The Best Man

by Richard Peck

  “I’m the backup driver,” Uncle Paul said. School was officially over. We were out of our desks again, milling around—sobbing, eating brownies. It was chaos, but Uncle Paul’s eyes met mine. “Your dad’s taken your grandpa Magill to a doctor’s appointment. Just routine.”

  Then here came Argus, offering a paw. Uncle Paul shook it. That gave me time to step up and make the introductions the way Grandpa had taught me.

  “Uncle Paul, this is our student teacher, Mr. McLeod.” Like Uncle Paul didn’t already know who Mr. McLeod was. North Koreans knew. But this is how you do it.

  They shook hands. Big square hands. “Ed,” Mr. McLeod said.

  “Paul,” Uncle Paul said.

  • • •

  Uncle Paul and Mr. McLeod and Argus left and took me with them. Whatever Uncle Paul was driving, we weren’t spotted, and Mr. McLeod didn’t have to get under the dashboard.

  We took him home for dinner that night, and how great was that? The most famous student teacher in the world was coming to my house—and his dog too.

  As we turned into our driveway, Dad was just locking up the garage. Grandpa was there in his wheelchair, in the balmy evening. If you ask me, they looked like they hadn’t been anywhere all day.

  No pizza that night. I ate grown-up food. Dad served it up in his lucky apron. Mom had settled at the kitchen table between Uncle Paul and Mr. McLeod. The front door banged open and echoed through the house.

  Holly.

  “That’ll be our daughter, Holly,” Mom told Mr. McLeod. “Eleventh grade. Pretty much.”

  Holly seemed to be on her phone. When wasn’t she? But wait. There were two voices, both whiney. Janie Clarkson?

  Holly and Janie Clarkson bumbled into the kitchen. They both had their phones out. They may have been texting each other.

  Argus loped over, checking them out. They froze.

  Janie Clarkson spotted Mr. McLeod and couldn’t believe her eyes. “I’m like wow,” she said, and dropped into a chair.

  It took Holly longer. If there was anybody in Illinois or the world who didn’t know who Mr. McLeod was, it’d be Holly. Listen, it’s possible.

  Seeing Mom between him and Uncle Paul at the table, Holly closed her eyes. “Janie’s staying for dinner tonight, but we don’t eat whatever that is.”

  Dad held up a plate. “You can’t get this in any restaurant.”

  “Please,” Holly said with her eyes still closed.

  • • •

  That was our first Friday night with Mr. McLeod. And here’s how it ended. Dad thought Mr. McLeod might like to see the workshop over across the alley in Grandpa’s basement. We’d told him Grandpa had been the architect of the school. Dad said I should give the tour.

  Argus stayed behind in the kitchen. We’d be crossing Cleo’s turf, and she didn’t allow dogs. Any dogs.

  When Dad headed upstairs to put Grandpa to bed, I led Uncle Paul and Mr. McLeod down to his basement.

  I flipped the switch, and the whole basement lit up with hundreds of little pinpoint lights. I jumped back. There’d never been but one light down here, over Grandpa’s workbench.

  We three stood there on the stairs. Lights gleamed out of dozens and dozens of miniature houses. It was like being on a plane coming in over some city—Chicago, in fact.

  Because over there was the LEGO Ferris wheel we’d put together when I was in preschool. Now every little car on it was lit, and the wheel was turning. Grandpa’s grandpa had remembered riding it at the fair in 1893.

  Grandpa had done a scale model of every house he’d ever designed and filed them all away on shelves. Now they were out and lit up. They stood in landscaped lots on Ping-Pong tables.

  Over there was Westside School, except for the all-purpose room that was added later. Even the playground swings where Lynette had beaten up Natalie. Toy-car traffic crowded the curving streets.

  There was more than you can imagine, including the great Chicago buildings Grandpa had studied: the Palmolive building. Navy Pier. And up a stretch of Lake Shore Drive, the centerpiece of the city: Wrigley Field, flying its flags. The ivy on the outside walls. The hand-operated scoreboard. It glowed like that first night game, 8/8/88.

  A picture hung on the wall, draped in Christmas lights. Mr. McLeod studied it a long time. It was a young guy with mushroom hair and his shirt open with beads hanging down. The girl with him had flowers in her hair.

  Hippies.

  Love children.

  Grandpa and Grandma.

  All around us the lights of Grandpa’s life flickered on our faces. How many hours had Dad clocked down here, putting Grandpa’s life back together?

  “I could have helped,” I said. “I could have been down here with Dad.”

  “He’ll need you later,” Uncle Paul said.

  11

  Since Mr. McLeod wasn’t a real teacher yet, he kept coming up with new ideas. We started every morning with some National Guard workout routines. Just what we could do next to our desks.

  It woke up Russell Beale for the day, most of the day. We ran in place and did stretches, with Mr. McLeod in his shirtsleeves, being our leader.

  “Really put your heart into it, Esther!” he’d call out. “Way to go, Emmas!” Mrs. Stanley exercised along with us: front squat, back squat, box squat. She was an unusual sight. According to Lynette, she lost a little over a pound and a half.

  It was always something. Down in the storage room Mr. McLeod came across a stack of maps from back when there were maps in the classroom. He hung them around our walls, dusted them down, and we’d have to find places you never heard of. We tried to explain to him that we’d never need to know about these places. Kazakhstan? The Upper Peninsula of Michigan? Please. But then he’d cut out in another direction. Omaha. Omaha Beach. Selma. Wherever.

  Natalie’s hand was up about this, a lot. She warned him that being exposed to this much unfamiliar material could damage our self-esteems.

  We racked our brains for ways to slow him down a little. “Hey, Mr. McLeod,” we hollered, “when are you going to read to us?”

  He looked confused. “You’re kidding, right? Can’t you read for yourselves?”

  “Of course we can,” we roared. Most of us. But we liked being read to. And we liked seeing teachers kept busy.

  “Well, maybe I could read you a little from my favorite book,” he said, rubbing his smooth chin. “Do you want to hear it?”

  Sure. Anything.

  He said it was about an army officer just back from war in Afghanistan, and looking for a guy to room with. The book was a Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that just happened to be on the desk. Mr. McLeod opened it and began to read.

  Who knew there were wars in Afghanistan in 1878?

  Who knew where Afghanistan was?

  So we were back to geography and history again before we knew it.

  We liked every day to be the same, but Mr. McLeod was always looking for something new. He liked field trips. We had one a week with moms doing the driving. We seemed to have more moms than troops. We went to the arboretum twice.

  There’s a YouTube of us building fires to cook our lunches outdoors. We didn’t have to start with flints. We could use matches, but we had to bring kindling to get a fire going. Natalie brought a commercial fireplace log with a wick, from Costco. And we hit the demo farm to watch baby pigs being born. Two Joshes threw up.

  It must have been Environmental Ecology. We did a whole unit on wild plants you can eat. Dandelions, and cattails you can boil and nibble like corn on the cob. We set up a field kitchen and made soup from parboiled stinging nettles. I wouldn’t want to eat it twice, but it was okay.

  The field trips were great, and the moms were always ready to roll. Mrs. Eichenberry drove a showroom-fresh Mercedes, fully loaded. The only downside was that Mr. McLeod wanted us t
o write up reports after. This looked like homework, but Mrs. Stanley went along with it. She graded our papers. Natalie got an A-minus on one of hers, and her mother called Mrs. Dempsey about it.

  Our next-to-last trip was to Wrigley Field, a VIP tour hosted by Uncle Paul with lunch in the club rooms. We didn’t eat weeds that day.

  It was an away day for the Cubs, so we went all over, into the dugout—everyplace. We got through the big double doors in right field to the indoor batting cages. It was like Field of Dreams. We jogged the bases.

  We sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” from the box seats like it was the bottom half of the seventh. It may have been the best day of my life till then.

  Uncle Paul handed Mr. McLeod a regulation bat so he could take some practice swings at home plate. There’s a ton of YouTube on Mr. McLeod taking swings and Uncle Paul watching.

  The rest of us got scaled-down plastic blue-and-red Louisville Slugger souvenir bats. We battered each other senseless with them. Lynette gave Natalie a real whack around back. It was what school should be. Now we were totally used to different things on different days. Now we could do different.

  • • •

  You’d think they couldn’t get better, but our last field trip was the best. Mr. McLeod wanted to bring the troops to Grandpa Magill’s basement—that world Dad had set up.

  It had really interested Mr. McLeod, who was very big on history. Our town. Chicago. Illinois. He was always amazed that we didn’t know where we were.

  “Point north,” he’d say, and we’d point in every direction.

  Dad told me I’d have to clear it with Grandma Magill first.

  “Dad, you wouldn’t like to clear it with Grandma for me,” I said. “Would you?”

  “Not really,” he answered.

  So one afternoon I caught up with her coming back from a meeting of the League of Women Voters, an outfit she runs. She was aiming her Lincoln at the garage. Then she was climbing backward out of it and seeing me there.

  “Archer. To what do I owe this rare visitation?”

  “Hi, Grandma. I was wondering if I could bring my class to see Grandpa’s basement. Like a field trip.”

  “Like a field trip?”

  “A field trip.”

  “You want to show them your grandpa’s workbench?”

  “Well yes, that’d be good,” I said. “And everything else.”

  “What else?”

  “Ah,” I said since she didn’t know.

  Her hand was on her hip. “Let’s have a look down there first.” We were already halfway to the basement door.

  Then down we went. On the bottom step I fumbled for the light switch. Grandma was right behind me, and she wasn’t crazy about surprises.

  Between here and the workbench was a carpet of winking lights. Grandma’s hand closed on my shoulder. She let me lead her down into Grandpa’s life. Hers too. Some of the Ping-Pong tables overlapped. You could get between others, between neighborhoods. You could take Lake Shore Drive up to Wrigley Field. Over where the lights stopped would be the nighttime lake. I hadn’t looked for our own houses before.

  Grandma went right to them: the pair of square houses, back to back across an alley. Aimed at the garage was a Tootsietoy Lincoln Zephyr. The wrong year, but still . . . A toothpick swing was in the yard where Grandpa always sat with Cleo. The pinpoint lights sparked in the two circles of Grandma’s glasses.

  I walked her over to the picture framed in lights. The boy with the mushroom hair. The girl with flowers in hers. She stopped and reached out to them.

  “I ironed my hair,” she said. “On an ironing board. You can’t imagine. And those flowers were real. Everything was.”

  She pointed to the boy, to Grandpa. “And that boy,” she said, “I’d have followed him to the moon.” She may have been crying a little bit behind her hand. I didn’t mean to make her cry. I didn’t know she could. But it was all right. I was there.

  • • •

  It was perfect attendance on the day of the last field trip.

  Now that we could walk to school, we wanted to be driven everywhere else. But we walked that afternoon, just the troops and Mrs. Stanley and Mr. McLeod. A couple of die-hard au pairs with toddlers in strollers came along behind, but they fell back when we got to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

  I’d already had to do an introduction in class, about Grandpa’s career. Written out, of course. I’d had to use semicolons twice because Mr. McLeod really liked semicolons. I told them how Grandpa built the school and a lot of the town. How he doesn’t like it when people make changes, or litter on the lawn.

  There was barely room, and you had to be careful. But everybody was impressed. “Awesome,” they said, and “This is as good as the Museum of Science and Industry.” Little Josh Hunnicutt was totally into it. It was more his scale.

  Somebody was sitting over in a shadowy corner, past the picture. Grandpa himself, though not quite full-sized anymore, sitting there, dressed in his summer suit. Only half of him worked.

  I went over to him. He didn’t say anything, but caught my eye with his good one, and pointed with his good hand. Dad had made a display of blueprints, rolled up and tied with ribbon. Grandpa pointed to his bad hand.

  He wanted me to put a rolled-up blueprint in the hand that didn’t work. When I did, it looked like he was holding it, like he was still in business. He winked at me, and I turned to the room.

  “Listen, this is my grandpa, the great architect, the builder of our town.” I’d told them before, but they could hear it again, and see him. “This is Mr. Addison Clark Magill, born on September 13, 1942, the day Cubs shortstop Lennie Merullo committed four errors in one inning.” I told them all about him, and he smiled with half his mouth, and one eye twinkled.

  Then it was time to introduce him to Mr. McLeod.

  He came over, and Uncle Paul came with him. “Grandpa, this is my student teacher, Mr. McLeod. Mr. McLeod, this is my grandpa, Mr. Addison Clark Magill.”

  Grandpa put up his working hand. Mr. McLeod took it in both of his.

  “My son has built all this to remind me of my life and my small contribution to Chicago,” Grandpa said, only a little slurry. “I believe Chicago’s the finest city in the world.”

  “So do I, sir,” Mr. McLeod said, close to Grandpa’s ear because the troops were making a racket and Grandpa’s hearing wasn’t great.

  “Are you a Chicago man?” Grandpa asked.

  “No, sir,” Mr. McLeod said. “I’m from Council Bluffs, Iowa.”

  “That where your people are?” Grandpa asked.

  “No, sir. I lost my parents when I was a kid. I was fostered, and so I had many homes and none.”

  “Then you’re welcome in this one,” Grandpa said, and shifted his good eye to Uncle Paul.

  12

  We’d wanted to give Mr. McLeod a party on his last day. We’d given Argus a party, and we were still up to here with brownies. But the week got away. You could smell summer from here. Then it was Friday.

  The first bell had rung, and we were ready for our workout. But Russell Beale was missing.

  “He’s not absent,” Raymond Petrovich said. “I saw him coming into school.”

  Mrs. Stanley sent Raymond and me to check the boys’ restroom. It was five minutes after the hour. You worry about sixth graders, but Raymond was about as tall as any of them. And there were two of us. Also, I was eleven. I’d had my birthday.

  We ducked into the nearest boys’ restroom, but it was empty. Then we thought we might as well check the one in the other wing. Andy was at his post by the front door. Mrs. Rosemary Kittinger’s replacement was at the desk.

  Russell was in the other restroom, watching the door when it opened. He was just standing against a sink, going nowhere. Both his hands were tied to a faucet with plastic clothesline. It was wrapped a
round and around and knotted tight and sealed with the faucet water. You could see how he’d tried to get loose.

  But what you really noticed was the word written across his forehead in pink Day-Glo Magic Marker. Three big letters—

  G A Y

  “What the . . .” said Raymond.

  Russell knew what they’d written on him. He could read it backward in the mirror.

  Always before, he’d seemed a little younger than the rest of us. Not now. And he wasn’t ready to cry yet.

  We didn’t talk. Raymond and I started on the clothesline. Russell had rubbed some skin off his wrists trying to get free. We kept at it until the clothesline fell off into the sink.

  I only looked at Russell in the mirror. His eyes were wet. He was checking around for the paper towels and the liquid soap. He wanted that word off him.

  “I’ll do it,” Raymond said. Russell looked up at him, and Raymond started working over his forehead with a soapy towel. I thought it wasn’t coming off. But there was pink on the paper.

  The door opened behind me, and we all jumped. I hoped it was Andy. It was Mr. McLeod.

  He’d come looking for us, and here we were, bunched up at the sink. Russell’s face was turned to Raymond, and Raymond was scrubbing on his forehead. I was rolling up the clothesline to stick in the trash. We weren’t going to say anything about this. We were going to let this go.

  Mr. McLeod started to speak, but Raymond showed him the word on Russell’s forehead. It was beginning to blur, but it was still there.

  You could feel heat coming off Mr. McLeod. We hadn’t seen him mad before. He took Russell’s hands and looked at his wrists.

  “Sixth graders,” I said, and showed him the clothesline. I started to throw it in the trash.

  But Mr. McLeod said, “No, give it to me.” He stuffed it into his pocket. “They brought it from home.”

  “I’m not saying who they were,” Russell said. “Forget that.” His voice cracked and started to change right then. It was like this was the beginning of the end of being a kid for him.