“
Cory?
” Her voice demanded my attention.
I had to turn around. Last time I’d resisted, she’d smeared saliva on the back of my neck in the shape of a heart.
Brenda Sutley was grinning, her red hair oily and ratty and her wandering eyes shining with mischief. She held up her index finger, which had a dirt-grimed nail but no booger on it.
“Got’cha,” she whispered.
“
Cory Jay Mackenson!
” Leatherlungs roared. “
Turn around this instant!
”
I did, almost giving myself whiplash. I heard the traitors around me giggling, knowing that the Harpy would not be satisfied with this display of respect. “Oh, I guess you know all about the division of fractions by now, don’t you?” she inquired, her hands on hips as wide as a Patton tank. “Well, why don’t you come up here and do some division for us, to show us how it’s done?” She held the accursed yellow chalk out to me.
If I am ever on death row, the walk to the electric chair will be no more terrifying than that walk from my desk to the chalk in Mrs. Harper’s hand and then, ultimately, to the blackboard. “All right,” she said as I stood there shoulder-slumped and hang-doggy. “Write down these fractions.” She rattled some off, and when I copied them my chalk broke and Nelson Bittner laughed and in two seconds I had a fellow sufferer up there with me.
Everybody knew by now: we weren’t going to be able to defeat Mrs. Harper with a frontal attack. We weren’t going to be able to storm her ramparts and yell victory over her scattered math books. It would have to be a slow, insidious war of snipers and booby traps, a painstaking probe to learn her weakness. All us kids had found out by now that all teachers had a sore spot; some went crazy over gum chewing, others insane over behind-the-back giggles, still others nuts over the repeated squeaking and scuffing of shoes on the linoleum. Machine-gun coughs, donkeylike snorts, a fusillade of throat clearing, spitballs stuck to the blackboard: all these were arsenals in the battle against Hitlerian teachers. Who knows? Maybe we could get the Demon to bring to class a dead, stinking animal in a shoebox, or get her to sneeze and blow ribbons of snot out of those talented nostrils of hers to make Mrs. Harper’s hair uncurl.
“Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!” Leatherlungs bellowed at me as I finished my queasy attempt at fraction division. “Go sit down and pay attention, you blockhead!”
Between Leatherlungs and the Demon, I was really in for it.
After the three o’clock bell had rung and Davy Ray, Johnny, Ben, and I had jawed about the events of the day, I pedaled home on Rocket under a dark, glowering sky. I found Mom at home, cleaning the oven. “Cory!” she said when I walked into the kitchen intent on raiding the cookie jar. “Lady from the mayor’s office called for you about ten minutes ago. Mayor Swope wants to see you.”
“Mayor Swope?” I paused with my hand reaching for a Lorna Doone. “What for?”
“Didn’t say what for, but she said it was important.” Mom glanced out the window. “A storm’s blowin’ up. Your father’ll drive you over to the courthouse, if you can wait an hour.”
My curiosity was piqued. What would Mayor Swope want with
me?
I looked out the window as Mom continued her oven cleaning, and judged the gathering clouds. “I think I can get there before it starts rainin’,” I said.
Mom pulled her head out of the oven, looked at the sky again, and frowned. “I don’t know. It might start pourin’ on you.”
I shrugged. “I’ll be all right.”
She hesitated, her fretful nature gnawing at her. Ever since my camping trip, though, I could tell she’d been making a mighty effort to stop worrying so much about me. Even though I’d gotten lost, I’d proven I could survive in the face of hardship. Finally, she said, “Go on, then.”
I took two Lorna Doones and headed for the porch.
“If it starts comin’ down hard, you stay at the courthouse!” she called. “Hear?”
“I hear!” I told her, and I got on Rocket and pedaled as I crunched the Lorna Doones between my teeth. Not too far from the house, Rocket suddenly shuddered and I felt the handlebars jerk to the left. Ahead of me, the Branlins were pedaling side by side on their black bikes, but they were going in the same direction as me and didn’t see me. Rocket wanted to turn to the left at the next intersection, and I followed Rocket’s sage advice to take a detour.
Thunder was rumbling and it was starting to sprinkle a little as I reached the dark-stoned, gothic-styled courthouse at the end of Merchants Street. The drops were chilly; summer’s warm rain was a thing of the past. I left Rocket chained to a fire hydrant and went into the courthouse, which smelled like a moldy basement. A sign on the wall said Mayor Swope’s office was on the second floor, and I climbed the wide staircase, the high windows around me letting in murky, storm-blue light. At the top of the staircase, three carved gargoyles sat atop the black walnut banister, their scaly legs curled up and their claws folded across their chests. One wall was decorated with an old tattered Confederate flag and there were dusty display cases holding butternut uniforms riddled with moth holes. Above my head was a darkened glass cupola, reachable only by ladder, and through the cupola I heard thunder resonate as through a bell jar.
I walked along the long corridor, which had a floor of black and white linoleum squares. On either side were offices: License Bureau, County Tax Department, Probate Judge, Traffic Court, and the like. None of their lights were on. I saw a man with dark hair and a blue-paisley bow tie coming out of a pebbled-glass door marked Sanitation and Maintenance. He locked the door from a ring of jingling keys and looked at me. “Can I help you, young fella?” he asked.
“I’m supposed to see Mayor Swope,” I said.
“His office is at the end of the corridor.” He checked his pocket watch. “Might be gone home by now, though. Most everybody leaves around three-thirty.”
“Thank you,” I told him, and I went on. I heard his keys jingling as he walked toward the stairs, and he whistled a tune I didn’t know.
I passed the council’s chambers and the recorder’s office—both dark—and at the corridor’s end I faced a big oak door with brass letters on it that said OFFICE OF THE MAYOR. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to knock or not, and there was no buzzer. I grappled with the question of etiquette here for a few seconds, as the thunder growled outside. Then I balled up my fist and knocked.
In a few seconds the door opened. A woman with hornrimmed glasses and an iron-gray mountain of hair peered out. Her face was like a chunk of granite, all hard ridges and cliffs. Her eyebrows lifted in a question.
“I’m… here to see Mayor Swope,” I said.
“Oh. You’re Cory Mackenson.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Come in.” She opened the door wider, and I slipped in past her. As I did, I got a jolt of either violet-scented perfume or hair spray up my nostrils. I had entered a red-carpeted room which held a desk, a row of chairs, and a magazine rack. A map of Zephyr, brown at the edges, adorned one wall. On the desk there was an in tray and an out tray, a neat stack of papers, framed photographs of a baby being held between a smiling young woman and man, and a nameplate that said MRS. INEZ AXFORD and, underneath that in smaller letters, MAYOR’S SECRETARY.
“Just have a seat for a minute, please.” Mrs. Axford walked across the room to another door. She rapped softly on it, and I heard Mayor Swope say in his mushmouth accent, “Yes?” from the other side. Mrs. Axford opened it. “The boy’s here,” she said.
“Thank you, Inez.” I heard a chair creak. “I believe that finishes us up for the day. You can go on home if you like.”
“Want me to send him in?”
“Two minutes and I’ll be with him.”
“Yes sir. Oh… did you sign that application for the new traffic lights?”
“Need to study that a little more, Inez. Get to it first thing in the mornin’.”
“Yes sir. I’ll be goin’ on, then.” She retreated from the mayor’s domain and closed the door and said to me, “He’ll be with you in two minutes.” As I waited, Mrs. Axford locked her desk, got her sturdy brown purse, and straightened the photographs on her desk. She wedged her purse up under her arm, took a long look around the office to make sure everything was in its proper place, and then she walked out the door into the hallway without saying boot, shoot, or scoot to me.
I waited. Thunder boomed overhead and rolled through the courthouse. I heard the rain start—slowly at first, then building up to a hammering.
The door to the mayor’s office opened, and Mayor Swope emerged. The sleeves of his blue shirt were rolled up, his initials in white on the breast pocket, his suspenders striped with red. “Cory!” he said, smiling. “Come in and let’s have us a talk!”
I didn’t know what to make of this. I knew who Mayor Swope was and all, but I’d never spoken to him. And here he was, smiling and motioning me into his office! The guys would believe this about as much as they believed I’d stuck a broomstick down Old Moses’s throat!
“Come in, come in!” the mayor urged.
I walked into his office. Everything was fashioned of dark, glistening wood. The air smelled of sweet pipe tobacco. There was a desk in the office that seemed as big as the deck of an aircraft carrier. Shelves were full of thick, leatherbound books. They looked to me as if they had never been touched, because none had bookmarks in them. Two burly black leather chairs faced the desk over an expanse of Persian carpet. Windows afforded a view of Merchants Street, but right now the rain was streaming down them.
Mayor Swope, his gray hair combed back from a widow’s peak and his eyes dark blue and friendly, closed the door. He said, “Have a seat, Cory.” I hesitated. “Doesn’t matter which one.” I took the one on his left. The leather pooted when I sat down in it. Mayor Swope settled himself in his own chair, which had scrolled armrests. On his flattop of a desk was a telephone, a leather-covered jar full of pens, a can of Field and Stream tobacco, and a pipe rack cradling four pipes. One of the pipes was white, and had a man’s bearded face carved into it.
“Gettin’ some rain out there, aren’t we?” he asked, his fingers lacing together. He smiled again, and this close I saw his teeth were discolored.
“Yes sir.”
“Well, the farmers need it. Just so we don’t have another flood, huh?”
“Yes sir.”
Mayor Swope cleared his throat. His fingers tapped. “Are your folks waitin’ for you?” he asked.
“No sir. I came on my bike.”
“Oh. Gosh, you’re gonna have a wet ride home.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Wouldn’t be good,” he said, “if you had an accident on the way. You know, with that rain comin’ down so hard, a car could hit you, you could go down in a ditch and…” His smile had slipped. Now it crept back. “Well, it wouldn’t be good.”
“No sir.”
“I suppose you’re wonderin’ why I wanted to see you?”
I nodded.
“You know I was on the panel that judged the writin’ contest? I enjoyed your story. Yessir, it deserved a prize.” He picked up a briar pipe and popped open the can of tobacco. “It surely did. You’re the youngest person ever to win a plaque in the contest.” I watched his fingers as he began to fill the pipe’s bowl with bits of tobacco. “I checked the records. You’re the youngest by far. That ought to make you and your folks very proud.”
“I guess so.”
“Oh, you don’t have to be so modest, Cory! I sure couldn’t write like that when I was your age! Nosir! I was good at math, but English wasn’t my subject.” He produced a pack of matches from his pocket, struck one, and touched it to the tobacco in his pipe. Blue smoke bloomed around his mouth. His eyes were on me. “You’ve got a keen imagination,” he said. “That part in your story about seein’ somebody standin’ in the woods across the road. I liked that part. How’d you happen to come up with that?”
“It really—”
Happened
, I was going to say. But before I could, somebody knocked at the door. Mrs. Axford looked in. “Mayor Swope?” she said. “Lord, it’s pourin’ cats and dogs! I couldn’t even get to my car, and I just had my hair fixed yesterday! Do you have an umbrella I might borrow?”
“I believe so, Inez. Look in that closet over there.”
She opened a closet and rummaged around in it. “Should be one in the corner,” Mayor Swope told her. “Smells awfully musty in here!” Mrs. Axford said. “I believe somethin’s mildewed!”
“Yeah, gotta clean it out one of these days,” he said.
Mrs. Axford came out of the closet clutching an umbrella. But her nose was wrinkled, and in her other hand she was clutching two articles of clothing that were white with mildew. “Look at these!” she said. “I believe mushrooms are growin’ in here!”
My heart seized up.
Mrs. Axford was holding a mildew-blotched overcoat and a hat that appeared to have been run through a washer and wringer.