by Stephen King
“Maybe,” Todd said slowly, and Dussander could see he had already accepted it. His eyes were luminous with relief.
“No—surely!” Dussander cried.
He began to cackle with laughter, the rocking chair squeaking back and forth. Todd looked at him, puzzled and a little frightened, but after a bit he began to laugh, too. In Dussander’s kitchen they laughed and laughed, Dussander by the open window where the warm California breeze wafted in, and Todd rocked back on the rear legs of his kitchen chair, so that its back rested against the oven door, the white enamel of which was crisscrossed by the dark, charred-looking streaks made by Dussander’s wooden matches as he struck them alight.
• • •
Rubber Ed French (his nickname, Todd had explained to Dussander, referred to the rubbers he always wore over his sneakers during wet weather) was a slight man who made an affectation of always wearing Keds to school. It was a touch of informality which he thought would endear him to the one hundred and six children between the ages of twelve and fourteen who made up his counselling load. He had five pairs of Keds, ranging in color from Fast Track Blue to Screaming Yellow Zonkers, totally unaware that behind his back he was known not only as Rubber Ed but as Sneaker Pete and The Ked Man, as in The Ked Man Cometh. He had been known as Pucker in college, and he would have been most humiliated of all to learn that even that shameful fact had somehow gotten out.
He rarely wore ties, preferring turtleneck sweaters. He had been wearing these ever since the mid-sixties, when David McCallum had popularized them in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. In his college days his classmates had been known to spy him crossing the quad and remark, “Here comes Pucker in his U.N.C.L.E. sweater.” He had majored in Educational Psychology, and he privately considered himself to be the only good guidance counsellor he had ever met. He had real rapport with his kids. He could get right down to it with them; he could rap with them and be silently sympathetic if they had to do some shouting and kick out the jams. He could get into their hangups because he understood what a bummer it was to be thirteen when someone was doing a number on your head and you couldn’t get your shit together.
The thing was, he had a damned hard time remembering what it had been like to be thirteen himself. He supposed that was the ultimate price you had to pay for growing up in the fifties. That, and travelling into the brave new world of the sixties nicknamed Pucker.
Now, as Todd Bowden’s grandfather came into his office, closing the pebbled-glass door firmly behind him, Rubber Ed stood up respectfully but was careful not to come around his desk to greet the old man. He was aware of his sneakers. Sometimes the old-timers didn’t understand that the sneakers were a psychological aid with kids who had teacher hang-ups—which was to say that some of the older folks couldn’t get behind a guidance counsellor in Keds.
This is one fine-looking dude, Rubber Ed thought. His white hair was carefully brushed back. His three-piece suit was spotlessly clean. His dove-gray tie was impeccably knotted. In his left hand he held a furled black umbrella (outside, a light drizzle had been falling since the weekend) in a manner that was almost military. A few years ago Rubber Ed and his wife had gone on a Dorothy Sayers jag, reading everything by that estimable lady that they could lay their hands upon. It occurred to him now that this was her brainchild, Lord Peter Wimsey, to the life. It was Wimsey at seventy-five, years after both Bunter and Harriet Vane had passed on to their rewards. He made a mental note to tell Sondra about this when he got home.
“Mr. Bowden,” he said respectfully, and offered his hand.
“A pleasure,” Bowden said, and shook it. Rubber Ed was careful not to put on the firm and uncompromising pressure he applied to the hands of the fathers he saw; it was obvious from the gingerly way the old boy offered it that he had arthritis.
“A pleasure, Mr. French,” Bowden repeated, and took a seat, carefully pulling up the knees of his trousers. He propped the umbrella between his feet and leaned on it, looking like an elderly, extremely urbane vulture that had come in to roost in Rubber Ed French’s office. He had the slightest touch of an accent, Rubber Ed thought, but it wasn’t the clipped intonation of the British upper class, as Wimsey’s would have been; it was broader, more European. Anyway, the resemblance to Todd was quite striking. Especially through the nose and eyes.
“I’m glad you could come,” Rubber Ed told him, resuming his own seat, “although in these cases the student’s mother or father—”
This was the opening gambit, of course. Almost ten years of experience in the counselling business had convinced him that when an aunt or an uncle or a grandparent showed up for a conference, it usually meant trouble at home—the sort of trouble that invariably turned out to be the root of the problem. To Rubber Ed, this came as a relief. Domestic problems were bad, but for a boy of Todd’s intelligence, a heavy drug trip would have been much, much worse.
“Yes, of course,” Bowden said, managing to look both sorrowful and angry at the same time. “My son and his wife asked me if I could come and talk this sorry business over with you, Mr. French. Todd is a good boy, believe me. This trouble with his school marks is only temporary.”
“Well, we all hope so, don’t we, Mr. Bowden? Smoke if you like. It’s supposed to be off-limits on school property, but I’ll never tell.”
“Thank you.”
Mr. Bowden took a half-crushed package of Camel cigarettes from his inner pocket, put one of the last two zigzagging smokes in his mouth, found a Diamond Blue-Tip match, scratched it on the heel of one black shoe, and lit up. He coughed an old man’s dank cough over the first drag, shook the match out, and put the blackened stump into the ashtray Rubber Ed had produced. Rubber Ed watched this ritual, which seemed almost as formal as the old man’s shoes, with frank fascination.
“Where to begin,” Bowden said, his distressed face looking at Rubber Ed through a swirling raft of cigarette smoke.
“Well,” Rubber Ed said kindly, “the very fact that you’re here instead of Todd’s parents tells me something, you know.”
“Yes, I suppose it does. Very well.” He folded his hands. The Camel protruded from between the second and third fingers of his right. He straightened his back and lifted his chin. There was something almost Prussian in his mental coming to terms, Rubber Ed thought, something that made him think of all those war movies he’d seen as a kid.
“My son and my daughter-in-law are having troubles in their home,” Bowden said, biting off each word precisely. “Rather bad troubles, I should think.” His eyes, old but amazingly bright, watched as Rubber Ed opened the folder centered in front of him on the desk blotter. There were sheets of paper inside, but not many.
“And you feel that these troubles are affecting Todd’s academic performance?”
Bowden leaned forward perhaps six inches. His blue eyes never left Rubber Ed’s brown ones. There was a heavily charged pause, and then Bowden said: “The mother drinks.”
He resumed his former ramrod-straight position.
“Oh,” Rubber Ed said.
“Yes,” Bowden replied, nodding grimly. “The boy has told me that he has come home on two occasions and has found her sprawled out on the kitchen table. He knows how my son feels about her drinking problem, and so the boy has put dinner in the oven himself on these occasions, and has gotten her to drink enough black coffee so she will at least be awake when Richard comes home.”
“That’s bad,” Rubber Ed said, although he had heard worse—mothers with heroin habits, fathers who had abruptly taken it into their heads to start banging their daughters . . . or their sons. “Has Mrs. Bowden thought about getting professional help for her problem?”
“The boy has tried to persuade her that would be the best course. She is much ashamed, I think. If she was given a little time . . .” He made a gesture with his cigarette that left a dissolving smoke-ring in the air. “You understand?”
“Yes, of course.” Rubber Ed nodded, privately admiring the gesture that had produced the smoke-r
ing. “Your son . . . Todd’s father . . .”
“He is not without blame,” Bowden said harshly. “The hours he works, the meals he has missed, the nights when he must leave suddenly . . . I tell you, Mr. French, he is more married to his job than he is to Monica. I was raised to believe that a man’s family came before everything. Was it not the same for you?”
“It sure was,” Rubber Ed responded heartily. His father had been a night watchman for a large Los Angeles department store and he had really only seen his pop on weekends and vacations.
“That is another side of the problem,” Bowden said.
Rubber Ed nodded and thought for a moment. “What about your other son, Mr. Bowden? Uh . . .” He looked down at the folder. “Harold. Todd’s uncle.”
“Harry and Deborah are in Minnesota now,” Bowden said, quite truthfully. “He has a position there at the University medical school. It would be quite difficult for him to leave, and very unfair to ask him.” His face took on a righteous cast. “Harry and his wife are quite happily married.”
“I see.” Rubber Ed looked at the file again for a moment and then closed it. “Mr. Bowden, I appreciate your frankness. I’ll be just as frank with you.”
“Thank you,” Bowden said stiffly.
“We can’t do as much for our students in the counselling area as we would like. There are six counsellors here, and we’re each carrying a load of over a hundred students. My newest colleague, Hepburn, has a hundred and fifteen. At this age, in our society, all children need help.”
“Of course.” Bowden mashed his cigarette brutally into the ashtray and folded his hands once more.
“Sometimes bad problems get by us. Home environment and drugs are the two most common. At least Todd isn’t mixed up with speed or mescaline or PCP.”
“God forbid.”
“Sometimes,” Rubber Ed went on, “there’s simply nothing we can do. It’s depressing, but it’s a fact of life. Usually the ones that are first to get spit out of the machine we’re running here are the class troublemakers, the sullen, uncommunicative kids, the ones who refuse to even try. They are simply warm bodies waiting for the system to buck them up through the grades or waiting to get old enough so they can quit without their parents’ permission and join the Army or get a job at the Speedy-Boy Carwash or marry their boyfriends. You understand? I’m being blunt. Our system is, as they say, not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“I appreciate your frankness.”
“But it hurts when you see the machine starting to mash up someone like Todd. He ran out a ninety-two average for last year’s work, and that puts him in the ninety-fifth percentile. His English averages are even better. He shows a flair for writing, and that’s something special in a generation of kids that think culture begins in front of the TV and ends in the neighborhood movie theater. I was talking to the woman who had Todd in Comp last year. She said Todd passed in the finest term-paper she’d seen in twenty years of teaching. It was on the German death-camps during World War Two. She gave him the only A-plus she’s ever given a composition student.”
“I have read it,” Bowden said. “It is very fine.”
“He has also demonstrated above-average ability in the life sciences and social sciences, and while he’s not going to be one of the great math whizzes of the century, all the notes I have indicate that he’s given it the good old college try . . . until this year. Until this year. That’s the whole story, in a nutshell.”
“Yes.”
“I hate like hell to see Todd go down the tubes this way, Mr. Bowden. And summer school . . . well, I said I’d be frank. Summer school often does a boy like Todd more harm than good. Your usual junior high school summer session is a zoo. All the monkeys and the laughing hyenas are in attendance, plus a full complement of dodo birds. Bad company for a boy like Todd.”
“Certainly.”
“So let’s get to the bottom line, shall we? I suggest a series of appointments for Mr. and Mrs. Bowden at the Counselling Center downtown. Everything in confidence, of course. The man in charge down there, Harry Ackerman, is a good friend of mine. And I don’t think Todd should go to them with the idea; I think you should.” Rubber Ed smiled widely. “Maybe we can get everybody back on track by June. It’s not impossible.”
But Bowden looked positively alarmed by this idea.
“I believe they might resent the boy if I took that proposal to them now,” he said. ‘Things are very delicate. They could go either way. The boy has promised me he will work harder in his studies. He is very alarmed at this drop in his marks.” He smiled thinly, a smile Ed French could not quite interpret. “More alarmed than you know.”
“But—”
“And they would resent me,” Bowden pressed on quickly. “God knows they would. Monica already regards me as something of a meddler. I try not to be, but you see the situation. I feel that things are best left alone . . . for now.”
“I’ve had a great deal of experience in these matters,” Rubber Ed told Bowden. He folded his hands on Todd’s file and looked at the old man earnestly. “I really think counselling is in order here. You’ll understand that my interest in the marital problems your son and daughter-in-law are having begins and ends with the effect they’re having on Todd . . . and right now, they’re having quite an effect.”
“Let me make a counter-proposal,” Bowden said. “You have, I believe, a system of warning parents of poor grades?”
“Yes,” Rubber Ed agreed cautiously. “Interpretation of Progress cards—IOP cards. The kids, of course, call them Flunk Cards. They only get them if their grade in a given course falls below seventy-eight. In other words, we give out IOP cards to kids who are pulling a D or an F in a given course.”
“Very good,” Bowden said. “Then what I suggest is this: if the boy gets one of those cards . . . even one”—he held up one gnarled finger—“I will approach my son and his wife about your counselling. I will go further.” He pronounced it furdah. “If the boy receives one of your Flunk Cards in April—”
“We give them out in May, actually.”
“Yes? If he receives one then, I guarantee that they will accept the counselling proposal. They are worried about their son, Mr. French. But now they are so wrapped up in their own problem that . . .” He shrugged.
“I understand.”
“So let us give them that long to solve their own problems. Pulling one’s self up by one’s own shoelaces . . . that is the American way, is it not?”
“Yes, I guess it is,” Rubber Ed told him after a moment’s thought . . . and after a quick glance at the clock, which told him he had another appointment in five minutes. “I’ll accept that.”
He stood, and Bowden stood with him. They shook hands again, Rubber Ed being carefully mindful of the old party’s arthritis.
“But in all fairness, I ought to tell you that very few students can pull out of an eighteen-week tailspin in just four weeks of classes. There’s a huge amount of ground to be made up—a huge amount. I suspect you’ll have to come through on your guarantee, Mr. Bowden.”
Bowden offered his thin, disconcerting smile again. “Do you?” was all he said.
Something had troubled Rubber Ed through the entire interview, and he put his finger on it during lunch in the cafeteria, more than an hour after “Lord Peter” had left, umbrella once again neatly tucked under his arm.
He and Todd’s grandfather had talked for fifteen minutes at least, probably closer to twenty, and Ed didn’t think the old man had once referred to his grandson by name.
• • •
Todd pedaled breathlessly up Dussander’s walk and parked his bike on its kickstand. School had let out only fifteen minutes before. He took the front steps at one jump, used his doorkey, and hurried down the hall to the sunlit kitchen. His face was a mixture of hopeful sunshine and gloomy clouds. He stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment, his stomach and his vocal cords knotted, watching Dussander as he rocked with his cupful of bourbon in
his lap. He was still dressed in his best, although he had pulled his tie down two inches and loosened the top button of his shirt. He looked at Todd expressionlessly, his lizardlike eyes at half-mast.
“Well?” Todd finally managed.
Dussander left him hanging a moment longer, a moment that seemed at least ten years long to Todd. Then, deliberately, Dussander set his cup on the table next to his bottle of Ancient Age and said:
“The fool believed everything.”
Todd let out his pent-up breath in a whooping gust of relief.
Before he could draw another breath in, Dussander added: “He wanted your poor, troubled parents to attend counselling sessions downtown with a friend of his. He was really quite insistent.”
“Jesus! Did you . . . what did you . . . how did you handle it?”
“I thought quickly,” Dussander replied. “Like the little girl in the Saki story, invention on short notice is one of my strong points. I promised him your parents would go in for such counselling if you received even one Flunk Card when they are given in May.”
The blood fell out of Todd’s face.
“You did what?” he nearly screamed. “I’ve already flunked two algebra quizzes and a history test since the marking period started!” He advanced into the room, his pale face now growing shiny with breaking sweat. “There was a French quiz this afternoon and I flunked that, too . . . I know I did. All I could think about was that goddamned Rubber Ed and whether or not you were taking care of him. You took care of him, all right,” he finished bitterly. “Not get one Flunk Card? I’ll probably get five or six.”
“It was the best I could do without arousing suspicions,” Dussander said. “This French, fool that he is, is only doing his job. Now you will do yours.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Todd’s face was ugly and thunderous, his voice truculent.
“You will work. In the next four weeks you will work harder than you have ever worked in your life. Furthermore, on Monday you will go to each of your instructors and apologize to them for your poor showing thus far. You will—”