by Pete Dexter
A few yards beyond the smiling salmon, also smiling, was an old black man in a chef’s outfit who was cutting thick, dripping slices of ham and roast beef to order, and beyond him was a smaller table set with boiled eggs, pickled herring, and pickled pigs’ feet, this mostly for the unusually large number of members who’d made their money in the bar business and preferred a traditional holiday breakfast.
Larsson was an eater. He took two empty plates, filling one with flapjacks and sausage and maybe two pounds of eggs Benedict, and the other with clams, waffles, hash-browned potatoes, and some of the salmon. In spite of his Christmas binge, Calmer was not much of a drinker and could hardly bring himself to look at the food on Larsson’s plates. Or for that matter at the grinning, half-eaten monster salmon at the end of the table. There were whole towns in South Dakota that couldn’t eat that fish at one sitting.
Presently, they returned to the table, back to Larsson’s hat, and he said a quiet blessing over his food and then covered the eggs with ketchup, then covered that and everything else on the plate with maple syrup. He poured syrup until the ketchup began to float.
Calmer had taken three pieces of bacon, a slice of toast, and a glass of orange juice. He drank half the juice and then on an impulse handed it to one of the waitresses and asked her to fill it the rest of the way back up with vodka.
And then he did it again, and the second one came with a little umbrella. Larsson smiled at Calmer and smiled at his friends as they passed by the table, and some of them stopped a moment to ask after his wife or tease him about the sweater.
“We go back a ways, you and me,” he said to Calmer when they were alone again.
Calmer found he had no opinion on that, and said nothing.
“Goddamn, but it goes by, doesn’t it? Time, I mean? Things change, people come and go, and here we still are…”
Calmer began to feel the vodka and loosened his overshoes and put his feet up on one of the empty chairs and sat watching Larsson eat, with no particular thought in his head except that drinking screwdrivers was not a disagreeable way to spend the morning. His feet were hot and beginning to burn, as they always did for a week or so after frostbite.
Larsson signaled the waitress.
Calmer pried his stocking feet out of his overshoes and could not have felt better if the warden just took off the leg irons. He set them back where they’d been on the chair. “You mind?” he said.
“You know, honey,” Larsson said to the waitress, “I don’t see that a little shot of Irish in this would leave me any worse off than I already am. That man’s not even a member and he’s having all the damn fun.”
While she was gone Larsson moved his plates to the side—both of them clean as a whistle, the last streaks of syrup wiped up with the last of the flapjacks—and set his elbows on the spot where they had been. He leaned in, and Calmer was afraid he might reach for his wrist and call him honey too.
“Well, get to the point, right?” Larsson said.
Calmer shrugged. Larsson burped. Larsson said, “Merle was a decent sort, Calmer, not the warmest human being I ever met, but a decent administrator.” He stopped, rearranging it in his head. Calmer waited, saying nothing. “The plain fact is, the man made some mistakes, and now he’s left us to clean up the damn mess.” Larsson’s voice took an unexpectedly hard tone as he said this, and then a long empty moment ensued, Larsson staring at him like he expected Calmer to object. The waitress brought Larsson his Irish coffee.
“Look, I know you didn’t have much use for the fella; shit, maybe you don’t have much use for me neither.”
“What did he do?” Calmer said.
Larsson smiled at that. “That’s the old Calmer,” he said, “here’s the problem, here’s how we fix it.” He checked the room, making sure nobody else was on the way over. “The worst of it?” he said. “There’s been some… statistical irregularities in the testing.”
Calmer stared at him, waiting.
Larsson said, “The rest is probably nothing that can’t be handled in-house,” and seemed to think that over, as if for the first time. “There’s money missing from the general account, but my thinking is, I don’t see any reason to tarnish anybody’s name if we don’t have to.”
To Calmer the conversation had begun to feel like somebody stealing your car and then calling you up to see if the transmission was still under warranty. Calmer sipped at his drink and wiggled his toes and considered the tapered shape of the human foot.
Larsson said, “So why’s the old fucker coming to me, right? Well, you’re the only one I know that might have a handle on this. The first I heard about it, a friend of mine in Pierre, a man fairly high up in the state government, called up as a personal favor to warn me that we’ve got a red flag on the statewide achievement tests.”
In the same year they’d squashed him, Calmer had noticed an unlikely improvement in the standardized tests over at Jefferson, in fact had asked the principal over there for breakdowns of the scores. He tried to remember what year that would have been.
“We got skewered results,” Larsson said. “Whole classes getting ninety-eighth, ninety-ninth percentile in math, all of them over at Jefferson, the same three or four teachers—and the dumb bastards, one of the classes was even remedial math.”
“Skewed,” Calmer said. “Skewered means skewered.”
“That too,” Larsson said.
Jefferson was the old high school. The principal, Lobby Johnson, had come up through the ranks of the athletic department, spent a dozen years as the school’s head football coach, and by now had thirty-odd years with the district, twenty-four of them in lockstep with Cowhurl. There had been hard feelings when Calmer was chosen assistant superintendent ahead of him, and Cowhurl had told Calmer on the day he was appointed to leave Lobby Johnson and his high school alone, that he would oversee what went on over there himself.
Calmer hadn’t cared much for this arrangement but went along with it, leaving Lobby Johnson and his high school to Cowhurl, and for his part, Lobby Johnson went about running his school like a football team and harboring his grudges against the school system and against Calmer, and when the time came he was first in line to compose a letter of complaint. This marked the beginning of the end for Calmer; Cowhurl and the board had decided to get rid of him and were building a case, soliciting complaints—nothing official, just a phone call at home, an informal talk over lunch—covering themselves in the eventuality of a lawsuit.
But Lobby Johnson at least had never pretended that he and Calmer were friends. There were others who wrote complaints who had been friends of Calmer, some who owed him their jobs, the most surprising of the bunch being a middle-aged assistant principal who lived just up the street and had been promoted into his position on Calmer’s recommendation, and for years had dropped into the house for a Saturday- or Sunday-afternoon beer. He was a disciple of Calmer’s ideas on school discipline, which came down to one idea really, that if you wanted a kid to behave like a human being the first thing you did was treat him like a human being.
With Cowhurl and the board suddenly after Calmer’s scalp, though, the assistant principal had a change of heart, and wrote a letter complaining that Calmer disrupted the smooth operation of his school with his—Calmer’s—unannounced visits to see for himself how the students were being treated. Calmer, he said, was undermining discipline.
Like the others who turned against him, the assistant principal, for all his kitchen visits, had never said a word to Calmer about it before.
The waitress brought more drinks.
Calmer said, “What about the money?”
“We can put you on a consultant basis,” Larsson said. “Say, two thousand a week, against a minimum of ten thousand.”
Calmer looked at him blankly, gradually realizing he was being offered a job. He’d thought Larsson wanted a favor.
“Twenty-five hundred,” Larsson said, “but that’s all I can squeeze out of the discretionary fund.”
They had a few more drinks, which seemed to clear things up, in the way more drinks will sometimes do. Calmer saw no reason in the world not to drink screwdrivers every morning of his life.
“I can’t go outside the district,” Larsson was saying, “bring somebody in that’s got to be brought up to speed. But I found out what’s going on, which means sooner or later somebody else is going to find out, which then leaves us at the mercy of any small-time politician in the state who wants to be governor and goes blabbing to the papers. Besides that, I’ve got to hire a damn superintendent, and the whole mess has to be cleaned up by then, to keep whoever’s next clear of this, completely out of the picture. You can see that.”
Calmer nodded.
“And I can’t use somebody we already got to look into it; it’s the same fucking problem, who do I trust to keep his mouth shut? Hire some local lawyer and the next thing you know he’s running for governor too.”
“Tell me about the money,” Calmer said.
“All right, three thousand a week against a guaranteed fifteen, but that’s all I can do.”
“No, the money you said was missing from discretionary spending.”
Larsson scratched his head and smiled. “You would have done this for the good of education, wouldn’t you?” Calmer didn’t answer, and Larsson continued to smile.
“I don’t know how much,” he said, “don’t even know for a fact who all took it. It’s a side issue here, though. The problem’s the test scores.”
Calmer shrugged, seeing no reason to remind Larsson that he’d seen it coming. That he’d gone to Cowhurl and warned him.
“At this point I got no idea how long it’s been going on or how high it went. That’s going to be important, I think, how far back this goes.”
The waitress brought Calmer another screwdriver, and he thanked her and gave her a ten-dollar bill. The biggest tip he’d ever left in his life. He took half of the drink down at once, noticed that he could no longer taste the vodka.
She came by again a few minutes later, possibly trolling for another ten-dollar bill, but this time Larsson asked for his tab. He held the pen awkwardly to sign, the way Cousin Arlo and his family held spoons when they ate.
Calmer started for the bathroom but meandered over to the bar instead and stood a little while staring, transfixed as the bartender doctored up three Bloody Marys, sticking a stalk of brownish celery into each glass before she slid them across the bar to the waitress. The waitress stood beside him while she waited, smiling.
She said, “You remember me, Mr. Ottosson?”
He smiled at the girl and shook his head.
“Carolyn Dickerson? You were the best teacher I ever had.” Teaching, there would always be that. They’d squashed him—ruined him, he’d thought for a long time—but here was some kid he didn’t even remember, calling him the best teacher she ever had.
“Thank you,” he said, and the room seemed to pitch, and a moment later he was dripping sweat.
“Mr. Ottosson?” she said. “Are you okay, hon?”
Hon.
He smiled again and excused himself and moved past her, walking through the double glass doors outside onto the practice putting green in his socks. The cold felt good against his head, which was wet with perspiration, and then, without feeling it coming, he threw up over the snow. His eyes watered and his sinuses stung, and when his vision cleared, he bent over and picked up a little clean snow and rubbed it across his face.
The waitress had seen him vomit, and she came out now and took his arm. “Are you okay?” she said again. Beyond her, he saw Larsson collecting his boots and hat and coat at the table, hurrying, and beyond Larsson, the brunch crowd, hushed and watching. The best teacher she’d ever had. What did anybody here have that was worth more than that?
SEVENTY-FOUR
They gave Calmer the office that had been Cowhurl’s, and the secretary who had been Cowhurl’s, Alma, and authority to interview anyone in the district, up to and including members of the board themselves, as well as access to personnel files and all the district’s financial records.
It led to misunderstandings, his moving into Cowhurl’s office, and Calmer would rather have taken his own old office, but it was already occupied, as it happened, by a woman who’d been Lobby Johnson’s assistant principal when Calmer was demoted into classroom teaching. The woman was one of Cowhurl’s bunch and had written a letter for him claiming Calmer’s lack of organizational skills was devastating faculty morale, and then written several others along the same lines that were signed by various members of the staff.
The office itself was vast and yawning, a place for meetings maybe, not for work, and likewise the desk. Calmer hadn’t seen a shine like that since the visit to the funeral home to pick out Lily’s box. There were no bookshelves in the room, or books, not even a dictionary, and the secretary didn’t seem to understand who Calmer was or why he was there. She also appeared unsure of what stage of mourning the place was supposed to be in, and answered the phone in a hushed voice, as if family members might be just out of earshot, saying good-bye to Merle.
He made do with what he had. He brought in a few books and some copies of the Atlantic and the New Yorker, and put up a map of the world on the wall opposite the bank of windows, and hung his Think sign on the wall behind his desk. Alma was afraid of him, afraid of everything, and for a long time she started whenever he stepped out of the office. He saw that she was uncomfortable being asked to do things and preferred to be told. Cowhurl had called her when he wanted her and never looked up from his desk when he gave her orders: Call Mrs. Cowhurl and tell her I’ll be late for supper.
Calmer would say, “Alma, would you see if you can get me Lobby Johnson?”
In Alma’s long experience the nicer the boss was to you, the closer you were to being fired. And under this cloud her days passed, as they had always passed at work, but then something strange: slowly, almost unnoticeably, she began to think of Calmer in a different cast than any of the others, began grudgingly to trust him, and then to like him, and then one morning found herself looking forward to his coming through the office door.
Calmer worked carefully, beginning with a simple time chart he drew of all the standardized testing the district had done over the last dozen years, horizontal lines across the top designating months and years, and vertical components dropping out of them at regular intervals, showing the test scores, school by school. Names were added, teachers and students alike, and sometimes one of these names was familiar and would pull him off his spot to some other time and place, and he would occupy the old landscape a little while, complete with Lily and his old job, and realize only later, perhaps walking into the empty house, where he was on the time chart himself.
Before beginning the interviews, he built probability models for all the episodes of aberrant testing and could tell you, within ten million or so, what the odds of an entire class of remedial math students scoring in the ninety-ninth percentile of a standardized test were. The process was mostly trial and error, something like guessing your shoe size and then trying on the shoe, but it imitated the sound of scientific research, even to science teachers, and put together with the now undecipherable chart on the wall, it provoked confessions right and left.
Still, there were mornings Calmer could not remember why he was getting
dressed for work or what work it was he was supposed to do. One afternoon he walked into his old office instead of Cowhurl’s, and the current occupant—he had no idea who the woman was—dissolved into a fit of weeping and began some kind of confession of her own, and Calmer had no idea about that either, and while she was still sobbing he made his apologies for the interruption and left.
Another day he caught himself backing into his old spot in the faculty parking lot of the junior high school where he’d taught English for the five years before he’d retired. He smiled at that one, the absentminded professor.
In the end—five and a half weeks of interviews, 116 subjects—he built two more models, one giving the district every benefit of the doubt and one making the opposite case, and from these figures, he calculated best-case and worst-case scenarios of the school district’s standing statewide without the cheating. Either result—the district in the top 40 percent of the state’s schools or right in the middle—was ruinous politically, Flatt County being the richest, best-equipped, best-paying school district in the state, voters expected the best test-takers to come out of it and any bond issue the school board might have been contemplating for the next five years was now dead in its tracks.
It took Calmer two more weeks to recheck his work and write the report. Thirty-one pages, single-spaced. Alma probably could have polished it off in a couple of hours—when she got going out there it sounded like a hailstorm on the roof—and had knocked gently on his open door several times that day, offering to take the job off his hands. He saw that she was getting used to him now and was both anxious and resigned at the prospect of his leaving, knowing that work would go back to what it had always been when they brought in Cowhurl’s replacement.