by ALEXANDER_
I opened my eyes. McLeod was standing over me. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said drily.
I couldn’t think what he was doing in my bedroom and was wondering how I could smuggle him out of the house without Mother or Gloria seeing him when he said, with equal sarcasm, “Whenever you’re ready.”
I sat up, saw the hay, and then felt like a fool. McLeod moved around the loft, stepped to the edge, put his hand on it, and vaulted down. Neat. I started to follow.
He looked up. “Use the ladder.”
But of course I didn’t. My landing left a lot to be desired. I fell on my back and knocked the wind right out of me. It was awful. I felt like I was drowning. I couldn’t get in a breath. Dimly I saw McLeod turn, look at me and then come back on the double. He picked me up, bent me over, and started pounding on my back. Suddenly I could breathe.
“Are you all right?” he asked as I stood up, drawing in great gulps of air.
I nodded.
“You seem to have a mania for picking the one way of doing anything that will get you in trouble. Next time do what I tell you.”
“Yes.” I didn’t feel up to arguing.
“All right, come on. I can’t get Richard in here until you get out.”
We started walking out. “What do you mean?” I asked, and saw the empty stall as I passed it.
“What I say. When I led Richard in here he started going berserk. Neighed and reared and tried to pull the reins out of my hand.”
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“So that’s what I heard! I mean I was dreaming I was in the stall with Richard and he was rearing and neighing and trying to kill me.” My head was beginning to clear. “You mean that even though I was upstairs in the middle of all that hay he knew I was there?”
“That’s not unusual. A horse won’t go over an unsafe bridge even though it looks perfectly all right to his rider. You know that.”
“But what spooked him?”
“He’s been abused. All people spook him, as you put
it.”
I had stopped short of the door. “But he’s all right with
you.”
“Now he is. It took me weeks to get near him without his trying to stampede or shy, and more weeks to mount
him.”
“Did you know he was that way when you bought him?” “Of course.”
“Is that why you bought him?” I was galloping ahead with my questions to get as much as I could of this new slant on McLeod. I thought it would be hard to imagine him gentling a frightened animal but to my surprise, it wasn’t. And of course, the moment I came to that conclusion, he clammed up.
“I think that’s enough of the press conference this morning. You’ve managed to delay your lesson for half an hour so you should not feel it’s been in vain.”
But I wasn’t entirely finished. “Is that how you knew I was up there?”
“It seemed a logical deduction.”
He said it so drily I wanted to laugh. As we stepped from the dark stable into the sunlight I glanced up at him. At that moment he was looking down at me, smiling slightly. It
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was a nice smile, but I got the full benefit of his burned side. I looked away.
“Go back to the house and start translating where you left off.”
His voice this time was different—so cold I wondered if he had seen me look away from him. I glanced back at him and for a second, just before he turned his face and walked off, I knew he had seen how I felt.
I watched him go over to a tree where he had tied Richard, then I went back to the house and opened up Vergil, wishing he hadn’t seen my reaction quite so plainly. I was a little surprised, too, because one of the compensations of having a stupid look has always been that no one could tell what I was thinking. It used to drive The Hairball back up the tree, because all his students used to tell him how perceptive he was. He’d come home and have his ego inflated a little more by Mother and Gloria, and then he’d turn his radar equipment on me. And I’d just look at him as though he were talking Choctaw and bounce those waves right back at him.
But McLeod was not The Hairball. In fact, I found him puzzling. When he came back in the house it was as though we were back to square one, Vergil on ice, and that’s the way it went for the next week or so. Every now and then he’d say something dry and funny and I’d laugh, and for a minute there we’d be on the same wavelength. I liked him then, I liked him a lot. Then bang! Out of the blue he’d freeze and I’d be back in the tundra.
“Do you like him?” Meg asked in one of our dawn’s- early-light conversations.
By this time Moxie had accepted Meg as a blood relative and was purring as she ran a finger up and down his spine.
“Yes,” I said, rather grudgingly. “He’s okay—at least
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some of the time.” It was funny, but not even to Meg did I want to say how I felt.
“What’s he like?”
You can see now why I find females tiresome. That’s a very female kind of a question. “How the blazes do I know what he’s like? That’s a stupid question.”
Meg didn’t say anything, which I always find suspicious in women. It usually means they’ve decided to try for another opening.
I was right. Meg said, “Does he like you?”
“Will you cut out the inquisition? What are you anyway—the FBI?”
Still, it was an interesting question, and one to which I hadn’t given any thought. I mean, I’m usually more interested in what I think of people than what they think about me, barring, of course, crucial types like Mother and Gloria where the answer has great bearing on how comfortable I am. Even my stepfathers didn’t trigger me that way. For one thing, I came as a kind of package deal with Mother, which reduced the alternatives: They had to like me—or pretend to. For another, I didn’t care. Besides, if you’re an adolescent, it’s a real challenge to get any member of the older’ generation to admit to plain not liking you. It’s against their principles. For real! You can sweat out weeks of thought on how you can most bug an adult and come up with something really new and gross, and ail you’ll get is understanding. The hairier the act the more you’re called an idealist reacting to an unresponsive society. I mean, it’s frustrating. Joey swears he knows a boy who was so mad when he was asked (politely) to take the garbage out, that he emptied it instead—coffee grounds, melted Jell-O, baby’s upchuck and everything—-right on the new living-room carpet before
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God and everybody. The first thing that happened was that his father apologized for having been so insensitive to his needs. His mother burst into tears and said it was all her fault, and the next day he got the new bicycle he’d been hankering for. So why bother?
But no imagining could produce an image of McLeod looking apologetic or guilt-ridden. All I could summon up was that chilling stare that left me in no doubt as to who would shortly be behind the eight ball, and the dry half smile that vanished so quickly that day in the stable. No, I decided, he couldn’t like me. In fact, he must hate me. The thought made me oddly unhappy.
I must have been thinking about it the next day as we struggled through some awful diatribe by Wordsworth drooling over a half-witted child named Lucy, because McLeod put down the books and said, “If my face bothers you that much you can sit at the table over there by the window.” I realized then that I had been staring at him, and I could feel my own face get hot.
“I—it doesn’t b-bother me. I mean—I’m s-sorry. . . . I d-didn’t—” Embarrassment won out. I couldn’t go on.
He got up and ambled over to the window, his hands in his pockets. There was an awful silence. Here I go, I thought. Out. But it just goes to show that you should never say never, or think that just because your imagination boggles at something it can’t happen.
McLeod said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Finish your comment about the poem.”
I must have been really unstrung. What I wanted to do was to tell him somehow t
hat I wasn’t even thinking about his face, although I could see, with me looking at him and away again, off and on like that, why he would think so. I tried to get my thoughts back to Lucy, hardly a mind-
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gripper under the best of circumstances. But I couldn’t concentrate.
“Well?”
“Your face doesn’t bother me,” I blurted out, and realized as I said it that it was true. I hadn’t even thought about his disfigurement since that day in the stable. “I don’t think about it that way any more.”
He was sitting on the sill of the window, staring down at his crossed feet. “Then what were you thinking?”
I wanted to tell him but I didn’t know how. I mean, I have pretty well perfected the techniques of how to put somebody down or off or out. But I didn’t even know how to begin to tell him that I was wondering whether or not he liked me, because that was like telling him that I liked him. It’s disconcerting, making important discoveries like that in the middle of a conversation. Everything stops while I sort things out. One thing was certain: I’d never before tried to tell anyone—least of all a grown-up—that I liked him. The words were piling up in the back of my throat until I could almost feel my eyes bulge. But nothing came out.
“Never mind. I didn’t mean to invade your privacy. Continue with Lucy.” He came back to the table and stood looking down at his copy.
I was really in a turmoil, as though somebody had switched on a propeller somewhere in my midriff. Not knowing what to say, or rather, not knowing how to say what I wanted to say, I looked down at the book and grumbled, “The way he goes on about Lucy, it’s worse than Humbert Humbert over Lolita. I mean—”
But I never got to what I meant.
There was an explosion of laughter. “Oh, my God,” McLeod said and put his hand up to his eyes.
I felt rather clever. “It’s crap, isn’t it?”
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I knew right away I’d gone too far, even though I could tell he still wanted to laugh. I said hastily, “I mean—the whole Lucy thing’s silly, don’t you think?”
“No. But it’s a bad choice for you now at this age. They should know better. By the way, try for a word other than * »»
crap.
“It’s a legitimate expression of authentic feeling,” I quoted The Hairball piously.
“It’s also laziness. When you have found ten synonyms or reasonable substitutes then you may use it. In the meantime, as part of your assignment tomorrow, you can look up the Latin equivalents—there are several—and decline them; then you can see how many times each of them is used, and how they are used, in the Vergil.’’
I was furious. “That’s a lot of work. Besides, you’ve already set the homework.”
“But a limited vocabulary is a serious handicap. I should dislike your going to St. Matthew’s under such a grave disadvantage.”
I stared back at him, too mad now to remember my embarrassment. I knew good and well he was laughing at me, but not by a flicker did it show.
“By the way,” he said. “Whom were you quoting just now?”
“The Hairball,” I said, not thinking.
“The what'
“My last stepfather.”
“How many have you had?”
“Two. Then there was Mother’s first husband who would have been a step if I had been born then. Only I wasn’t. He was Gorgeous Gloria’s father.”
“The one you’re so devoted to.”
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I decided to live dangerously. “I thought you were never supposed to end a sentence with a preposition.”
“I, too, can quote,” he said deadpan. “There is a certain type of insubordination going on around here up with which I will not put.”
I couldn’t help grinning. “You’re not serious about me having to do that Latin word bit, are you, Mr. McLeod?” (At our school in New York the teachers all make a big thing about us calling them by their first names. Democracy and all that. It didn’t even occur to me to do it with McLeod.)
“Oh, yes. That is, if you want to use your favorite word again.”
I sighed loudly. It really is against my principles to give in to an adult. But somehow, of the two of us, I had a strong feeling he wasn’t going to do the yielding.
“All right. I won’t—at least, I’ll try to remember.” “Angels could no more,” McLeod said, moving towards the bookcase.
I gathered my things up. “Is that from a poem?” “Yes.”
“That stuff always turns me off.”
He pulled down a volume. “You like planes, don’t you?” “Sure.”
He came back, turning over the pages. “You might like this,” he said, and read aloud:
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hovering there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never lark, or even eagle, flew,
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
It was queer, what it did to me. There were little explosions in my head and stomach and a tingling down my back. My throat was dry. McLeod was looking at me. “Here,” he said, holding out the book. “Take it.”
CHAPTER 5
It was after twelve when I got home. McLeod had kept me half an hour overtime, although, come to think of it, I hadn’t felt kept. I just hadn’t realized it was so late. But I did realize I was hungry. The house was blessedly empty. I like empty houses or rooms. I once said this to one of the five school psychologists and he got so upset that they broke out a fresh set of Rorschach’s for me to run through. So I went through all their bags of tricks and answered all their stupid questions and I still like empty houses and rooms, especially those that are empty of people I’m related to, except maybe Meg.
Feeling relaxed and eager to look at that poem again, I was pouring myself some milk when the screen door squeaked open and in came Gorgeous Gloria and Putrid Percy.
“Hi,” Gloria said, oozing with friendship. Then she gave
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me a big smile and I knew instantly what all our roles were: hers was The People's Choice as Big Sister of the Year. Mine was the same as it always is, Unappreciative Kid Brother. Mother’s is Unappreciative Parent. Meg’s is Unappreciative Kid Sister. The plot is whatever is happening at the moment. But I was the only member of the cast available, which meant that the burden of revealing the Unappreciation by which Gloria is always surrounded lay solely, and heavily, on me. I watched her carefully over the glass of milk I was drinking to see how the plot developed.
“Percy, this is my kid brother, Chuck.”
He tossed his head to get a long curling lock out of the way. “Hi, man.”
I waved a hand. “Hi,” I said, when I had finished drinking the milk.
Gloria glanced at the books that I had put down on the table. “Chuck’s trying to get into St. Matthew’s,” she explained in a kindly fashion.
Percy took a bite out of a doughnut Gloria had taken out of a jar. “Anybody can do that,” he mumbled through a full mouth, showing a lot of teeth and wet dough. Then he swallowed. “What’s your problem, man?”
“Chuck’s not the academic type,’’ Gloria said, nibbling at a carrot stick, and still eyeing the books.
My part was beginning to shape up. I was now not only Unappreciative Brother, I was also Backward Brother.
“Percy goes to Princeton,” Gloria said (as if we all didn’t know), turning the top book around so she could see the title on the spine.
I sudde
nly realized that was McLeod’s book, and for all I knew he might have his name in it, and then Gloria would really have a plot to get to work on.
7I
I’m not usually a fast thinker. But Gloria’s hand was on the cover of the book about to open it, and emergency bells were clanging in my head. There wasn’t time to put the milk container I was holding down or back in the refrigerator, so I dropped it.
Milk flew all over the floor and over Gloria’s feet. The People’s Choice for Big Sister vanished as the real Gloria stood up. “You clumsy clot,” she shrieked in her best witchlike voice. “You verminous moron. You did that deliberately.”
“Gosh, I’m sorry,” I tucked the books under my arm and moved towards the back stairs. “But if you get it off right away everybody says it won’t stain.” I opened the door to the stairs.
Percy the Pursuer was slapping at his shorts with a rag. “Lousy coordination,” he was muttering. But he was looking in a strange way at Gloria, and who could blame him? America’s sweetheart, voice like an ungreased axle, was enumerating the goodies in store for me once Mother had been apprised of my latest sin.
“You did that deliberately,” she said, staring up from the floor where she was wiping off her sandals. “I know you, Chuck Norstadt, that’s your subtle way of distracting my attention. You’ve done it before. And don’t think I won’t find out what it is you don’t want me to know and tell Mother. I will, I always do, and then you’ll be so sorry you’ll crawl.”
I really couldn’t have written her part better myself, if the object was to show Percy what he was about to take to his heart; if not home. Which just goes to prove what everybody says: I’m not very bright. If I had been, I would have given my all to convince Percy what a jewel he was about to acquire. With any luck they’d elope—at the least he’d keep
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her attention occupied. Instead, I couldn’t have done a more efficient job of showing her up if I’d planned it for a week.
Her voice followed me up the stairs. I closed my door and stuck a chair under it—there isn’t a key in the house, and in this mood Gloria wouldn’t hesitate to walk in. Then I sat down at the small table that serves me for a desk and cursed my idiocy. It was the big sister bit that got me—of all her acts it’s the most repulsive. When she’s being her real self it’s unpleasant, but nobody’s fooling anybody else. It’s the phoniness that brings out the worst.