by Jeff Parker
In back, Ever pulls tacks from the bulletin board and gnaws on them. She vibrates occasionally and looks around to see if anyone notices.
The rest of them are fixated on my leg, which is pathetically skinny, devoid of muscle. The cuff of my pant leg crooked, revealing a dirty white sock, underneath a bald cream shin peers out. I fix the cuff then animate furiously, turning circles in the chair, trying to divert their attention.
But they’re ready for me. “Hand,” another boy shouts when I scrawl wellness charts on the chalkboard. Then they all stare at my hand. A small liver spot—my first—underneath the big knuckle. The skin is wrinkled like when you straighten out a crumpled sheet of paper. I shake the hand and move it around. Their eyes follow. My hand trembles a tiny bit. I write to keep it in check, “For tomorrow PP. 120-162, Defense Mechanisms: Repression, Rationalization, Compensation, Projection, Idealization, Daydreaming, Regression, Denial, Sublimation, Displacement, Reaction Formation, Negativism...” My hand jumps, scraggly, incomplete lines. I hold it in front of my face and peer through my fingers at the class, still transfixed, as if my hand was some thing they’d never seen before.
The bell rings, breaking the spell. The sound of the word “Hand” is replaced with the sound of zippers on backpacks, shuffling papers, sneakers on the tile floor.
“Bye, Professor Crazier-than-a-Shithouse-Rat,” Ricky Champagne says.
When he and the bigger boys are gone I let Michael out. He thanks me and copies the assignment off the board, looking back at my leg as he leaves, then at my hand, then at my face. I wheel myself to the faculty lounge, where the walkways are too narrow for what the insurance company calls my “personal transportation vehicle.” No one will open the door for me in the teacher lounge even though I can hear voices: the gifted language arts teacher says to another teacher, “You want to hear what this little bastard said to me? He goes, ‘If you can tell the meaning of the word from the context, then why do you need the word?’”
The only things worse than the kiddies are the red squirrels. They stalk me like the kiddies do, up into the tree. And this treehouse isn’t your ordinary thing. I built it myself in the oaks right around the time I found out about the Wife’s affair with the abortionist. I slept here when she didn’t come home and I could walk. It has outlets, insulation, running water, an electric platform elevator that operates on pulleys, brown carpet, and several pump pellet rifles. Once I got out of the hospital with the handicap, being alone in the house was intolerable, so I started coming up here again. It was in part a penance. It made life more difficult and kept me in constant jeopardy. Now the electricity is shut off in the main house. The doorways there aren’t big enough for the chair and the carpet is impossible to wheel through.
Everything there reminds me of her.
We started off with normal gray squirrels. They were almost tame, cute, their numbers slim. Before she left, I bought the Wife the Holy Grail of yard décor, interactive yard décor at that, a device resembling a little windmill with pegs on the ends to which she’d attach corncobs smothered in peanut butter. Attach that whole apparatus to a tree and the gray squirrels would tip back on their hind legs respectably, spin the mill until they got hold of a cob, clean the kernels of peanut butter, then drop the rest for the birds. Sometimes they slipped and clung to a rotating cob and me and the Wife would laugh, mauling grapefruits on the back porch. I don’t know where the red squirrels came from but they started showing up one day. They kept the gray ones at bay. They’re smaller than the gray squirrels, with white spots on their chests. These red squirrels took flight from faraway tree limbs and pounced. They held tight and ate peanut butter, kernel, cob, everything, and the Wife and I admired their determination and vigor.
But the red squirrels kept multiplying. Our yard, trees, ornaments, everything overrun with them. They chased away the timid gray squirrels. They evicted the birds from the birdbaths. They nested in the grinning gargoyle curio shelf. And one day we retired the mill when a red squirrel leapt from an overhead limb and bit the Wife.
But they’d moved in for good. Now they burrow their way into the wood of the treehouse. They store nuts and moss there. They mate and fight on the roof at night. They squeeze in under the windows and deposit squirrel shit in the carpet. The pellet guns are for them.
Big Daddy and I meet AAA then he follows me to the treehouse. I’m relieved. His car in the driveway is enough to keep the kiddies away. At home my four garage windows are busted and two red squirrels dart in and out in a game of chase. I lunge for one as it scurries by, forgetting for a moment that I can’t walk. The Principal rights me, and we adjourn to the treehouse for SmackDown.
“They trespass everything,” I blubber, gauging the patter of small feet in the tree. I try to get into the match, but the sound of their ratty feet in the tree just has me going tonight.
“Thank God for this sport,” the Principal says.
“I’ll take these rodents from beneath,” says I, grabbing a pellet gun and wheeling toward the elevator.
“I’ll keep you posted,” the Principal says.
On the ground I take aim at anything red that moves, but my pellets suck dirt. Then I pump the thing up again. It’s supposed to be twenty-pump, but I can barely get past five. You’d think my arms would be stronger wheeling around all the time but it’s the opposite.
Ever steps out from the trunk like a tree sprite and almost gets shot. She hands me the last duckling, unharmed. She plops to the ground, drawing her knees up close and binding them in her arms. She flicks her earring and taps the koala backpack in her lap. I rest the rifle across my armrests.
“You’re the only teacher to know, you know,” she says. “Besides who’s-his-face up there. Whatcha think?”
“I think your situation is unfortunate,” I say.
“There’s lots of things I miss about being normal,” she says.
“What are you doing here, Ms Quick?”
“It’s Ever,” she says. “I wanted to apologize.”
“For what? You helped me today.”
“For when I was here with those boys. They found out where you lived from the auditor’s website,” she says. She explains that she’s seldom asked to go along on anything.
The Principal hollers: “Annihilate the bastards, Champion! The Rock’s in the middle of his speech, and they’re munching through the wires.” Ever looks up.
“You better go now,” I say.
“Okay.”
“Thanks for bringing it back,” I say.
Back upstairs I prop the pellet gun against Big Daddy’s recliner. The duckling goes on top of the TV. “Did you hit any of them?” he says.
“I’m a lousy shot,” I say, as the electricity flickers, then goes out.
Big Daddy is called out of our lunch when another student wrecks at the curve in the road. It interrupts the liverwurst and mustard sandwiches made for us by the secretaries, Gerald and Gerard. They’re old men, gay and living together though me and Big Daddy are the only ones to know. They somehow got in the habit of fixing us lunch every day because we are very old helpless men and they are slightly younger old helpless men. They keep a small radio in the main office constantly tuned to the Christian rock station.
With Big Daddy gone, I filter through the files. Evelyn Marquee Quick. 162 IQ. Family from Sewanee. Never received a grade below A in her entire academic history. But last year, an odd blip on the medical records. She was absent from school for a solid two months. I can make out “bingo accident” on the doctor notes, but the absentee forms are blotted out, ripped, damaged beyond readability. I hear steps outside the office, stick the file back into place, and roll back to my liverwurst as Gerard pops his head in the door.
“No fatalities,” he says. “Damn the Jaws of Life.”
Well, the accident just served to rile them up. When it comes time for my class they are heaving textbooks at walls, and rolling small nails under my wheels. I’m talking techniques for managing stress: “
Visualization. Deliberate daydreaming about pleasant surroundings. A defense mechanism.” Ricky Champagne’s eyes feast on me. I can see right through to his little brain, pondering my physicality, searching for just the right part. I glance down at myself as well, practice standard defensive body language, arms folded across the chest.
“Crotch,” he announces.
And Ever spits a tack. “Why don’t you just shut up, Rick Champagne. Everyone knows you’re nothing but a hyperactive, pre-pubescent, bald-pecker hormone cluster and no one’s all that impressed.”
The class goes silent, but now they consider him. He tries to come at me again, though by less clever means. “You’re saying it’s healthful to daydream? This is whacked, everyone knows only freaks sit around daydreaming all day. Or those whose lives are so miserable due to their own stupid actions they have no choice but to daydream.” He chuckles, implies me, looks around the room for support.
Ever stares him down. She shakes her head slowly then reverts attention to the front. Everyone else follows suit. It is the first time I understand her power, whether the orgasms are real or not. How her peers must be scared of her and in awe of her. How their barely pubescent minds can’t comprehend her. How the mystery of the female orgasm must seem so clear to her. How some women go their whole lives without even one and this girl has multiples every day that seize her foundation.
Ricky Champagne straightens up in his chair. Then he bolts, bawling and blubbering like a kindergartner, out the classroom door.
I capitalize quickly and get through like three days’ lessons in one 50-minute period. It’s amazing. I teach again. Health is all of a sudden a magical thing. Their eyes glitter with recognition. Some of them write notes. When the bell rings they wait for me to dismiss them before packing up. I say, “You’re dismissed.”
Then I say, “Hold on a minute, Ever.”
Michael stops on his way out the door. He’s always the last one to leave class, generally after my releasing him from some sort of confinement, so he feels uncomfortable. He looks from Ever to me. “Fascinating stuff this Immune Response Mobilization, Professor,” he says. “Would you be able to explain to me again the communication between the helper T cell and the B cell?”
“Let’s talk about that tomorrow, Michael,” I say. He nods, shuffles. Looking back as if betrayed, he slides out the door.
“Yes, Professor?” she says.
“Why did you do that?” I say.
“You’re welcome,” she says.
“Well thanks,” I say. “I owe you twice.”
“Hold on,” she says, reaching out and taking both my wrists in her hands. She looks into my face. I look down at her white knuckles. She shakes.
“Ever,” I say, “Are you faking these?”
Her eyes are like drops of mud. She tightens her grip. “It starts around the baby thing, then shoots all through me.”
The electrician explains to me that, indeed, small rodents apparently chewed through the treehouse’s electric wires. Though he doesn’t know how they managed that without barbequing themselves. Then we locate a formerly red now charcoal squirrel at the bottom of the tree. “Guess they couldn’t,” the electrician says, laughing. He goes to his truck and comes back with a Miracle Whip jar filled with powder. A strip of tape across the top reads “Strychnine.”
“This prevents recurrences,” he says. “And I don’t have to honor no guarantee.”
I thank him. He patches the wires up and leaves. Then I bring out the Wife’s old mill. Attach juicy cobs of sweet corn to it and coat them with extra crunchy peanut butter and a sprinkling of strychnine. This is the difference between the kiddies and the red squirrels. The kiddies are way too smart to fall for this. But the red squirrels come right away.
I park the chair on the porch and eat a grapefruit like me and the Wife used to. In no time at all they wretch and plunge from the tree. It reminds me of a time when Big Daddy and I were merely acquaintances, former classmates. He was just a guy who answered the phone at the high school when I wanted to go out for beers. Standing, I was taller than a lot of tall people.
The squirrels crawl and writhe through the weeds. Their filthy red bodies flip around. They crawl toward the little rocks where the lawn ornaments used to be like they’re crawling toward their pitiful little tombstones. I chunk the grapefruit rind and hit one on the head. They squirm until I almost can’t take the joy anymore. And finally, almost all at once, they’re still.
Two Hours and Fifty-three Minutes
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 11:42 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: a little catch-up
Dear Jana,
Hi, I found your address online. It might be weird to get an email from me after so long.
I don’t rightly know where to begin. I often remember those days in ‘94 and ’95: You and I, two spry young HTML coders who couldn’t get enough of each other. What really did it for me was how you brought our work back to the bedroom. Serious. I loved that. If you had been one of those “Fuck me with your big dick” kind of girls, I don’t think we would have made it as long as we did. But there was this one thing you would scream—I can hear your voice right now: “Open carrot, div, align equals right, close carrot, indention, open carrot, image, space, source equals harder dot harder dot harder dot jpeg, close carrot, indent out, open carrot, backslash, div, close carrot.” I couldn’t control myself. And you didn’t have to worry about referring to external javascripts or style sheets or database query strings which is what it’s all about now, so technified and unerotic. Those days, the early days of the Internet, were much simpler times. Give me a basic scripting language over object orientation any day.
I should probably give you the old me-update huh? I kept on with the coding, moving up here and there as the technology changed. Eventually I bought a book on SQL and learned databases. It was a good move at a good time from a career perspective. The past five years I’ve been in database design. It’s interesting, when you’re building databases all day you focus in on one thing, the primary key. Everything else is relation, relation, relation. Does this other thing relate to my primary key? If so, how? If not, how to organize the relation?
It’s not the reason I’m writing. My wife—yeppers, married—wants to have a baby. We’ve been trying for a while and with no results. I suggested she get a fertility check up and she kind of half got offended. Ah, that’s not true. Lisa doesn’t get offended. Everything is ironic with her. But she got ironic offended and said I needed to get a fertility check up too. I said, “Look, it’s not me okay. I’ve been responsible for two abortions in my life.” Lisa thinks this is a trip. She accuses me of bragging about my abortions. But I’m a good sport and I went and did the jerk off into a cup thing. The results came back showing her pond fully stocked. Me? Low sperm motility, which means the percentage of moving sperm and their quality of motion. I’m telling them that their results must be off, to retest, and they say things like, it’s not the first time they’ve had a guy who can’t make babies suggest a history with a woman who claimed they made a baby. I about punched him for, in effect, calling into question your good name—you know how fond I’ve always been of you, Jana, even after we split. I checked around on the Internet and certain people’s sperm motility does decrease over time, especially if they’re mountain bikers or some new studies show that cell phones actually have an impact. But I don’t ride and I don’t talk so much on the cell, surely not enough for that. Quite the opposite. I sit ten-hour days in a one-thousand dollar ergonomically correct office chair, comfortably resting my balls on an indentation which keeps them, as I code, warm and balanced.
Sometimes things seem so far away though it’s like you don’t really even remember them. You can start to feel crazy because part of you is so sure your life went like this and another part of you feels this panic because maybe you misread something all these years. I don’t know what
I’m really trying to get at. I just think about you sometimes, especially when something like this comes up. I hope it doesn’t create bad memories or something. Where are you in the world?
Solid Gold,
Dealer
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 12:14 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: a little catch-up
Dealer,
Conceivably it’d be nice to hear from you. But do you have to be so pornographic? I’m not like that anymore. Let’s agree to keep this brief electronic reunion strictly business. You wrote me for a reason and I’ll discuss that point with you because it’s having some bearing on your life, which I don’t feel completely comfortable about. (But I’m not accepting your friend request on MySpace, and you really should write people before just adding them.)
There’s something I never told you. I came down with a condition while we were together. It’s kind of rare, often misdiagnosed, leads to all kinds of break-ups, divorces, single-parent children, lifelong sex phobias, blah blah blah. So the fallout in our situation pales totally in comparison. We hardly even knew each other.
The fact is, I was never pregnant. It was a ridiculous excuse to keep from having sex with you, because of this condition, because I started getting headaches when we did it. At first I thought what was causing the headaches was the screaming. I always hated HTML. I did that for you, because I very well knew you loved it. If I have a gift it’s knowing what people love. It’s called Sexual Headache and means a sudden, excruciating headache when approaching orgasm and afterward.