by Jacob Stone
“Yes, Mr. Pollard, I understand. Death by humiliation. Not the most pleasant way to go.” He paused, then added with a wistful smile, “I assure you almost every single math teacher alive can sympathize. And Mr. Pollard, I assure you also that you will certainly be trying harder. We will pick a day where we will meet after school each week so that we can bring your work to a passing level. Agreed?”
Henry nodded energetically. “Any day you want. Can I go now?”
Mr. Shapiro gave Henry an uneasy smile. “Just one more minute,” he said. “This may be a difficult lesson to learn, but Mr. Pollard, in life one must temper one’s expectations. One must be realistic, or we open ourselves up to crushing disappointments. For example, I don’t foresee you ever being an A student in math, but with enough hard work you should be able to earn a C. There’s nothing wrong with that. No shame whatsoever. Everybody has different aptitudes, different strengths, as you clearly have a strong aptitude in drawing.”
“I understand.”
Mr. Shapiro’s wistful smile weakened. He left his chair and sat on the edge of his desk so he was closer to Henry, his smile growing sadder as he continued to stare down at his student.
“The same can be true with affairs of the heart, although there the disappointment may be even more painful. Youthful crushes are natural, but as painful as they may turn out to be, they’re ultimately fleeting. Miss Klosky is very pretty, no doubt, but have you considered talking with Miss Bower? She’s a very nice girl. Smart, a good heart to her.”
Henry’s cheeks burned red as he realized Mr. Shapiro was telling him that Sally was well out of his league and that he should instead focus his attentions on Nancy Bower, a pear-shaped girl with braces, greasy hair, and bad skin. At that moment he never hated anyone more than he did Mr. Shapiro. Tears of anger welled in his eyes, but he’d be damned if he’d let Mr. Shapiro see him cry. He did, however, want his math teacher to hear the biting hatred in his voice as he thanked him for his concern, and then he was out of his chair and rushing to the door. Mr. Shapiro tried saying something else to him, but Henry ignored whatever it was and slammed the door shut behind him as he stepped into the hallway.
He was so caught up in his hurt that he didn’t notice that Mark Angler, Brad Black, and Tony Fausano were waiting for him. These three had tormented him since fifth grade when they nicknamed him the hog ogre after their teacher had read the class the book, Zeralda’s Ogre.
He noticed them, however, after one of them tripped him and sent him sprawling to the floor. Before he could gather himself another of them ripped his notebook out of his hands. A coldness filled his head and his world came crashing down around him after he’d gotten to his knees and saw that Brad Black was looking through his notebook. Brad flashed him the nastiest smile Henry had ever seen.
“I knew a dummy like you wouldn’t be taking any notes,” Brad said. “What were you going to do with these drawings? Beat off to them later? Huh, is that what little hoggies like you do?”
In a blind rush, Henry was on his feet, charging Brad, but Mark and Tony grabbed him and held him back. Brad ripped the drawings from the notebook and walked up to Henry’s face, his nasty smile turning into an exceptionally ugly leer.
“What do you think you were going to do just then?” Brad demanded as he held a fist up to Henry’s face and his spittle flew into Henry’s eyes. “You were going to fight me? If you tried that I’d punch you in the face so many times I’d pulverize it, maybe even make it uglier than it is now, if that’s possible.”
“Please, just give me back my drawings,” Henry pleaded.
Brad snorted out a laugh, then turned and yelled out, “Hey Sally, want to see what the hog ogre was doing in class?”
To Henry’s increasing dismay, Sally was standing only twenty feet away with several of her friends. At this point, he was begging Brad and the others to please let him go and to give him back his drawings, and then he was silently begging God for Sally not to come over, but none of his begging did any good. Sally and three of her friends wandered over, but all Henry could focus on was Sally, and how her beautiful face was marred by confusion. He’d been trying to break free of Mark and Tony’s grasp, but he gave up then.
Brad handed Sally the loose-leaf notebook pages, and as Sally looked at them with an inscrutable expression, Henry prayed that she’d recognize how devoted he was to her and that his love for her was pure, and that she would recognize the goodness in him, even if he did look like a hog ogre. It seemed like an eternity before she stopped studying those sheets of paper, although it could’ve only been seconds. During it all Henry’s insides had turned into a cold queasy mush, and he prayed that she’d say something kind, or at least look at him with kindness. He didn’t care any longer whether his love for her remained unrequited as long as he could continue to love her. When she finally looked at him, she did so with an inscrutable expression, and then as she stared into his eyes, her face contorted into something that wasn’t so beautiful any longer.
“Yuck,” she said.
She ripped the drawings up and let the torn-up pieces of paper flutter to the floor. She must’ve walked away with her friends then, but Henry was blind to that. He pulled himself free of Mark and Tony’s grasp, which wasn’t so hard since they were laughing themselves to tears. Then he ran from them, and kept running even though he was badly huffing and puffing shortly after leaving the school grounds. He was a mess, tears and snot streaming down his face, but he didn’t stop running until he’d covered the full three miles from the school to his house.
Chapter Twelve
Long Island, 1979
“You need to talk to your son!”
Mr. Pollard had just stepped through the door after a long day of working for the New York City Transit Authority. He was amazed his wife even heard him seeing that she was in the kitchen preparing dinner and she had the TV set in there blasting away. The woman must have hearing like a bat. That was all he could think of. He breathed in deeply and smelled the sausage, peppers, and onions that were cooking. Well, that was one good thing at least. He joined her in the kitchen, and after lowering the volume of the TV, he nuzzled the back of her neck while she busied herself with the homemade sauce she was preparing. She acted as if he wasn’t even there. He gave up and took a beer from the fridge.
“He’s my son now, huh?” he said. “I thought he’s always your little angel.” Sighing, he asked, “What did the boy do?”
“He got into a fight with other boys in school.” Her voice turned brittle as she added, “And he cut three of his classes.”
Mr. Pollard took a long pull on his beer, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Doesn’t sound like that big a deal,” he said.
Mrs. Pollard turned to give her husband a severe look. “It is a big deal,” she insisted. “Henry won’t tell me what happened, but I could tell that he’d been crying. You need to get to the bottom of it.”
Mr. Pollard took another pull on his beer while his wife stood her ground, her arms crossed over her chest. Anyone looking at them would have a hard time reconciling them as Henry’s biological parents, at least at first. Mr. Pollard stood six feet, four inches tall, and was a large, barrel-chested, broad-shouldered block of a man. While his skin was naturally pale and his features could be construed as doughy and a bit lumpy, he was good-looking in a rough and tumble sort of way. His wife in contrast was barely five feet tall; a diminutive and very pretty redhead. It would take some doing, but if you had enough of an imagination and you studied them carefully you’d be able to see where bits of Henry came from, and the only conclusion you’d be able to make was that Henry had been badly shortchanged genetically. Almost any combination of genes from his parents would’ve resulted in a good-looking kid, and Henry got the one in a million mixture that didn’t.
Mr. Pollard blinked first in the mini-staring contest he had with his wife, realizing quickly enough that if he didn’t give in she’d let the sausages burn.<
br />
“Okay, I’ll talk to him,” he grumbled, letting out a heavy sigh of defeat.
“Henry’s in his room.” A worried look weakened Mrs. Pollard’s expression. “He insists he’s not hungry and won’t be eating dinner. Something’s wrong.”
Mr. Pollard nodded. Sausage, pepper, and onion smothered in his wife’s homemade tomato sauce was not only his favorite, but Henry’s. While he thought his wife babied Henry too much and that boys Henry’s age needed to be able to work out their own differences with fists if necessary, he had to admit that if Henry voluntarily missed tonight’s dinner, there had to be a problem. He polished off the rest of his beer and left the empty bottle on the countertop, then headed off to his son’s room. He didn’t bother knocking on the closed door, and just walked in without warning while Henry was doing one of his drawings.
In his no-nonsense tone, he demanded, “Tell me about this fight you had today.”
Henry looked ashen as he tried to bury the drawing he’d been working on within a stack of other drawings.
“Nothing happened.”
This was said so sullenly that Mr. Pollard eyed his son carefully until he could intuit the meaning. “Some boys picked on you, huh?”
Henry looked utterly miserable.
“And you didn’t fight back?”
Henry gave him a crestfallen, helpless look that answered him as well as any words could have.
Mr. Pollard nodded to himself. “It’s my fault, not yours. I should’ve taught you how to fight by now,” he said, although as far as he was concerned it was really his wife’s fault. She was always babying Henry, always insisting that their son was too sensitive to get into fights or do anything where he could hurt himself, which was ridiculous. Thirteen-year-old boys are supposed to get into fights! They’re supposed to roughhouse and get scrapes and bumps and bruises! Mr. Pollard closed the bedroom door so his wife wouldn’t be able to hear them.
“You let other boys pick on you and it never stops,” he said secretively once he was sitting on Henry’s bed. “Here’s what you do. Tomorrow you pick out the meanest of them and you beat the bejesus out of that boy. You do that and the rest of them will leave you alone forever.”
Henry gave his dad a look as if he were crazy. “I can’t do that.”
“Sure you can. You’re as strong as an ox, Henry. You get that from me. All you need to do is get your hands on that boy, and the fight’s over. Stand up, I’ll show you what to do.”
Reluctantly, Henry did as he was told.
“Okay, you got short arms, so you want to get close to that boy and then start pounding away. Clench your fists as tight as you can and use short punches. Don’t pull your fists back any farther than your chest. Let’s see what you got.”
Mr. Pollard held both palms up to his son, and Henry half-heartedly punched one of them.
“Come on, you can do better than that. Let it rip. Fast and furious, and twist your body into each punch.”
Henry started punching his hands, at first reluctantly, but then a crazed intensity took over.
“Ow, ow, ow, you’re breaking my bones. Don’t stop, though . . . Ow, ow, ow. Holy cow, you’re one strong kid . . . A natural mauler. You’re going to make mincemeat out of that bully. He won’t stand a chance.”
Henry had thrown around forty punches in rapid succession before he started slowing down and his punches became sluggish.
“That’s enough for now, killer,” Mr. Pollard said with a renewed sense of pride. “I almost feel sorry for that bully, but that boy deserves every bit of the lesson you’re going to be teaching him.”
Henry stopped punching his dad’s palms. His stubby arms fell slack, and he started looking mopey again.
“I don’t think I can do this,” he said dejectedly.
Mr. Pollard good-naturedly tousled his son’s hair. “Sure you can, and you will. Henry, I have complete faith in you. Believe your old man, it will be over before you know it. And then the rest of those kids will know what they’re dealing with.” He paused before adding, “You’re going to need your strength for tomorrow. You’re sure you don’t want any of that sausage and pepper mom’s cooking up? It sure smelled good.”
Grudgingly Henry admitted that he could eat.
“Good. Let’s go to the kitchen and help mom set the table. And don’t mention any of this to her. No need for her to worry, especially since it’s going to be that other boy who’ll be getting knocked on his butt.”
Mr. Pollard draped his arm around his son’s shoulders and walked with him to the kitchen. He’d almost asked Henry about the drawing Henry had been working on when he came into the room. Before his son had shoved it into a stack of other drawings, Mr. Pollard had caught a glimpse of it, and it looked to him like a picture of a blonde girl having spikes driven into her eyes. He might’ve been mistaken, though, and besides Henry had quite an imagination and was always drawing weird stuff.
* * *
The next day after opening bell, Henry was walking to his locker when Brad Black sidled up to him and called him an ugly little hoggie. Brad was probably going to say more, but before he could Henry turned and punched him in the stomach with every ounce of strength he could muster, and Brad went as white as a sheet and his body sagged. The next moment, Henry was shoving Brad into an empty locker. Brad was a tall, skinny boy, and while the lockers were five feet long from the floor to the top shelf, they were also very narrow and weren’t made to have teenage boys shoved into them. The sides of Brad’s head got scraped pretty badly and a piece of his left earlobe was torn off. By the time the assistant principal, Mr. Aronson, had pulled Henry away, Brad Black had been completely forced inside the locker, and later had to be cut out by the fire department.
The school originally talked about suspending Henry for the rest of the school year, but after hearing from other students how Brad and his gang had picked on Henry for years, his suspension was shortened to two weeks. When Henry returned back to school, no one picked on him anymore. Further, if he had paid any attention to Sally Klosky, he would’ve noticed that she now looked at him with a renewed interest. But he no longer paid any attention to her. As far as he was concerned, she no longer existed. His second day back, he sought out Nancy Bower during lunch and asked if he could sit with her. She told him she’d like that.
Chapter Thirteen
Los Angeles, the present
The lights were off when Morris unlocked the front door to his house, which made sense since it was three minutes before midnight. He was tired and hungry, and his stomach had been rumbling for hours. Earlier he had to snack on something if he was going to make it through the press conference without passing out from hunger, and he knew Natalie would’ve wanted him to have something healthy, like an apple, while he was craving potato chips, so he compromised and had both. But that was five hours ago, which meant all he’d had that day other than the apple and chips was a tuna-salad sandwich. Now as he opened up the refrigerator, he prayed silently that he’d find a take-out bag from the Banyan Tree Grill waiting for him. When he saw the bag with the restaurant’s logo, he silently whispered his thanks.
Inside the bag was an order of the pan-roasted chicken and a slice of chocolate espresso cake, and, as Natalie had threatened, a small spoonful of the cake had been dug out, really only a nibble. Of course, he wasn’t about to eat any dessert with espresso in it after midnight, he’d save that for breakfast tomorrow morning, but it would be something to look forward to. Morris again whispered his thanks as he moved the chicken into a pan so he could reheat it. He had just closed the oven door when he heard a soft padding behind him, and then the excited piglike grunts his bull terrier, Parker, made.
Parker wagged his tail furiously while his rear end wiggled like a crazed whirling dervish, all the while the dog making more of his piglike grunts. Morris got down on one knee so Parker could push his cement-hard head into Morris’s stomach while Morris scratched Parker behind his ears.
“You just woke
up, huh?” Morris commented in a soft whisper as the dog stretched and nearly unhinged his jaw as he yawned. “Let me guess, you smelled the food and thought you could weasel a midnight snack out of me?”
Another of Parker’s piglike grunts.
“Yeah, well, not the Banyan Tree Grill chicken. Sorry pal, you’re out of luck there.”
“Who are you kidding?”
Morris looked back to see that Natalie had joined him in the kitchen. She had a tan cloth robe wrapped around her slender body and fuzzy pink slippers covering her small feet. At ninety-five pounds she wasn’t about to make a lot of noise moving about the house, but it was because of her slippers that Morris didn’t hear her enter the kitchen.
“Ha! If Parker thinks he’ll wear me down, he’ll soon find out who’s boss,” Morris said. “He’s not getting a morsel of that chicken.”
The dog let out another grunt over hearing his name. Natalie laughed. “We both know who’s boss, and we both know you’ll give in like you always do,” she said. “Although I can’t blame you. We’ve got a champion moocher on our hands.”
“We’ll see.” Morris gave Parker’s muzzle several rubs with his palm, then straightened up. “I’m reheating the chicken at three fifty for fifteen minutes. Sound good?”
“I’d add two ounces of water so it doesn’t dry out, and cover it with some foil.”
Morris embraced his wife and gave her a kiss. Parker, jealous of the attention, attempted to bull his way between them.
“I tried to be quiet,” he said. “I apologize if I woke you. And thanks for picking up the food.”
“You didn’t wake me. I couldn’t sleep. Hon, you better take care of the chicken, otherwise it might be too dry for Parker. We both know he’s getting at least half of it.”
There were two grunts this time: the piglike one from the dog, and a harrumph of protest from Morris. He left his wife so he could add the water and the foil to the pan he was reheating, then sat down at the kitchen table. Parker plopped down by his feet while his wife got behind him and kneaded her thin, delicate fingers into his neck muscles.