by Barry Rachin
A nonentity to most of the staff, Carl brought a sandwich and a piece of fruit to work in an old-fashioned lunch pail and sat in the far corner of the lunch room, most days, with the cafeteria workers and bus monitors. Lean and muscular with a perpetual scowl, he ate his food without looking up or taking part in the general conversation. Neither liked nor disliked by the rest of the staff at Brandenburg Middle School, he was the janitor's helper.
When the meal was done, Carl rose abruptly and grabbed his lunch pail. "After we set the gap on the boiler," he said over his shoulder, directing the remark at Bob Watson, “I'll change that dead bulb.”
"No hurry," Bob replied with a dry grin. "Whenever you get to it."
******
Once word got out that Ed Gray, head of the English Department, had been bested, one-upped, made a fool of - take your pick - by Carl Solomon, the teaching staff were divided in their loyalties. Those who disliked Ed and saw him as a pretentious windbag got a sadistic satisfaction out of the incident, while strangely refusing to admit that the janitor's helper could score any higher than dull normal on a Stanford-Binet.
Those who supported Ed Gray, which was most of the senior teaching staff and the head librarian, Miss Curson, felt that Ed had been duped; in all likelihood, Carl was talking off the top of his head and had never read a damn thing worthy of literary consideration.
“You know that custodian, Carl, ...the janitor’s helper,” Grace spoke in a casual tone, as though the information was of no great importance.
Pam Sullivan, the office manager, raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips by way of a response. “You sure are desperate for a date.”
Grace winced. She told her about the incident with Ed Gray and Pam’s mouth eased into a wicked grin. “Serves him right, the arrogant snot!” As a part of the office staff she had no allegiances to the head of the English Department and felt free to speak her mind. Unlocking a file cabinet, Pam fingered through a stack of manila folders. “Carl Solomon... lives over on East Ave. Whenever I call over there some old lady with a foreign accent answers the phone.”
“His mother?”
Pam shrugged. The door opened. A boy with jet black hair and Hispanic features dropped off an early release form. He waited patiently while Pam checked the signature. Pam always nabbed the underage forgers. She knew where a stepfather habitually lifted the pen off the paper in the middle of a signature or crossed the t’s with a downward slash. The boy sauntered off down the corridor in the direction of the entrance. A bell rang shrilly. Students spilled out into the hallways and began rushing pell-mell off to their next class. Grace ran her tongue over her lips. “How long has Carl been working at Brandenburg?”
“Damned if I know. A couple years at least.” She grinned again. “Seems like we got ourselves a real mystery here.”
Grace didn’t like where the conversation was going. “Maybe the incident was nothing at all. A tempest in a teapot.”
“A what in a who?” At the far end of the hall, Principal Skinner exited a classroom with a teacher’s aide and was moving in their direction.
Grace reached for the door. “Gotta run.”
******
The rest of the day went by in a blur. Several students stayed after for extra help with an essay assignment: WHAT I WOULD DO IF I WON THE MASSACHUSETTS STATE LOTTERY. One freckle-faced, floppy-eared boy, Benny Finnegan, reminded Grace in a twisted sort of way of Alfred E Newman from Mad Magazine. The public health nurse visited the Finnegan family in October after an outbreak of head lice and an older sister, Nadine, had been treated for rickets.
Benny said he would spend at least a hundred grand on Play Station 3 video games. “Yes, well let’s see if we can get that down in print,” Grace suggested. She tried to picture the gawky youth as a middle-aged homeowner burdened with a mortgage and family obligations, but her mind balked at the effort. What if this silly kid ended up marrying the girl of his dreams and his life unfolded a huge success? Grace’s life over the past few years had spun out of control, her dreams gone up in acrid smoke.
“A comma after the dependent clause, Benny,” she said gesturing to a spot on the page. The boy lifted his head. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like an elevator circulating randomly between floors. Then he smiled, a goofy, endearing gesture. With a knot welling up in her throat, Grace smiled back.
Another bell rang. The clock on the wall registered three-thirty. Grace and her daughter would be on the road to Cape Cod by six. They had her cousin’s cabin for the weekend. A minivacation in Mashpee. No matter that the weather had turned abruptly colder with frost on the early morning ground. The Cape was especially beautiful this time of year free of summer tourists and gridlock. And she definitely needed to get away.
Bob, the head Janitor, stuck his head in the door. “Pam said you were looking for me.”
“I need construction paper. Two reams.” Because of a tight budget and dwindling resources, art supplies were kept under lock and key in a closet off the boiler room.
“I can get that for you now,” he replied.
Everybody was fond of Bob, both students and faculty alike. Short and heavy set, he lumbered about the school with a pokey, low-keyed authority. When the rear door got damaged by an errant delivery truck, he rebuilt the frame from scratch and hung the new door. During outdoor recess, Grace had watched him shim the jamb using cedar shakes, plumbing each side with a 48-inch level. When the new door was finally hung, it swung freely and closed tighter than the original. Once finished, Bob packed his tools and went back to collecting adolescent trash and cleaning heel marks.
“Here we are.” Bob held the boiler room door open for her and they were both were greeted with a blast of warm air. “Need anything else?”
“Just the paper,” Grace replied.
Bob removed a key from a box perched on a cluttered desk and disappeared into the supply room. Almost a foot tall, the box was egg-shaped with two, sleek drawers which followed the sloping contour of the wood. Grace stepped closer and ran a finger over the coffee colored surface, which was smooth as a freshly powdered, newborn’s bottom. The box wasn’t so much a container to store small objects as a work of art, a sensuous, freeform sculpture. Grace shook her head in disbelief. “Your talents are endless,” she said as Bob came up behind her with the reams of paper.
“Black walnut,” he remarked shyly, indicating the carcass, “with red birch handles.”
Grace pulled a drawer gently open. “And this?” She gestured at the orangey wood with paisley swirls ranging from blood red to lemony yellow.
“Amboyna burl from Cambodia,” Bob removed the delicate drawer and handed it to her. The inside was lined with emerald flocking. “The tricky part is gluing the amboyna directly to the walnut.” He caressed the burnished wood with a stubby finger. “The surface is wet-sanded with tung oil through eight, separate grades of sand paper. It takes a week or so for the finish to properly cure. Then it’s rubbed out to a high luster with rottenstone and beeswax.”
The boiler suddenly fired up with a loud swoosh. Grace’s nostrils tingled with the faint odor of fuel oil. “The box belongs in a museum not a boiler-room.”
“That’s not for me to say,” the janitor replied with a mischievous grin.
Grace handed the drawer back to him. “What?”
“Carl Solomon built the box. He’s the artisan.” Bob Watson shook his head emphatically. “This stuff is so far out of my league …” He left the sentence unfinished. The boiler clicked off and a pump turned over making a rhythmic, whirring noise. “If you want to see more of his handiwork, Carl has another box on display at the Brandenburg Art Center through the holidays.”
Grace felt the breath catch in her throat. Something inchoate rumbled deep down in her solar plexus sending waves of indefinable emotion rippling up to the surface. Bob returned the key to the delicate drawer and inserted it in the box. “And yes, despite all rumors to the contrary, he does read Russian literat
ure.”
******
If you wish to appeal this decision, please notify the Brandenburg District Court within fourteen days of receipt … Grace crumpled the letter from the district court and flung it in the trash.
The Toyota dealership had promoted her ex-husband, Stewart, to assistant manager in June. Now he cruised about in a fully-loaded Camry XLE—a twenty-five thousand dollar car with heated outside mirrors, chrome-tipped dual exhaust, a rear lip spoiler and leather-wrapped steering wheel. All this extravagance, yet the state of Massachusetts couldn’t see fit to increase his child support by twenty-five, lousy bucks.
And that was only half the problem.
Grace got home from school around five-thirty. Her daughter, Angie, arrived two hours earlier. The sixteen year-old collected the mail and laid it out—sales fliers, junk mail, credit card applications, magazines and assorted bills—on the kitchen table along with the court letter perched conspicuously on top of the pile. Angie was sure to ask about the letter, and Grace would be compelled to tell her. To tell her what? Your father, the congenital philanderer who favors blustery lies over simple truths, is a skinflint. He begrudges his own flesh and blood an extra hundred bucks a month.
Grace climbed the stairs and entered her daughter’s bedroom. Angie was curled up on the bed reading a paperback. On the cover of the book was a picture of a bearded Hindu poised in full lotus position. A chalkboard hung from the mystic’s neck by a piece of string. “Is that required reading, or are you off on another weird adventure?”
With the breakup of her parent’s marriage, Angie developed a spiritual wanderlust.
There was a short flirtation with Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Scientists. Trips to a musty reading room on Huntington Avenue and an occasional Sunday service—that lasted a sum total of three months. Later Grace found several Hari Krishna brochures wedged under her daughter’s bed. They were wrapped in a furry tangle of dust bunnies. She never broached the issue.
More recently, Angie had gone off with a friend to spend the weekend at a Sufi commune in upstate New York. The teens drove the entire length of the Massachusetts Turnpike, through the scenic Berkshires crossing over the state line heading westerly toward the Catskills. Nothing came of that either. There were no metaphysical earthquakes. The girl returned from the land of the whirling dervishes with a bad case of diarrhea and craving for junk food. Angie threw the book aside. “I’m hungry. Could you make me a crazy omelet?”
In the kitchen Grace cracked a couple eggs and scrambled them briskly with a fork. She diced some sweet onion together with green pepper and warmed them in a pan until the translucent onions turned pearly. While the vegetables were cooking she laid a row of sliced pepperoni on the edge of a plate and opened a bag of cheddar cheese. Angie hadn't mentioned the letter from the court and that was good.
“Gina Grabowski accused the gym teacher of trying to look down her blouse while she was tying her sneakers.”
“Really!” She added a dash of salt and pepper. When the vegetables were sufficiently caramelized, Grace slid them directly from the pan into the egg then poured the batter back into the pan. She drizzled the cheese over the egg, topping the concoction with a layer of pepperoni. When the egg began to sizzle, she added a splash of water and covered the pan, steaming the omelet. That was the trick. The bottom never burned and it came out perfect every time.
Grace could imagine a half dozen over-sexed male teachers who might (the operative word here was ‘might’) ogle Gina Grabowski’s smallish boobs, but the gym teacher was not on the list. Kurt Smiley was a deacon at Saint Phillip’s Church and taught CCD classes two nights a week. Grace lifted the lid. A cloud of sweet smelling steam floated toward the ceiling. She folded the sides of the omelet toward the middle, added another tablespoon of water then lowered the lid.
“As I recall, Gina accused a male teacher of a similar indiscretion last year.” The spicy odor of the pepperoni and cheddar billowed through the kitchen. She slid the egg onto a plate, placed a dollop of sour cream on top of the omelet then rounded off the creation with a splash of mild salsa.
Angie was big boned with a fleshy nose and bronze complexion. Not pretty in the traditional sense but attractive, sensuous even, in her quirky, understated way. Grace bore little physical resemblance to her daughter. She had a reasonably good figure, but you would never know it by the way her clothes hung on her angular frame. Her hair was dark and straight. She never knew what to do with it. If she grew it long, the wispy strands hung limply. An act of desperation, she had her stylist trim it short over the summer. The page boy was suppose to make the lanky woman who turned forty on Tuesday look mod, hip, svelte, cool—not like Tinker Bell in a midlife crisis. Over the years, the body had seen a bit of wear and tear—a handful of birthing stretch marks around the lower belly and, more recently, a smattering of crow’s feet about the eyes. The not-so-subtle indignities of aging. “This is wicked good!” Angie smeared more salsa on what was left of the omelet. The oils from the pepperoni bled into the egg staining it with an orange glow.
“About the book,” Grace pressed.
“It’s no big deal!” Angie said abruptly, showing no willingness to pursue the matter, but after a moment she added, “The swami got disillusioned with the material world and took a vow of silence.”
“Language being corrosive to the spirit,” Grace added.
“He communicated by scribbling brief messages on a chalk board then, after a couple years, announced that he’d put away his chalkboard and begin speaking again. But when the moment arrived, he had a change of heart, went into spiritual seclusion and never spoke another word for the remainder of his worldly existence.”
Grace squirted a stream of dish detergent into the sink and let the water fill. “You’re not planning…”
“Cripes,” Angie exploded, “it's just some dopey book!”
Grace tapped her daughter on the wrist. “Are you packed for the trip?”
“All set.” Angie rose from the table and began putting food away. They were only taking the bare necessities - a couple changes of underwear, towels, sheets and a few cosmetics. There was no one Grace had to impress on the island. She had budgeted the trip as down time - a chance to decompress, recharge her emotional battery.
“The Village Idiot got kicked off the school bus,” Angie said in a flat, matter-of-fact tone.
The Village Idiot was Dwight Goober, a twelfth grader who lived two streets over. He’d been in trouble with the law since elementary school when he defaced the brand new playground at Lexington Park with graffiti. Dwight, who always struggled with academics, couldn’t even get the spelling of the four-letter words right. That’s how the police knew it was him. Who else could be so dimwitted? And he readily admitted vandalizing the playground as though it was a badge of honor. The court put him on juvenile probation and his mother had to pay a fine. Over the years his penchant for petty crime and mayhem reached legendary proportions.
“What did he do,” Grace asked.
“Punched a kid.” Angie pulled on a wind breaker but thought better of it and switched to a warmer jacket. She stuffed the windbreaker in her overnight bag. “Ellen Barrows.”
“Nice girl. What about Ellen?” Grace asked distractedly.
“Ellen Barrows —that’s the girl Dwight clobbered.
Grace retrieved her car keys and checked the time. She hoped to reach the Cape Cod Canal before sunset. “You didn’t say he hit a girl.”
“You didn’t ask.” Angie grinned but it was not a particularly pleasant expression. “When they passed out brains, Dwight thought they meant ‘trains’ and said ‘I’ll wait and catch the next one’.”
“The Village Idiot has to live in Brandenburg.” Grace set the security alarm and they went out the door.
******
The drive to Cape Cod was uneventful. Few people were heading south this late in the season. The maples and oaks gradually gave way to scr
ub pine rooted in bleached soil. A huge hawk sat far up in a tree just outside of Fall River. As they sped past, the bird spread its massive wings and flew off to the north, on an updraft of frigid air lifting the bird high above the earth.
“Your father’s stopping by to see you Tuesday,” Grace said. The predatory bird had nudged her memory, a free association of sorts.
“Whatever.” Angie curled up in a fetal position next to her mother with her knees jammed up against the dash. They reached the Bourne Bridge that took them across the waterway in record time. Halfway around the rotary, they picked up route 6 that meandered all the way to Hyannis, where the Kennedys lived and, still further north, to the gay and lesbian populations of Provincetown.
Grace spotted a diner up ahead. She must have traveled this route a hundred times or more and never noticed the brown, clapboard structure. A dozen cars lined the front of the building. “Hungry?”
“Not really, but there won’t be any food at the cabin.”
Grace pulled the Volvo off the road into the parking lot. Most of the patrons were Indian. Some wore braided hair and cowboy shirts. One man with prominent cheekbones sported a string tie fastened with a turquoise clasp. All the customers seemed to know each other. Behind them, the door opened and more smiling Indians straggled into the diner. “Mashpee,” Grace spoke softly. “They’ve lived in this region for centuries.”
These were the descendents of the legendary Indians who greeted the Pilgrims when the first settlers arrived in Massachusetts in the early 1600’s. The Wampanoag Tribe presently numbered about 1500 on the Cape. Each July 4th they joined with other tribes from across the country to celebrate their traditional customs, folklore and dance. Grace and her family had attended the Mashpee Wampanoag Powwow often when she was a young girl. They feasted on fried dough and clam cakes, listened to the tribal drumming and chants. The highlight of the three-day event was the fireball contest held at dusk on Saturday night where a flaming, kerosene soaked rag ball was kicked and tossed about in an attempt to score points. Soccer with a decidedly homicidal flair!