by Jeffrey Ford
In math, Krapp whipped us with long division, and in the middle of one of his explanations, out the window, across the field, on the baseball diamond, Mr. Rogers appeared as if from thin air, talking, with his finger pointing up. Krapp stared like he was seeing a ghost. The ex-librarian walked the bases through half-melted clumps of snow. As he rounded second, he stopped for a moment to clap. At third he signaled “safe” and turned to view the cheering crowd. Home base was covered by a small ice dune. Rogers climbed it halfway, with a strong wind in his face. Then a police car showed up on the field, and like we were watching a movie, we all got up and went to the window. Krapp said nothing. Two officers got out of the black-and-white car with the blinking cherry on top, and each took one of Mr. Rogers’s arms. He kept talking as they loaded him into the backseat of the cruiser. The engine started, and they rolled away toward Sewer Pipe Hill.
Krapp told us to sit down. He closed the math book and checked the clock. It was fifteen minutes until the end of the school day. He went behind his desk and grabbed his chair, lifted it and slowly carried it out in front of the class. Placing it down, he took a seat facing us.
“From now until the bell rings, I will answer any question you have. You can ask me anything except one thing,” he said. “You can’t ask me why the sky is blue.”
You could have heard a pin drop. I felt all of us kids tense like one clenched muscle. No one wanted their Krapp too nice. He looked out over our heads at some spot on the back wall. I stared so hard at the clock that I could see the minute hand move. Almost a whole quarter hour of complete silence. At four minutes to, I thought of a question. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself raising my hand and saying, “Where’s Charlie Edison?”—but I never did. Finally Hodges Stamper raised his hand and asked, “Is it almost lunch yet?”
“You’ve had lunch,” said Krapp, and then the bell rang.
Jim made me tell him about it three times. He called it “The Soft Side of Krapp,” but I told him about how Krapp sat staring at us, his arms crossed against his chest. “Like he had all the answers,” I said. “Kind of like a swami.”
“He’ll be out on the baseball diamond in no time,” said Jim.
A Hundred Bottles A piece
The day the horses started at Hialeah, Jim decided the ground was clear enough for us to go in search of the man in the white coat’s house. It was a Saturday, and the sun was shining. There was a light breeze. As we forded the stream behind the old Halloway house, Jim said to me, “We can’t keep calling this guy ‘the man in the white coat.’ It takes too long to say.”
“What do you want to call him?” I asked.
We stepped onto the path, and he said, “I had an idea. Remember the name of the nun who told us about him walking the earth? Her name was Sister Joe, so…”
“Brother Joe?” I asked.
“Josephine,” he said.
“No,” I said immediately. “You can’t call him that.”
“How about Deathman?” said Jim. “Like Batman.”
“I don’t want to say that,” I told him.
“Well, what do you want?” he asked.
I’d thought of calling him Dr. Watson and was about to say it when Jim cut in and said, “No, wait! We’re gonna call him Roger—’cause his face looks like a skull, and the flag that has the skull is the Jolly Roger. What do you think? We could call him Jolly Roger.”
“Too much like Mr. Rogers,” I said.
“Son of Krapp?” said Jim.
“How about Dr. Watson?” I said.
“No, that sucks. We could just call him Mr. White for short,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, although I wasn’t crazy about it, and we both said it out loud a few times to practice.
Going back across the stream at one point, we came upon Tony Calfano’s fort—a lean-to made of tree limbs and brush, a standing triangle of logs. Calfano hunted in the woods with a pellet gun. He was in my class and lived around the corner from us, next to Mrs. Grimm. When he’d kill squirrels, he’d skin them and hang their dried pelts on the walls of his fort. I’d come upon the spot by accident only two other times, and both times it gave me a shiver to see it. He’d told me in school that he knew where sassafras grew in the woods and that he’d pick it and make sassafras tea. One time this kid Tom Frost asked Tony why he was out of school, knowing that the cops had been to his house when his mother went nuts. Calfano said, “I had Frost bite on my dick.”
Farther on in our journey, we had to pass through a place we called “the crater,” a round depression in the woods on the way to the railroad tracks. It was about twelve feet deep and huge in circumference. The edge was a sloping dirt hill, and all across its sunken space knee-high pines grew like grass. Crows perched in the trees at its far edge. We didn’t know that area of the woods very well. In trying to find the back of Mr. White’s house, we would have to travel almost to the end of the trees.
Whenever we saw a backyard off to our right, we’d sneak up cautiously, staying well hidden, and look to see if there was a wooden garage standing by itself. At first we went all the way to the tracks and didn’t find the house and had to turn back and look again. There was one with a garage in the backyard, but when I looked at the house, I didn’t see that high window where the light had come on. I shook my head, and Jim laughed.
“Did you really see this place?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Were Laurel and Hardy there?”
I gave him the finger.
“Okay,” he said, and we looked some more, traveling back and forth along the western edge of the woods. Finally he said, “Forget it,” and started to head home. When we got to the middle of our path across the crater, he stopped and turned west. “Let’s look over here,” he said. We walked through the low pines to the western edge and climbed up the embankment. There we found a place of giant pines with boughs that swept down to the ground. I had a sudden memory of running around them through the night in waist-high snow and knew that we were close.
“This is it,” I told Jim.
We entered an area where we’d never been before. It was more like a forest, with tall pine trees, their brown needles covering the ground. The branches were so high above us that when the sun occasionally snuck through, it was like a beam out of Flash Gordon. The fear was building in my muscles, and my head was going dull. Then, through the pines, I saw the edge of the garage and immediately crouched down. I whispered to Jim, and when he turned and saw me, he dropped, too. I pointed toward the garage. He couldn’t see it from his angle, so he crept back to where I was and looked.
A minute later we were behind the last row of pines and had a clear view of the garage, the backyard, and the house. Its afternoon peacefulness made it scarier to me. We knelt there for a long time, listening to the breeze and staring at the windows. I thought of Charlie Edison trapped inside there, and my mouth went dry. I was losing strength through the bottoms of my sneakers.
Jim turned to me and whispered, “If anything happens, run home and tell somebody to call the cops,” and then he was off, across the short space of open ground to the back of the garage. I couldn’t believe he’d gone, and I didn’t want to be left alone. As I started toward him, though, he looked back and held up a hand to make me stop. He stood upright and walked out of sight around the side of the garage that couldn’t be seen from the house. At every second I expected the back door to squeal open, the light to go on in the upstairs window. After a very long time, Jim appeared behind the garage and waved for me to come.
I ran up next to him, and he whispered, “The car is gone. He must be out killing someone.”
I stopped walking.
“Come on,” he said. “Hurry up. I want to show you something.”
I took a deep breath before stepping into the shadow of the garage. There were oil stains on the concrete floor, and shelves lined the walls, stacked with empty Mr. Clean bottles, all turned out the same way to show the bald guy with his arms folded. Jim grabbed
my arm and said, “Look back there.”
He pulled me slowly, farther into the garage. I saw a huge silver box lying across almost the whole width of the place. It hummed with electricity.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A giant freezer,” he said.
An image of Barzita, eyes shattered, frost on his chin stubble, arms twisted and solid as an ice pop blossomed in my head, and I pulled my arm out of Jim’s grip. “No,” I said, and took off at top speed. As I passed the back end of the shed, I heard car tires on the gravel of the driveway. That’s where Jim passed me. We got back into the woods and then stopped and got down to catch our breath. We still had a full view of the backyard, and we watched.
“Did he see you?” I asked Jim.
“No way,” he said.
The sound of the car door closing in the garage shut us up. We saw him come out and head toward the back steps. He wore a white rain hat, and over his thin wrist he carried a black umbrella. Mr. White was bony, with a big Adam’s apple and a sharp nose. He reached for the railing leading to the back door and then stopped. He turned slightly and looked over his shoulder into the woods. When he took two steps directly toward where we hid, I felt Jim’s grip on my ankle, telling me not to run. Mr. White stopped again and sniffed the air. At one point I thought he was staring right into my eyes.
He finally backed away toward the steps and then climbed them. We ran like hell the minute the door closed. Halfway across the crater, we started laughing, and it made me run faster. We didn’t stop until we were almost home.
“He killed Barzita, froze him, and when the snow came, he dumped his body in the road,” said Jim.
“Do you think?” I said.
“What do you think?”
“I’m wondering about all the Mr. Clean,” I said.
“Me, too,” said Jim.
“Maybe he cleans up the death with it,” I said.
“A hundred bottles apiece,” said Jim.
What Time Will D Meet C and A?
Mary broke from the gate of her vacation like Pop’s favorite horse, Rim Groper, and was all over Botch Town at least once a day. Whenever Jim and I went down into the cellar after our homework, all the figures would have moved. Mr. Felina was in his driveway, Peter Horton was on his way toward Hammond, and Mr. Curdmeyer was spending a lot of time in his grape arbor in the middle of winter. The first things we always checked for were the prowler and the white car. The prowler prowled up and down just outside the school while the white car passed Boris the janitor’s house.
“He’s in two places at once?” said Jim.
“He’s got powers,” I said.
“Do you think he splits himself and one of him spies on people and the other kills them?” he asked.
“Probably,” I said.
We went back to looking for the right configuration that would tell us where Mr. White would strike next.
“What are we gonna do if we figure it out?” I asked.
“We’ll need to do something,” said Jim.
We asked Mary about a dozen times how she figured the stuff out, and she just shook her head. Then one night when we were studying Botch Town, we heard Mrs. Harkmar’s voice from the other side of the cellar. She was explaining to Mickey and the other students how her system worked.
“This is very complicated, so if you feel stupid, it’s okay,” said Mrs. Harkmar in a flat voice, like a robot. “First, they’re off, and then you start counting—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Then one, two, three, four, five, six. Then one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four, five, six. Like that. Then you start to add a lot with multiplication. Fast and faster on the back turn. See them in your head. See it. They’re coming into the home stretch. Follow each one. Where are they going? Will they win, place, or show?”
We heard the ruler hit the desk and knew that Mrs. Harkmar had finished the lesson.
Jim looked at me and shook his head. We laughed, but we made sure that Mickey couldn’t hear us. A few minutes later, Jim put his hand in his pocket and pulled something out. “Oh, I forgot to show you this.”
He handed me what looked like a baseball card. It was a New York Yankee card, an old Topps. The player, a painting instead of a photo, was named Scott Riddley. He had a Krapp flattop haircut and a mustache, a glove on his right hand. It said he was a pitcher.
“I got that in Mr. White’s garage,” he said. “It was leaning against one of those bottles of Mr. Clean.”
“Really?”
He nodded.
“It’s old,” I said.
“From 1953,” he said. “I looked on the back.”
I never understood the stuff on the backs of baseball cards. “Where?” I asked.
He turned the card over and pointed at a number, and I nodded without really seeing it.
“Mr. White collects Mr. Clean bottles and old baseball cards,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Well, go write it down,” he said, and pointed to the stairs.
I thought of Mrs. Harkmar’s lecture the next night when my father got home from work early and decided it was time I learned math his way. We sat at the dining-room table, the red math book open in front of us. My father had one of his yellow legal pads on which he sometimes did problems for fun, and I had my school notebook. He gave me one of the pencils he collected. On his night job as a janitor at the department store, he sometimes found half-used pencils in the trash. He sharpened them till their points were like Dr. Gerber’s needles. “These are good pencils,” he said.
I nodded.
When he wrote numbers, his hand moved fast and the pencil made a cutting sound. He crossed his sevens in the middle. We started with him asking me the times tables. I knew up to five, and then things went black. He asked me what was six times nine. I counted on my fingers, and at one point the digits in my head that I’d imagined as bundles of sticks turned into eyes. Rows of eyes, staring back at me. I figured in silence for a long time, feeling the right answer slip away. I gave my answer. He shook his head and told me, “Fifty-four.” He drew six bundles of nine sticks and told me to count them. I did. Then he asked me another one, and I got that wrong, too. He told me the answer. On the next one, he went back to six times nine. “Fifty-one,” I said. He got red in the face, yelled, “Think!” and poked me in the chest with his index finger.
By the time we got through with multiplication, he was sweating. We moved on to my homework—a word problem. Planes and trains all going somewhere at one hundred miles an hour, all leaving at different times, passing each other, laying over for fifteen minutes, with passengers A, B, C, and D, each getting off at Chicago or New York or Miami. I tried to picture it and went numb. My father drew an airplane with an arrow pointing forward. Then he drew lines like triangle legs to two different spots I guessed were on the ground. He wrote out “100 miles an hour.” He connected the dangling legs of the triangle with a straight, slashing line. He wrote A, B, and C at its points, the top point being the plane. He wrote D outside the triangle and drew a box behind it and wrote “Train Station” in script.
He said, “How far is Chicago from New York, and what time will D meet C and A? Figure it out, and I’ll be back in a little while.” He got up, went into the living room, and turned on the TV. I sat there looking back and forth from his drawing to the book. I couldn’t make anything out of it and eventually had to look away. For a while I stared at the screaming faces made by the knots in the wood paneling. I looked out the window at the night and at the light over the table.
In the middle of the table was a brass bowl with fruit in it. There were some bananas, an orange, and two apples, and they were all going brown. Three teeny flies hovered above the bowl. I stared at it for a long time, too tired to think to look elsewhere. It was like I was under a spell. My arm came off the table, my hand holding the pencil straight out toward one of the apples. When I jabbed, I jabbed slowly, letting the pencil slide through the rotten outer skin and into the mush b
elow. I stabbed that apple three times before I even knew I was stabbing it, so I stabbed some other fruit. The pencil made neat dark holes.
“What’s your answer?” said my father, returning to the table.
“B,” I said.
I saw him glance over at the fruit. “What’s this shit?” he asked, pointing at the brass bowl.
I said, “It went bad, and I wanted to warn people not to eat it, so I poked holes in it while I was thinking.”
He stared at me, and I had to look away. “Go to bed,” he said.
As I shuffled away from the table, I heard him crumple his drawing of the airplane triangle. “B, for ‘bone-dry ignorance,’” he said with disgust.
Up in my bedroom, the antenna was silent. Instead I imagined the aroma of Mr. White’s pipe smoke. The smell was so strong I could just about see it. George was out of bed more than once, pacing the floor, sniffing the closet. The next morning came like a punch in the face.
Do Something
Three nights in a row, we noticed that the white car was somewhere close to Boris the janitor’s house. On the fourth night, it was parked in his driveway. Jim lifted the car out of Botch Town and said, “We have to do something now.”
“It’s Boris?” I asked.
He nodded. “If we tell Mom or Dad, we’ll get in trouble for not telling them sooner, and if we tell the police, we’ll still get in trouble. We should call them and not say our names but tell them everything we know and who we think will be next. Then we hang up.”
“No,” I said. “If you call, they can trace it. I saw it on Perry Mason. We need to write a letter, no return address.”