by David Crow
Unbeknownst to Silas, German soldiers had killed Sarah’s husband on the Western Front. She’d been left with two children and poor prospects for remarriage since most of the men were at war and like her husband would never come home.
When returning an overdue book, Silas finally mustered the courage to ask Sarah on a date. Sarah turned out to be eager for male companionship to fill the hole in her heart and bosom, and to provide a father for her sad, Saddly children. She leapt at the chance for new love.
Silas filled Sarah with endless rounds from his throbbing pistol. Due to his love for her, he joined the war effort and became a hero on Sword Beach at D-Day. After the war, they married, he adopted her children, and she knocked out thirteen more kids, making Mrs. Sarah Marner the happiest and best-serviced woman in all of England. Silas was elected mayor of London and helped rebuild the war-torn city. He was a hero and friend to all, including Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
My essay wasn’t returned. Instead Mrs. Ralph handed me a note that read, “Tomorrow afternoon at 4:30, you and your father will meet with the county school psychologists and me in Rockville for a conference.”
When I got home, Dad and Mona were waiting for me in the kitchen.
“I got a disturbing call from your school principal,” Mona said.
“What the hell did you do to warrant a meeting with your teacher and a handful of psychologists?” Dad said. “How did your mouth overload your ass this time? And why the hell does it involve me?”
Mona folded her arms. “You’re pure trouble, David. You don’t even try to learn or get along. The principal said you wrote an obscene essay that had nothing to do with your assignment.”
“Let me buy a bus ticket for Gallup,” I said. “I’ll run to Fort Defiance and live with the Kontzes. That’ll be best for everyone. Even Sam and Sally agree.”
This request, like my previous ones, was met with stony stares and silence.
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, Dad and I drove to the Montgomery County Office of Education in Rockville. He mumbled the entire way. I heard “Harvard assholes” three times. As we rolled into the parking lot, he said, “How’d you let this happen?”
“I wanted to have some fun and get even with Mrs. Ralph. Everyone hates me. All the teachers say I need a lot of help with my dyslexia and extensive tutoring to catch up, and they’re threatening to fail me for missing so much school.”
Dad walked ahead, ignoring me. When we entered the building, a woman at the counter directed us to a conference room where three stern men in suits sat at a big table with Mrs. Ralph. The psychologists stood and introduced themselves, shaking Dad’s hand. Mrs. Ralph slowly got to her feet, glancing around the room and then at me.
After everyone was seated, she said, “Mr. Crow, David has missed an unacceptable amount of class. Apparently, you spend a lot of time with a sick grandfather or on an Indian reservation. When he does appear, his lack of understanding regarding assignments is startling.”
Dad crossed his legs and scowled. She’d embarrassed him.
“We think something might be wrong with your son. His analysis of Silas Marner has nothing to do with the book. He made up his own story, inventing several absurd, disturbing sexual references.” She handed him the essay.
Dad scanned the page. His lips chattered as he tugged at his tie.
Mrs. Ralph directed her attention to me. “Where’d you come up with the material? Certainly not in the book I assigned.”
Unbelievable. She thought I’d misinterpreted Silas Marner. How stupid could she be? “The sex stuff came from cowboy joke books and from Glamour magazines the girls left on the bus. The war stuff came from books on World War II.”
My teacher sat up in her chair. “In other words, you had time to read cowboy joke books and magazines and make up a fantastic story, but you didn’t have time to read a book assigned for class.”
Dad stood, adjusted his pants, and thrust out his chest. “This little bastard has been putting you on,” he said, his voice thundering in the small room. “He knows you don’t like him, and he doesn’t like you either. He tied up half the PhDs in the whole damn county just to show you he can. He’s done this sort of crap all his life, and I haven’t been able to beat it out of him.”
The lead psychologist adjusted his wire-rim glasses and cleared his throat. “Mr. Crow, please understand that we’re concerned about your son. We’re here to help him. We don’t believe in corporal punishment. David is showing signs of alienating behavior and needs counseling. We would advise you to choose a therapist and attend a series of sessions together. He also needs substantial tutoring and perhaps should repeat a grade.”
I stared at my lap. My life was over. Dad would finally be angry enough to kill me, like the other assholes he’d told me about, the ones he assumed society was better off without.
I glanced up at him, expecting the worst, and did a double take. His face had gone from pinched fury to amusement. Mostly from relief, I burst out laughing. He started laughing too.
“Alienating behavior,” Dad mocked. “Who wouldn’t be alienated by the likes of you? David wanted to make you look stupid, and he succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. No one else could have assembled this team of idiots. This goddamn meeting is over.”
Dad waved at me to get up. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” He smiled and slapped me on the back.
The psychologists had been right about me, but Dad felt disaffected in this world too, especially when confronted by highly educated people. Their diagnosis made us kindred alienated spirits. We walked out of the conference room as Mrs. Ralph and the psychologists stared at us with their mouths open.
“Jesus H. Christ. What you wrote was really funny,” Dad told me in the parking lot. “How do you come up with these things?”
He started up the Rambler. “Mrs. Ralph is a bigger battle-ax than Miss Brezina. Now I know why you wanted to get even. And those psychologists are like the stupid ones we had in San Quentin. Who cares what they say? The more educated they are, the easier they are to fool.”
As we drove back, we mocked and mimicked Mrs. Ralph and the psychologists, laughing harder with each new rendition of the meeting. Then Dad went quiet for several minutes.
A couple of blocks from home, he touched my arm. I couldn’t believe how gentle he was. “It’s time for you to figure out how to get along in the East.”
CHAPTER 39
AT THE END OF THE SUMMER, close to the start of my sophomore year, I was throwing the football with John, James’s brother, in a grassy area along Kensington Parkway. We took turns playing quarterback and receiver to get ready for tryouts. Just before John had to go home, he threw the ball to me, pretending it was the last two minutes of a game.
“Run deep and I’ll hit you,” he yelled as I raced off. “It’ll be high and hard.”
Looking up and sprinting at full speed, I tripped over an exposed tree root as the ball sailed past and shattered a bees’ nest the size of a pumpkin. Sprawled on my belly, my glasses thrown, I felt a large chunk of the nest twisted in my shirt. Seconds later, my whole torso burned with stings that sent me to my feet screaming. My ears buzzed more intensely than after Mr. Yazza blasted me with rock salt.
I ran as fast as I could, but an angry swarm of bees kept up with me, stinging my neck, throat, and face. Hundreds of them. Gulping for air, I swallowed a couple, and my throat seared on the inside, an indescribable, frightening flame. I staggered back to our house and collapsed on my bed. By then, my eyes had swelled shut, and I fought to breathe. Sam and Sally ran into my room after me.
“There are bees flying everywhere in front of the house!” Sally shrieked. “Some are still on you!”
“You look like a jack-o’-lantern,” Sam said. “You got stingers all over your head.”
“Let’s call Mona.” Sally headed for the door. “He could die. Look at him. He isn’t breathing right.”
Sam came back a few minutes later. “Mona said to never call
her at the hospital again. She’ll be home in a few hours. She said to put some ice on the stings and turn off the lights.”
The stings settled into throbbing pain, different from the buckle end of a belt or a shotgun blast or the gaseous blast from the oven. A sort of numbness came with the intense ache, deadening every cell in my body, and I gasped for breath as if I’d run uphill for miles.
I lay there for what seemed like days. It was dusk by the time I heard Mona’s quick steps as she entered my room. Sitting on the bed, she held my hand. It was the first time she had ever touched me.
“Are you having trouble breathing?” she asked, making it sound as if breathing were akin to taking a bath.
“For a while I couldn’t breathe right, but it’s better now.”
“Good.” She got up from the bed. “If the stings were going to kill you, you’d already be dead. I’ll be back shortly. Let me change clothes first.”
When Mona came back, she helped me arch my back to lift my torso from the mattress and then pulled off my T-shirt. Dozens of stingers fell onto the sheet, and I heard popping noises like someone was stomping on Bubble Wrap.
“I’ll poke your stings to drain them and clean them with alcohol. It might hurt a little, but it’s necessary.” She gently stuck me with her needle, over and over, which didn’t hurt nearly as much as the scorching alcohol. “My, look at all the stingers that came out of you. You’re very fortunate. Now get some rest.”
The next morning, I heard her rapid footsteps enter my room. “Here’s some toast and warm milk,” she said in her normal monotone. “Stay put and I’ll bring you soup tonight.”
Other than eating twice a day, I didn’t move. Sam and Sally came to visit, but I barely heard them. On the fourth day, I could see and hear again and had the strength to get out of bed.
When I walked into the kitchen, Mona looked at me with her thin, tight smile. “You have bad eyesight, you can’t hear well, you’re scrawny, you’re dyslexic and not terribly bright, but you’re one tough little fellow. You’ll be okay.” Those were the kindest words she ever spoke to me.
I ENROLLED AT WALTER JOHNSON HIGH, named for baseball’s greatest right-handed pitcher, the “Big Train.” The school was a larger, fancier version of the junior high. But just before classes started, Mona’s dad suffered another heart attack, this one worse than before, and we had yet another family meeting in the living room. Mona said all of us would be leaving for Hatteras in two days.
“Not much happens the first month of school anyway,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” I said, my voice rising. “I’ll probably flunk out even if I try hard from day one. Being a month late will make it impossible. And I just started football tryouts. I can make the team, but not if we’re gone. It’s not fair.”
“You’re too skinny to make the team, and even if you do, you’ll sit on the bench, so it doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t matter to you, but it matters to me. It’s my chance to be one of the guys. You can’t yank us out of school for a month or more again.”
Mona ignored me, and Dad said it was up to her to decide what was best for us.
I stared at both of them, hot anger shooting through me. I wanted to run as fast as I could out the door, get a bus ticket, and go back to Fort Defiance. The Kontz family or Henry would have taken me in. But Dad would have hunted me down and beaten me. There was no escape from him.
WHEN WE RETURNED TO KENSINGTON, I walked into Walter Johnson clueless about what the students had been doing for the past month, though I was getting used to that. The halls were filled with happy, well-dressed kids moving with purpose, like the ones in junior high, but there were a whole lot more of them. Oh, how I wished to be liked by them, to understand school and life the way they did.
The secretary in the main office told me to report to the guidance counselor.
“We don’t have a complete transcript for you from last year,” the counselor said, looking at my file. “Where’s the rest of it?”
“We spent part of the year in Fort Defiance, but you should have all my grades from there.” That was a lie. I never told Window Rock High School where to send my records. “Maybe they didn’t get entered properly.”
She flipped through my file again. “We don’t have anything from Fort Defiance. You can’t go to school here with an incomplete transcript.”
“We traveled so often, neither school could keep up with me. But I’m a sophomore. Honest. I finished ninth grade at Kensington Junior High.”
“School started almost five weeks ago. Where have you been?”
“We had to go to North Carolina. My stepmother’s father had a heart attack about the time school started, and my parents made me go with them to help. We were there for a month last winter when he had his first heart attack. They don’t seem to think it’s important for me to be in school. I have a note from my stepmother if that will help.”
She didn’t reach for the note. It wasn’t clear whether she accepted my explanation or simply didn’t know what to do with me, but she ended up sending me to class with a full schedule.
It was no surprise that I couldn’t do the work. And my ongoing struggles with dyslexia and ever-worsening eyesight made things even harder. D minuses filled every grading slot. None of the teachers wanted to fail me.
I did become better at not drawing attention to myself, the opposite of what I’d wanted to do in Gallup and Fort Defiance. But as I learned from Mrs. Ralph and the other teachers and students in Kensington, no one thought I was funny or endearing.
I shuffled from class to class without doing anything while my fellow students matured and worked hard to get good grades. The only kids doing as poorly were the heavy drug users. No one cared about them either. The parents and schools seemed lax to the point of letting the kids raise themselves. Students had access to smoking rooms and could get passes to drive away from school during the day—almost any excuse worked. Many of my peers freely used marijuana. I slid by unnoticed.
CHAPTER 40
ON A SATURDAY MORNING IN October, Sam and I went with Dad to run errands. On our way home, we stopped off at the post office, and Dad hurried in and came out with two brown packages that he tossed into the trunk. Messages and supplies from his new compadres.
It hadn’t taken him long to resume his stealing operations. When Sam wasn’t in the car, Dad would let things slip about the criminal connections he’d found in West Virginia. He didn’t ask me to be his lookout, but I knew about the PO boxes and could easily guess what he was doing when he disappeared for stretches at a time.
As he pulled our new Ford Country Squire station wagon into the driveway, we saw Sally crying in the front yard. She had a bruise under her eye and a fat lower lip. The card table she used to sell lemonade was upside down, and paper cups littered the grass. “What the hell happened here?” Dad asked.
“A boy from across the street rode his bike by our house and smashed my lemonade stand,” she said, sobbing. “Then he threw my bike in the creek and hit me when I tried to stop him.”
Sam fished out her bike while I righted the card table, gathered the cups, and picked up the empty plastic pitcher. Dad put some ice in a washcloth for her swollen lip. I wondered how this boy could hit a defenseless girl. Sam and I had done a lot of bad things, but we would never have done something like that.
Dad, Sam, and I walked over to the neighbor’s house. A fat man wearing a coat and tie answered the door. His clothes seemed too formal for a weekend. “I’m John Sturdivant,” he said. “Who might you be?”
“I might be Thurston Crow, the neighbor across the street who wants to know what you’re going to do about your dumbass son. He smashed my daughter’s lemonade stand, hit her, and threw her bicycle into the creek.”
“I think you’re mistaken, sir,” the man said. “Please stay here a moment while I query my son.”
Who the hell says “query”? I’d never heard the word before but understood t
hat the pretentious fool planned to ask his son for his version of what happened. While we waited, Dad kept saying “query” over and over again, his face creasing deeper with each pronouncement.
When the man finally returned, he said, “I’m sorry for your trouble, sir, but you are mistaken. My son says he rode by your house this morning and might have knocked over a cup of lemonade. I regret that, but boys will be boys, as you know. He didn’t smash your daughter’s lemonade stand or throw her bike into the creek, and he certainly didn’t strike her. He would never do such a thing. Good day.” He closed the door in our faces.
Dad marched back toward the house, and Sam and I trotted to keep up with him. The Y vein on his forehead throbbed. His eyes bulged. His chest poked out like he was trying to stretch his shirt to the breaking point. His lips chattered like a machine gun. For once, he was angry at someone besides us.
Twitching his arms, he stopped and looked at us. “David and Sam, I think you boys know what to do.”
Hell yes, we knew what to do. We’d trained for this moment all our lives. Query Man deserved the full Crow treatment. It was the first time Sam and I had plotted together since our days in Gallup. Soon we were laughing and coming up with all kinds of ideas for ruining Query Man’s life. Too bad we didn’t have any of Mr. Pino’s cherry bombs.
Dad went to his bedroom while Sam and I divided our duties. Riffling through the Yellow Pages, I looked for products and services that could be delivered on short notice. Sam read off the phone numbers of every florist within a ten-mile range.
“We’re having a surprise birthday celebration today,” I told each one. “Please send a rush order of flowers with balloons.” They promised delivery by midafternoon, and none asked for payment in advance.