He raised his eyebrows. “It’s a rebus.”
“Spare me.” I slammed the door behind me.
He stood outside, hands in his jacket pockets.
Emily was back in the store, sitting behind the cash register, holding a pink-and-silver paperback with a drawing of a long-haired, naked-to-the-waist man on its cover. “Skipped out on me to spend time with Cam, didn’t you?”
“Who?”
“Him. Cam, short for Camelot. That’s what he’s called, didn’t you know? Doesn’t he seem from never-never land?”
That was Peter Pan’s hometown, not Arthur’s, but I didn’t correct her.
“He has money and looks even if he’s a little old, and he knows it. Always did.”
“Who is he? What’s his real name?”
“Arthur.”
I was oddly relieved. “Arthur King.”
The rebus. He hadn’t been kidding. The crown equaled king, and everybody who received the card was supposed to know that.
“They called him King Arthur, then Camelot, get it?”
“Part of the sausage people?”
She nodded. “Like I said, rich and handsome and smart, too.”
No wonder he was apoplectic about the defaced ads, the gossip campaign.
King’s Sausage. The alleged abductor-killer of Ted Serfi, heir apparent of the rival meat clan.
But if Arthur had something to do with Serfi’s disappearance, why was he playing tag with me and worrying over the gun that had been put in my bag? Unless it was his gun, unless it had been used to kill somebody else.
If it hadn’t killed Jimmy Pat, had it—had he—killed Ted Serfi?
And how did that fit with his watching Emily? Why was he out there, given his whines about sinus headaches? I watched him light a cigarette despite the wind and several decades of government warnings. “You and he,” I said, “you know each other?”
“Not nearly well enough,” she murmured. “But…don’t laugh. I think he wants to know me better. He’s been hanging around, watching me. Think he could be shy? Camelot?”
“Why else would he hang around?”
She gave me a cryptic sidelong glance. “There could be other reasons,” she said, her attention back on the man outside, watching him almost hungrily. It was not the expression I’d expect of a woman in mourning for her one true love. Then she pulled her gaze back at me. “You ever been trapped?”
“By him?” I gestured to the outside.
She shook her head. “Trapped. For real. I mean, when it isn’t something you could fix. Did you ever know you were trapped? Permanently? When I was a junior in high school, my parents, their car was hit by a truck. My mother was killed, my father was left…like that.” She gestured toward the back room, as if I could see the man.
“I had to quit school and take care of him and the store, and here we are, six years later, in the trap.”
My teacher-self kicked in. Suggestions flowed, as if she’d tapped a reservoir. As if she’d requested them. “You could get your equivalency degree,” I began. “You’re smart. Then, you—”
“Don’t. It’s not like I’m an idiot and never thought of it. But what then? A job that pays enough for me to pay somebody to take care of him, too? Doing what? A person who’d be willing to take care of him and his temper, anyway?”
“What if you sold the store and got cash that way?”
“Sell it to what fool? It’s not worth anything, except it keeps us off the street because we live upstairs. Well, I do. My father, he lives back there.” She looked at me and her eyes welled up. “Jimmy Pat was my chance out.”
I wondered how far out. Gambling was sure to wipe out whatever profits Jimmy earned driving a produce truck. He’d have become just another trap. I felt that in my bones, but kept it to myself. Too late for it to matter.
“Now he’s dead and I have some happy ending, right? A regular fairy tale.”
Need I say this seemed an ill-advised time to jog her memory about the story she wanted to sell? Her only chance of a semi-happy ending, her one and only asset was whatever she thought she knew. And much as I’d like to believe we all make our own destinies and all that fascinating and uplifting philosophy, far as I could see—the girl was trapped. The only alternate destiny she could forge would be to put her father in institutional care and light out for the hills. It sounded both desirable and unkind.
She sat glumly, her glance moving from me, through the window to Arthur King, who kicked idly at a hummock of slush.
He still clutched his book. Maybe he was planning to hold on to The Prince until Machiavelli wrote a sequel, The King. For him personally. With a golden crown on the cover.
Then he looked up and over and I was willing to swear he exchanged a glance—the merest suggestion of a glance—with Emily, but it was a familiar, collegial, conspiratorial glance. A checking-on-how-things-were-going glance.
My sympathy for her psychic afflictions dried up.
The two of them were in collusion. Arthur’s being nearby wasn’t coincidental. I had called, announced my arrival, and she…
I looked back at gorgeous Emily. There was no mystery about a man following such a woman around. The glance was probably just that—a contact, finally, after he’d checked the waters. She had, of course, been seeing somebody else. She was supposedly in mourning. He had to play his cards carefully.
“I should go.” Let them speak directly one to the other.
“Aren’t you—aren’t we going to talk about that article?” she asked. “About my story?”
“I didn’t think you were emotionally up to it.” I flicked another glance Arthur’s way. With a last deep drag, he dropped his cigarette, shoved both his gloved hands into his jacket pockets, and walked off. I had stayed too long. Emily’s eyes, tension-ringed and speculative at the same time, followed the man for as long as they could. Was it love, lust, or something else altogether?
“I’m in a hurry,” I said. The light level outside was lower, my anxiety higher. “Another time, maybe. We got sidetracked.”
“That bitch,” she said. “Coming here and lying to my face.”
“Let’s not start, all right? Meantime, what I was thinking was that if you know who killed Jimmy Pat, tell the police. Then, after the trial, you could still sell your story—for big bucks, probably—to those newspapers you mentioned. If you can’t write, it’d be an as-told-to. You wouldn’t have to share any of the money, either.”
“Stop already,” she said. “I don’t know who killed Jimmy.”
“You’re peddling a theory?”
“I never said I was talking about his shooting.”
“Then what…why tell me?”
“You’re the only writer I know. I thought you knew stuff.”
“About Mummers. Maybe.”
She lowered her lids and let her exasperation show. And be heard. “You’re obtuse, you know? Not exactly a walking ad for higher education, if you catch my drift.” She waved me away. “I have to think, okay?” She stood up, slammed down her book, grabbed a lipstick from behind the counter and applied it, and marched to the rear. Not a word of explanation.
“Fine, then.” I wrote my number on a three-by-five. “Call if you resolve this. Or I’ll call you if I get a definite offer from a magazine.” Not that I had hopes of selling an article about a subject unknown to the author. “Dear Editor, I have this idea except I don’t know what it is, but I want a lot of money for it…”
Emily returned, wearing a long black coat and a white angora hat that accentuated her pale eyes and made her look angelic.
Appearances aside, she grabbed the card with my number on it and ripped it up. “I won’t be using it,” she said, as the pieces fluttered to the floor. “Not worth it for the no-money you’re talking.” Her eyes were glittery, almost feverish-looking. “Besides, you gave me a better idea. Much. So thanks.”
She flipped a square white sign from Open to Closed, and we made our exit.
A
nd as she walked away from me, I could have sworn I heard Emily, the woman in black, she whose last chance at happiness and love had recently been murdered, chuckle to herself.
Twelve
THE NEXT DAY, NATURE’S MOOD HAD IMPROVED A LOT MORE THAN MINE. The sky had blown itself out of grayness into clear blue and the wind was taking a rest. The day had an edge of definition, a sense of itself I sorely lacked.
So far as I could tell, I had spent all this short new year rushing hither and yon to screw things up. Twice, Emily had offered me something important and I had not only failed to get hold of it, but I’d inspired her to give her secret to the attractive goon and possible murderer who’d intimidated me.
My friend Vincent was lying about me, trying to use me for disturbing reasons of his own.
The whole world, except Mackenzie, believed I was deeply into inflammatory journalism that endangered them. And I was still precisely nowhere.
I struggled to reach out to my classes from deep within the void where I was stuck, and succeeded only in establishing that I was not only a lousy sleuth, but a lousy teacher as well. “Take, for example, stupidity,” I told my first-period class. “A stupid person or act could also be referred to, with slightly different shades of meaning, as dense, moronic, obtuse, slow, witless, imprudent, irresponsible—” the words piled into my skull with no effort, each one pointing a little finger at me “—reckless, asinine, pointless, senseless, and each synonym gives you a—”
A generalized murmur of interest rose from the seats. A girl giggled. A boy made the circlng-finger-to-head sign indicating lunacy.
“Synonyms, remember?” And then I remembered. This class hadn’t been studying them. “Just…seeing if you remember what you learned awhile ago, given that a wide vocabulary strengthens your writing.” I took their compositions out of my briefcase. I had graded them the night before while Mackenzie put on a stack of CDs and buried himself in an arch Thirties locked-room mystery, complete with diagrams, floor plans, and people who lived off inherited wealth.
These essays had filled my entire evening. There’d been no time left over to begin my article.
When class was done, Renata walked directly in front of my desk, head held high as she intrusively ignored me and flounced out of the room. I’d thought we’d reached a truce and I couldn’t comprehend her haughty body language, but I knew she hadn’t been sending warm and cheerful greetings my way.
Sally Bianco lingered behind. “Miss Pepper,” she said softly, “I heard what you’re doing for Renata.”
“Doing? Me?”
“About making up the work. About writing during school, that business. So she can pass.”
“And?”
“I’d feel better if there was something I could do, too. To make it up, what I’ve done.”
“Sally!” There is nothing more annoying than a good person insisting she’s a sinner. “For Pete’s sake!”
“My mother says you’ll never trust me again. Every time I think about it, I get so angry. My reputation—”
“Sally, I—”
“If only I had a chance to atone, to—”
I gave up. “Okay, I’d like a two-thousand-word composition from you on ethics. What moral ideas should guide our choices?”
“Two thousand?”
I nodded.
“By when?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Absolutely. Not a moment later.”
She exhaled. “Thanks, Miss Pepper,” she said, and she made a brisk, almost exuberant exit.
The girl who’d missed the plane from Chicago was back—with a great tan. I’d been right about only one of the tardy trio. The flu case had no tan at all—just a ghastly gray hue and a lingering cough. And Badluck Dooney Scott was still out—“really burned,” a friend of his said. “His whole arm. Spray bottle thing went up like a flamethrower, and when he stopped pushing on it…sucked it back on him. Really bad.” I allowed myself a moment of repentance for having so cynically disbelieved. We’d do a class card, messages of goodwill, visits, although the boy needed a keeper most of all.
Today the class was discussing Steinbeck’s The Red Pony, always a favorite. It’s an unsettling, unsentimental work about coming of age. But let’s face it: literary merit has nothing to do with its student appeal. For them, its prime and perhaps sole value is that at seventy pages total, it is the shortest novel on any reading list in the known universe. To less than avid readers, it’s the promised land of assigned novels, the chocolate fudge sundae on the scholastic menu.
Problem is, the kids are so dazzled by its brevity they can think of nothing else. That’s what they want to talk about—but not to me. They feel they are secretly pulling one over, but if they admitted it (“I loved this book because it was so short”), I might notice its abbreviated length. Their mamas must have taught them that if you can’t say something nice—like “it’s so short!”—say nothing at all. I grow fatigued trying to pull a discussion out of the book’s wee body, but I keep it in the curriculum to avoid student insurrection.
“These stories,” I said, “are about Jody’s growing up, about what he learns during the process. Not all that he needs to learn is wonderful, or happy, either.”
Duh, their collective eyes said, except for one girl who first tried out her thoughts in a whisper to her neighbor, who, in turn, nodded permission to go public with the idea. “It was harsh,” she said.
Good. It was. Nature was. Life was. Sacrifice was. “Any harshness in particular you want to mention?” I asked. Would it be the unfairness of the pony’s death after Jody had taken such loving care of him? The harshness of Jody’s father’s approach to life and child rearing? Jody’s loss of faith in adult omniscience?
The girl rolled her eyes. “Like when it died, the red pony. That was so sick with the cutting the lump and then, the buzzards eating its eye, oh, gross, yellow liquid and eye eating! How could he write that? It was so harsh!”
Her female classmates nodded gravely. Her male classmates looked at her with contempt. Girl, their eyes said. They could take as much eye eating as Steinbeck or I dished out.
Steinbeck pirouetted in his grave.
I pushed and prodded, and asked and answered questions until finally, the hour ended.
Teaching can be oh gross and so harsh.
And then it was back to poetic meter, a subject that is never wildly appreciated by people of the senior high persuasion. We slogged through iambic ta-tums, trochaic tum-tas, anapestic ta-ta-tums, and dactylic tum-ta-tas, eyes growing steadily glassier. With each new definition, I read a real-life, entertaining, illuminating poem they might like. My offerings were silently rejected. The class was much too worried about remembering arcane words to pay attention to silly things like poems.
“Dactylic,” one grumbled. “Sounds prehistoric, like it belongs in a Spielberg movie.”
They were building long-range anti-poetic missiles, and we hadn’t yet approached an examination of the number of beats per line, something humans instinctively feel, along with the tadums, until we make it part of the curriculum and slice the music into units from monometers to heptameters.
Sorry, I wanted to say, I’m not the one who decided to lessen your instinctive enjoyment by making you learn technical terms. Why can’t that wait? Kids are born loving rhythm and verbal music. They bounce balls and skip rope and tease each other in homemade or learned rhyme. As they grow, they eat, sleep, and breathe music, the instrumentation of that rhythm they crave. So why do we squeeze it dry as soon as we can? Why not leave the technical business for after we have them hooked, when they ask how it works.
Maybe because if we didn’t teach all those deadening terms and make it obscure and fearful, everybody would read and write poetry. There’d be a glut. Pretty scary.
We slogged on through the hour. Sometimes you aim merely for endurance, and don’t dare think about inspiration.
I had packed lunch, trusting neither the
cafeteria food nor the weather. But as my class stampeded out, I considered the landscape on the other side of the windows. The great outdoors looked as if it could finally support human life, and I hoped that fresh air might help, as I felt mentally mildewed.
Renata entered the room as I prepared to leave. I must have looked as surprised as I felt.
“You said I had to write during lunch period,” she mumbled.
Had I thereby condemned myself to playing prison matron every noon? Until when? “I’ll be back to check up on you.”
“You aren’t staying? You said…” She looked unduly horrified. Shouldn’t she look happy?
“I’ll provide the paper.” I gave her the new year’s accumulated flyers and notices. “Use the backs for your rough draft. I’ll check at the end of the period.” At least she’d have to copy over whatever it was she’d brought into the room.
“I didn’t think I’d be alone,” she whined.
“Easier to concentrate.”
She slipped into her seat and put her head down on the desk.
“See you,” I said. She looked up with the pathos of an unadopted puppy.
I managed to steel my heart and get out, only to hear a ruckus, a Code Blue something-bad-is-happening sound.
I slammed the door behind me, and trotted toward the noise. Caroline Finney, the gentle Latin teacher whose skin resembled tissue paper and whose thoughts should have been on retirement, not rumbles, also strode resolutely toward the room at the end of the empty hall. We carried scowls and disapproval as anti-riot gear.
We approached the open door from separate directions, hearing male voices ride over one another.
“I told you—think you could barge in here—Me! I’m not the one who—I didn’t lie!—loyalty, all these years—pass it off on—the hell out of here!”
Caroline shook her head so vigorously her gray bangs jostled and rearranged themselves. “Boys, boys, boys!” she said before she’d even reached the room from which the sounds poured.
I was apprehensive, but not about the possibilities of real danger. This is a good school—our students fight the old-fashioned way, by hand. After they’ve spent their allowances on CDs, recreational substances, and sunglasses, they don’t have cash left for heavy weaponry.
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