by Jan Dunlap
“I’m not taking the class, Sara,” I reminded her. “You are. Supposedly.”
“What do you mean, ‘supposedly’?” she argued. “I show up… sometimes. It’s a stupid class. Ms. Knorsen just keeps harping about how important it is for parents to spend time with their kids. That’s ridiculous. My parents never spend time with me—my mom’s too busy with work and her club, and my dad’s always traveling for his job. I don’t need to spend time with them.”
And I was pretty sure that was exactly why Sara didn’t like Gina’s class. As her counselor who was aware of her family situation, I could just imagine that every time Gina started discussing healthy family relationships, Sara immediately tuned her out. Not having experienced a nurturing bond with her own parents, Sara wasn’t interested in hearing about others’. Along with her truancy problems, Sara’s disciplinary issues in the classroom were directly related to her feeling that no one cared about her. To cope with that void in her life, she’d perfected deceiving her teachers—and her counselor—to an art.
Which reminded me about the conversation I’d had earlier with possible-Crusher Paul Brand.
“What about art, Sara?” I asked. “Mr. Brand told me you’ve been skipping his class. Is that a stupid class, too?”
“Yes,” she snipped. “He wants us to scrapbook.”
Well, okay, maybe she had a point there. Personally, I was still pretty much lost about that whole scrapbook thing, let alone it being high school art class material. To be honest with you, it sort of reminded me of trying to braid leather strips into key chains when I was in Cub Scouts.
Time-consuming, yes.
Artistic? I don’t think so.
In its great institutional wisdom, however, the school district of Savage High didn’t pay me to question the curriculum. My job—a fairly large part of it, as it turned out—was making sure that students parked their little cabooses in their classroom seats at the designated times.
Whether or not they were going to be scrapbooking in those seats.
“Sara, you have to attend classes,” I told her. “That’s how school works. You go to class, you do the work, you get a grade, you graduate… hopefully. Eventually.”
I reached into the back seat and grabbed Goldie.
“You’re welcome,” I said to Sara, plopping the flour into her arms.
She looked down at the sack and frowned.
“This isn’t my baby.”
“Sara, it’s your baby.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not,” she insisted. “My bag of flour had a picture of a gold medallion on it, and this one has Robin Hood.”
I looked at the bag she held up in front of my face.
Sure enough, Robin was there. He even had a green cap with a feather in it.
“What did you do to my baby?”
I could have sworn she actually sounded upset. Sara Schiller, world-class truant and absent pretend-parent, was distraught over a bag of flour she hadn’t wanted in the first place.
“Your baby turned into some excellent buttermilk biscuits,” I informed her. “They were great with the salmon. I tell you what. Just take old Robin here and wrap him up in a baby blanket. Ms. Knorsen will never know the difference.”
Sara gave me a glower. “Yes, she will. I will never trust you again, Mr. White. That’s the last time I ever ask you for help.”
She tucked Robin under her arm and stomped off into the building.
That went well, I decided. Now I didn’t have to lug Goldie—or Robin, as it turned out—around for the morning, and, with any luck, Sara would park her little caboose in front of the other counselors for a while whenever she got in trouble with teachers.
Not bad for a Tuesday morning, and I hadn’t even stepped into my office yet.
More geese honked in the sky as I walked into the building and hung a right to detour by Alan’s classroom. As the faculty’s local news junkie, he might be able to fill me in on any other controversies that could be cooking with turbines in Minnesota.
Not that I intended to do any extracurricular sleuthing for the police, mind you. I was, after all, a high school counselor, as I’d been so recently reminded.
Although, if I did uncover an important clue to Sonny’s untimely demise, I might consider sharing it with Rick.
If, in return, he would tell me which teacher was the Crusher.
True, I already had a deal with Rick for that information if I helped him find the Ferruginous Hawk in Morris later this week, but since the MOU-net had been silent about the bird yesterday, I was beginning to lose hope. Fall migration had a way of becoming unpredictable with some species. A sudden cold front could push migrating birds through the state much faster than expected, while a lingering spell of warm weather could entice other species to stick around their summer haunts longer than normal. Either way, the hawk’s absence from any sightings on Monday didn’t bode well for finding it Thursday.
Then again, when it came to birding, you just never knew what you’d find until you looked.
Kind of like my weekend walk at the Arb.
“Look! Here’s a late Green Heron.”
“Look! Here’s a dead man dressed like a scarecrow.”
I leaned into Alan’s classroom and spotted him back in the corner, his head down on his desk top and his eyes closed.
“Rough night, huh?” I said.
He opened one eye.
“Parenting is not for the timid,” he informed me, “or for those who want to sleep at night.”
I walked to the back of the room and sat down in a student’s desk across from my brother-in-law.
“Are you finding fault with my niece?”
“Not at all. Louise is perfectly incredible,” he insisted. “It’s the rest of the world that has its nights and days mixed up.”
“What do you know about turbines in Stevens County?”
“Frankly, very little,” he replied. “I’m lucky if I even know what day it is. I figure I’ll have time to catch up on state news again when Louise is—oh, I don’t know—seventeen?”
“Months?” I asked.
Alan closed his eye and sighed.
“Years.”
“How the mighty Hawk has succumbed to such a tiny child,” I observed.
Both of Alan’s eyes flew open and fixed on me.
“I’m not the one who carried a sack of flour around school all day yesterday,” he reminded me. “At least my baby smiles and drools.”
“But mine made good biscuits,” I said. On second thought, I added, “Forget I said that.”
“I’m not even asking,” Alan assured me. He yawned, lifting his head from the desk and stretching his arms toward the ceiling. On their way back down, his hands smoothed over the crown of his head as my brother-in-law shook away his tiredness.
“But back to the turbines,” he continued. “As luck—and the lovely wide-awake Louise—would have it, I did happen to catch a program on public radio late last night that featured a panel discussing wind energy. Apparently, when it comes to reducing bird mortality, fewer and taller turbine towers are turning out to be a big piece of the solution out in Altamont Pass in California.”
I knew about Altamont. Set atop a ridge in central California, the Altamont Pass Wind Farm was constructed back in the 1970s as one of the first wind farms in the country in hopes of developing alternative sources of energy for a nation dependent on Mideast oil. At its peak, the farm had almost 6000 turbines in operation, making it the largest concentration of turbines in the world.
Unfortunately, its location, prime for catching electricity-generating winds from the Pacific Ocean, also was a critical corridor for raptor migration and overwintering, especially as the Golden Eagle population rebounded thanks to those same federal protection statutes that were now such an obstacle for the proposed farm in our neighboring Goodhue County. By the turn of the new century, experts around Altamont were counting 2,000 r
aptor deaths every year from bird-turbine collisions, in addition to some 8,000 other bird and bat victims. As a result of the carnage, alternative energy proponents and the local Audubon Society chapters determined to find a compromise that would permit wind generation with reduced avian fatalities. Last I’d heard about it, part of that compromise included replacing the old turbines with an improved design that made wind harvesting more efficient … and less deadly.
“I can understand how fewer turbines to fly into would certainly help,” I said to Alan, “but how do taller ones make a difference?”
My brother-in-law yawned again and leaned back in his chair. I thought I spotted a small dribble of dried formula on his shoulder.
“Taller towers are the reason they can go with fewer turbines,” he explained. “When the turbines are up higher where the wind is naturally faster, you don’t need as many turbines to produce the same amount of energy. For the hawks, eagles, and owls, though, taller towers are especially good news: the blades are much higher off the ground, well out of the zone where the birds fly to hunt their prey.”
“So the hawk doesn’t run into a blade that will slice him in half just as he’s diving for some dinner,” I said.
“Exactly. They’ve already seen a big drop in avian mortality at Altamont. If I’m remembering this correctly, they’re hoping for an eighty-percent decrease in bird deaths.”
The familiar sound of slamming locker doors began to echo in the school hallway. I stood up to go.
“So you’re saying that the turbine manufacturers have already been working with conservationists to come up with more bird-friendly wind farms.”
Alan nodded. “And if Sonny Delite was as sharp an advocate as you say he was, he’d know about those turbine improvements, just like the utility company would. If birds colliding with towers was the problem, Altamont’s taller towers are the solution.”
I stood to the side of the doorway as two students sauntered in.
“Which means that there had to be some other reason Sonny was opposing the construction in Stevens County,” I concluded.
“Who says he was opposing it?”
I looked at Alan suspiciously. “Red did. She said he was Don Quixote jousting at windmills. Alan, do you know something I don’t?”
Alan laughed. “I always know something you don’t know, White-man.”
“Such as?” I gestured for him to elaborate.
“Oh, let’s see … I could tell you about the formation of the Italian city states prior to the Renaissance and how their political structures—”
“Alan.” I stopped him before he got to full lecture mode. “What do you know about Sonny and the wind farm plans for Stevens County?”
He got up out of his chair and walked across the room to join me at the doorway.
“According to a news article I dug up last night—or was it this morning?—on the Internet, Sonny Delite didn’t want to take any windmills down in Stevens County, Bob.”
He gave me a soft punch in my right shoulder.
“He was on the team wanting to put them up.”
Chapter Seven
It was almost the end of the school day, and I sat in the back row of the Savage High School auditorium watching Mr. Wist the Amazing Hypnotist up on the stage telling eight students they were now chickens in a farmyard.
“This should be good,” Boo Metternick, our new physics teacher, whispered next to me. “Was this assembly your brainstorm, Bob, or did the whole counseling department come up with it?”
I assured him that my colleagues and I shared the credit for the day’s special activity.
“We wanted to make sure students took advantage of our break this week to attend some college open houses,” I explained. “Mr. Wist came highly recommended. At the end of his show, he does some trick that really motivates students to think about life after high school.”
“That would take a magician, not a hypnotist,” Boo pointed out. “The last thing high school students think about is life after high school.”
I threw a quick look at Boo. “Are you sure you weren’t a high school counselor in another life?”
Boo shook his head and lapsed back into silence beside me.
Shoot. Even if I had tried, I couldn’t have come up with a better opening line than that for my new colleague to tell me he was the Bonecrusher.
Me: “Are you sure you weren’t a high school counselor in another life?”
Boo: “A high school counselor? No way. I don’t pretend to have even half of your brilliance and insight, Bob. But I was a famous wrestling celebrity once. They called me the Bonecrusher. Melodramatic, I know, but hey, it was a paycheck.”
Instead, Boo continued to sit in silence in the next chair.
I mentally reviewed the latest I’d heard through the faculty grapevine about him, which wasn’t much at all. He was single, he was new to the Twin Cities, and he’d only been teaching for three years, the last two in a rural school district in northern New Mexico. What he’d done prior to that, no one seemed to know. But he had dropped in to play some pickup basketball with me and Rick last Wednesday morning before school, and I could personally attest to the man’s strength and agility in an athletic contest.
Oh, and there was one more thing I knew about Boo Metternick: his middle name was Charles, giving him the initials of B.C.
Bonecrusher.
Maybe I’d spend the ten dollars that Alan was going to owe me on something cute for Baby Lou.
The sound of a rooster crowing filled the auditorium, pulling my attention back to the students on stage, who were now diligently pecking at invisible grain and flapping their imaginary wings. The rooster cry was coming from a short freckled boy who had jumped up on a chair and was currently stretching his neck as far upwards as humanly possible.
“The farmer’s wife is coming to gather eggs,” Mr. Wist announced to his subjects, who began to scurry around the stage, clucking and bumping into each other. The rooster-boy crowed even louder.
“It looks like the hallway outside my classroom when the first bell rings for class,” Boo said. “Do you think we could get this guy to hypnotize my students to study more?”
Before I could answer him, a loud crash came from the stage, followed by a cacophony of chicken noises. The rooster picked himself up from the floor, crowing repeatedly in agitation as he shook out his arms.
Mr. Wist, now laying beneath the rooster’s overturned perch, was out cold.
The other seven students continued to squawk in confusion, then abruptly leapt from the stage and fled out the auditorium doors.
“Is this part of the act?” Boo asked.
Up on the stage, Mr. Lenzen made a beeline for the prone hypnotist. In the packed audience, students shifted uneasily in their chairs, while faculty members asked them to remain seated. From outside the auditorium, I could hear wild clucking. I turned to Boo.
“How are you at rounding up chickens?” I asked. “Unless I’m mistaken, until Mr. Wist gives them the release word, those kids are going to think they’re hens in a barnyard.”
“I grew up on a farm,” Boo said, already moving toward the closest exit. “If I can wrestle steers, I can catch a few student-sized chickens.”
Wrestle … steers?
I followed him out the door and spotted three of the hypnotized students making a turn into the girls’ locker room down the corridor.
“You take them,” Boo said, pointing at the disappearing students. “I saw the other kids head towards the cafeteria.” He took off in that direction at a run, his arms pumping smoothly like big pistons.
Boo Metternick, Savage’s own steer wrestler, catcher of hypnotized chickens, and physics teacher.
Aka … the Bonecrusher.
“Yup. You’re the man, all right,” I said under my breath to his retreating form. “I am so going to get you on my lunchroom shift.”
I turned and jogged down the hall to the locker room door.
Seeing the wor
d “Girls” stenciled on the door gave me only a moment of hesitation. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d had to enter the girls’ facilities at Savage High in the course of my counseling duties, but it still tugged a tiny bit at my sense of propriety. Call me old-fashioned, but I didn’t think men belonged in the girls’ locker room.
At the moment, though, I supposed I could consider it less a girls’ locker room and more a chicken coop.
A henhouse?
Talk about politically incorrect. Our female coaching staff would tar and feather me if I ever let that one slip. And then Mr. Lenzen would get into the act. He’d probably suspend my coffee machine privileges.
Ouch. A day without school coffee was a day without … school coffee.
Something to think about there …
A loud cackle came from the other side of the door, focusing my attention back to the problem at hand. There were really big chickens in the locker room.
“It’s Mr. White, and I’m coming in,” I called out before I pushed on the door to open it.
It wouldn’t budge.
From the other side came the sounds of shrill squawking.
I put my shoulder against the door and pushed.
Again, it wouldn’t budge.
Again, more squawking. Louder this time.
Great. I was probably the first counselor in Savage High School history to be stymied by students who thought they were chickens barricading a door.
I needed another tactic.
“Oh, my,” I said loudly, hoping that the power of suggestion would work as well for me as it had for our illfated hypnotist. “What do I have here? Grain, and lots of it. I bet hungry chickens would just love to eat this grain.”
The squawking stopped. I pressed my advantage.
“Especially hungry chickens at the end of a very long school day,” I called through the door. “I wonder if there are some really hungry chickens in this locker room? If they would just open the door, those really hungry chickens could have some of this wonderful feed.”