Inukshuk (15 page)

Coming out of the boys' washroom and heading east again up the orange corridor, he became aware of a force mounting in the crowd behind him, some nameless chaos or commotion, but did not connect it with himself in time to brace sufficiently, so the shock of someone's body hurled against his and slamming and pinning him to the lockers on his right was almost total. Black hair, jeans, turtleneck sweater. One of a pack of wild younger kids he'd seen around sometimes. “Hip check!” the kid yelled. And immediately following that, another body—blond hair, plaid shirt—flew against him, shoulders ramming against Thomas's rib cage and causing his arm to whip out spastically, the back of his hand striking locker metal. His books spilled to the floor and were kicked out, skittering from under him across the corridor. “Shoulder check!” the kid yelled. “See you on the ice, pussy!” And both of them, whoever they were, were gone, ducking and weaving out of sight through the crowd of students so fast, Thomas could determine where they'd been only from the disturbance left in their wake. Not Malloy. Neither kid had been Malloy. He was pretty sure of that. But he was just as sure they would have been acting on Malloy's instruction.

“Hockey morons!” he yelled after them. “Douche bags!”

He bent, and bent again to begin picking up his books. “Sorry. Scuse me. Do you mind?” Stinging heat of embarrassment in his
face, thinking,
Stupid, stupid, I'm such an idiot
. His math book was on the other side of the hall, splayed facedown in a puddle, notes and homework sheets scattered everywhere. His notebook binder and history text were back closer to where he'd been standing. The drawings of Franklin's hand would have blown upstream with the rest of his loose math papers, all of them being kicked along, caught against feet and legs and then kicked to the wet, sand-tracked linoleum, stepped on or stepped over. Thomas went after them, one by one, retrieving bent, scuffed, and footmarked pages, old tests and homework assignments. “Thanks. Sorry. Hey—yeah, that's mine, too. Thanks.”

And out of nowhere, here was his father, stooping to retrieve the last few pages of notes from in front of his own classroom door, jovially flushed and energetic in his
Hey, I'm Mr. Franklin, the new teacher
persona, the blue of his eyes infuriatingly snappy and accentuated by his blue oxford shirt, causing Thomas to speculate, incongruously,
What's up with him? Something's up. He's in love again? Holy smokes. Who's he in love with?
He didn't realize he'd drifted this far afield of his normal route. He'd never make it to his next class on time. And now here was his father, holding the last of his papers, shaking them in his face, causing him to reconsider all of his perceptions. Mad, not jovial; vengeful, furious, not in love.

“Who did this?”

“Some kids. I don't know. Didn't see.”

“I need to know. Was it Jeremy Malloy? What—”

“Negative.”

Their eyes slid together briefly. Thomas did not want to witness or apprehend his father's emotions; did not want to give away anything like his own emotional condition, either. He wished they'd come to a tacit agreement about this immediately, keep it cool for school, wait, talk later, if at all, but from the way his father kept staring, clench-mouthed, eyes flicking from Thomas's right eye to his left and back again, he knew there would be no such agreement. His father smelled of teacher's lounge coffee and that unique singed garlic smell Thomas only ever noticed on him at school—something
to do with his metabolism maybe, his failing antiperspirant and the work of teaching. Or maybe it wasn't him at all. Maybe it was from the school—some combination of elements he absorbed out of the air here and converted through a personalized reverse osmosis process into his own soap-and-garlic-tinged funk.

“Dad. It wasn't Jeremy Malloy. Just some kids in a rush to class or something.”

“‘Or something?'”

“I don't know.”

“You listen to me, Thomas. . . .”

“No.” He shifted his books to his other hand. “Not now. OK? I've got class. It was an accident.”

“This is unacceptable.”

“It's pretty normal. Actually.” He flipped a backward wave and went back the way he'd been heading.

“Thomas!”

Only later, sliding into his seat seconds after the final bell and patting down his pockets for a pen, zipping open his notebook binder and settling lower in his seat so as not to be registered as tardy, did he notice his hand: the middle knuckles of his left hand split, red and skinned where he'd struck the lockers, fingers already swelling. This was no ordinary wound. He pressed between the tendons, made a fist, and flexed his hand open again. The fingers were tight where they'd begun swelling, but otherwise he felt no pain. He placed his hand flat on the table. Maybe a slight ache spreading up from the palm through the knuckles. But that wound—it was like something from the movie! Ghoulish. Like the pictures of hemorrhagic sores Devon had sent.
Easy bruising
: one of the top ten symptoms. It was happening!

“Dude.” It was Griffin, the stoner-huffer kid who often shared Thomas's table and who, in exchange for being allowed to copy answers off multiple-choice exams, had always been mostly kind and friendly with Thomas. Griffin leaned closer, moist mint-over-smoke breath covering the side of Thomas's face. “What happened, man? Girlfriend bite you again? I'm so sorry.”

Thomas laughed. Shrugged. “It's nothing.”

Again, Griffin leaned in. “Check it out. I got just the thing for you.” He pressed his knee to Thomas's and directed his gaze downward, under the table, open palm flashing an amber pharmaceutical vial. “Hyrdros and methadone or some shit. Stole them off my old lady after her operation. Only a few left. No shit, hey? Take them.”

“Thanks. No . . .”

“For reals! Shit like that has to hurt.”

“It doesn't, actually. But . . .” To make him happy or at least prevent his getting them both busted with all the whispering and nudging, Thomas accepted. Squeezed the bottle's cylindrical warmth in his busted hand and tucked it into the front pocket of his jeans, nodding, all the while fixing his gaze on the front of the room: Ms. Johannesen—poor misled, iron-haired Ms. Johannesen, thinking anyone was listening to her or wishing to learn anything about the current state of world affairs or the history of Western civilization. “Thanks.”

Griffin was nudging him again. He was a handsome kid with dark blond hair to his shoulders and reddish beard stubble, a few millimeters of it always covering his chin and cheeks. Pink chapped lips like a little kid, and perfect skin. To look at him, you wouldn't guess he was high more than half the time. In fact, Thomas had not believed at first, but had learned gradually, that Griffin was not lying—he'd seen enough folded paper packets of pills, stolen pill bottles, flattened green buds in Baggies, and had too often witnessed Griffin snorting hits of something from a brown vial, after which his eyes would roll back and his eyelids twitch shut for minutes at a time while class droned on. “Oh man. What day is it?” he'd ask afterward. “Did she even notice? Did she say anything? Of course not. Fuck yeah, dude . . . you gotta try.”

“Go on. Take them.”

Thomas waved him off. Almost giggled from all the attention.

“Can't dry-swallow?”

Thomas shook his head.

“Dude, this is serious. You have to keep ahead of the pain. That's what my mom says. She's a nurse. She should know.”

“Doesn't hurt.”

Again, he nudged Thomas. Again, Thomas shook his head. Pretended to write something in his notebook. Watched his pen moving—circles, squares, dashes—and wondered,
Why not?
And then he remembered. His feet. Still aching. Had to keep his head on straight. Figure out a few things. Plan.

“Later,” he whispered. “For sure.”

“Dude, whatever. Live life. That's all I got to say.”

 

 

ALONE IN HIS CLASSROOM after hours with the debate kids, no sound of other classes in session or corridor traffic, only the solitary click of the custodian's mop on the hallway floor scrubbing from side to side, his AM talk radio coming a little nearer, a little louder with each mop swipe, Franklin often felt a peculiar kind of loneliness (really an awareness of the general isolation of a single life and the ridiculousness of most social conventions) so keenly, it made him want to laugh aloud. That or blurt weird, inappropriate things to shock the kids and get them riled. The pointlessness of these hours spent after school, pooling information, testing logical semantic tricks on one another, rhetorical positions, and surfing the Web for every possible statement of truth or half-truth to learn their given debate topic, could seem to him so terribly, comically obvious. And, of course, that the whole essence and raison d'être of the debate team itself (the thing he was always harping at them to bear in mind:
People, people, please lose your sentimental attachment to truth; believe what you want outside the club, but here truth is immaterial; here linguistic and reasoning skills reign supreme; truth is whatever you make it!
) so neatly intersected his existential gloom only made for a perplexing overlay of irony.
Bunch of goofballs alone after school arguing and practicing verbal gymnastics. What for?
Well, to keep his job, for one thing. Score big in the upcoming tournament in Cranbrook, for another, and thereby maybe assure his reassignment to this extracurricular post instead of being assigned, say, assistant coach of basketball.

Meanwhile, outside, the bronze tones of afternoon turning to
early evening and the hammocky tree shadows lengthening across the school yard cued some half-pacified animal part of his brain in a way that contributed to the melancholy (Wright: . . .
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. / A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. / I have wasted my life.
), making him long for an action he couldn't name or specify, but which might look a lot like throwing on sweats and runners and going for a jog, if he could, feeling the blood surge to the surface of his skin, the sweat freeze, breath race—if he weren't committed to the rest of the afternoon here with these lonely, misfit teens. Twelve of them, total. None handsome yet (though more than a few, he suspected, would one day mature into surprising attractiveness), many with crooked, metal-encaged teeth, bitten, bloody nails, most of them a little overweight, two severely underweight. Bumpy, greasy skin. Dandruff flakes on collars. Eight of the twelve wearing glasses. Nine of the twelve, boys. Not a one of them sporting a pocket protector or carrying a slide rule or oversized calculator—none of the classic nerd indicators of his own bygone era.

So far, they'd done admirably in one debate, marginally in another, and had been shut out in the others. Not too impressive. They needed to knock heads in Cranbrook next week if they wanted a shot at the spring invitational in Ottawa. The topics were good for their particular mix of talents and intelligence, especially the number one Lincoln-Douglas proposition:
Quebec should be allowed to secede from the union
. This they could nail. He was pretty sure. He just needed to keep his focus, keep all of his attention in the room. Help them. They liked and trusted him, even if he was new; he was pretty sure of that. And he'd earned their trust, he supposed, by liking them back in his way—by letting them more or less run the show, giving them that respect, and by breaking up the session unpredictably with dramatic free-association exercises (also new to them), which they claimed to love, though he suspected mainly they loved it because of his own occasional hilariously overplayed bumbling participation, freely making an ass of himself.
Cued extemporizing
.
“Get used to it, people. Being comfortable speaking in public is a little
like controlled barfing, puking on command . . . a skill like anything else, and especially valuable in this context. That's what we're here to improve, right? Out of ideas? No problem. Just keep talking and stay on point
.” The club had such a feeling of isolation, he sometimes wondered if a person coming in or overhearing them from the hallway would have the first idea what they were up to. Some cultish, argumentative variation on Toastmasters.

Right now, they were working independently in teams of two and three, some clustered around computers at the far side of the room, others with their desks repositioned to face together, quizzing each other from note cards and books, all of them busy. In earlier years, as a young teacher straight out of college, nothing had pleased him more than this, witnessing his students' self-directed industriousness and enthusiasm. Used to make his face flood with warm feelings and eyes burn at the corners. Those days, he'd sometimes wander out of the room and back again just for the joyous rush of sentiment he experienced returning, seeing them all there, still at work, so engaged and earnest—
Oh people, my people, my favorite chosen few
. Debate team, he'd tell anyone who might listen then
, “Is not just an interesting and fun way to develop your public-speaking skills, practice forms of consensus-style governance; it's maybe the only remaining formal piece of your education that will actually train you in the fundamental civic responsibility of every person in a democracy, which is knowing how to take a stand in the world about anything—how to formulate an argument and articulate it forcefully, in public. Where else are you going to learn that? Tell me anything in the world more important to know how to do!”
Now what? He still believed in it, but he couldn't keep his thoughts from meandering, floating in and out. He no longer ran the convoluted free-form congressional-style practice sessions. Too involved, too much time and effort. He sat on the edge of his desk, letting them work on their own, eyes drifting from the stack of Sinclair Ross mock-essay pop quizzes on his leg to the clock . . . the window . . . the students . . . back to the essays. No rush of good feelings. Exhaustion. What had happened?