In the Fall They Come Back

by Robert Bausch

  “Why not? How do you keep from thinking about it? Do you just forget that you’re temporary?”

  “Really.” She looked away.

  “Have you ever imagined dying?”

  “No.”

  “Sometimes, when I sleep very deeply, without dreaming, it’s like getting a little taste of death, and I wake up and say to myself, ‘That wasn’t so bad.’ ”

  “Good lord.”

  “You’ve never considered what it would be like to die?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever had a close call? Certainly you’ve had a close …”

  “Yes, and what I did after was laugh. Really hard.”

  “Everybody laughs. Nervously maybe, but they laugh. But what about after. You ever thought about it after?”

  She sipped her coffee, staring at me now. Then she said, “Are you serious?”

  “I’d just like to know.”

  “Let’s talk about something else.”

  I said nothing. We didn’t talk for a while, then she said, low and under her breath, “You’re so morbid.”

  “I prefer to think of myself as a realist.”

  “An obsessed realist.”

  It wasn’t an obsession. I mean I didn’t very often picture myself lying in a casket, or strapped to a gurney with plastic running out of every opening in my face, but still—everything I did was now somehow tinged with the knowledge of the dark; what Bible did to me, really, was warn me not to be trying to get anywhere. “Just be where you are,” he said.

  I guess I didn’t know how to do that. I wanted hope for the future back, that’s what I wanted. I tried to explain that to Annie but she didn’t want to hear anymore about it.

  “Why don’t you shut up about that,” she said finally.

  She could tell it hurt me, but when she reached for my hand, I withdrew it. I had nothing more to say to her and I wanted her to know it. The last thing I said to her that morning was: “You just don’t understand.”

  I stopped going over to Bible’s so regularly sometime near the end of that summer. One Thursday in August, I went down the street and had coffee with Annie, and then she and I played a little tennis. I came back to the apartment, took a cool shower to wash the sweat off, and then instead of driving down to Bible’s place, I decided to take a nap. I think I was planning on stopping by later that day, but I slept way too late, and then it was dinner time so I just didn’t go. I thought about calling him, but I was afraid he wasn’t close to the phone and he’d have to get up and limp to where he could answer it. That’s what went through my mind anyway. His foot was getting much better, though. He’d made good progress during the time of my regular visits.

  He didn’t call me, and naturally I thought that meant he didn’t need me. So Monday came around and then Wednesday and then another Thursday. I didn’t show up for two weeks and still he didn’t call me. When I finally went back there he acted just as though I hadn’t missed a visit. He was always glad to see me.

  I thought I was free of the responsibility of my visits. Maybe even, in a way, free of him. I realized, of course, that I didn’t really wish to be free of him—and even if I did, it wasn’t an important wish. I mean, I did miss him in the spaces when I didn’t go by there. He was nice to know. If it wasn’t for the talk of endings and all, I might have enjoyed visiting him a lot more often than I did. Our conversations were, as I said, enthralling and mostly entertaining. I learned more than I can say, to tell the truth.

  Sometimes he called me “Lad.” I guess I liked that, too.

  28

  In the Fall They Come Back

  The summer ended, and oddly enough I was not too unhappy about it. I had another year of teaching in front of me and I felt a bit more confident about it. I knew I wouldn’t be getting any kind of raise, and I knew I might someday decide to try something else—maybe even further graduate study. I didn’t want to feel settled into anything. I’d find a profession—there was no doubt about that in my mind at all. I just wasn’t ready for more graduate work and I couldn’t think of anything that I’d rather do than teaching. Anyway, I came to see higher education as a kind of prison of the mind and the teachers were the guards. I realized I’d rather remain a guard for another year before once again becoming an inmate. I know that sounds dramatic and a little prosaic, but that’s how I felt.

  The second year was when Leslie Warren came to me. She was a senior, for the last time according to Mrs. Creighton, and she would be in my English class. We were at the first faculty meeting that September, the week before Labor Day, and when she announced that Leslie Warren was coming back everybody groaned. Even Doreen looked at me and rolled her eyes.

  But I kept my mouth shut. I listened to the other items on the agenda, the announcements of new students and important dates, and when the meeting was over I went to Doreen’s room and asked her about it.

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  “Did you have trouble with her last year?”

  “Not so much.”

  “I know her a little bit,” I said. “I don’t think she is so bad.”

  “Well then. You’ll see.”

  “I’ll see what?”

  With mock exasperation she said, “Oh not now, Benjamin.”

  The best thing about the second year was I didn’t have to drive a bus anymore. Mr. Creighton finally decided to sell all four of them, which would compensate for the small loss of enrollment in the first year. He was certain folks would find a way to get their children to the school and he just didn’t want to do the maintenance any longer. I had an extra hour and half of sleep in the mornings, and I got home an hour earlier in the afternoon.

  The seniors were gone, but I still had George to deal with—a slightly bigger and more capable George—and Mark Talbot, Happy Bell, and Jaime and a few others. Mrs. Creighton came to believe that Suzanne Rule was ready to actually sit in a class, so she put her in my senior English class. I wouldn’t have minded very much except Suzanne required that a guardian angel accompany her, and that angel was, of course, Mrs. Creighton. For every one of those classes—at least in the beginning of that year—Suzanne crouched in next to Mrs. Creighton, bent so low she looked like one of the dogs. She and Mrs. Creighton were always early, and Suzanne would sit in a desk in the corner that faced the center of the room, so that her side was to me, and Mrs. Creighton would sit in front of her, the chair facing me, which made it easier for her to write notes on Suzanne’s pad. (She also whispered to Suzanne a lot, which really irritated me.)

  She tried to write down everything I said, and of course I had to numbingly and trippingly stick to the fake lesson plan that I’d drawn up for the class over the summer. It was the most excruciating experience trying to follow my “plan.” We had classes on prepositions, and commas, and subjects and predicates, and verbs, adverbs and adjectives, and even gerunds. (Gerunds!!! Most of those terms sound like some sort of weird anomaly in one’s reproductive organs. “I’m sorry Mr. and Mrs. Kettlewell, but your gerunds are totally adverbial and you’re suffering from a dangling participle. It doesn’t look like you will be able to conjugate children.”) And I hated having Mrs. Creighton there to observe everything I tried to do. I’m pretty sure the kids hated it too. One day, in an early class, Mark Talbot actually raised his hand and asked what Mrs. Creighton was doing there.

  “She’s just visiting.”

  “Are you in some kind of trouble?” he asked.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Pay attention to your studies young man,” Mrs. Creighton said. Suzanne Rule did not budge. She sat staring at the surface of her desk and the yellow pad Mrs. Creighton made notes on. With her head down and her scraggly red hair dangling, I could not even make out the slightest feature of her face, and like I said, I don’t think anyone—except a few of the boys last year—had ever seen her eyes.

  Around the second or third week of school Doreen and I stepped outside my classroom for a cigarette. Just as we got outsid
e, Leslie drove her car into the driveway and behind the building. We were standing in the smoking area where the early students normally gathered, but on this morning each student seemed to make the awkward decision not to join the two of us. They began to gather a little way down the embankment toward the basketball court. It was a self-imposed aristocracy, teachers high on the hill looking down on the students, who also watched Leslie cross the parking lot. She stopped under the big tree on the other side of the building, just on the edge of my sight. I wanted to move to the outer corner so I could see her better, but I resisted it. Doreen lit my cigarette for me. We stood there, in the shade, watching Leslie Warren.

  Then Doreen said, “Any trouble from the bitch yet?”

  “No,” I said. “Now you’re ready to talk about her?”

  “Oh yeah. I’ll talk about her.” We had some time before the beginning of classes for the day. Doreen wore her penny loafers, white jeans, a blue, puffy blouse and a thin black belt. Her hair was damp and the splotches of red acne along her jaw looked almost like a birthmark. “She thinks she’s so beautiful.”

  “She is,” I said. “She really is a beautiful young girl.” No one could help but notice her beauty—and I’m sure if you saw her it wouldn’t be long before you remarked on it either. It gave me a kind of exquisite pleasure just to look at her. I swear to you this was not sexual; there was no desire in it. As I’ve said before, this was pure aesthetics. It simply provided a kind of intellectual delight to look upon something so perfectly rendered, so beautifully designed. She had perfect light brown skin, a lovely, bright smile, and sparkling eyes that froze in your mind like the memory of certitude and permanence. “So why should I watch out for her?”

  “She’s a pain in the ass,” Doreen said. “And real dangerous. You’ll see.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “She can ruin a career.”

  I laughed.

  “I’m not kidding. She knows how she looks, and she knows men, too.”

  “I’ll be on my guard.”

  Doreen looked up at me gravely. “You can make light of it. But you just watch yourself with her.”

  “It’s hard to think of this place as …”

  “As what?”

  “A career.”

  “Well, aren’t we proud.”

  “To tell you the truth, lately it’s hard to think of anything in my future, much less a career.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m just feeling fully mortal today.”

  “Maybe you should quit smoking.”

  “Isn’t it possible Miss Warren will behave this year? It’s her last chance, right?”

  “Oh, she’ll get another chance. People who look like that always do.”

  A cool breeze brushed the smoke away from my face. “Tell me about her.”

  “She is a troublemaker in and out of class.”

  “Well,” I said, “she hasn’t done anything wrong yet. We’re in the third week and she’s been quiet and listened carefully.”

  “You’ve got Mrs. Creighton in there with you. Wait until she’s gone.”

  “Maybe it’s too early to vouch for Leslie in my class, but I’ve seen her out of class, and she’s been just fine. She was a big help to me with George and the party and all. Was she that bad in your class?”

  “I couldn’t complete a sentence. She’s got a dirty mouth, too.”

  We were quiet for a while, then I said, “It surprises me to hear you, of all people, talking so badly of her.”

  “Why ‘me of all people?’ ”

  “Well, you’re a bit of a rebel yourself, right?” I hoped this didn’t offend her, since we’d never talked about it and I was reading her manner of dress, her demeanor, and her general carriage—but I could see she was pleased. I think it’s safe to say that most people like to be called a rebel. At least those of us who are young do.

  “She’s not just a rebel. She’s a criminal.”

  “A criminal. What crime has she committed?”

  “I know she’s into drugs.”

  “How do you know it?”

  “I hear the kids talking.”

  “How do they know it?”

  She said nothing.

  “I want Leslie to talk in my class.”

  “Really.”

  “I want to encourage discussion.”

  “Believe me,” she said, “it won’t be discussion.”

  “They can have ideas,” I said. “They just don’t seem to know anything. Do you have Jaime Nichols in your class?”

  “The little one? Dark hair, kind of a deep voice?”

  “That’s her. When I first met her, she didn’t know who Adolf Hitler was. Now she knows. I’m proud of that.”

  “Yes, we’ve all heard of your Adolf Hitler project.”

  “That’s not what I called it.”

  She leaned back, frowning as though she was disgusted by something on my face. But then she said, “I have to say, Jaime’s a very good student now.” We were quiet for a minute. I wanted her to credit me with the blossoming of Jaime Nichols. I wanted credit without asking for it, but if it came down to it, I wasn’t above pointing it out again. Then she said, “You don’t really believe she didn’t know who Hitler was, do you?”

  “Of course.”

  She smirked. “Really.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No. What?”

  “She was just playing you and you fell for it.”

  “She doesn’t strike me as the sort to play games like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s so—well, she’s so small and mousy.”

  Doreen laughed. “How could she exist for one hour in this culture—does she watch TV? Listen to the radio? Has she been living in some forest, in a bubble—how could she live in this culture without …”

  “I was amazed, too.”

  “She already knew who Hitler was. She was just giving you the business. She’s just as much a wiseass as any of these kids.”

  I smoked quietly for a while, watching the group of students down the hill increase. I was certain that Jaime was sincere in her ignorance, but I realized that saying that to Doreen could be taken as a sort of indictment of her teaching, not to mention Professor Bible’s. Suddenly I was thinking of Bible again. I hadn’t seen him for nearly a month, and I wondered how he was doing. I looked at Doreen and when her eyes met mine I almost said something to her about how he had made me feel; about the loss of any longing for the future. But she looked away and said nothing.

  I was always planning on stopping in to see Bible again. He was never far from my mind, but like I said, I had wandered away from the regular routine and it was hard to get back.

  “Here comes the mute,” Doreen said, and she flipped her cigarette into the grass.

  A blue Chevrolet Nova came up the drive very slowly. Sitting in the front passenger seat, her shadow bent over and frozen, was Suzanne Rule. A large, heavyset woman, wearing a purple shirt with large yellow flowers, baggy yellow pants, and white boat shoes, got out of the car and came around to Suzanne’s side and opened the door. When Suzanne leaned over to get out of the car, she stayed that way. She did not say anything to the woman in the baggy pants, but she let her hand touch the side of her leg as she passed. The woman closed the door, got back in the car and waited until Suzanne had gone into the building—which did not take long, because Suzanne almost ran to the door, still bent over and curled like a question mark.

  “You know her story?” I asked.

  “I’ve heard it, but who really knows?” Doreen shook her head. “She always runs in like that. When she rode my bus she’d jump down and scoot like she’d stolen something; like she’s got to go to the bathroom really bad.”

  “How does she learn anything?”

  Doreen laughed. “You know what? She gets straight As. She could probably recite the Constitution.”

  “She ever have to do
that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did Bible ever ask them to memorize anything?”

  “No. Of course not. What could they learn from that?”

  “Mrs. Creighton wants me to have my students memorize poems.”

  “But that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

  “You know Bible always said the same thing, but I think it’s crazy.”

  She looked at me. I’d known her for a full year, and she knew that Bible had taught me everything I ever learned about teaching, so it was an awkward moment—I felt as though I’d spoken rudely about one of her parents. I said, “I just mean you guys must know something I don’t know. I don’t see the value of rote memory for much of anything except the multiplication tables, valences, and the law of cosines.”

  We breathed in the perfect September air for a while, saying nothing. Finally Doreen said, “You really must want to teach these kids something.”

  “I think they have to want to learn, too.” I threw my cigarette into a rubbish can filled with sand next to the door.

  “Really,” she said. “They wear some folks down over time, but if you really believe in school …”

  Whenever she talked like this, I realized school was a belief for her, as it was for Bible and probably Mr. and Mrs. Creighton; a belief like Christianity or Buddhism. She was only a hypocrite about smoking. Everything else was entirely moral and, in its own way, beautiful. “What we do,” she went on, “we are called to do by this profession. Nobody gets into this business for the money.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “I spent my first two years in the public school system. Bloody drug-recruiting centers for Christ’s sake.”

  “Some of these kids are into the same things.”

  “I’m just trying to warn you,” she said. “If something happens to your idealism because of Leslie Warren, I don’t know if …”

  “I’m not an idealist,” I said. “I’m not even really a teacher. Sometimes I think this is all just temporary.”