Tee Jay slowly turned his head and looked across the classroom at Elvin and there was sheer malevolence in his eyes.
“Tee Jay,” Jim warned him, and Tee Jay turned back. “Tee Jay, I want you to open your book at page 37 and read the second paragraph.”
Tee Jay opened his English Primer and sat for a moment in silence.
“Well?” Jim asked.
“I just read it. All the way through.”
“I meant out loud, Tee Jay. Out loud, so that we can all hear it.”
Haltingly, Tee Jay read the paragraph, his fingertip crawling from one word to the next. His left eye was completely closed now so he had to cock his head to one side. “The season – demands – that America learn – to better duh-wuh – duh-wuh—”
“Dwell. To better dwell,” Jim prompted him.
“To better dwell on her – choice – choicest possession—”
Jim picked up Tee Jay’s book and finished it for him. “The legacy of her good and faithful men that she well preserve their fame, or, if need be, that she fail not to dissipate what clouds have intruded on that fame, and burnish it newer, truer and brighter, continually.”
He put the book down. “That was Walt Whitman, talking about Thomas Paine; and if ever a man deserved respect, it was Thomas Paine. Like he deserved respect, because he risked his life fighting for equality and justice and what he believed to be right.”
He paused, and then he added, looking straight at Tee Jay, “The day you do that, that’s the day that you’ll start earning your respect.”
Jim spent the rest of the time until recess going over yesterday’s homework, which had been to write a 300-word appreciation of Rip Van Winkle. He never set his class essays longer than 300 words; some of them had to struggle for an hour to write twenty: ‘Rip van Winkles old lady was always giving him a hard time so he went to the wood and drank some stuff and woke up twenty years later and she was dead by then so that was cool.’
Others wrote 600 words of incomprehensible nonsense: ‘People said that thunderstorms were thunderstorms but they werent they were all these real miserable goblin-type guys playing ninepins and Rip van Winkles knees were smoting.’
And Beattie McCordic, of course, turned Rip van Winkle’s nagging wife into a feminist icon: ‘He was a typical man with nothing going for him … who took the world easy, would eat white bread or brown, whatever was less trouble … would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound … and the whole story like blames his wife for nagging him to try to get his act together. Like even his dog thinks he leads a dogs life but what do dogs know and anyhow the dog was male and what do they know (males I mean.)’
In spite of all of his students’ shortcomings, however, Jim could feel a real yearning for understanding in everything they wrote. Even in some of the most laboured essays, heavy with crossings-out and misspellings, there was a strenuous groping for knowledge, a genuine struggle to find the key to literacy. Young people in a darkened room, trying to feel their way towards the door. There were times when he could have cried over what they had written; not for himself, but for them.
‘Rip van Winkle let his childrin run wile they never wore no shos and his suns pants was alus fallin down.’ That was Mark Foley’s essay in its entirety. But Jim could see what it was about the story that had caught Mark’s attention: the careless, lazy father who never took care of his children, so that his son had to troop after his mother wearing his ragged hand-me-down galligaskins – ‘which he had much ado to hold up with one hand, as a fine lady does her train in bad weather.’
In his own way, at home, Mark had suffered the same kind of experience, with a beer-gut father who owned a run-down automobile body shop in Santa Monica, so the story of Rip van Winkle was much more to Mark than just a legend. Mark had lived it; and now he had taken the first step toward expressing himself through fiction.
Who knows, thought Jim wryly, as he closed Mark’s book and dropped it into his ‘Out’ tray. Maybe Mark was destined to be a latter-day Washington Irving.
He was turning to Rita Munoz’s essay (printed in capital letters, as usual, in multi-coloured felt-tip pens), when he happened to turn towards the window. It was dazzlingly bright outside, but he could see all the way across the schoolyard to the boiler-house. A group of boys were playing basketball right outside the boiler-house door; and Sue-Robin Caufield was leaning against a railing talking to Jeff Griglak, captain of the school athletics team and one of the brightest students at Westwood Community College for years. John Ng was sitting on the other end of the bench, eating something indescribable out a box and reading Treasure Island.
It was no more than a flicker; a dark shadow passing over his eye. But the door of the boiler-room suddenly opened, and the tall dark man in the Elmer Gantry hat appeared. He hesitated for a moment, looking right and left, with one hand raised to shield his eyes from the sunlight. Then he hurried diagonally across the schoolyard, and disappeared behind the science block.
He left the boiler-room door ajar. But, strangely, it seemed as if none of the students in the playground had noticed him. None of the boys playing basketball had stopped for a moment, and Sue-Robin had carried on flirting with Jeff Griglak without pausing for breath. Her hair bounced and shone in the mid-morning sunlight.
Jim frowned. He got up from his desk and walked up to the window, cupping his hands around his face to cut out any reflection. Apart from the half-open boiler-house door, everything else appeared to be normal. And yet…
And yet he had a gut feeling that something was badly wrong. He felt as if he had been shown a picture that had been deliberately designed to confuse him: like a painting by Rene Magritte, or one of M.C. Escher’s drawings of never-ending staircases. He left the classroom and walked quickly along the corridor until he reached the swing doors that led outside.
There was laughter and chatter and shouting in the schoolyard but Jim didn’t hear it. He was making his way toward the boiler-house door. He cut right through the middle of the basketball game, and smacked away the ball as it came bouncing toward him.
He reached the boiler-house and peered inside. He could see the handrail and the concrete steps that led down to the boilers themselves; but the rest was in darkness. He called out, “Hallo! Is there anybody in there?”
He listened, but there was no answer, only the deep whistling noise of the gas-fired burners. He called out again, and there was still no reply. He guessed that the man in the Elmer Gantry hat must have gone down there to steal something; or maybe to do some damage. There had been several incidents of former students coming back to take their revenge on the college which they thought had failed them. They had to blame somebody or something for their inability to make it in the world outside.
Jim switched on the overhead lights and looked down over the railings. The boiler-room smelled strongly of heat and gas, but the two large grey-painted boilers appeared to be undamaged. No broken gauges; no pipes sabotaged; nothing like that. Jim was about to switch off the light and go back outside when he glimpsed something glistening in the shadows between the boilers. A black, viscous trickle making its way across the floor. It looked like an oil leak, quite a bad one. He went down the steps, his shoes chuffing on the concrete, approached the boilers and hunkered down so that he could see between them.
The glistening fluid had crept so far across the floor that it was almost touching his toe. He dipped his finger into it and held it up; and it was then that he felt a chilly, tingling feeling all the way down his back. This wasn’t an oil-leak. The liquid had looked black against the concrete, but on his fingertip it was dark, congealed crimson.
Jim strained his eyes to see into the shadows. He fumbled in his pocket and found half a book of matches from the El Torito Mexican Restaurant. He struck one, and it flared up briefly, but it did little more than burn his thumb. He wished to hell he had a flashlight. There was something there – a dark, lumpy shape – but that was all that he could make out.
&nb
sp; With his knees bent, he edged his way between the boilers, feeling his way with his hands. It was so hot in there that sweat was dripping from his forehead before he had even managed to shuffle six feet forward, and his shirt was clinging to his back.
He thought he heard a bubbling, groaning noise, and he stopped and listened, although the sound of the boilers was deafening.
He struck another match, and shouted, “Anybody there? This is Mr Rook! Is there anybody there?”
Again, that agonised, bubbling noise. It sounded like somebody trying to talk while they were drinking a glass of water.
Jim inched forward a little more, and suddenly he was touching something heavy and warm and wet. He shouted out, “Ah!” and recoiled violently.
Shaking, he struck another match; and used it to ignite the last few remaining matches in the book, to give himself a brief flare of bright light. Lying on the concrete in front of him was Elvin, recognisable only by his Dodgers T-shirt, plastered in blood. He had wounds everywhere: all over his arms, all over his face, all over his body, as if somebody had been determined to stab every inch of him. They looked like the gaping mouths of a shoal of stranded fish.
Sensing the heat from the matches, Elvin tried to lift his hand up. He let out another groaning sound; but it was the last gargling exhalation of air and blood from punctured lungs. As the matches burned down, and the light died, so Elvin died, too, and Jim was left in darkness, with the boilers roaring on either side of him.
He took hold of Elvin’s sticky hand, and squeezed it, and whispered, “God be with you, Elvin. So goddamned young,” and that was all he could manage to say.
Chapter Two
Lieutenant Harris knocked on the open classroom door, and stepped inside. He was short and stocky, built like a hefty little linen-chest, with a snub nose and a scrub of sandy hair and a livid red scar on his chin. He wore a sandy-coloured polyester suit with sweat marks under the armpits.
“Mr Rook?” he said. His voice was a soft, congested rasp.
Jim had been standing by the window, looking out. On his desk was the single page of Elvin’s last essay, My Best Poem. He had taken it out of his file, with the intention of giving it to Elvin’s parents. It was Three by Gregory Corso: three short verses, and the last verse read,
‘Death weeps because Death is human
spending all day in a movie when a child dies.’
Jim turned around. He didn’t know whether to smile or cry. The red-and-blue police lights were still flashing outside, although the ambulance and the coroner’s station wagon had left about ten minutes before. Special Class II had been excused college for the rest of the day, and they didn’t have to come back tomorrow if they were still too upset. Three grief counsellors had been called in, to help the students to cope with what had happened. After all, Elvin had been everybody’s friend. Slow, very slow; but endlessly patient; and willing to help anybody if they needed help – fixing the transmissions on their automobiles, putting up shelves, wiring plugs, running errands. Nothing had ever been too much trouble, because the best way in which Elvin had been able to communicate with people was not through words but through practical actions.
Jim had recognised that, and had let him help around the school – mending fences, draining the swimming-pool, and repairing damaged lockers. Elvin used to sing, when he was working. He loved it.
And now, at the age of seventeen years and four months, he was dead.
Lieutenant Harris prowled about the classroom. “What can you tell me about Thomas J. Jones?”
“Tee Jay? What do you want to know? That he’s black? That he’s not very clever? That he comes from a broken home?”
“I want to know if you think that’s he capable of homicide in the first degree.”
Jim turned around and looked at him. “What can I say? I guess we’re all capable of homicide in the first degree, if you give us enough provocation.”
“Come on, Mr Rook. You saw Elvin’s body. You saw what his assailant did to him. One hundred and twelve stab wounds, that’s what the medical examiner counted. Most of us would stop feeling provoked after we’d inflicted just one.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”
“I’m trying to find out from people who knew him well whether Thomas J. Jones had the motive or the psychological characteristics to murder Elvin P. Clay. You’re his teacher. You probably know him better than anybody; his mother excepted.”
“I don’t think he’s a killer,” said Jim.
“He sure isn’t a babe in arms.”
“Listen, he finds it difficult to read. He can’t manage anything more than basic maths. His mother has three daughters and four other sons, and they all live together in a three-bedroom house in the shabbiest part of Westwood. He’s intelligent and energetic, but he’s also dysfunctional and deeply frustrated, like most of the kids in my class. If it hadn’t have been for a garbled set of genes, he probably could have been somebody very special.”
“But you caught him fighting Elvin this morning, didn’t you? A pretty damned serious fight, from what I’ve heard about it so far. And from what I’ve heard about it so far, Thomas J. Jones made specific and unambiguous threats to kill Elvin, in front of several witnesses.”
He took out his notebook and flipped it open. “His actual words were, ‘I’m going to kill him – I’m going to kill him for that – I’m going to murder that mother.’”
Jim said, “Yes. That’s exactly what he said. But he was angry. Elvin said something to upset him, I don’t know what. But in my opinion Tee Jay’s threats didn’t really mean anything.”
Lieutenant Harris gave Jim a long, pained look, as if he were feeling the first pangs of chronic indigestion. “They didn’t really mean anything? Yet less than two hours later, you found Elvin fatally wounded in the college boiler-room, with more holes in him than a chickenwire fence.”
“But Tee Jay didn’t do it, did he? I talked to him already. He spent the whole of recess talking to his friends on the basketball team; and they vouched for that, too.”
“Well, that’s right. Except that we have a ten-minute window. Tee Jay left his friends at approximately 11:05 and said that he needed to call his uncle. He was seen going into the main college building and he wasn’t seen again until 11:15 or thereabouts.”
“Did anybody see him going to the boiler-room?” asked Jim.
“No, sir. But that isn’t really me point. The point is that he had just enough time to go to the boiler-room and perpetrate an act of homicide. He had the motive, and he had the opportunity. What’s more, he has a considerable amount of blood on his clothing, which he freely admits is Elvin’s.”
“Blood from the fight in the washroom. That doesn’t prove anything.”
“Maybe not. But we’ll be running some tests.”
Jim said, “What about the man in black?”
“Excuse me?”
“The man in black. Black suit, black wide-brimmed hat. I was marking books. I looked up and saw him coming out of the boiler-room. He stopped, and took a look around, as if he didn’t want anybody to see him, and then he went off.”
“He was acting suspicious?”
“Well, furtive. That’s the word. Furtive.”
Lieutenant Harris tapped his pencil against his puckered lips. “He must have been. In fact he was so darn furtive that nobody else saw him. There were seventy-nine students out on that playlot this morning – seventy-nine – and not one of them saw anybody unfamiliar.”
“You’re kidding me,” said Jim, in disbelief. “He walked out of the boiler-room in open view of everybody. He opened the door, looked around, and just went marching off, right through a whole crowd of kids. One of them must have seen him.”
“Black suit? Black wide-brimmed hat?” Lieutenant Harris flicked all the way through his notebook and shook his head. “None of your students saw anybody like that.”
“All right. Maybe not. But I sure did.”
Lieu
tenant Harris tucked his notebook into his pocket. “So … do you want to give me a description?”
“You’re not going to take a note?”
“It’s all right, Mr Rook. I can remember it. How tall would you say he was?”
“Hard to tell, with that hat on. Six feet plus. Not heavily built. One hundred and ninety max.”
“And a black suit?”
“That’s right. Baggy, flappy, unconstructed.”
“And what would you say was his ethnic origin?”
“Couldn’t tell, exactly. The sun was against me.”
“You don’t even know if he was black or white?”
Jim thought for a moment, trying to remember what the man had looked like; but then he said, “No.” He hadn’t glimpsed anything which would have conclusively shown him whether the man in the Elmer Gantry hat was Caucasian or Afro-American or even Oriental for that matter. Both times the man’s face had been turned away, or shielded by the brim of his hat, as if he hadn’t wanted Jim to see what he looked like. But the mystery was, how come nobody else had seen him? Sue-Robin Caufield couldn’t have been standing more than fifteen feet away from him when he came out of the boiler-room door; and Jeff Griglak had actually been facing him.
“Okay, Mr Rook.” Lieutenant Harris took out his notebook again and went through a whole list of procedural questions. How old Jim was. Whether he was married or divorced. Where he lived. His telephone number and his e.mail domain name. Then he said, “Fine … thanks for your time.”
“What happens now?” Jim asked him.
“Thomas J. Jones has been arrested on suspicion of murder in the first degree. We’ll be taking him back to headquarters for questioning.”
Rook & Tooth and Claw Page 2