Sticks and Stones - Lynn Hall (smarten punctuation)

by Lynn Hall

  Finally he felt he had to say something. “All right, so I’m not the world’s greatest singer.”

  The laughter increased. As it pounded into Tom’s head, he became aware that this was not easy, happy, natural laughter, but something strained and sharpened. It was as though none of them wanted to laugh, to go on laughing, but they were powerless to stop. Tom remembered laughing that way as a very small boy when a stout but dearly loved aunt had fallen down the front steps. She had been hurt, and Tom had not wanted to laugh, but in his fright and embarrassment at seeing her in a foolish position, he had laughed and been punished for it later.

  “Okay, gang, that’s enough now. Straighten up and let’s get to work. We’ve got a lot of pages to get collated yet.” Even Miss Hershaw seemed to know what the laughing had been about.

  Gradually the class settled down, but for the rest of the hour the tension remained in the air, and occasionally smothered giggles threatened to set everyone off again. Tom worked silently and wished for the time to hurry by. He had an uncomfortable feeling of moving within an invisible covering that separated him from the people around him. Not since his first week at Great River last February had he felt so alien.

  After his last class Tom met the music instructor in the band room, and played for him five pieces of music that were among his favorites and were sophisticated enough for state music. Mr. Knapp said he thought either of the Tchaikovsky pieces would do. Tom played both of them again and finally decided on ‘‘Romeo and Juliet.” Then he played it once more.

  He was stalling, hating to leave the band room and the beautiful soothing music. Mr. Knapp’s face was the first Tom had seen since journalism class that he was sure was friendly. All day he had been followed by the sensation of being talked about, giggled about. Conversations stopped when he entered classrooms, or at least he felt that they did. And still he could not understand what it was all about.

  When he finally left the band room, his Volkswagen stood alone in the student parking lot. He was relieved.

  But when he opened the door, he was startled to see a small form in the passenger’s seat. It was Teddy Schleffe.

  “Hi, Tom. Can I ride home with you?”

  Tom let out his breath and climbed in. “Sure, Tiger. What did you do, miss the school bus?” He was suddenly thankful for the uncomplicated companionship of the chubby, shaggy-haired little boy.

  “They went off without me,” Teddy pouted. “Mike and Butch told them to, ’cause they don’t want me to ride on their bus with them.”

  “Oh, come on now,” Tom scoffed. “They’re your brothers. They wouldn’t do a thing like that to you.”

  “Yes, they would. They don’t like me. They call me bad names.”

  Tom thought with sudden pain of the simplicity of a seven-year-old’s problems, compared to his own. “What bad names?”

  “They call me Peewee and Shorty and stuff like that.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what you do, Teddy. Next time they call you a name you just say, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ Got that?”

  All the rest of the way home Teddy muttered and memorized until he could say it perfectly.

  As Tom brought the bus to a stop in front of the Schleffe house, Mrs. Schleffe came out of the doorway and pounded across the footbridge with hard angry steps. Figuring that Teddy was in for a scolding, Tom rumpled the little boy’s hair in a quick gesture of assurance. “Remember what you’re going to say—”

  Before he could finish, Mrs. Schleffe pulled open the door and jerked Teddy out of the car. But to Tom’s amazement she turned not on Teddy but on himself.

  “You keep your hands off my little boy,” she said in whiplash tones. “And, Teddy, don’t you ever ride in his car with him again, hear?”

  After she and the confused Teddy disappeared into the house, Tom sat staring after her, stunned by the outburst. Slowly, automatically, he released the brake and coasted on down the hill to The Cottage.

  What is this, all of a sudden, hate Tom week? he wondered. Have I got leprosy spots that I didn’t see in the mirror this morning? Bad breath? Body odor?

  He tried to be light about it, but the confusion and pain would not be fooled into disappearing. He wanted to go up to his room and shut the door and think, but his mother caught him in the hall.

  She was bubbling. “Tom. Wait a minute. You’ll never guess what. That dentist I told you about this morning, you remember? Well, he is the same one I went to school with, and he’s a widower now, and he’s taking me out Friday night. Isn’t that nice?”

  “Yeah, that’s great, Mom.’’ He spoke so vaguely as he climbed the stairs that Charlotte stared after him and wondered whether he might really resent her dating another man so soon after her divorce.

  “Kids,’’she sighed.

  11

  In the weeks that followed, Tom tried not to know that something was wrong between him and the others at school. He tried to pass it off as his imagination when a teacher looked at him for an instant with an odd kind of curiosity or when two of his classmates exchanged looks over his head or at the corners of his vision. There were no more incidents of open rudeness after the unaccountable giggling in journalism, but still the puzzling isolation grew. He sat in the middle of a classroom full of contemporaries who should have been friends, and he felt as though he were in parentheses.

  The insidious pressure of feeling himself separated and stared at began to wear on his nerves. He found it difficult to concentrate on what the teachers were saying because he was straining to catch the meaning of the whispers behind him. As a result, often when he was called on to answer a question, he hadn’t heard the question, and aware that everyone was watching him, waiting for something to laugh at, his mind would go blank when he searched for the answer the teacher was expecting.

  Although most of the others treated him with a tense kind of surface politeness, Floyd Schleffe’s attitude changed so definitely that Tom knew beyond a doubt something was wrong. Floyd now avoided Tom, and when they did meet, Floyd was arrogant almost to the point of contempt. The words they exchanged were normal enough, but Floyd’s pale eyes showed an unmistakable glint of malice. Tom would not have been surprised to see Floyd thumb his nose or stick out his tongue.

  At first it had been a relief not to have Floyd popping up when he would rather have been alone, but before long Tom was as annoyed by Floyd’s new attitude as he had been by the old one.

  On the last Saturday afternoon in September the state music locals were held in the gym of the Great River High School. Among the musicians whose performances got a one-rating were Tom Naylor, piano solo, and Karen Obermeier, French horn solo. For Tom the day held a triple victory. First, the one-rating meant that he would go on to compete in the regionals and, hopefully, make the trip to Des Moines for state finals. With luck, he thought, Karen might make it that far, too, and they’d be sharing the bus trip, the restaurants and sightseeing, the finals banquet—ample opportunity to let her see that he wasn’t a leper.

  The second part of the victory came after the ratings were announced. For a warm and trembling few moments behind the stage curtain, Mr. Knapp and the other contestants congratulated Tom as genuinely as they did the other winners. Confusion, people stepping over and reaching around one another, maneuvering instruments, dropping sheet music, laughing and chattering in a release of stage-fright tensions—all these combined to camouflage Tom. He was a part of it, he and his one-rating, and for the moment the others were too busy to remember to hold themselves separate from him.

  The third victory was a small inner one, but it was precious to him. For the first time in his three years of piano recitals and contests, Tom had been able to bring himself to just the exact point of balance between too much calm and too much tension, and to hold himself there. Waiting backstage for his turn to go, he commanded the tremors to leave his hands, and they did. When the rolling, burning sensation began in his intestines, he took
a deep breath and held it, and the rolling stopped. He felt taut as he walked onto the stage, but it wasn’t a sick, sweating tautness that blocked his memory and stiffened his fingers. He commanded his mind to love the music, and his mind forgot the audience and knew only the music. He knew he had never played better.

  All through October Tom did his best to shut out the continuing hurt of his isolation at school, and to concentrate on pleasanter things. Afternoons between school and supper he worked at the piano, going over and over the difficult passages of his regionals music until they gradually smoothed out. After supper as often as his homework permitted, he drove out to Sweet Ridge.

  While he was lost in his music or caught up in Ward’s company, he was able to forget the way things were going at school, but on the Friday before the regionals competition there was another disturbing incident.

  Mr. Harmon’s sixth-hour P.E. class had been playing basketball, the Reds against the Blues. Because of his height and coordination, and because the Wheaton coach had been an outstanding one, Tom was easily the best of the Blues. The top scorer on the Reds’ team was Robert Short, who more than made up for lack of size by playing an intense and highly polished game.

  Today, when Mr. Harmon blew his whistle and called, “Okay, that’s it. Showers, everybody,” the score was Reds—thirty, Blues—twenty-eight. Puffing but exhilarated, Tom fell into step beside Robert.

  “Man, you and those damn hook shots,” Tom said, panting. “I had you going, though, didn’t I?” In an unconscious gesture of “us against the lesser players,” he dropped his arm across Robert’s shoulders and landed a soft punch to the bicep.

  As they separated to push through the shower room door, Mr. Harmon said sharply, “Naylor!”

  Tom turned, puzzled, and climbed onto the stage where Mr. Harmon stood with a basketball under each arm.

  “Sir?” Tom said. It was a habit left over from the Wheaton school.

  “Knock off the ‘Sir’ stuff, and watch your hands.” As he spoke, Mr. Harmon’s glance slid away from Tom’s face. He seemed angry, but also embarrassed.

  Tom felt himself go red, but he didn’t know why. “What do you mean, ‘watch my hands’? What did I do? I don’t know what you mean.”

  Mr. Harmon’s embarrassment grew until it overshadowed his anger, and Tom had a sudden feeling that the man was wishing he hadn’t said anything.

  Tom said, “Look, Mr. Harmon, is there something about me you don’t like, or am I doing something you don’t like? Pardon me for saying this, but all year I’ve had the feeling that, well, I don’t know, that I irritate you.”

  Mr. Harmon turned away to look for his attendance book. “You just keep your hands off the other boys, and we’ll get along fine.”

  He walked away, leaving Tom feeling hurt and frustrated. “I didn’t hit him hard enough to hurt him,” he said in a puzzled tone. But Mr. Harmon was storing the basketballs in the equipment closet and couldn’t hear.

  “I wish I knew what the hell is going on. Something is—I’m sure of that now.” Tom was sitting half in and half out of the sleeping bag on Ward’s couch. The schoolhouse was dark except for the flame of the oil burner in the center of the room; it was a moving light and made moving shadows of the young men’s faces. Ward was in his cross-legged hunch at the foot of the sleeping bag, holding a nearly empty coffee cup in both hands and staring down into it. His face, even in the dim light, was stretched with sadness.

  They had spent the evening nailing to the floor multicolored squares of carpet samples Ward had bought in Dubuque for almost nothing from various carpet dealers. Now the room had a warm crazy-quilt look.

  Every now and then Ward lowered one foot to rub the carpet. “I think I’ll get some more of these squares and run them up the walls about three feet all the way around. What would you say to that?”

  Tom was a little surprised. It wasn’t like Ward to change the subject when the subject had been Tom, especially if something was bothering Tom. In fact, Ward was the only friend he had ever had who was, or at least seemed to be, as interested in Tom’s life as he was in his own. So now this small sign of disinterest hurt more than it should have.

  Tom said, “If I were a psychiatrist, I’d say you were constructing a womb.”

  “Maybe I am.” There was no flippancy in his voice, only the puzzling sadness Tom felt every now and then in Ward. “Tom, this thing at school. Whether you believe it or not, I know exactly what you’re going through. If there were some magic words I could say that would help, I would. All I can say is—you’ve got at least one good friend if worst comes to worst.”

  The air was close and quiet between them. Tom wanted to touch Ward’s arm, to make some kind of connection between them that would say “I know.” But Mr. Harmon’s voice stilled the impulse: “Keep your hands off the other boys.” A sourness pulsed up from his stomach at the remembered words. He moved one foot inside the sleeping bag and gave Ward a light kick.

  “One good buddy is all anybody needs,” he said. “So, old buddy, will you be my date tomorrow night for the regionals?”

  Ward glanced at him so oddly that he hurried on. “I’ll have to admit, you were my second choice. I asked this girl, Karen—I think I’ve told you about her. She’ll be playing tomorrow night, too, and I’d sort of thought she might ride up with me and go out afterwards.”

  “She turn you down?”

  Tom began picking at the metal teeth of the sleeping bag zipper. “That was another funny thing. Not just that she turned me down. I know I’m not that great a catch. But, I don’t know, her voice sounded so funny when she said it. She just said ‘Well, no’ in that exact tone, just like ‘Of course I wouldn’t. Whatever made you ask such a thing.’ Then right away she got kind of embarrassed, like she hadn’t meant it to sound that way, but I think she really did. The funny thing is, she doesn’t date anyone else steady, and I know darn well she was interested in me last year when I didn’t have the guts to do anything about it. Why do you think she’d act that way now? You’ve been around more than me.”

  Ward gave a short hard laugh. “Not around girls.”

  “Oh, sure you have. Do you think she won’t go out with me because of this other—whatever it is —that seems to be going around school? This ‘Tom is an untouchable’ thing?”

  “How should I know? Why don’t you ask some other girl?”

  Tom wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard a note of hurt in Ward’s voice. But that didn’t make sense. Still, he felt a need to smooth things over. “Because I’d rather have you go along. Will you, or are you going to poke around out here in your hermit’s den while I’m facing my big challenge? Mom’s going to drive up with Dr. Werle, so I don’t want to go with them and mess up her date. Come on, go with me.’’

  For the first time all evening Ward smiled. “Okay. I’d like to.”

  Tom sighed and slid down into the sleeping bag for a few minutes, then folded himself up out of it. “Gotta go take a walk. All that coffee.”

  As he crossed toward the door, he saw a fat manilla envelope on the card table by the typewriter.

  “What’s this?” He looked at the envelope and its addresses, and suddenly he knew what it was. “Oh, no, Ward.” He turned and looked across the room at Ward’s hunched figure.

  “Yep,” Ward said.

  “May I look at it?”

  “Sure. They didn’t say anything.”

  Tom pulled out the manuscript and the miniature form letter attached to it. It was a printed form, with the title typed in: “Dear Author: Thank you for submitting your manuscript, Spaces Between. We are sorry to say that at the present time we cannot use a book of this type. However, we will be glad to consider any manuscripts you would care to submit in the future.”

  “Damn,” Tom said softly. He went back to the couch and sat beside Ward, giving his arm a quick hard squeeze of sympathy. “That’s why you’ve been so touchy all night. Why didn’t you say something about it instead of letting me blab
on and on about my problems?”

  Ward shrugged. “I was going to tell you. I just hated to give you my thundercloud, I guess.”

  “Don’t be dumb. I give you all mine, and I want to be in on yours. I feel like I’ve got a part interest in Spaces, you know.”

  For an instant Ward’s hand closed over Tom’s knee; then they separated, embarrassed at the emotion that charged between them. Briskly Tom stood up and went to the outhouse.

  When he came back, he said, “Do you know where you’re going to send Spaces next?”

  “Sure. I’ve got a long list of likely publishers, and I’ll keep sending it out till I hit with one of them.” Ward was up pouring more coffee. His voice was back to normal.

  “Let’s get our minds off ourselves for a while,” he said, handing Tom a cup. When they were both settled into their beds, he went on. “Tell me. What do you think about reincarnation?”

  Happiness crept through Tom. These were the times he treasured. He sensed which side of the debate Ward would take, and chose the opposite.

  “I don’t believe in it. I think, once you’re dead, you’re dead. For one thing, if all the spirits of all the people who ever lived were around, somewhere, there couldn’t possibly be room for them.”

  “No, no, no,” Ward said. “You’re letting your thinking be bound by the physical. A human spirit is a nonphysical thing and therefore can’t take up any room. Now it seems to me we already have a lot of convincing proof that reincarnation does exist.”

  “You mean like Bishop Pike’s son?”

  “Him, Joanne Maclver, hundreds of carefully documented cases in which the most logical explanation is life after death.”

  Tom glowed with the stimulation of the battle. “But the people who believe in that stuff are usually so weird, I just can’t make myself take it seriously.”