THEY CALLED ME DOWN to the principal’s office in the middle of fourth period on Monday.
They had the principal in there, of course — Mr. Straub. And Officer O. O. Odom, in his brown uniform, standing next to Mr. Straub’s desk. And Dr. Rexroat, who looked like he’d had a pretty rough weekend. His suit was wrinkled and his white hair stood up in the back like he slept on it that way. He had missed some spots shaving, but his face was about as wrinkled as his suit, so I figured it was hard for him to smooth out his skin enough to do a close shave no matter what.
They had me sit down in a big chair right in front of Mr. Straub’s desk. It was higher than the chairs we had in the classrooms and my feet didn’t reach the floor unless I sat right on the front edge, which I didn’t do. Instead I slid all the way to the back of the chair and wished I could keep sliding back until I disappeared.
“You know why you’re here, don’t you, young man?” Mr. Straub said.
I couldn’t open my mouth or nod or move or anything. I just stared at him. He wore glasses with black frames and thick lenses that made his eyes a lot bigger from where I was sitting. He looked like a bug.
Officer Odom leaned over and grabbed the back of my chair. He smelled like an onion. “You need to answer the question. Your job right now is to answer all the questions.”
I couldn’t say anything to him, either. I could hardly even see anymore because of all the tears I was trying not to let go of, partly because I was so scared and partly because of his bad breath.
“This is a very serious matter,” Mr. Straub said.
“That’s right,” Officer Odom said, still leaning over me. He was like a giant talking onion. “Very serious.”
“He could have died,” Mr. Straub said.
“Do you know what that means?” Officer Onion asked me.
I looked at my hands. They seemed too small and I wondered if I had always had hands that were too small, and if everybody else knew it already but me.
“We’re going to need some answers, Dewey,” Mr. Straub said.
Boy, my hands looked little.
“Have you heard of reform school, Dewey?” Officer Odom said.
I made my hands into fists so I wouldn’t have to keep seeing how tiny my fingers were, but then my fists looked too little and I didn’t want to see them, either.
Officer Odom shook my chair. “Are you paying attention here?” He turned to Mr. Straub. “Is there something wrong with him?”
Mr. Straub said no, he had my test scores right there on his desk.
“Then why won’t he talk?” Officer Odom said. I opened my fists and slid my hands underneath me.
Dr. Rexroat burped, like somebody in a cartoon, and everybody looked at him. “Can’t you see the little malefactor is scared?” he said. I didn’t know what a malefactor was, but the way he said it, I knew it couldn’t be good. Dr. Rexroat didn’t move from his chair, where he seemed to almost be lying down more than sitting, but Officer Odom moved back over next to Mr. Straub’s desk. Maybe him and Dr. Rexroat had a secret sign that told him to do that, I don’t know.
Dr. Rexroat rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and I looked, too. A pencil stuck out of one of the soft panels up there and I wondered if Mr. Straub threw it one time or if it was a kid sitting right where I was, waiting for the principal to come in and expel him or something.
“Poison,” Dr. Rexroat said, still not looking at anybody, “is a funny thing. Take penicillin. You wouldn’t eat moldy bread because it would make you sick, or at least you think it would, but you would take an injection of penicillin, which comes from the culture of that very same mold, and it would fight off infection and save your life. Unless, of course, it killed you instead, which has been known to happen in some extreme cases of allergic reaction.
“Or say if we have a man with arterial blockage and thus a man who could stroke at any time. We can give that man medication to thin out his blood so it will trickle around arterial obstructions, even those obstructions that might otherwise cause him to stroke. But if we prescribe that same medication in excessive dosage, or in the same dosage to a smaller organism — for example, a rat — then the rat’s blood will thin to the point that the walls of his arteries and capillaries cannot hold it all in, will actually collapse, and so he will bleed internally. Of course all that blood has to go somewhere, and so it does — out of his mouth, out of his eye sockets, out of his ears, out of his anus. His organs will become liquefied, and that will be that. In one situation, in one dosage, and with one organism, it can save a life, but in another situation, in another dosage, and with another organism, it can take a life. Or, to put it another way, one man’s blood thinner is another man’s rat poison.”
Dr. Rexroat had crossed his legs and was tapping his knee with a little rubber hammer, making his top leg bounce. “Young man,” he said, still not looking at anything but that pencil stuck in the ceiling. “Is it possible that we owe you a debt of gratitude? That you somehow detected the symptoms of potential stroke in this Mr. Borgerding, and through swift action — blood thinner, or should I say rat poison, in his lunch biscuit — saved his life? If that is the case, you are surely to be forgiven if your dosage was excessive, causing Mr. Borgerding to react as he did, with the bleeding and the bruising.”
Boink. His leg jumped. Boink. His leg jumped again. “You see, despite what Officer Odom and Mr. Straub here told you, the situation for Mr. Borgerding was not life-threatening. But neither was it entirely comfortable for him, or his family, or apparently the entire school, or Poison Control, or the fine and dedicated doctors and nurses at Bartow Hospital.
“So, on to my question, then. Should we be thanking you, Mr. Turner? Or — and God forbid this should be the case — might there have been malice in your prescription for Mr. Borgerding?”
My hands had gotten so numb wedged under my legs that I couldn’t feel them anymore. My feet had gone to sleep, too, I guess, because the front edge of the chair cut off the circulation. I wasn’t sure what exactly it was he had said. Malefactor and arterial blockage and organisms and anus.
But I did understand what they were all getting at, of course, which was why did I poison Moe, which by now I had almost started to think I really had, and not David Tremblay. I wanted to tell them it was David. Or else I wanted to explain about what Moe and Head had been doing all that time, stealing my rolls and milk, and not letting me go to the bathroom because of their WHITES ONLY.
But I didn’t say anything. What could I say? And I was too scared, anyway, just like Dr. Rexroat said. I was a scared malefactor. Whatever it meant, I knew I must be one.
Officer Odom pulled out his handcuffs and said did they think he should put them on me. Mr. Straub said he doubted they were small enough, which got me thinking again about how little my hands were, but Dr. Rexroat said, “Don’t be a damn ass, Odom,” which probably hurt Officer Odom’s feelings a lot worse than the way my dad talked to him that night he came to our house.
“I’m just trying to do my job here,” Officer Odom said in kind of a whiny voice.
“You got no call to talk to him that way,” Mr. Straub said to Dr. Rexroat.
Dr. Rexroat tapped his knee one last time real hard, which looked like it caused his whole body to sit up all at once. Standing was harder for him, though, and I bet he wished there was some place he could tap himself again to help with that, too. He was wheezing when he finally made it, and he just grunted at Officer Odom and Mr. Straub and walked out without saying another word. I was sorry to see him go. He was the only one there that I sort of liked, even if I didn’t know what he was talking about.
After he left, Officer Odom and Mr. Straub mumbled between themselves for a while, and I just sat there with my numb hands and my numb feet that eventually went from being numb to aching, but I still didn’t move. I heard a train whistle from very far away, off one of the phosphate trains. Those trains went so slow, I don’t know why they bothered. Anybody who wasn’t blind could always
see them coming at a railroad crossing, except a drunk guy I heard about one time who fell asleep on the tracks that ran through Mr. Juddy’s property and probably no whistle loud enough in the world could have saved him, anyway.
In the end they didn’t put handcuffs on me and they didn’t take me to jail; instead they said I couldn’t go to school for two weeks and they said I had to go to a psychiatrist all the way up past Bartow in Lakeland. It must have been my mom’s idea.
When Dad got home that afternoon, he took off his belt, but Mom wouldn’t let him use it on me. She said, “Dewey needs our help right now, Hank. I don’t think we should handle it this way.”
Dad said he at least wanted to know what I had to say for myself, and he held my arms and kind of shook me until Mom made him not do that, either, and anyway, it didn’t matter because I couldn’t seem to say anything back, and finally he just sent me to my room.
Reverend Dunn came and tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t talk to him, either. I wanted to, but when I tried, nothing came out. It was like I had run out of words. Even when Mom came in once and put her arms around me and said, “Please, Dewey.”
Reverend Dunn told me God had a plan for everybody and my job was to figure out how everything that happened fit into God’s plan for me. The way to figure that out, he said, was to give myself up to God in prayer. I tried, but the only prayer that came into my head, besides the Lord’s Prayer, was the one from when I was little, which always scared me: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
God didn’t say a word back, but Wayne did. He said he was sorry he got me into all this, and he bought me Batman comic books just about every day from Honey’s Drugstore, until he ran out of money, even though I didn’t read them but just kept sticking them under my pillow on the top bunk, where I spent most of my time for about a week.
They made me go to the hospital to apologize to Moe. I went but didn’t say anything; I just looked at my shoes. So Mom said it for me: “Dewey wants to apologize for what he did. He showed very poor judgment but wants you to let him know if there is anything he can do to help out.”
Moe didn’t look sick or anything. In fact, he looked like he was having a pretty good time in the hospital, with all the flowers and candy and TV and food and attention. I wished it had been me in the hospital. His mom was there, and that surprised me. I guess I hadn’t thought a guy like Moe would have a mom. When she thanked my mom, she didn’t sound like she meant it, more like she just wanted us to leave. She pointed at me and said, “Ain’t he going to say anything?” Mom looked at me and said, “Dewey?” but I couldn’t think of a single word.
David Tremblay tried to give me all his Elvis and Beatles records the next day. He brought them in the bedroom and said, “Here,” and left them on the desk, but I didn’t touch them the same as with the Batman comic books, and after a couple of days, he took them back. He wouldn’t look at me, either. I guess he felt pretty bad, too.
Tink drew me a picture of Suzy like the other one she had drawn that time.
Mom cooked macaroni and cheese one night. She cooked fried chicken another night. She even had doughnuts for breakfast one morning, which wasn’t even a Saturday.
Darla Turkel came over one night and tapped on the window. I wouldn’t get out of bed to talk to her, so Wayne did. She stood outside and they whispered through the screen for kind of a long time. I didn’t even try to listen to what they were saying.
Mom said, “Dewey, do you think you’re punishing everybody else? Well, you’re not. You’re only punishing yourself by behaving this way. This is not the way you show that you’re sorry and that you take responsibility for what you’ve done.”
Tink said, “Why won’t you talk to me, Dewey? Are you mad at me?”
Wayne said, “You know, at school I heard some kids say they wished they were the ones to poison Moe. Everybody said nice things about him when he was in the hospital, but then they made fun of him ever since he came back.”
Dad didn’t say anything to me directly after that first day. He didn’t say anything to me at the dinner table, or on the way to church — not anywhere. But I knew what he was thinking, that he was disappointed in me. I worried that I had probably messed up the election for him, too, which was in just three more weeks. I bet he worried about that, too. One night I saw out the window that there was a blue light coming from his shed and looked like it was moving. I got worried at first but then figured it was that Niagara Falls lamp he fixed that time I asked him about military school and tried to talk to him about what was going on with the red bellies and the bathroom and all.
Darla came another night and talked to Wayne again through the screen. She wanted to talk to me but I still wouldn’t get up. She didn’t leave, though, but just kept whispering to Wayne, and after a while he said he was going outside with her and don’t tell Mom and Dad. It made me a little mad, him hanging out with Darla again like that first night all of us went to the Skeleton Hotel, but then I thought about how I didn’t talk to her at school and what a sorry thing that was. Walter Wratchford had told me to be her friend but I knew I hadn’t been her friend. I had been a pretend friend — only when nobody else could see — and I bet most people didn’t even know I knew her or even knew her name.
Wayne came back after an hour and crawled in the window and crawled back in bed. He was pretty nice to me. “Hey, Dewey,” he said, “why don’t you come down and tell me one of your old stories. You can lie in bed with me.” I wanted to but I didn’t do it.
The psychiatrist up in Lakeland, Dr. Boughner, kept asking me how come I wanted to be colored. Somehow he knew about the shoe polish and the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy. I didn’t answer him, but he just kept talking about stuff.
He said that I must have an identity with the colored people and it was a sign of low self-esteem. He said a lot of times if you’re angry at other people, it’s because you’re angry at yourself, and a lot of times when a boy is angry at himself, it’s because he has desires and attachments to his mom and resentments of his dad, and did I think I had those? He said that he thought I had those and what did I think?
When I just lay there on the couch and couldn’t say what I thought, he waited a long time, about half an hour, before he said anything else. He said, well, the thing I should know is that those feelings are natural ones and I shouldn’t feel guilty about having them. It’s not right to do what those feelings want you to do, he said, but it’s OK to have them. He said what happens when a boy has those feelings and doesn’t think he should is that he gets mad at himself and catches low self-esteem, and then gets mad at somebody else. Like Moe.
He said a fork is a symbol, and what did I think it was a symbol of? I guess somebody must have told him about me stabbing Moe, because I sure didn’t. I wondered if the right answer was the devil’s pitchfork and it meant sin, but I didn’t tell Dr. Boughner that, and Dr. Boughner never told me the answer, either, but he did say the rat poison was a symbol, too, and it wasn’t Moe I wanted to poison but somebody else, and who did I think the rat really was? He said could it be myself as a vermin for having the feelings I wasn’t supposed to have, or could it be my dad keeping me away from what I wanted?
I got mad at him for saying that. Maybe I was the rat instead of Moe, but my dad wasn’t the rat, and he shouldn’t have said so. But I still didn’t say anything.
Mom was waiting for me in the waiting room when we finished, and she stopped at a restaurant in Bartow called John’s Restaurant, where they had hamburgers with hot cole slaw they put on them that I guess they were famous for. She must have thought I would want one, but I never did like hamburgers, and especially hamburgers with cole slaw. I would have eaten a hot dog but I couldn’t quite make myself ask if I could order one instead.
She saw that I was getting sick on the ride home after that and stopped the car on the side of Bartow Highway so I could vomit. I kept my head out the wi
ndow the rest of the way, and the wind in my face kept me from being sick again. I went straight to bed, and Mom brought a cool washcloth in to put on my forehead. I fell asleep and when I woke up, it was still there so I must not have moved at all but knew I had been asleep for a long time, because the washcloth was dry and it was dark outside.
There were voices in the living room and somebody was crying, but I could tell from the sound of it that it wasn’t anybody in my family. The one crying in the living room was David Tremblay, and I knew just in hearing it that him and Wayne must have told.
After a while somebody went out the back door to the carport, and after a little while more, Mom and Dad started talking, just the two of them. Dad said, “Well, we have to call the police; it’s the only thing we can do at this point — try to get this thing straightened out.” Mom said, “Are you sure, Hank? They’ve all been through so much with this and it’s not all their fault. Why can’t we just let it go for now?” Dad said, “You can’t just let something like this go. Look what they did.” Mom said, “And look why they did it. Give them chores, put them on restrictions, don’t let them watch TV, make them read the Bible, I don’t care, but enough is enough.” Dad said, “What about Dewey?” Mom said, “You should go talk to him.”
I was still in the bunk bed, numb to everything the way I’d been all week, when he came in. He didn’t turn on the light but just stood next to my bed in the dark.
He said, “David Tremblay just came over here, Dewey, and he and Wayne told us what happened — that David was the one who poisoned the roll. They also told us about the incident with the fork and about what happened to Wayne and about the situation at school.” He stopped for a minute. I didn’t know what to say back, or if I even could say anything if I wanted to.
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