He picked up the frail fragments of ash from the ashtray, the remains of the playing-card, and sifted them through his fingers. They silkily fell back again, and formed the shape of a black, horned creature, with tiny, demonic eyes.
* * *
He arrived early for his first English tutorial on Monday morning and when his class came in he was standing at the window with his back to them, staring out at nothing at all. He hadn’t slept well. He was wearing a crumpled pair of tan-coloured chinos and a green checkered shirt which looked as if he had salvaged it from the bottom of the laundry basket. His hair stuck up at the back and no amount of smoothing it down would keep it down, even with spit.
Special Class II were unusually quiet as they took their places, although he could hear the murmur of the names ‘Martin’ and ‘Catherine’ and he knew what they were all talking about. Before he turned around he waited until all the murmuring and whispering had stopped, and there was nothing but an occasional cough or the squeak of a sneaker on the composition floor.
At last he stepped up to the front of the class and looked at all of them, one after the other. Greg Lake, pulling his usual faces over in the corner. Greg suffered from a lack of co-ordination, and it was a constant effort for him to show his feelings with his facial expressions. At the moment he looked as if he were sucking on a particularly sour lemon candy.
Amanda Zaparelli, olive-skinned and sultry, with a husky smoker’s voice, a liking for very strong perfume and lots of it, and a chronic inability to tell the difference between an adjective and an adverb. “You should of seen me walk into the room. I was so strutly.” “Give me that quickly cigarette, will you?”
Jane Firman, pale and dyslexic and given to sudden bursts of frustrated tears. Titus Greenspan III, serious and bulgy-eyed. Titus tried harder than almost anybody else, but he always took everything too literally. If he read that ‘the noon sun drilled a hole in my head’ he would put up his hand and ask why the narrator hadn’t dropped dead on the spot, spilling his brains all over the desert.
Sharon X, in a voluminous black djellaba-like dress which he could only presume was a Black Muslim mourning outfit. John Ng, moon-faced and serious, with a white carnation in a jelly-jar in front of him. White was the Vietnamese colour for death.
Jim looked at them all, one by one, and studied them all. They didn’t have any idea how much their predicament could hurt him. Sometimes he wished for their sake that they didn’t have to grow up and leave college – and, in particular, that they didn’t have to leave his class. They were so characterful, so individual, so full of inflated hopes and wild ambitions. They wanted to be celebrities. They wanted to appear on TV and live in big, pink-washed houses. But he had so little time to teach them – so little time to help them overcome their turtle-slow reading speeds and their painfully limited vocabularies, not to mention their stuttering and their word-blindness and their horrifying ignorance of history or geography or world affairs.
“What’s the capital of Chile?” he had asked Ricky Herman.
Mark Foley had shot up his hand and said, “I know! Con Carne!”
Jim loved them, all of them. But he hated the culture which had led them to believe that reading was unimportant, that correct spelling didn’t matter, that any dumb poem which they wrote was just as good as any dumb poem that Marianne Moore or Robert Lowell had written. He hated it most of all because it didn’t allow them the gift of expressing themselves, especially at times like these.
Very quietly, he said, “Yesterday, we all suffered a terrible shock and a loss so painful that it’s difficult to put it into words. Martin Amato was found murdered on Venice Beach in the early hours of Sunday morning. He was a son, a brother and a friend. He was a civil engineering student and captain of the football team. He was twenty-one years and two months old.”
Jim paced to the back of the class, where Sue-Robin Caufield was sitting. She wore a black scarf around her arm and she was biting back the tears. She and Martin had dated for a while, before Catherine came along.
“What do you say about somebody like Martin? He was reliable. He was considerate. He took himself too seriously. He wasn’t a genius, but that never affected his unquestioning loyalty to his college, to his team, and to all of his friends. He was the kind of regular guy who had the potential for happiness, and self-fulfilment, and to make a lasting contribution to society.
“Now all of that has been taken away from him – and from us, too. And because of that our lives are going to be poorer, and more doubtful, and less trusting of the world we live in.”
He walked up to Catherine’s desk. Today she was wearing her hair tightly braided with a black ribbon, and a black dress. Her eyes looked puffy from crying.
“Are you all right?” he asked her. “You can be excused this class if you want to.”
“I’m okay,” she whispered, without looking up. “Please … I’d rather stay here.”
Jim stayed beside her for a moment, watching her, and then he turned to the class at large. “Today I want you all to write me a short poem about Martin. I want you to use that poem to express in words everything you feel about him, or any other friend that you’ve lost.”
Muffy Brown put up her hand and said, “Excuse me, Mr Rook, sir, but isn’t that kind of like cynical? I mean Martin’s been dead for no more than a day and you’re turning his death into classwork?”
Muffy was small and pretty with a personality like a roomful of bouncing balls. Earlier this semester she had worn the most elaborate braids that Jim had ever seen, but now she had shaved her head almost bald except for a flat crewcut on top, and acquired a silver ring through her eyebrow.
Jim said, “Listen to me. If you can express your feelings about Martin’s death in writing, you’ll be paying him the greatest compliment you ever could. If you can put down the shock, and the anger, and the sense of unfairness… if you can learn to convey your grief to other people… not only will you be improving your communicating skills, you’ll be helping yourself to come to terms with what’s happened. You’ll be making it clear that Martin’s death touched you and affected you … and you’ll have found a way of telling the world just how much.”
He picked up one of his books and said, “After Allen Ginsberg’s mother died, he wrote a long poem called Kaddish, which was filled with anger and bewilderment and relief, too, because his mother had been mentally sick. He used it as a way of honouring her, of remembering her – and of coming to terms with the way in which she had changed from being a pretty young girl ‘sitting crossleg on the grass – her long hair wound with flowers –’ to an elderly woman ‘too thin, shrunk on her bones – new broken into white hair – loose dress on her skeleton – face sunk, old! withered – cheek of crone –’
“But finally, he says to her, ‘There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you’ve gone, it’s good.’ ”
He lowered the book, lowered his head. “For Martin’s sake, and for your sake, too, write something that comes right out of your heart.”
There was silence in the classroom. Then, almost as one, everybody brought out their pads, uncapped their pens, and began to write. Jim had never seen them so subdued. He went back to his desk, sat down, and started to write something himself. But he wasn’t writing a poem about Martin’s death. He was writing “2 Friends? Who? Journey? Where? Game in which both sides surrender? What?”
He sat with his head in his hands for a long time, trying to make sense of what he had written. After a while, however, he looked up. Most of the class were bent diligently over their work, although he could see that most of them had written no more than two or three lines. Still, for Special Class II, two or three lines was something of an achievement. Russell seemed to be the most inspired – or the most deeply affected – because he had already filled one sheet of paper and was on to his next, his tongue clenched between his teeth like a small boy trying to hook a maggot onto a fishing-hook.
When he looked toward Ca
therine, however, he saw that she wasn’t writing at all. She was sitting up quite straight, her head tilted back, looking toward the ceiling. There was an extraordinary smile on her face, almost a radiance, as if she were supremely happy.
Jim watched her with gradually-increasing curiosity. She kept on looking at the ceiling, and she started to sway her head from side to side in a strange, repetitive movement that reminded him of something but he couldn’t think what. Shock, he thought. She’s going into shock.
Immediately, he stood up, tilting back his chair so that it fell onto the floor with a sharp, echoing clatter. The class all looked up at him, but he raised his hand and said, “Don’t worry. It’s okay. Just get back to your work.”
He went back to Catherine’s desk and stood over her. “Catherine? How are you feeling? How about going outside for a couple of minutes? Maybe you could use some air.”
She didn’t answer, so he cautiously reached out and touched her shoulder. “Catherine – come on, how about seeing the nurse?”
Slowly Catherine turned her head. As she did so, she closed her eyes. But when she had turned completely toward him, she abruptly opened them again. He felt a shrill sense of fright and he couldn’t stop himself from taking one step away from her. Her eyes were totally expressionless, as if she didn’t know who he was – or even what he was. He had never known anybody look at him like that before, and he couldn’t even think what to say to her. What do you say to a painted portrait, when it stares at you; or a snake that stares back at you, in the reptile-house?
“It’s all right, Mr Rook,” she told him, in the softest of voices. “I don’t need to see a nurse. I’m fine.”
“All the same, maybe you’d better go home. This only happened yesterday morning. Shock can last for days or weeks or even years.”
“I want to stay here,” she insisted. “Please, Mr Rook, I’d prefer to stay here.”
“OK, OK. But if you start to feel dizzy, or anything like that—”
“I have to stay here,” she hissed at him. “Don’t you get it? I have to stay here!”
“All right!” he told her, lifting both hands in instant surrender. “If you want to stay here, then stay here. That’s fine by me.”
Catherine continued to stare at him as he retreated along the aisle. He picked up his chair and sat down at his desk, giving her one last, long look of concern. She was still in shock, no doubt about it, but he didn’t want to distress her more than she was distressed already, and he didn’t want to disrupt the tutorial. He would have a quiet word with her later, when she was on her own.
He went back to his conundrum. 2 Friends? Who? What he didn’t see was the drop of blood that suddenly appeared between Catherine’s tightly-pressed lips and quickly slid down her chin. It dripped onto her notepad and made a red splattery mark.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Then she lifted her head again and continued to stare at the ceiling, her eyes still expressionless, as if she were listening to a long message that came from a long, long time ago, and far, far away.
He was leaving college at four o’clock that afternoon when he saw Catherine waiting beside the parking-lot, clutching her books close to her chest, her head bowed and her long hair blowing in the warm afternoon wind. He walked up to her and said, “Waiting for your brothers?”
She nodded. This time she wouldn’t even look at him.
“Come on, Catherine, you’ve had a hell of a rough time,” he told her. “You don’t have to come back to college until you feel like it. Maybe you should talk to your doctor. Or better still, you could have a word with the college counsellor. Did you ever talk to Naomi? I know she looks a little – well, eccentric, what with those glasses and that hedge of a hairdo, but she’s a terrific listener. She’s a real sane person too. Not one of these whackoes who’s going to tell you that you’re suffering from sublimated guilt or something.”
Catherine raised her head. Her eyes were streaming with tears, so that some of the strands of her hair stuck wetly to her cheeks. “What if I am guilty?”
“Guilty of what? Guilty of being the last person to see Martin alive?”
“He wanted to stay with me. He wanted to sleep with me. But I said no.”
“So what are trying to tell me? If you’d let him sleep with you, he wouldn’t have gone back to the beach, and he wouldn’t be dead?”
“I didn’t know what to do. If I’d let him sleep with me, and Paul and Grey Cloud had found out—”
“Catherine, you’re a big girl now. You’re way past the age of consent. If you wanted to sleep with Martin, then there’s nothing that Paul and Grey Cloud could have done about it.”
She shook her head. She really was exceptionally pretty, especially with her hair floating across her face and her eyes glistening.
Jim said, “You can’t let your brothers rule your life. All right, I know they’re family. I know they think that have your best interests at heart, not to mention the racial purity of the Navajo. But look at me. I’m part German and part Scottish and part Hungarian. You may be Navajo, but first and foremost you’re Catherine, your own person. Only you can decide what’s best for you.”
“That’s not the point. If Paul and Grey Cloud had found out that Martin and I were sleeping together, they would have beaten up on him, I know it. Every time I’ve gotten friendly with anyone, they’ve frightened him or chased him away. Martin was the first boy who wouldn’t let them push him around. If it had ever gotten really serious between us – I don’t know. It all scares me. It scares me so much. That’s why I didn’t let Martin into the house.”
Jim said, “You weren’t to know what was going to happen to him. How could you? You were doing your best to protect him.”
She lifted her head, her mouth tightened with grief. Jim said, “Here,” and took a travel pack of Kleenex out of his coat pocket. He pulled one out and dabbed her eyes for her. It had been a long time since he had dabbed a woman’s eyes.
“I killed him,” she said, her voice choked with grief. “I should never have dated him. I should never have fallen in love with him.”
“Come on, Catherine. You didn’t kill him. It was bad luck, that’s all. Everybody knows that the beach can be risky at night.”
He dabbed her eyes again, and it was at this moment that he heard the throbbing of a tweaked-up V8 engine, and her brothers’ black Firebird rolled into the parking-lot and stopped close beside them. Paul and Grey Cloud climbed out in their black jeans and their sunglasses, came over to Catherine and stood either side of her.
“Well, well, the Cheeryble Brothers,” said Jim, referring to the irrepressibly optimistic characters in Nicholas Nickleby.
“The what?” asked Grey Cloud, taking off his sunglasses.
“Forget it. I don’t expect you to know anything about Dickens.”
“Dickens? They sound like hotels for people like you,” Grey Cloud retorted.
“Well, well, a sense of humour,” said Jim.
Paul came up close to him. “Catherine is coming here for the education, man. She’s not coming here to look for a date. She’s not here to look for any kind of counselling, either. And most of all she’s not here for some kind of indoctrination into the white man’s way.”
“What she chooses to make of her time here is up to her, wouldn’t you say?”
“No, I wouldn’t say. And if I were you, I’d stick to teaching English and stay out of the rest of her life, OK?”
“Otherwise what?”
“Otherwise you remember what happened to your college football captain.”
“That’s a threat,” said Jim.
Grey Cloud shook his head. “That isn’t a threat any more than what we said to Martin Amato was a threat. That’s just another prediction.”
Jim took Susan out that evening to St Mark’s, on Windward Avenue, for a steak dinner and an evening of live blues. He liked St Mark’s because it was a friendly, jostling, casual place and dinner didn’t usually cost m
ore than $30 a head, so long as he didn’t drink too much Stag’s Leap chardonnay. They sat at a cramped corner table and tried to hold a conversation while King Jerry and the Screamers gave a deafening rendition of The House of the Rising Sun.
Afterward, Jim drove Susan home. They sat outside her house in Jim’s Rebel SST with the engine quietly burbling.
“Thanks for coming out,” he told her. “I needed something like that to get my mind off Martin.”
“That’s OK. I enjoyed it.”
He touched her shoulder. “Listen,” he said, “you know what you said earlier, about boats bumping?”
She looked at him with her head slightly tilted to one side and he knew what her answer was going to be. Girls who want to bump will immediately give you a kiss: they won’t look sympathetic.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that – I don’t know, Jim. Our relationship doesn’t seem to be going anyplace.”
“Where do you want it to go? Paris? Rome? Van Nuys?”
She smiled and shook her head. “It’s not a question of where I want it to go. It should have a dynamic all of its own. But all we seem to be doing together is nothing very much.”
Jim propped his arm on the back of his seat, and faced her directly. “So what are you saying to me? That you want to stop doing nothing very much, and do something else instead? I’m only a college teacher, Susan. My only dynamic is to turn semi-literate kids into people who can express themselves.”
Susan said, “Yes. I know. And I’ve always admired you for what you do. But the truth is, Jim—” She paused, and then she said, “The truth is that I’ve forgotten why I fell in love with you.”
He felt a cold snail-like sensation in his stomach. It made him feel like a teenager all over again. “Is it important that you remember why?” he asked her. “I mean, so long as you do?”
“That’s the thing about it, Jim. I don’t. Not any more.”
“The other day, you said you almost did.”
Rook & Tooth and Claw Page 27