Class Dismissed

by Kevin McIntosh

  “Francis.”

  Frank put his hands flat on the table and looked at his wife.

  “This wouldn’t happen to be the rough draft of your presentation to the school board on that new reading program?”

  “Perhaps.” Frank laughed. “I’m not Mozart. I need practice.”

  “Speaking of practice,” Patrick’s mother turned to him, “Miss Sturmblad wants to know if you’re going to continue guitar lessons this summer.” She waited for her son to respond. “What do you think?”

  Patrick wobbled his head side-to-side.

  “Is that a ‘yes’?”

  Patrick deked the last bite of meatloaf across his plate. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Well, she needs to know.”

  His father nodded. “She’s got plans, too, sport.”

  Patrick found it hard to imagine Miss Sturmblad having plans, stuck as she was on “Tom Dooley” and “Kumbaya,” despite her claim of being Bobby Zimmerman’s childhood playmate back in Hibbing. She wouldn’t know Lou Reed if he bit her on the ass. Which he wouldn’t. But this was as directive as his father ever got with him, and it forced his attention. Everyone assumed that Patrick’s general disinterest in the world was a response to his dad’s expectations. But his father’s expectations, if he had any, were a mystery to him. His mother’s cheery prodding aside, he was left to his own devices. It was a conflict of interest for Dr. Lynch to inquire too deeply into his children’s dealings with their teachers. If his son needed help with his homework, he’d give it. If he wanted to play the guitar, he’d buy it. If the guitar gathered dust in Patrick’s closet, so be it.

  “Okay.” Patrick turned to his dad. “I’ll decide.”

  “And the job at Knutson’s,” said his mother, “are you still interested in that?”

  This was a moment when he really missed Erin. She would’ve chatter-chatter-chattered throughout dinner with their mother—her dress for the prom, what boy was asking what girl, did they have more Cool Whip?—random and meaningless—irritating—questions, but the spotlight would never have fallen on him. His dad would fill any dead air with a set-piece on the Renaissance or ancient Egypt or the best pedagogy for teaching fractions. A question this uncomfortable—and untimely—would never come up.

  He tapped his fork on his plate. “Actually, I was thinking…Gunther said maybe…I could work at—Hendrickson’s.” Patrick looked at his parents. They looked at each other. There, he’d said it. This was not the week he’d planned to spring this on them, but there it was.

  “Hendrickson’s?” His mother fought the inflection she gave this word, but her voice rose that judgmental half-step. “Are you sure you don’t want to—”

  Patrick’s father showed a palm to his wife. “No offense, son, but what do you know about cars?”

  “Not much. But it’d be pumping gas and stocking and cleaning, mostly. Gunther could teach me stuff.”

  His mother shook her head.

  “What? Gunther’s really smart, you know.”

  “I know.” She pursed her lips. “He’s got the highest Iowa test scores in the history of Willard County. And the lowest grades in the sophomore class.”

  “Norma.” This was as loud as his father got. But Patrick took no comfort from it, understanding that Dr. Lynch’s displeasure came from this singular breach of professional ethics and not its use against his friend.

  He turned on his mother. “You’ve always hated Gunther.”

  She flushed. “That’s not true. Not true at all.” She swallowed. “I just don’t think he’s the…the best influence.”

  “He’s my best friend!”

  “What about Charlie Sorenson? You two used to get along so well—”

  “In third grade, Mother!” He threw up his hands. “We both liked fire engines.”

  “Patrick,” said his father, the voice of reason. “Your mother and I will discuss it, consider it.” His mother let out a bitter sigh that revealed they already had. “You could learn a lot from Fred Hendrickson. The man’s a magician with a carburetor. And an honest businessman—never charges a nickel more than he’s owed. But I’ve known him a long time. He’s got more temper than any adult you know.” His father let that truth linger in the air.

  “May I go do my homework?” Patrick asked. Not a request his parents were likely to hear twice, and one they could hardly refuse. I only said we’d discuss it, Norma, he heard as he retreated to his room, a voice something like his father’s but with a lot less authority.

  “A toast,” proclaimed Gunther, hoisting his Bovenmyer’s beer, “to Patrick’s Scheme.”

  Patrick raised his beer. “To tomorrow.”

  “May 9, 1978, a day which shall live in infamy.”

  They clinked longneck bottles and leaned back against the windshield. The windshield was pleasantly warm, as was the hood of the rusty Ford pickup. Dusk was settling over the soybean field off Rural Route 17, the sky gray-pink beyond the stretching flatness. Patrick breathed in the freshly turned soil. “I love that smell. What is that?”

  Gunther took a large swallow of his Bovey’s, the beer to pick when you’re having six. “That?” He inhaled. “That’s loamy.”

  “It’s—it’s what? You made that up.” Gunther had a rich invented vocabulary, a personal dictionary. Yesterday was frajulation.

  “Loamy.” Gunther adjusted his watch cap. “Jesus—haven’t you read anything? Willa Cather? Rolvaag? Midwestern earth is loamy—everybody knows that.”

  Gunther seldom oppressed him with his superior knowledge; that was at the core of their friendship. He teased him plenty, called him a Philistine, but the joke was always on Gunther: Can you believe how weird I am? It was that third beer that brought out the edge. He’d heard it in Mr. Hendrickson’s voice before: Gunther, you dumbshit, where’d ya put the oil gaskets? It scared him more than he’d ever admit. But he’d die before he’d take that job his mother had lined up with Mrs. Johansson, bagging groceries at Knutson’s, Doug’s family’s store.

  Patrick swigged his beer, forced a mouthful down. He had no taste for alcohol. Neither of his parents drank; it held no glamour for him. Just one of the factors that kept him outside every clique at WCHS. Nursing a beer alongside Gunther was an occasional price of his friendship, like playing that stupid baseball game.

  Gunther didn’t look at Patrick, just bobbed his head slightly, pulling at the hairs on his chin, an attitude Patrick read as disdain. “Maybe we should just forget the whole thing tomorrow,” Patrick mumbled.

  “What?” Gunther jerked his head back, as if Patrick had interrupted a conversation he was having with himself.

  Patrick put his beer down on the hood of the truck. “Maybe you could find a smarter partner in crime.”

  “When, exactly,” Gunther waved his Bovenmyer’s in befuddlement, “did you start listening to me?”

  Though he’d spent countless hours—days, weeks—inside Willard County High, as faculty brat and student, he’d never been on the roof. Only a tall single story, it couldn’t have afforded much of a view even in daylight. All Patrick could make out by moonlight was the chain-link backstop, the white lines of the parking lot and the yellow rectangle marked BUS. The original WCHS had come down when Patrick was in kindergarten. The older building—two-story, red brick, built during the booming 1920s—had seemed majestic to him, a big school for big kids. An edifice well worth climbing. This ’60s pre-fab job was a disappointing, already-crumbling embarrassment. “Late Prairie School,” Dr. Lynch had once described it, as if Frank Lloyd Wright himself had taken part in its design.

  Patrick kicked at the tarred, pebbly roof. Somehow he knew he’d wind up playing the girl’s part—lookout—in his own scheme. No sign of the county sheriff’s car, of course, not at 2:07 a.m. Still, the sheriff was known to cruise by the high school at night this time of year, senior prank season. Throug
h the years, seniors had deposited cows, sheep, and the principal’s St. Bernard on this roof. Running into inebriated seniors—not cops—had been Patrick’s biggest fear, but Gunther assured him that prank season never started till after prom, next week.

  “Shit, shit.” Patrick pointed his flashlight toward Gunther’s muffled shout. A pair of work boots waggled out of the vent—a large upside-down J—like a chorine in a big Busby Berkeley production number. “Pull me out, pull me out,” he shouted. Patrick wrapped his arms around the ankles of Gunther’s greasy jeans and tugged. His tool belt was jammed in the curve of the J.

  “Harder.”

  “I’m trying,” Patrick grunted. Throwing all his weight backward he freed Gunther, who fell, tool belt jangling, into his lap. Gunther shook himself, wiping under his eyes, smearing the black eyeliner he’d scribbled around his face. Hadn’t Cary Grant used it as a cat burglar? Okay, Peter Sellers, then. “You look like a raccoon, Gunnie.” Patrick smelled the sour beer on his breath, tried to push him off. “A fucking drunk raccoon.”

  Gunther rolled over. “I’m not drunk,” he mumbled. “Just a little toast beforehand.”

  “Yeah, a little toasted.” Patrick stood, smacking the dust off his jeans. Gunther had mandated black, but jeans and a purple Vikings sweatshirt were the best he could do. “So, what’s the problem?”

  Gunther sat up, pulled his black watch cap over his forehead. “It’s like this,” he began, and launched into one of his monologues, this one so technical Patrick was lost from—defibrillator? He wouldn’t ask for clarification.

  Patrick threw out his hands. “Stop, Gunther. Make this simple. What’s the bottom line?”

  Gunther took in a deep breath, blew it out. “Bottom line: we go in through the window.”

  Patrick kicked pebbles at him. “Jesus H. Christ!” He kicked at the roof again. “After all this!” He stalked off.

  Gunther stood. “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t figure in the—car.” He pointed toward a set of headlights turning into the faculty parking lot driveway. “Down.”

  They fell to their stomachs. Patrick skinned his palms as he hit the roof, pebbles imprinted his face. He fumbled for the flashlight and turned it off. “Seniors?” he stage-whispered. Gunther commando-crept to the roof’s edge. Patrick crept after him, pebbles filling the waistband of his jeans. The car crept, too, crackling along the driveway toward the faculty parking lot. A station wagon. Patrick swallowed. Dr. Lynch’s. His father had gotten up to use the bathroom and checked on him as he still did sometimes, as if he was an infant whose breathing needed monitoring. Christ! His dad was no fool—technical drawing? He wrote the damn K-12 curriculum. His mother’s mac ‘n’ cheese rose in his gorge. He was going to leave it, along with his dignity and his father’s trust, on this roof.

  The car stopped just before the parking lot. Patrick held his face in his hands. He heard gears grinding and looked up. The station wagon was backing onto Main Street, heading toward Evergreen. Toward his house.

  Gunther sat up and smacked Patrick’s side. “Okay, let’s move.”

  Patrick lay prone, head in hands. “I am so, so fucked.” He looked at Gunther. “That was my dad.”

  Gunther laughed. “No way.”

  “How many olive green station wagons you expect to pull into the high school tonight?”

  “One: you’re imagining the color; it’s too dark to tell. Two: your dad drives a Ford.”

  “So?”

  “That was a Chevy.”

  Patrick sat up. “How can you tell?”

  “Taillights. Chevy’s are more…rhomboid.”

  He was too relieved to press Gunther on terminology. “You sure?”

  “Positive. That was some salesman, thought he took the Red Wing exit.”

  Patrick exhaled. “Man, I was sure that was my dad.”

  “Well, relax, matey.” Gunther bounced some pebbles in his hand. He tossed one at Patrick. “Sorry about the vent. You were right—simpler is better.” For all the millions of words he’d heard Gunther expound, this was a first: an apology. Gunther stood. “It’s still your scheme. Let’s do it your way. I’ve got the tools.” He slapped his tool belt. “You got the pack?”

  “Jawohl.” Patrick’s old Boy Scout pack was a key piece of gear. Into it they would stuff as many student files as he could carry: records of Patrick’s mediocrity and of Gunther’s brilliance and failure; grades, comments, test scores for the entire sophomore class and as many juniors as would fit. Everything a college would want to know—gone. This wouldn’t be another prank, another trivial farewell joke played on the school. School was the joke. The records were locked, of course, but the key to them was in the secretary’s desk, lower righthand drawer, under a stack of notepads. Just a Thought from Norma Lynch.

  Gunther checked the tire iron that anchored the rope around the vent. He trailed the rope to the roof’s edge and gave it a good yank. “All set. We leave as we came.” After a lucky seventh toss had snagged the tire iron on the vent, they’d scaled the building, Gunther first, more Batman than Thomas Crown, leaving oily boot prints up the wall that would be visible for years to come. “You lead the descent.” He held out the rope.

  Patrick hesitated. He didn’t know why.

  Gunther thrust the rope at his chest. “Do it for Katie.”

  Even in pitch dark, Patrick’s fuck you face was discernible.

  “Very well,” said Gunther, wrapping the rope around his right hand, pacing backward. A final tension check. Uncharacteristic caution, thought Patrick, from his contrite buddy. “Salud,” said Gunther, eyes wide, before he raced past Patrick in a storm of pebbles, stepping off the roof and into the inky Minnesota night.

  Patrick had expected him to rappel the one story slowly, like Spencer Tracy in The Mountain. But this time Gunther, whose movements tended toward the lethargic, flung himself in space before Patrick could exercise his veto. He could only watch as the rope snapped taut and Gunther turned, disappearing boots-first toward Dr. Lynch’s office window.

  Patrick had heard accidents before. He lived at a dangerous four-way stop at the edge of Peterson’s Prairie, where town met farm and Buick met tractor. Many a supper was punctuated by the crunch and crinkle of spraying glass, of metal folding into metal. But no sound compared to that of his best friend slicing through his father’s office window. Though instantaneous, he heard it in three parts: boots punching a man-sized hole; flesh compacting broken glass; and, moments later, a jagged fragment falling from the window’s top, tinkling down onto the pile.

  Somehow Patrick thought to grab the flashlight before he, too, leapt from the roof. Though he also remembered to bend his knees he landed hard, biting deep in his tongue. He stuck the flashlight through the semi-circular hole and swirled the light around his father’s office, darker than the night. The beam caught shards of glass, shiny, red. Gunther was up hard against Dr. Lynch’s desk, one leg straight out, the other underneath him. His black T-shirt was matted to his chest, his watch cap down over one eye, his face striated with blood. Blood was on the floor; Patrick could taste it. Gunther’s right arm was bent the wrong way at the elbow, the back of his hand nearly touching his shoulder. He waved his left weakly.

  “Gunnie?” was all Patrick could manage.

  “Oh, Paddy,” said Gunther, shifting on the glass. “I think I’m dying.”

  Patrick had to buy a suit for the funeral. Even in this extremity his mother was practical, insisting he get navy blue, not the traditional black. Blue he could wear at Christmas and Easter, she’d said as she flitted through the racks at Target, maybe even graduation if he’d done most of his growing. When, she asked, patting down his shoulders, pulling at his sleeves, attempting that embarrassing inseam check, would he wear a black suit again?

  Erin had managed to avoid the “freshman fifteen” at the U of M and still fit into her long black dress from senior ch
oir. Her mother, too, wore a black dress, similar length but more sophisticated, that she’d gotten for her twentieth anniversary. When their parents had come back from that anniversary weekend in Minneapolis, they’d laughed, recounting how young everyone thought Norma looked in that dress, how she’d even been carded trying to get a Tom Collins in the Radisson lounge. Patrick couldn’t see it at the time—can any boy see his mother as young?—but as they stood shoulder to shoulder now, two trim, pretty blondes, eyes red-rimmed, he was struck by how sisterly Erin and his mother looked. The girlishness, though, was gone from his mother’s expression; he appreciated it now in its absence. He doubted he’d ever see it again.

  The basement of St. Immaculata’s was jammed. All the women, it seemed—ancient Mrs. Jones, his second-grade teacher, helmet-haired Mrs. Johansson, even Miss Sturmblad, who’d delivered “Ave Maria” at the service with her rapid-fire, Joan Baez vibrato—wanted to embrace him, kiss him, weep over him. The men didn’t embrace him, of course (male hugging would come to Peterson’s Prairie in 1992 with a Robert Bly reading in Winnipee Falls), but they gave slow, double-palmed handshakes and firm hand-and-elbow grips. Ben Carlson, coach of the Willard County Homesteaders, who’d played tackle on the ’steaders next to Patrick’s dad, stared at Patrick, swollen-eyed, for a full minute. He’d never known what to make of his friend’s unathletic son, couldn’t stifle a laugh when Patrick punted a football behind himself in gym class. But now he held Patrick’s hand between his and stared, eyes filling. “If you…” he began, “…if you grow to be half the man your father was,” he pursed his lips, “that’ll be twice as much as most men.” Patrick nodded dumbly, unsure what to say, unsure he could do the math.

  The receiving line snaked to the far side of the basement, till it commingled with the line for the table filled with noodle-bake casseroles. All these people grieved for his father and wanted, sincerely, to comfort his—his family’s—grief. But if Patrick could have made them disappear, blinked them away like the girl on I Dream of Jeannie, he would have. He wasn’t a child; he understood, intellectually, that his dad was upstairs in that big gold box. He believed his mother when she said, calmly, too calmly, that she’d found his father on his office floor Saturday afternoon, that he looked like he was sleeping, that Dr. Greene could do nothing to wake him. But it felt like his dad was away, maybe at the Minnesota Superintendents’ Convention, and he’d come back from St. Paul in a few days, refreshed, having schmoozed with colleagues and watched a Twins game, and ask his son, Did you realize the state capitol was covered with genuine gold leaf? The people in this basement wanted to share grief. But grief would come later, much later, in periodic, never-ending waves.