by Sean Boling
Chapter Twenty One: Dale
People talked about him at the board meeting as though he wasn’t there, but they would still look at him. They would take their turn in the public comments line, which was longer than it had been for any previous meeting by far, and read their passage they had written or try to remember what they wanted to say about why Dale Copeland should retain his position, or why Dale Copeland should be released from it, and regardless of their stance, they would look at him after they were done. If they were supporting him, they would wink or nod in his direction. If they were in support of ousting him, they would glance over with an apologetic smirk or practically subliminal frown.
The board members did much the same. During their public exchanges, they referred to Dale in the third person, none of them addressing him directly except with their eyes when someone else was talking.
Before the meeting was adjourned, Dale was finally spoken to in the second person by the interim member who had taken over for Rod, a placid bookkeeper who was most likely chosen under the assumption he wouldn’t do anything other than keep the seat warm until the next election.
“Is there anything you would like the board to know, Mr. Copeland, before we begin our private deliberations?”
Dale shook his head, and as soon as people started to stand up, he hurried to the door in the back of the room.
To his relief, he heard no voices flagging him down as he trotted to his truck. He wondered why he had bothered coming in the first place. As he suspected, his heart and lungs had seemed to migrate entirely into his neck and head, leaving the rest of his body numb, and his ability to hear or remember anything overwhelmed by the throbbing that pounded him above the shoulders. He recalled the term “good man” being used frequently, often as a qualifier.
“He’s a good man, but…”
“Good man, but…”
“But…”
When Wendy told him the board president was on the line the following morning, he was pelted with the same onslaught of feelings and lack thereof.
He asked her to take a message.
She jotted down enough notes to compose a memo, while saying “okay” and “mmm-hmm” a dozen times each. He felt guilty for putting her through that, and walked out to her desk so he could apologize the moment she hung up.
“That’s okay,” she stayed seated and reviewed her work, perhaps as an excuse not to look at him.
He watched as she tapped her pen under every other word in every line and worked her way down. He was about to try and read what she wrote, but thought that would be rude.
“So what’s the verdict?” he asked.
She took a deep breath and started with news about the school.
“They’re whittling down to Kindergarten through fifth grade. The contract with the district emphasizes fill rates rather than raw numbers, and most of the defections this year came from sixth through eighth. We can blame the losses on kids wanting the full middle school experience.”
“The full middle school experience?”
“I know it sounds horrible at our age,” Wendy clarified. “But they haven’t gone through it yet. They’re curious. Sports, cheerleading, a different teacher for each subject. That sort of thing.”
Dale wasn’t wholly convinced.
“If that’s how they want to spin it,” he shrugged.
The other news loomed. Neither was sure how to get there. Dale decided to make the move, since Wendy was kind enough to take the message.
“And who’s going to take over?” he asked, assuming that if the news was good, it wouldn’t have been difficult for her to deliver.
“They’ve offered you another job,” she said.
“Really?”
“Special Education Coordinator.”
“They invented a job for me.”
“They had to create it at some point. They said the pay would be comparable to the same position in the district.”
“I would hope so,” he exhaled a quick laugh. “It’s not a hard offer to match. Am I supposed to stay on as principal for the rest of the year?”
“They’d like you to resign, effective on the last day of school. If you’d rather take a leave of absence until then, they’ve got Ken Bedrosian ready to jump in. Otherwise he’ll officially start as the interim principal on the first day of summer while they search for a permanent hire.”
“So much for Ken being vehemently opposed to the charter.”
“I guess he hasn’t developed any hobbies in his retirement.”
They smiled at one another, decades of shared experience passing between them. Then Wendy seemed to remember something that made her uncomfortable, and appeared to search for an invisible wall to hide behind.
“Is there something else?” Dale asked.
“Well…no”
Dale pulled one of the chairs away from the wall and sat down beside her desk.
“I’ll take the job,” he said. “Or use it as leverage to get my old job back with the district.”
“It’s not that.”
He knew it wasn’t. He let her work her way up to what she wanted to say.
“They would ‘like’ you to resign,” she said. “That’s a direct quote.”
Now he remembered.
“How could I forget?” he leaned back in the chair.
“You’re not into that sort of thing,” she smiled.
Which was still true for the most part, as his excitement at possibly forcing the board’s hand had already turned to dread at the thought of actually pursuing the matter. But he had spent a lot of the previous year trying to reinvent himself, and promoting that new version to convince others, if not himself, that he was well-versed in the art of the deal. He wondered if he had come so far as to take hostages, or if recent events were enough to demonstrate how unfit for business he was.
“They’re depending on you to go quietly,” Wendy said, picking up on his apprehension. “You’re good at this job. And you have a three-year contract.”
“I’m surprised Rod didn’t remind me of my contract situation when everything started to fall apart. We talked a lot at that last conference.”
Wendy snorted, then explained herself.
“You’re surprised Rod didn’t remember something about someone other than himself?”
Dale felt as though he had lost the right to comment on anyone’s ambition.
“I thought you were mad at me,” he said.
“I was,” she shot back. “But not enough to think you deserve this.”
Dale appreciated both her candor and her respect. But none of his feelings at the moment could escape the pull of what beckoned.
“Would a buyout leave them with enough to hire a replacement?” he deliberated aloud.
“They could limp along with Ken for a while,” Wendy speculated with him. “Or string along a couple other placeholders until they got out from under it.”
Dale couldn’t bear to sit any longer. He stood and paced in no particular pattern, moderating a debate between the positions in his head.
Wendy stood up and steadied him.
“Go home and talk to Alma and Jonathan,” she said. “I’ll handle things here today.”
“Thank you.”
As soon as his words stopped vibrating, he felt incapable of doing or saying anything else. He stood there trying to muster the energy to leave. Wendy hugged him, which filled him up enough to make it out the door and down the stairs to the parking lot.
Once behind the wheel, he put his hands behind his head and arched into a ball as though waiting for a bomb to drop, and fueled up on a minute of his own heavy breathing to start the drive.
Alma said very little when Dale led her through the circumstances.
She gave the impression of nodding when he explained the board’s decision, and she may have actually nodded when he told her what they had requested of him. A look of surprise mildly made its way across her face as Dale told her about his contract situation
. He remembered that the idea behind a longer contract for the principal was to provide some stability amongst the one-year contracts for everyone else, and to insure they had some administrative consistency to get the school up and running.
“And since I was so busy doing all those things to fulfill the contract,” he addressed the reason why he had never mentioned it to her before, “I never thought much about the contract itself.”
Which led him to the possibility of a buyout, which inspired her to make a noise. It was a quick hum, followed by more silence.
“We could buy the house for Jonathan,” he tried to coax her into saying something. “And have enough left over to start some sort of nest egg he could eventually live off.”
She finally consented.
“People may think you deliberately tanked in order to force the issue,” she offered.
“I’m getting used to people thinking things about me.”
She fell back into silence.
Dale joined her, willing to wait as long as it took for Alma to provide some more guidance.
When she spoke at last, it was to suggest that he talk to Jonathan about what loomed, since the decision revolved so tightly around him. Then she changed the subject.
Dale though it best to take his son to a place where Jonathan thrived, where he was at peace.
They didn’t need to make reservations at a campsite. They knew of a few spots in the woods off some side roads, a few thousand feet above the valley, from their years of searching for sites that allowed them to truly get away from the world of manufactured stimuli. He went with the safest site, the one sitting on a plot of land that belonged to a friend of a friend. It was not as beautiful as the others, but they would run no risk of being discovered.
Jonathan never seemed to prefer any particular site, anyway. It was Dale who cared, or Alma, or their daughter when she was younger and still camped with them. They were the ones who ranked the settings, who differentiated between those trees and these trees, this creek and that creek. All Jonathan needed was nature. He said so once through the instrument Alma had invented. He said the natural world took him back in time to a place when nobody talked much, and nothing made noise other than wind and water.
Jonathan bolted from the truck the moment they came to a stop in the clearing by a small stream that trickled its way through the drought. He stood by the narrow shore with his fists clenched in front of him, as though sinking a winning putt or free throw, and not wanting the celebration to end.
Dale kept an eye on him as he pitched the tent and dug the fire pit a little deeper out of respect for the dry surroundings. The pines were still green, though, and moss still clung to the boulders, offering a mirage against the scarce backdrop.
When his work was done, he sat on a toppled section of trunk and watched his son for a while. Jonathan’s fists were still drawn forward, but raised a bit higher, and he rotated slightly back and forth while looking up, nothing between him and the God he was either thanking or cursing.
Dale entertained an absurd thought that maybe the best thing for him would be to build a shack here, or someplace like it, and deliver supplies every few days and check in on him. The life expectancy would be short, he mused, but the quality would be high from Jonathan’s point of view. It was one of those ideas that quickly starts to fray upon thinking through the logistics. Dale brushed it away, and plotted a delicate method of saddling his son’s revelry with a rundown of what was happening back in their tiny slice of civilization, and the decision those circumstances were merging toward.
Dale got the interruption started by asking his son to help gather some firewood. Jonathan unclenched his fists and spread his palms downward, sweeping them slowly around as he walked the perimeter where the forest stood, as though his hands were a metal detector or a pair of divining rods designed to help him find wood instead of loose change or water. He would bring a single piece every time he found one, rather than stack them in his arms. Dale appreciated this system, as it allowed him to keep track of Jonathan without hovering. Even when he started to venture into the pines on his search for the next piece, Jonathan was never in the woods’ grasp for more than a matter of seconds before reappearing with a rotten chunk or skinny branch with the needles still attached.
When the sun set and fire reached its peak, Dale further paved the night with speech by commenting on how good the hot dogs were, and the beans, and then the hot chocolate, which he hoped wasn’t too hot, until he had gathered the strength to lower the shield from in front of his son.
“Thanks for coming up here with me, Jonathan,” he started lowering it with some small talk. “It’s been too long.”
Some doubts quivered and kept him from proceeding. He wondered if he was really doing his son a favor by treating him like an adult. He wondered what was so great about that. A lot of people seemed determined to avoid it. But Jonathan was an adult who never had the chance to decide if he liked being one or not, and maybe he would welcome the burden rather than feeling like he was a burden. If Dale couldn’t give him a house, he could at least give him that chance.
“I’ve been so wrapped up in work,” he looked into the fire as he continued, “in getting things going for the school, for us, for myself. Mostly for myself, I suspect. I have a very strong suspicion. Even bringing you up here is kind of selfish. I want your opinion on something, even though I already know what I should do. I want you to make me feel good about that decision, or give me an excuse to do what’s tempting, so I can say that I’m doing it for my family.”
He turned away from the fire and looked over at Jonathan, whose attention remained on the flames that kept the tics and idiosyncrasies at bay.
“So, no pressure,” Dale watched Jonathan watch the fire. “You’ll give me what I need either way. I’ll appreciate whatever you have to say. See? Now I even feel better about bringing you up here. I’m getting so good at spinning any situation in my favor. So good. ‘Good,’ ‘good,’ ‘good.’ They constantly said that about me at the board meeting, the one where they ended up canning me. Proof that if you say anything often enough, it loses meaning. ‘Good man,’ ‘good man,’ ‘good man’…”
The fire snapped out a burning ember and Jonathan laughed. Dale smiled and nearly laughed with him.
“I notice you do that a lot. Say something over and over and over. That must be why. You can beat the meaning out of it, beat it into submission. One less word flying at you. One less expression to make sense of. I totally understand. I get it.”
Jonathan settled back into a staring contest with their source of heat. One of the logs popped again, and he repeated the expression “A poppin’ good time” for about a minute straight. Dale couldn’t place where the words may have come from. “A poppin’ good time.” Perhaps it was a line from a series or a movie, or the hook to a commercial that he had since forgotten, or didn’t notice to begin with, as it meanwhile captivated his son. Maybe Jonathan had strung the words together on his own. The “good” made sense, but Dale tried to think of a time during another camping trip when he said something about the fire popping. He couldn’t make the connection, and was left with another unsolved mystery inside Jonathan’s mind.
Dale let it drift away and join the other forgotten puzzles. He rubbed his back against the log behind him and waited until it was clear that Jonathan was done talking before he continued to explain the situation.
“Anyway, back to the part about being canned. That’s not entirely true. And that’s where you come in. I know I didn’t bring the instrument. That’s on purpose. All you need to do is listen. I’ll follow up when we get home. I don’t know how to use it as well as Mom, anyway. And you know how I feel about the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ cards. I just want to plant what’s happened lately into that fascinating head of yours, let you in on what’s going down amongst those of us who can supposedly communicate with each other.”
Dale was drawn back to the flame as well. The night air started to put
on some chilly weight, and it felt good to face the warmth in full.
“The charter wants to fire me, but I have a contract. So there’s a chance I can force them to pay me for the remainder of that contract, more or less, to get rid of me. Or I can accept a different job they’ve offered me, at less pay, and have the awkward privilege of continuing to work with those who asked me to leave.”
He looked over at Jonathan, who appeared quite serious, no longer reveling in the peaceful accompaniment that nature offered. Probably because his Dad was interrupting it, Dale thought. Though he had faith that maybe the lack of civilized noise allowed Jonathan to really concentrate on what he was saying.
“I could just leave altogether, I suppose. Bail and look for a new spot, maybe get my old job back, who knows? But your opinion on the buyout is really all I’m asking of you. The other jobs, and wherever they’re located, that’s just rearranging the furniture. I want your thoughts on the buyout. I know this may be a lot to ask, but you’re an adult, and it affects you. And I know it seems like an easy decision on the surface, at least I hope we’ve raised you well enough for the right way to seem obvious, but bear in mind what we could do with that money. Any one of those houses we toured could be yours. We could start a trust that would pay your living expenses when we’re gone. We could accomplish everything I intended to build over the span of many years with one swing. One slimy, drawn-out swing.”
The volume of the world seemed to lower from where Dale sat. The thickening air muffled the sounds of the forest, and the fire barely hissed. Jonathan looked beautiful in the orange glow of the firelight. A still photograph of him at that moment, at that angle, would cause women who saw it and didn’t know him to ask if he was single, and men to tell themselves that women want more than looks in a man.
“I’m sorry,” Dale said. “I’ve let you down. I shouldn’t have done this.”
Dale wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the past year or just that night.
“There was so much happening, so many things that seemed okay, because they were getting me where I needed to be, to do all the wonderful things I was going to do.”
The hush that had fallen over their campsite persisted, and Dale felt as though his voice had become too loud for it. He stopped to gauge where he needed to be, and could hear the stream fighting its way to a larger body of water so many miles away.
“I’ve heard so many people say the same thing,” he matched his voice to that of the stream. “They say having a special needs child made them a better person. And I thought I was the same. I was so proud of myself. I was getting so much out of having you as a son that I started to feel guilty. I wasn’t sure I could make it up to you.”
He stopped and listened to the water again, which now seemed to be running straight through him.
“Now I know I can’t. And I’m not the person I thought I was.”
The fire snapped once softly, then unleashed a loud, crackling stream.
They both flinched and smiled.
Dale went with the flow and lightened his tone.
“It was all a crackin’ good time, until it wasn’t.”
“Poppin’ good time,” Jonathan corrected him, then continued to correct him while Dale chuckled.
They each quieted down and Dale wanted to talk with him some more, but he already knew what needed to be done.
So he told Jonathan about those things that had seemed okay, the events that inspired him to overreach, and the people involved. He speculated on what may have motivated them, what circumstances they faced and what they hoped to achieve, for Dale could only speak for himself, but he wanted to stay up late with Jonathan and tell stories, and he wanted the stories to mean something. He was convinced there were lessons to be learned from the lives of Rod and Artie, of Candice and Mia, of everyone involved, at least during the brief time he knew them, and the small window through which he was able to observe them.
Dale kept clutching to the belief that Jonathan’s sober expression indicated he was listening intently to his ideas on how everyone ended up in their respective corners. But then a blue jay would bounce onto the nearby branches and screech at them, or the fire would spew another ember, and Jonathan would react with such glee that Dale wondered if Jonathan welcomed the distraction and was telling his Dad in his own way to shut up. Or perhaps, he hoped, the goose to Jonathan’s senses further amplified his appreciation of their conversation, or what Dale liked to think of as a conversation.
He clung to the latter explanation and proceeded. He imagined out loud what the future might hold for the players, what the fallout might be for Candice and Rod, how Mia and Artie might adjust to their new schools, and how the other people in their lives may be affected.
He projected as far as he could, then started to tire. Jonathan was still alert, however, which Dale found encouraging.
“You may be wide awake, son, but I’m about to nod off,” he announced as an overture to prepare their tent for bed. “Forgive an old man for not being able to keep up with you young folk.”
He crawled into the tent and made sure that Jonathan’s sleeping bag was spread out with a pillow on top for when his son was done watching the fire, then slid into his own and watched his son’s silhouette projected onto the tent wall surrounded by the swirling lights of the flame.
And when Dale awoke hours later to find the light and shadows no longer dancing together, and the air much colder without the fire to stave it off, he also felt Jonathan closer to him than normal, curled up inside the cocoon of his own sleeping bag, lying in the fetal position, his head and knees burrowed into the side of Dale’s sleeping bag.
For warmth, most likely.
For all the different kinds of warmth, Dale hoped.