the kids to lunch and forgot all about Belazi and West. It would make things simpler the way things would have been vastly simpler had he not interfered in that rape so long ago. It would be easy, so easy to say, “All right, let’s just forget all this,” and then go back to teaching the way he’d come to teach lately. It would be easy, very easy, because the kids would all have had a good fight, and Dadier would have shown himself to be a fine guy by forgetting all about it and not getting Belazi and West in trouble. So easy.
The kids crowded around Rick and Miller, and West was smiling broadly, insolently, and everyone was very quiet, and they waited. They had heard what Miller suggested, and now they saw Rick and Miller staring at each other, and they did not know that one was deciding and the other was waiting for that decision. They themselves waited, but they did not wait the way Miller waited, and they did not know Rick was making one of the hardest decisions he’d ever had to make in his life.
When Rick finally spoke, he addressed Miller. He did not speak sternly or harshly or reprimandingly. He did not shout, and he did not whisper. He said it in a normal, conversational tone, and he looked directly at Miller when he said it, and he might have been discussing something entirely different, he might have been someone working at a bench alongside Miller’s who was simply explaining a job that had to be done.
He said, “I’m taking them down, Miller,” and Miller said nothing, and then Rick added, “I have to.”
Miller continued to stare at him for a moment, and the circle of faces seemed to blur together, and Rick wondered if he’d made the wrong choice. And then one of the faces broke into a smile, and that face was Miller’s, and Miller said, “Sure, Mr. Dadier.” And then he shouted, “All right, goddamnit, le’s break this up.”
The circle held for just a moment, and Rick shoved Belazi and West ahead of him, not knowing whether to expect resistance or not. But the boys parted to let him through, and Rick walked past them with his head high.
He was not surprised to hear a voice behind him pipe in a high falsetto, “Oh Daddy-oh! You’re a hee-ro.”
But a second voice shouted, “Oh, shut yo’ goddamn mouth!” and Rick smiled as he stepped into the corridor with Belazi and West ahead of him. He remembered what he’d thought earlier, before the fight, remembered what he’d thought about just one kid, one kid, that’s all, one kid getting something out of it all, one kid he could point to and say, “I showed him the way,” and that would make it all right, if he could only say that.
And so the smile mushroomed all over his face, and he walked down to Small’s office, smiling all the way, smiling happily because the second voice he’d heard had belonged to Gregory Miller.
14
Solly Klein stood near the bulletin board in the teachers’ lunchroom and pointed a stubby forefinger at the school page of the World-Telegram-Sun.
“Another list of names,” he said. “All the suckers who passed the elementary school exam this time.” He shook his head, tapped the tacked page with his finger, and then walked back to the table. “They never learn,” he said. “They get sucked in every year.”
“The way you got sucked in,” Lou Savoldi said, looking up from his tea.
“I got sucked in, all right,” Solly answered. “Had I known what...”
“Had I but known,” George Katz said, smiling. “Ah, had I but known.”
“Read your history book,” Solly said.
Rick, entering from the stairwell behind the gym, stopped at the refrigerator in the kitchen, opened the door, and looked inside for his container of milk.
“I’ve got the milk, Dadier,” Manners called from the table.
Rick nodded, closed the door, and then walked into the dining room.
“Look at all the happy faces,” he said, smiling.
“We ought to get two containers from now on,” Manners said. “I’ve almost finished this one.”
“You’re a greedy pig,” Rick told him.
“I can’t help it,” Manners said apologetically. “I like milk.”
“The trouble with you,” Katz said humorously, “is that you were weaned too early.”
“I was never weaned,” Manners answered slyly. “There’s nothing I like better than the breast.”
“You owe me money on that container,” Rick said. “And you haven’t paid me for yesterday’s yet, either.”
“Wait until payday,” Manners said. “I’m a little short.”
“High finance at Manual Trades,” Solly said sourly. “A bunch of bankers. What’s the bill come to now, Dadier? Twelve cents?”
“Twelve cents is a lot of money today,” Savoldi said.
Rick smiled. “As a matter of fact, it’s twenty-six cents. Milk went up.”