by Jon Hassler
“It will be like this three days and three nights,” said the cop. “You hayseed sons of bitches bring us nothing but trouble. The best thing for you hayseed sons of bitches to do is to stay home and take care of the livestock.” He was interrupted by the honking of drivers backed up in four directions. “Don’t let me catch you in Minneapolis again as long as you live.” He put his revolver into its holster and waved us away.
We drove off under a cloud of gloom. The cop’s outburst reminded me of Mrs. Carpenter’s in her living room, but this time I couldn’t seem to lift my spirits above it. I wasn’t full of capon. I wasn’t with Carla. My hands, like Harvey’s, shook. The seat springs in Harvey’s car were shot and we sat very low, with our eyes barely up to window level. We seemed to be viewing the city from the gutter. Harvey said if he didn’t find a parking place in two minutes he was going home. He didn’t find one, and he headed out of the city, muttering. In a suburb I got out of the car with my bag and took a bus back downtown. I couldn’t stand leaving the city Carla was in.
I went to the hotel where the team was staying and asked the desk clerk where I could find the Staggerford cheerleaders. The clerk said the cheerleaders were in Room 746 but only registered guests were allowed above the first floor.
“I’m with the Staggerford team,” I told him.
“Sorry, the team checked in an hour ago. All twelve of them.” He showed me a card with the names of the players. “Your name isn’t one of these, is it?”
I hesitated.
“What’s your name?”
“Pruitt.”
“Pruitt. Well, why didn’t you say so? Let’s see. Yes, here we are. Dale Pruitt, Room 420, a single. Sign here please. Here’s your key. I’ll have to ask you to carry your own bag. We’re short-handed this afternoon.”
DALE PRUITT, he said. I signed my brother’s name.
“Sorry for the mix-up. We get so many freeloaders at tournament time. There’s the elevator. Up you go.”
I got off on the fourth floor and let myself into 420, a small room with a rusty radiator, a double bed, and a picture of Hong Kong over the desk. The closet had been converted into a half bath. What was my brother doing with a hotel room in Minneapolis in the middle of the week? He was no basketball fan. He was a scholar. I couldn’t figure it out, but whatever the reason, it was a stroke of luck. I would make 420 my headquarters and split the cost with him. I unpacked my bag and changed my shirt, preparing to go up to the seventh floor and announce myself to Carla. As I waxed my butch, someone knocked on the door and a voice called, “Dale, are you in there?” A girl’s voice. Carla’s voice.
I didn’t go to the door. It was wise of me not to, of course, but I doubt if I knew that at the time. I was simply paralyzed by shock. “Dale,” she called once more, and then she went away. It was a while before my power of locomotion returned and I began to pack my bag.
Sad to say, a certain other power never did return. I’m talking about the ability to see life as simple and cohesive. Up to that moment in my life, everything had been running according to plan. Even my humiliation in Carla’s garage had been predictable, for in the garage Carla had acted according to my expectations—exceeded them, in fact. But her knocking on my brother’s door fit absolutely no plan I knew. Like the ravings of her mother and the traffic cop, it was nonsense. That was when I began to see that everything in life was subject to change—without notice.
I called the lobby and told the desk clerk I was not Dale Pruitt after all; I was really somebody else and I had registered as Dale Pruitt only to get upstairs and now that I was up on the seventh floor where all the action was I wouldn’t be needing Room 420. The real Dale Pruitt could have it. The clerk said that if I wasn’t out on the street in two minutes he was coming to look for me and he would bring the house detective along I hung up.
I stepped into the corridor and locked the door and put the key on the elevator and sent it down to the lobby. I walked to the end of the corridor where some chairs were arranged around a low table. I slipped my bag under the table and picked up a newspaper and settled into a chair, and whenever the elevator opened I peeked over the paper to see who it was. Sometime later Carla stepped out of the elevator in a dress I had never seen before, not the kind a girl wears to a game. She knocked on 420, waited a moment, and left.
About three o’clock my brother arrived with a suitcase and a bag of groceries. He let himself into 420 and in less than a minute Carla showed up again, this time with a suitcase and a heavy garment bag. She stood outside the room and called my brother’s name. The door opened. She went in. The door closed.
What is truer than a platitude? “Because of woman’s beauty,” my brother had said, “for passion burns like fire.” I hitchhiked home from Minneapolis that afternoon and my eyes burned with tears. My brother, too, got burned when Carla, about graduation time, discovered herself pregnant. They were married in June, with me as best man (I was tempted to wear my shredded suit; my resentment was that strong) and they left immediately for California, where Dale got a job driving a tour bus around Hollywood and wrote verses for a greeting-card company on the side. In a few years they had a second baby, another daughter, and my brother went to work for the greeting-card company full time.
“Girls turn out to be just like their mothers,” was another thing my brother used to say. When he and Carla walked into our ten-year class reunion, I couldn’t believe my eyes. (This was their first trip back to Minnesota together. Dale had come alone when Mother died, and some years later Carla had come alone when her mother died.) At the reunion Harvey Polk said Carla would go 200 pounds if she’d go an ounce. I doubted that. Maybe 180. She was wearing a long fur coat over a scarlet pants suit. She said that Minnesota in her memory was always cold and, August or not, she wasn’t leaving California without her fur coat. There was a large rip in the fur under one sleeve, and with the red showing through when she raised her arm she looked like a kodiak with afresh wound. The skin of her face was coarse. All evening we had to keep calling her back to the conversation from wherever her mind was slipping off to. If my brother was aware of how Carla had gone to hell, he didn’t show it. He talked only about his work.
He cornered Harvey and me at the bar and described his house in Los Angeles—how he had converted his garage into a den, and that was where he spent his evenings writing verse. He had a bed out there and sometimes he spent the night. In the daytime he was an editor for this greeting-card company. He edited anniversary cards, birthday cards, sympathy cards, and a new card he said was coming on strong—the love card.
“It’s a nonoccasional card,” he said, pointing his chin at Harvey and me. “It’s catching on like wildfire because love knows no season and lovers need no reason. That’s the line we use on our displays: ‘Love knows no season and lovers need no reason. ‘ I wrote it.”
Was this the same man who once wrote scholarly articles and lectured to me about love? Everything the monks told him about love he was now turning into money. He said young people in love thought nothing of spending a dollar for a love card that cost eight cents to manufacture. They sold like wildfire. Was it for this the monks instructed him in the fiery nature of passion?
And Carla. Was this the same girl I once loved? When the reunion banquet was served, my brother and I and Carla shared a table. Chicken was brought in on large platters, and, as we ate, the emcee came around and asked each of us to describe one experience from our high school days. I told the story of how my suit was cut to pieces in Carlo’s garage. I had had several screwdrivers and I got carried away. I stood up and moved to an open area to reconstruct the layout of the garage. I brought in every detail I could remember, and I demonstrated how to dismantle a bandsaw. Carla didn’t laugh. That surprised me. Everybody else laughed, at least a little—even my brother, who was never much of a laugher. When I returned to my place at the table, I told my brother how I had once considered wearing the shredded suit to his wedding. The thought tickled him.
> “And believe it or not, I still have the suit,” I said. “I’ve kept it all these years. At first it was a matter of never getting around to throwing it out, and then after Mother died and we sold the house and I moved into Miss McGee’s I kept it. I thought it might come in handy some day as a joke.”
“What kind of joke?” asked Carla, glaring at me.
“I don’t know, but it just seemed to want another wearing.”
“I’d love to see you in that suit,” said my brother. “If we come over to Miss McGee’s tomorrow, will you put it on for us?”
“You Pruitt brothers make my ass tired!” said Carla. She was wrenching apart a chicken joint and glaring at us across the table. She was loud enough to be heard all over the room, and most of the talk and laughter died away. “Every time you Pruitt brothers get together you make my ass tired!” It was our first time together in years. You could hear the clink of silverware for the rest of the meal. Others took their turns at the microphone, but nothing was funny. When Carla finished her chicken and my brother told her it was time to leave, she followed him out the door, wiping her greasy hands on her fur coat and scowling back at me.
They did not come to Miss McGee’s house the next day. If they had, I might have put on the suit at their request. But today I wouldn’t do it. I’ve had the suit around since the days that used to follow one another in simple and perfect order, and if some day I bring it out of the closet and take it out of the box, it will not be as a joke.
MONDAY
NOVEMBER 2
ON HALL DUTY OUTSIDE his class-room door, Miles was expected to discourage scuffling, running, necking, and eating in the halls. It was his policy, when standing at his post, to look stern. He had learned long ago that a teacher’s success in his profession depended largely upon his facial expressions and that a look of sternness was nowhere more valuable than in the corridors between classes. This morning, however, try as he might to look stern, he looked merely sullen. He had stayed up too late typing his recollection of Carla Carpenter, and when he had finally gone to bed his toothache kept him awake. Now it was nine thirty of a rainy Monday morning and his first-hour class, particularly groggy on Mondays, had done nothing to clear his head.
Thanatopsis Workman came out of her home ec room across the hall and said that her husband refused to grant her a day off for the funeral of the mother of her best friend.
Miles said he didn’t believe it. He also said, “Slow down there,” and “Stop chewing gum,” but these orders went unheard in the racket of the passing students.
“I couldn’t believe it either,” said Thanatopsis. “I got the call Saturday night during the party. Joanie Cooper and I were like sisters. Her mother was a second mother to me. The funeral is tomorrow in St. Paul and I assumed Wayne knew I was planning to attend, and this morning on the way to school I told him I wanted him to get Mrs. Peterson as my substitute tomorrow rather than Mrs. Carlson, who never cleans up properly, and Wayne said I could have anybody I wanted as long as I paid them out of my own pocket. Out of my own pocket, Miles! My God, I haven’t missed a day of school in over a year for fear people would think I was taking advantage of being the principal’s wife. I haven’t taken one day of sick leave or one day of professional-growth leave. And now, just once, I ask for a substitute so I can go to my best friend’s mother’s funeral and Wayne says I have to pay her out of my own pocket. He says the Faculty Handbook doesn’t allow for a funeral like that. He says it allows for the funerals of relatives and that’s all. Joanie Cooper was my best friend from the time we were little. We roomed together in college. We slept at each other’s houses. I’ll go to her mother’s funeral no matter what, Miles, don’t think I won’t, but it’s so unfair of Wayne. He’s so stern about these things. He wouldn’t think of going against the Faculty Handbook. Where did that Faculty Handbook come from anyway?”
“Stevenson wrote it years ago when he first came to town, but I don’t think even he believes in it much anymore. Until Wayne resurrected it, there were several years when it was completely forgotten.”
“Well, it’s the most arbitrary, legalistic document ever written, and wouldn’t you know it’s because it’s so arbitrary and legalistic that Wayne loves it so much. He reads it sometimes in the evening. It’s his Bible. He wouldn’t think of making special allowances for emergencies that the Faculty Handbook doesn’t provide for. He has to be firm, he says. I can see that. He’s trying to establish a reputation for firmness. But I’m afraid all it will get him in the long run is a reputation for bull-headedness.
“Why don’t you see Stevenson? He’ll give you a day with pay. He’s really mellowed a lot since he wrote that book.”
“Wayne would kill me if I went over his head.”
The bell rang for second hour as the halls emptied.
“But pay or no pay, I’m going to St. Paul tomorrow,” said Thanatopsis, returning to her classroom, her small hips lifting smartly under her tight red skirt.
“I’ll talk to Wayne,” said Miles gallantly. “I’m on the Grievance Committee.”
Miles turned and entered his classroom just as Jeff Norquist jumped out the window. Jeff had come into the room, put his books on his desk, and vaulted through the open window. It was a drop of only a few feet to the courtyard where his girl friend Annie Bird was waiting for him in the rain. The rest of second hour popped out of their desks and watched Jeff and Annie hurry across the street toward the pool hall, trying to light a wet cigarette between them on the way. Miles saw Superintendent Stevenson watching from his office window across the courtyard.
Second hour couldn’t get over Jeff’s heroic, defiant act. Second hour, which overreacted to every stimulus—a joke or a sentimental story, a threat or a burp—was crazy all hour. Lawrence Winters dropped his books on the floor. May McClure dropped her compact. Gordie Albertson’s eyes crossed. Charlie Zeney had an attack of asthma. Roxie Booth bled at the nose. At wit’s end, Miles gave them a surprise test, composing it as he went along and finishing it off with an essay question designed to keep them quiet for twenty minutes. The slowest student answered it in five.
Because his toothache grew worse and it hurt him to talk, Miles gave the same test to third hour. As he expected, third hour regarded it with great seriousness. Bernadine Temple changed her glasses to see the questions on the board. Bill Clifford sharpened four pencils. John Innes read each question with a grimace, as if he were lifting weights. William Mulholland, the scientist, studied the test from beginning to end, considered its value in the larger picture of his whole education, seemed satisfied, wrote his name at the top of a sheet of paper, cracked six of his knuckles, and went to work.
During his free hour, Miles went to see Wayne Workman. In the outer office, where Wayne’s secretary had her desk, two sheets of paper lay on the floor, and standing on the paper, one foot on each sheet, was Hank Bird. Little Hank Bird was a sophomore and the youngest of the Sandhill Reservation family of Birds. He was the son of Bennie Bird, proprietor of the Sandhill General Store, where Superintendent Stevenson began, and ended, his tour of the reservation twenty years ago. He was the brother of Annie Bird, Jeff Norquist’s girl friend.
Wayne’s office was open and empty. Miles went in and sat down. It was a small office: two chairs for visitors, one window with a dusty Venetian blind, no carpet. To the right of Wayne’s desk was a bookcase stuffed with lost-and-found items—mittens, notebooks, padlocks—and to the left of the desk was a closet door. Wayne kept a clean desk, covered by a sheet of glass. Under the glass was a snapshot of Thanatopsis and a printed card. From where he sat, Miles read, upside down, the title on the card: “The Secret of Success.” He read the secret: “Plan your work, and work your plan.”
“Hello, Pruitt, what can I do for you?” said Wayne, stepping out of his closet.
“What were you doing in there?” asked Miles.
“Never mind. What can I do for you?”
“I came to ask you to grant Thanatopsis a day’s l
eave with pay.”
“Pruitt, if you don’t stop calling my wife that crazy name, I’ll have to take measures. Her name is Anna Thea.”
“Sorry. I came to ask you to give her a day off.”
“Out of the question.” Wayne sat down and with the sleeve of his suitcoat he polished the glass on his desk.
“I’m on the Grievance Committee, Wayne. It’s a reasonable request.”
“It goes against policy.” Wayne opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out the Faculty Handbook, a black loose-leaf notebook. “Read this.”
“I know what it says.”
“Read it anyway.” He found the page and handed the notebook to Miles.
Miles read a line or two, then, hoping to impress Wayne with how ridiculous it was, he backed up and started over, aloud:
“ ‘Absence from Duty: Illness and Death.
“ ‘Leave shall be granted by the principal, subject to the authority of the superintendent, for absences made necessary by reason of serious illness or injury to the faculty member, or by reason of death in the faculty member’s family. The faculty member’s family shall be defined to include his spouse, his children, and the spouses and children of his children; his brothers and sisters and the spouses and children of his brothers and sisters and the spouses and children of his wards; his parents or guardians and his grandparents and his uncles and aunts; as well as the parents or guardians, grandparents, brothers and sisters and spouses and children of the brothers and sisters of the spouse of the faculty member. The uncles and aunts of the spouse too.’ ”