A Hole in Juan

by Gillian Roberts

  My words seemed to float on the air currents in the loft, and to hang up against the high ceiling and the dark skylight, and I realized the two males were watching me, as if I were a specimen. Of what, I couldn’t say, but with their every silent inhale and exhale, the air thickened.

  “Okay,” I finally said. “What is it?”

  “You’re letting him win,” Pip said.

  “This isn’t some macho game. This is my life. Even so, I admit it—he wins. Everybody else loses.”

  “Not making anything better by walkin’ away.” My husband looked sad, perhaps disappointed in me.

  “I can’t make it better,” I said. “I have no super powers.”

  Mackenzie looked grim. “Of course, you should do whatever seems right to you.”

  This was not how I’d wanted this to go. Not at all. Instead of murmurs of sympathy and a chorus of “Of course you should get out of that loathsome place! You’ll find something better, something more worthy of you!” they were behaving as if I’d suggested treason.

  Mackenzie stood up and busied himself at the counter. In a minute, the grinder was pulverizing coffee beans, and he hummed softly as he measured them into the French press. I couldn’t make my thoughts settle into any coherent pattern, so I sat where I was, trying to organize them.

  I should do what I thought was right, he’d said. What seemed right to me was quitting. Therefore, the end was in sight.

  So why didn’t I feel relieved?

  Mackenzie poured the boiling water into the press, took out two mugs—Pip had not yet developed the habit of coffee—and returned to the table, bearing all the makings. “Why not make the most of the situation?” he asked quietly.

  Pip watched his uncle, as if expecting a miraculous fairy-tale sort of ending.

  Mackenzie shrugged. “I’d vote for civil disobedience instead.” He put his elbow on the table and rested his head on the palm of his hand and looked as if he’d given me an actual plan, or solution. “It’d be an appropriate response.”

  He put down his arm, and leaned toward me. “Pip’s right. You can’t simply quit. If you do, do you think Havermeyer’s going to go to the kids and explain why you’ve left? Do you think anybody’s going to debate those ideas, learn something from this, do something about this?”

  “Of course not. I only—”

  Pip beamed. He’d been right, whether or not he knew why.

  “Correct. Instead, there will be some mumbled cover-up of a reason, and you’ll be out in the cold with nothing gained. You lose, the kids lose.”

  “And there’s no chance you’ll find out what happened to the chemistry guy, either,” Pip said.

  “You are therefore suggesting what?”

  “Like I said, civil disobedience. Another right of ours. Protest and keep on keeping on, and spread the word, and print that poem and find out about Reyes and I’ll help if I can.”

  “Me, too,” Pip said.

  “That’s no solution,” I said. “Know what’ll happen? I’ll get fired.”

  “Exactly!”

  And slowly, the tension drained out of me, and the unease was replaced by energy, and I laughed. “And I’ll be no worse off.”

  “Precisely!”

  I love how his Louisiana accent makes the word have absolutely no precision. And I loved the idea.

  Pip looked at his uncle with renewed hero worship. And to tell the truth, I looked at Mackenzie with just about the same expression.

  Of course, there was a down side: This meant I definitely had to mark the rest of those quizzes and essays, after all.

  * * *

  Thirteen

  * * *

  * * *

  The next morning, the chip on my shoulder was so large, I had to enter the school building sideways. Worse, I liked wearing it and felt it was the perfect accessory. Coming to school with the express purpose of doing whatever I wanted until I was tossed out had a delicious, seditious feel.

  But before insurrection, I needed an update on Juan Reyes.

  Harriet’s normally happy expression grew solemn. “Very upsetting,” she said. “The hospital is so vague! They said they were cautiously optimistic. He wasn’t out of danger yet, but he . . . well, I think what they were saying was that it was a good sign because he hadn’t died, but really—that isn’t enough information!”

  I agreed, and I collected the contents of my mailbox. Harriet continued talking.

  “It’s been a difficult time, if I say so myself. Because on top of poor Mr. Reyes, Erroll was beside himself last night, and I can’t really blame him! Imagine somebody cheating by using an outside fur-shine expert’s help!”

  I looked at the mail. Another warning to read to our classes about the Friday night party. Costumes were to be “respectful,” behavior was to be “circumspect,” and alcoholic beverages and controlled substances were to be altogether absent. That last warning was pretty clear, but the others confused even me.

  There was a solicitation from an insurance company and a notice about a new English text that I might be able to review, and a While You Were Out slip, signed by Harriet. Apparently, Mrs. Wilson “needs to speak to you” about “a matter of some importance.” However, she would be away from the phone and her home for most of the day.

  I pondered the meaning of a message saying that I had to talk with someone who wouldn’t be available to do so. What was I to do with this information?

  Harriet dusted her smiling jack-o’-lantern, fluffed its black wig and straightened the witch’s hat. “Poor Erroll’s got an artist’s soul, you know. You can’t destroy their sensitivities that way and expect them to perform. He didn’t do well at all in the competition.”

  I couldn’t see the cause and effect in that, since Erroll would have had to prepare beforehand without knowing about the cheat, but it was not my place to question life in the taxidermy jungle.

  “This may mean he’ll have to take extra classes.” She followed her words with an enormous sigh. “His confidence is shaken.” Grief and compassion choked her. “Low self-esteem is terrible for a taxidermist. They can’t be timid! They can’t make a wrong cut! I don’t know how to help him, except to stand by my man and cheer him on.”

  “I’m sure that’s precisely what he needs. And by the way—Mrs. Wilson phoned me?” I waved the little pink square as a reminder.

  She blinked, then nodded. “Yesterday. An hour after school. I was still here, so I took the message. Something about bad company. Maybe a bad company? People who spoil things? To tell you the truth, she sounded like somebody upset about nothing. Certainly nothing urgent, so I didn’t think you’d want to be bothered at home about it. Was I right?”

  I nodded. “But it isn’t clear what she wants me to do, given that she’s out all day.”

  “I think she said she’d try to reach you today from wherever she found herself.”

  Bad companies? What did that have to do with English class, or with her son? Bad company? His friends were the same as ever, and they were an okay bunch, with, sometimes, the exception of Wilson himself, who could get obnoxious. He was cocky about things “working out” for him no matter how little effort he produced. He was constantly winking and telling me—and anyone else who showed emotions—to “chill out” and “go with the flow” and other semiarchaic but still annoying expressions. But that didn’t seem to be what was on her mind. Since I had to wait till she reached me, I put the message into my backpack and opted not to worry about it.

  So, apparently, did Harriet. “I need to think of something special for my poor baby,” she said. “I need to help him get through this crisis.”

  Erroll had a good thing going, milking Harriet for all she was worth. Of course, I could be wrong, cynical. Taxidermy could be his life’s passion, belatedly but sincerely found. His struggles could be heroic, his depressions severe when he failed to meet his standards of excellence.

  He might even intend to marry Harriet someday, and shower her with the wealth his
preserved turkeys, frogs, and boa constrictors brought them.

  And stuffed pigs would fly.

  “Sounds perfect,” I said, but before I could get away, Maurice Havermeyer’s office door opened, and he emerged, looking flustered until he saw me. “Ah, good,” he said. “I was about to send for you.”

  More grief? My shoulders dropped along with my spirits until I remembered that I was in charge. I was ready to be fired. Nothing he could do to me mattered.

  But it could surprise me. “I’d like your input on a situation,” he said. “Right outside the door. The student notice board.”

  We walked out of the office and faced the messy board, which always looked as if it were shedding. “What is the meaning of this?” he asked before I’d said a word.

  My first thought was that he’d spotted and disapproved of the peculiar party announcements I’d seen a few days back, and I looked for one of them now, for the headless pumpkin man, the “don’t get hung up” message, the added “don’t put yourself in this picture.”

  But those messages were gone or covered up, and being that alert to subtle changes in his environment would have been quite un-Havermeyerish. The board looked its usual self, layers of messages about lost backpacks and textbooks, pleas for articles for the newspaper, or attendance at a basketball game, and all the pages generously peppered with exclamation points. Everything urgent and high-pitched.

  Today, again the strident messages were heavy on orange and black, urging EVERYONE!!! to MAKE SOME MISCHIEF!!! ATTEND THE PARTY!!! it would be SO FUN!!!

  I looked back at the headmaster, feeling like a bad student trying to read the teacher’s expression as if the right answer might be visible there. His face looked grim, but didn’t yield a clue.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand. What situation?”

  His lips pursed and he pointed at a specific orange sheet, already half-covered by a plea for information about a lost notebook. “What is this about?” he demanded. “Who is missing—and who is against what? This is not the place for negative statements! Don’t students understand there are rules about posting on this board?”

  I followed his finger’s direction.

  My eyes had swept right over it, registering it as another Halloween message, but now I read the words, written in thick black marker:

  THE ANTIGONE BRIGADE IS HERE!!!!

  I swallowed my immediate response of delighted surprise. Why was he talking about negative statements? This was a clear and positive declarative sentence—a little heavy on the exclamation points. Was that what bothered him? Was I going to be in still more trouble for failure to contain excessive punctuation?

  And then I realized what he was seeing as compared to what was there. My bombastic headmaster, the self-declared educator, the pompous, self-important champion of “the canon” as he insisted on calling whatever he deemed a classic, that Maurice Havermeyer was mentally pronouncing her name not as An-tig-o-nee but as Anti Gone.

  How do you inform an employer who is already unhappy with you that he is an ill-educated ignoramus?

  Of course, given that this was get-myself-pink-slipped day, saying that would be an easy route out the door, but with larger issues at stake than pronunciation, I didn’t want my firing offense to be tactlessness.

  “Oh, Dr. Havermeyer,” I said. “You’re so clever to make puns about the classics! As if you didn’t know how to pronounce Sophocles’ protagonist!” I chuckled. He didn’t have to know what was making me laugh.

  His second chin wobbled and his eyebrows danced over a series of small muscle movements that illustrated a range of emotions from stymied to perplexed to worried to belligerent. For those moments, his face seemed a transparent mask over his brain, and I could almost read the thoughts circling his skull in letters as bold as the Antigone Brigade’s and with as many !!!’s.

  He finally settled on a tenuous expression of superiority. “Yes, yes,” he said in a bluff tone. “Of course. My little joke, heh-heh.” He cleared his throat. “But the serious question remains: What is this—this—this person—”

  He didn’t know who she was, or even that she was a she.

  “—about? What does this mean?”

  “This is the first I’ve seen it. I have no idea.”

  I didn’t know what it was about, though I knew its origins, and to me, it was about having hope for the future. The same people who’d frightened me with their secretive surliness had redeemed themselves.

  To me, this primitive scrawl was about freedom of expression, about patriotism, about preserving and caring for the basic rights of citizens, about knowing right from wrong, and being willing to stand up for what was right.

  And I knew that poster made my heart expand with renewed faith in mankind in general, and in the class that had so worried me specifically.

  None of which was safe to say to Maurice Havermeyer because he might actually understand that he was the villain of the piece. “I don’t know,” I said again.

  “Why Anti-goners? Is it goner as in a dead person? How can anybody be against dead people?”

  I hadn’t pronounced her name when making my face-saving joke and now, once again, I had to save his. “Why name themselves after”—I looked at the poster, not at him, as I carefully pronounced the name—“Antigone?”

  He frowned as he realized nothing was “gone” or “against”—nothing he understood, in any case—then retained the frown and looked back at me. “Then I repeat—what is this about?”

  “I don’t know. My seniors just read the Oedipus trilogy. They seemed quite moved by the ideas.”

  “Oedipus,” Havermeyer murmured. “The one who married his mother? Why him?” I would probably now be charged with teaching incest.

  “Her. She was his daughter, you recall.”

  “Who?”

  “Antigone.”

  After a beat, he said, “Of course.” I waited while the idea swam around in his skull, looking for a toehold. It obviously found nothing except resentment that a planned tirade against anything beginning with anti had to be shelved.

  “But did she—I don’t recall—been a while—did she have an army?”

  I shook my head. “Acted alone. It got her in a lot of trouble with the king.”

  The King of Philly Prep worried for a moment. “The classics,” he said, back to blustering. “People should not twist the classics to suit their own—are you certain you don’t know what this is about? Why doesn’t it say what it is? Why doesn’t it say what it wants? It says to join—but it doesn’t even say how to do that!”

  “Kids,” I murmured.

  He huffed as if building up steam, but he couldn’t find purchase. “I will investigate this further on my own,” he finally said. “Thank you for your time. Mustn’t keep you.” He looked at his watch, which hung, along with the fake Phi Beta Kappa key, on a chain across his wide belly. “School day’s about to start.”

  I didn’t see why he had to check the time. Surely the noisy onslaught of students pouring through the door not five feet away from us could have convinced him school was about to begin. On fine days, high school students did not spontaneously burst into a schoolhouse before they had to. But as usual, he wasn’t overly sensitive to what was going on right around him. Besides, he loved any excuse to use that pocket watch, that gold chain, that fake award.

  After he’d walked back to the office, I inspected the Antigone Brigade’s announcement to see if I’d missed anything. But even with the lost notebook announcement moved off it, it simply announced its existence and invited others to join, saying nothing about what it stood for or intended to do.

  With my new awareness of the adolescent subterranean communication system, I knew that most of the school population would be able to fill in the blanks. Further, they’d know that the faculty, lumbering around outside the loop, would be left in the dark.

  I’d forgotten to turn my cell phone off, and it rang. I was glad I answered, because it was Ma
ckenzie, whose voice I am always glad to hear.

  “Sodium,” he said by way of greeting.

  “The same to you,” I said.

  “Remember, last night, you told me about the girl in the lab and how she thought Reyes said ‘Oh, no!’ right before being blasted?”

  I certainly did. Once Pip was on his sofabed, watching TV with earphones on so the sound wouldn’t bother us, I’d filled in the blanks.

  “Just remembered a little high school chemistry and sodium explodes when a rush of water hits it, or it’s tossed into water. If he turned on the faucet, leaned in to put out his cigarette in the water, and saw what was directly below it—he’d say something. He’d know what was about to happen. Does that make sense?

  It did. And I didn’t think I’d told Mackenzie about the missing sodium. “How did you know that?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “I figured it had to be something pretty accessible that combines with water, given the sink and the ‘oh, no!’ and I suddenly remembered high school. Given the glass was all over, and his cuts, it must have been sitting there in a jar or something. We were . . . scientifically curious, but nobody got hurt. Gotta run,” he said, “but I wanted to tell you, for whatever it’s worth, before I forgot.”

  I thanked him, hung up, turned off the phone, and walked upstairs to my room.

  It made terrible sense. And it meant the note that said the explosion had not been an accident had been written by somebody who knew the truth and was trying to speak it.

  Including the prediction that “something worse” was about to happen.

  * * *

  Fourteen

  * * *

  * * *

  I didn’t know what to do with this new knowledge, except look and listen until I understood what it might mean. And in the meantime, it did not seem wise or kind to spread my anxieties. I didn’t know what else would happen or when, and I couldn’t protect any of us against it or make any sort of rational accusation.