Next time the crow came at him, however, Jim ducked and spun around and swung his arm, so that he knocked it halfway across the kitchen. It struck the side of Tibbles’ cardboard box with a hollow thump. Immediately, he made a grab for his heaviest cast-iron griddle.
The crow cawed furiously at him and came whirling back, more like a black windmill than a bird, but Jim was ready for it. Gripping the griddle in both hands, he hit the bird with a devastating backhand that sent it smashing into the tiles between the faucets. It croaked and dropped into the sink, and although it made a feeble effort to climb out again, it eventually fell back and lay on its side, its legs still quivering but its eyes closed.
Jim picked it up by one of its claws and dropped it into the pedal-bin. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘No funeral for you, you ghoul.’
He was shaking and he had to take a deep breath to steady himself. He dabbed his cheek with his fingertips and found that he was still bleeding, so he went back into the bathroom and dabbed tea tree oil on his face in case the crow had been infected with psittacosis or crowitis or whatever unpleasant disease crows could pass on to humans.
Back in the kitchen, he slung his brown canvas book bag over his shoulder and picked up the box with Tibbles’ body in it. He took a quick look in the pedal-bin before he left, but the crow was still lying there with its head in an empty yogurt pot and it was definitely dead.
He left his apartment and double-locked the front door behind him, although he doubted if any number of locks would keep the fox-woman out, if she wanted to come back in. The morning was still windy, with tumbling gray clouds. As he passed Summer’s apartment he was tempted to ring the doorbell and find out how she was, but he decided to leave her alone for the time being. She was probably sleeping, after last night’s shenanigans, and she had to go to work this evening, to do some Full Mooning and Cradling and Exploding and all the other pole-dancing moves she had to make.
For a moment, though, he stopped outside her door, and pictured how she had looked last night and everything that had happened between them, and it gave him a warm feeling that he hadn’t experienced in a very long time, and made him smile.
On the landing below, crunching over broken glass, he stopped for a moment outside Mrs LaFarge’s apartment, too. All of the windows were empty and above each of them the pink-painted stucco was stained with banners of black soot. Inside, he could make out the skeletons of Mrs LaFarge’s furniture, and wallpaper that was streaked with runnels of dirty gray. The stench of burning was still so strong that he had to pinch his nose between finger and thumb to stop himself from breathing it in.
He was about to leave when he realized that there was a figure standing in the far right-hand corner of the living room. The figure was completely motionless, and when he had first seen it he had mistaken it for a hat stand. But it was a woman, with a broad-brimmed hat on, and even though he couldn’t see her face very clearly, she appeared to be staring at him. For one chilling second he thought that it might be the ghost of Mrs LaFarge, but the woman’s hat was a different shape from the 1950s flying-saucer style that Mrs LaFarge had habitually worn.
‘Excuse me – who are you?’ he called out. ‘Ma’am? What are you doing in there? Didn’t you see the fire department tapes here? Nobody’s allowed inside.’
The woman gave no indication that she had heard him. She didn’t answer and she didn’t move. Jim didn’t know what to do. Maybe he should call the police and tell them that there was an intruder in Mrs LaFarge’s apartment. On the other hand, the woman looked very much like the fox-woman, although she was standing in silhouette against the bright gray light from the balcony window and he couldn’t be entirely sure. If she were the fox-woman, the likelihood of her still being here when the police arrived was remote, and Jim would simply look like a crank and a time-waster.
Right now, he knew that he had to appear as credible and as sane as possible, especially with Lieutenant Harris and Detective Wong and Dr Ehrlichman. After the terrible injuries that Maria had suffered – whether they had been real or illusory – he was convinced that Special Class Two were all in critical danger – and that he was, too. He needed all the support he could get, even if he had to be economical with the truth, and not try to insist that anything supernatural was going on.
He knew the fox-woman was plaguing him, for whatever reason, even if nobody else was likely to believe him. And although he didn’t know why, he felt that he was the key to whatever was happening, as if he were the key to a clock that kept losing time.
He was still standing outside Mrs LaFarge’s apartment when he heard Summer calling out, ‘Jimmy! What you doing, Jimmy-wimmy?’
He looked up. She was leaning over the railing wearing nothing but a blue-and-white striped shirt, with the collar turned up, and the top four buttons undone. Her hair was a riot, pinned up with grips. Up above her, the clouds were beginning to break, and the sun shone to give her a halo.
‘I was just on my way to college,’ he told her. ‘I was taking a look inside of Violette’s apartment and I thought I . . . Um, I was taking a look, that’s all.’ He decided in mid-sentence that it was better if Summer didn’t know that the fox-woman was inside. That’s if it was the fox-woman, and not some vagrant, or some looter, or some ghost.
‘You going to come see me at the Pothole tonight?’ Summer asked him.
‘Maybe. I’ll try. I have a whole lot of classwork to catch up with.’
‘Well if you can’t make it I’ll knock on your door when I come back from work and I’ll show you my Eye Opener.’
‘Wow,’ he said. He wished he wouldn’t say ‘wow.’ It made him sound like a fifteen-year-old.
He looked back into Mrs LaFarge’s apartment. The figure was still there, but now that the sunlight had brightened he could see that it wasn’t a figure, after all. It was a hat stand, with a broad-brimmed hat perched on top and a pale gray coat hanging underneath it.
He stayed there for a few moments, staring at it. Jesus, he couldn’t even trust his own eyes now. Or maybe he could. Maybe it had been a woman, and then changed back again.
He went down to the parking area, opened the trunk of his car and carefully stowed away the cardboard box with Tibbles’ body in it. Then he climbed into the driving seat, but he didn’t leave immediately. He sat behind the wheel for over two minutes, looking up at the balcony outside Mrs LaFarge’s apartment. He was half-expecting to see a gray figure in a wide-brimmed hat come hurrying out. But nobody did, and after a while he turned the key in the ignition and backed out into Briarcliff Road.
He switched on the radio and it was playing ‘The Dark End of the Street’ by Percy Sledge.
‘At the dark end of the street . . . hiding in shadows where we don’t belong . . . living in darkness, to hide alone . . .’
As he turned into the gates of West Grove College, a large cloud drifted across the sun, so that the campus suddenly looked as grainy and colorless as a black and white movie. Jim felt a sudden surge of deep misgiving, as if the cloud were an omen that something hideous was going to happen.
TWELVE
When he walked into Special Class Two, there was no sign of Bob Nussbaum, whom he had asked to stand in for him, and the classroom was in chaos.
He went over to his desk, but the shouting and the whistling and the throbbing of gangsta rap didn’t abate. Arthur and Billy and Grant kept passing their basketball, one to the other. Judii was talking on her cellphone and swinging her necklace around and around, while Tamara was peering into her compact and fixing her turquoise eye make-up. Behind her upraised desk-lid, Patsy-Jean was listening to her MP3 player with her eyes tight shut and at the same time burrowing her podgy little hand into a giant-sized bag of Golightly sugar-free tropical fruit candies.
Only Teddy appeared to be doing any work. He was hunched over his desk, scribbling furiously, but God only knew what he was scribbling about, because he never stopped scribbling from the moment he sat down at his desk to the moment the fina
l bell rang. Kim was sitting with his head in his hands, absorbed in a copy of the Korean edition of Men’s Health. He didn’t even look up when Jim came in.
Next to Kim, Maria was doing nothing at all, staring at the blackboard as if she were expecting some kind of doom-filled message to materialize on it, like mene, mene, tekel upharsin, the writing on the wall which had warned King Belshazzar of the imminent end of the Babylonian empire. Jim noticed that she had a fresh crimson bruise on the right side of her mouth, and her lip was split. He would have to take her aside at the end of class and talk to her about it, or at least arrange for her to talk to Nurse Okeke.
He perched on the edge of his desk, waiting for the music and the chatter and the basketball-throwing to die down. Over three minutes went by, and the noise continued, so he went across to the stationery cupboard, unlocked it, and took out a tub of yellow Play-Doh. Then he went back to his desk and took a scarlet roman candle out of his bag. He stuck a large blob of Play-Doh on his desk, and pressed the roman candle into it. Then he took out his Zippo lighter and lit it.
Almost immediately, the roman candle started to fizz and send up a shower of orange sparks, as well as pouring out smoke. Everybody in the class stopped what they were doing and stared at it in disbelief.
‘Sir! You just litten a firework, man!’ said T.D. ‘What you done that for?’
‘Just amusing myself,’ Jim told him, taking off his coat. The smoke was already so thick that he could hardly see the back row of the classroom. ‘If you don’t want to learn anything when you come to this class, that’s fine by me. You do what you feel like doing and I’ll do what I feel like doing. Today, I feel like lighting fireworks.’
‘Sir, that really stinks!’ protested Judii. ‘Isn’t it like some cancerous health hazard or something?’
‘Most likely,’ said Jim. ‘But what do you care? You obviously don’t want to be here anyhow.’
‘I had to talk to my friend Roxanne,’ said Judii, holding up her cellphone. ‘I met this really boom boy last night and I didn’t know if he was interested in seeing me or not. Like, if he does want to see me, that could affect my whole entire future, you know?’
‘Oh, that’s OK, then,’ said Jim, raising his hand in acknowledgement. ‘I wouldn’t like to think that you were doing anything unimportant, like finding out what a noun is.’
Teddy put up his hand, although Jim could barely see him through the smoke.
‘Sir? I know what a noun is, sir!’
‘I know you do, Teddy. But a considerable number of students in this class of ours haven’t the foggiest idea. Not that it matters. They’re not interested in finding out. They’re quite happy being ignorant and illiterate, and if they’re quite happy being ignorant and illiterate, who am I to spoil their happiness?’
The roman candle fizzed faster and louder and now a fountain of sparks was shooting right up to the ceiling tiles. Janice Sticky started coughing, and then Leon and Arthur and T.D. joined in, hacking and spluttering and wheezing and staggering around the classroom clutching at their throats.
‘Mr Rook, we’re dying in here!’ said Arthur.
At that moment, the roman candle exploded with a deafening bang, which made every student in the classroom jump in fright.
‘Shit, man!’ T.D. protested. ‘Almost gave me a freakin’ heart attack!’
‘So long as I have your attention,’ said Jim. ‘Billy, Georgia, you want to open those windows at the back there? I think we could all use some fresh air.’
Just as they opened the windows, the smoke alarm went off, a penetrating meep-meep-meep that made it impossible for his students to hear what Jim was saying to them next. He made his way down the center aisle, shouted ‘Excuse me!’ to Tamara, and climbed up on her desk. Then he reached up and pried the cover off the smoke alarm, and took out the batteries.
‘Right,’ he said, climbing back down. ‘Let’s get down to some serious grammar. That’s if everybody’s willing.’
Reluctantly, Special Class Two shuffled back to their desks and sat down.
‘So can anybody tell me what a noun is?’ Jim asked them. ‘Except for you, Teddy, that is.’
Billy put up his hand. ‘Is it like something you don’t do too often? Like people say to you, how often do you go to Burger King? And you say “noun then.”’
‘Interesting try,’ Jim told him. ‘But if you don’t do something very often you say that you do it “now and then.” Three words. Now. And. Then.’
He looked around the class. ‘Anybody else? No? You shouldn’t be afraid to have a shot at it, just because you might make a complete idiot out of yourself.’
Nobody else put up a hand, so Jim picked up an antique book with a green cloth binding and held it up in front of them. ‘You see this? This book was written by a guy called Gilbert Dargent, who was born in 1889. There’s a chapter in it all about his time at school, and in those days they used to teach their English students with a rhyme. I still don’t know of an easier way to learn what a noun is, or a verb, or any of the other parts of speech. Learn this rhyme, and nobody will ever think that you’re an ignorant illiterate jackass again.’
‘Hey, nobody don’t think that about me anyhow,’ T.D. retorted.
‘That’s because nobody you happen to know right now can tell the difference between a noun and a verb, either. But one day when you go out into the big scary world you’ll meet people who do. And wouldn’t you feel more confident if you knew that “hat” was a noun that you wear on your head and not the past tense of the verb “hit.”’
‘I knew that,’ said T.D., petulantly. ‘Who ever says “I hat that dude right in the mouth?” I mean, who says that? Everybody knows it’s “hitted.”’
Almost all of the other students laughed and jeered at him. T.D. turned around in his seat, furious. ‘What?’ he demanded. ‘Fit, fitted. Knit, knitted. Hit, hitted. Don’t you know nothin’?’
‘OK, OK,’ said Jim. ‘Here’s the rhyme. You may think it sounds old-fashioned. You may think that it sounds like a rhyme for nursery-age kids. But believe me, I know dozens of adults who aren’t too sure about nouns and verbs, and that includes some teachers, too.
‘A noun is the name of anything,
A hoop or garden, school or swing.
An adjective describes a noun,
Small shoes, bright eyes, new gloves, green gown.
A verb tells us what people do,
They dance, she walks, he laughed, it flew.
An adverb tells how things are done,
We quietly talk, they quickly run.
An interjection shows surprise,
As “Oh! How pretty. Ah! How wise.”’
Jim walked up and down the classroom, handing out copies of the rhyme to every student. When he reached Teddy’s desk, Teddy raised an eyebrow as if to say, ‘Why are you giving me one?’ But Jim leaned close to his ear and said, ‘Go on, Teddy, take it anyhow. It won’t do you any harm, and if the rest of the class think that you need it, too – well, it won’t make them feel quite so dumb.’
Teddy nodded, and took it. Jim had learned one thing about his students over the years. Most of them may have been borderline illiterate, but very few of them were stupid or insensitive. Behind all of their bravado, and in spite of their apparent indifference, they were all deeply aware that every one of them was fighting the same desperate fight.
‘What I want you to do now is open your copies of To Kill A Mockingbird to page one hundred nine. I want you to read the whole page very carefully, and make a list of every noun you come across, and every adjective, and every verb, and every adverb. And any interjections, if you can find them.’
He glanced up at the clock. ‘OK, you have a half-hour. I have to leave the classroom for a while, but I don’t want any more messing around, and by the time I come back I expect you to be pretty much finished. Janice – you can be the class snitch. Anybody does anything stupid or disruptive, I want to know about it.’
Jim left the c
lassroom and walked along the empty corridor. Outside, the wind had died down, the clouds had frittered away, and it was hot and sunny. Off to his right, one of the groundskeepers was mowing the wide grassy bank between the main college building and the swimming pool, with a tractor and a front-mounted cutter. The grass cuttings glittered in the sunlight.
He crossed the parking lot and opened the trunk of his car. He wondered if he ought to open the cardboard box and take a last look at Tibbles, just to make absolutely sure that he was dead, but the smell was enough to convince him that he must be. He lifted out the box and carried it around the side of the main building. He went down the concrete steps that led to the basement and pushed his way inside. It was hot and noisy down there, and he could hear the incinerator rumbling.
Halfway along the corridor, to the left, he turned into the boiler room. Dunstan the janitor was in there, in his brown dungarees, breaking up cardboard boxes and tossing them into the open door of the furnace.
‘Hi there, Mr Rook!’ he greeted him. ‘You aint s’posed to be down here, sir. Health and safety regulations. Don’t want you getting scorchified or nothing.’
‘That’s OK, Dunstan. I was wondering if you could burn this box for me, that’s all.’
‘Sure thing, if you want me to. But you could’ve just dropped it in the dumpster out back.’
‘As a matter of fact, Dunstan, there’s something inside it. My cat, Tibbles. He died, and I wanted to have him cremated.’
‘Your cat? This isn’t no pet crematorium, Mr Rook. Not so sure I’m allowed to incinerate animals. Health and safety regulations.’
‘Oh, come on, Dunstan. Do me a favor here. I didn’t want to bury him in my back yard. Too many goddamned gophers. Give them five minutes and they’d dig him back up again.’
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