The dining room at the country club had picture windows overlooking the first tee box and the ninth green, and even with all
the snow you could make out the general shape of the fairways by following the tree lines. Ice had caught on the underside
of the branches and pulled them down, like earrings, and the branches hung motionless in the sun as if gravity itself had
frozen in the night. Calmer squinted into the glare coming off the ice and noticed half a dozen children in the distance,
riding sleds and some sort of metal saucers down a hill, carefully avoiding the flat area at the bottom, where the green was.
Country club children, already programmed to the inviolability of putting surfaces.
They went to an unoccupied table, Larsson marking it for himself with his hat, which he hadn’t put on his head since he got
out of the car, and then he led Calmer to the middle of the room where the buffet had been laid out, about twenty-five yards
of it—fruit, biscuits, waffles, pancakes, a dozen steaming trays of eggs and bacon and sausage and breakfast steaks, gravy
with sausage, gravy with bacon, gravy with chicken gizzards, six or seven different kinds of potatoes. There was a separate
table of fish—perch, fried catfish, clams, trout, an enormous salmon, head intact and smiling in spite of a body eaten down
to semi-skeletal, giving it the look of an airplane fuselage under construction.
A few yards beyond the smiling salmon, also smiling, was an old black man in a chef’s outfit who was cutting thick, dripping
slices of ham and roast beef to order, and beyond him was a smaller table set with boiled eggs, pickled herring, and pickled
pigs’ feet, this mostly for the unusually large number of members who’d made their money in the bar business and preferred
a traditional holiday breakfast.
Larsson was an eater. He took two empty plates, filling one with flapjacks and sausage and maybe two pounds of eggs Benedict,
and the other with clams, waffles, hash-browned potatoes, and some of the salmon. In spite of his Christmas binge, Calmer
was not much of a drinker and could hardly bring himself to look at the food on Larsson’s plates. Or for that matter at the
grinning, half-eaten monster salmon at the end of the table. There were whole towns in South Dakota that couldn’t eat that
fish at one sitting.
Presently, they returned to the table, back to Larsson’s hat, and he said a quiet blessing over his food and then covered
the eggs with ketchup, then covered that and everything else on the plate with maple syrup. He poured syrup until the ketchup
began to float.
Calmer had taken three pieces of bacon, a slice of toast, and a glass of orange juice. He drank half the juice and then on
an impulse handed it to one of the waitresses and asked her to fill it the rest of the way back up with vodka.
And then he did it again, and the second one came with a little umbrella. Larsson smiled at Calmer and smiled at his friends
as they passed by the table, and some of them stopped a moment to ask after his wife or tease him about the sweater.
“We go back a ways, you and me,” he said to Calmer when they were alone again.
Calmer found he had no opinion on that, and said nothing.
“Goddamn, but it goes by, doesn’t it? Time, I mean? Things change, people come and go, and here we still are…”
Calmer began to feel the vodka and loosened his overshoes and put his feet up on one of the empty chairs and sat watching
Larsson eat, with no particular thought in his head except that drinking screwdrivers was not a disagreeable way to spend
the morning. His feet were hot and beginning to burn, as they always did for a week or so after frostbite.
Larsson signaled the waitress.
Calmer pried his stocking feet out of his overshoes and could not have felt better if the warden just took off the leg irons.
He set them back where they’d been on the chair. “You mind?” he said.
“You know, honey,” Larsson said to the waitress, “I don’t see that a little shot of Irish in this would leave me any worse
off than I already am. That man’s not even a member and he’s having all the damn fun.”
While she was gone Larsson moved his plates to the side—both of them clean as a whistle, the last streaks of syrup wiped up
with the last of the flapjacks—and set his elbows on the spot where they had been. He leaned in, and Calmer was afraid he
might reach for his wrist and call him
honey
too.
“Well, get to the point, right?” Larsson said.
Calmer shrugged. Larsson burped. Larsson said, “Merle was a decent sort, Calmer, not the warmest human being I ever met, but
a decent administrator.” He stopped, rearranging it in his head. Calmer waited, saying nothing. “The plain fact is, the man
made some mistakes, and now he’s left us to clean up the damn mess.” Larsson’s voice took an unexpectedly hard tone as he
said this, and then a long empty moment ensued, Larsson staring at him like he expected Calmer to object. The waitress brought
Larsson his Irish coffee.
“Look, I know you didn’t have much use for the fella; shit, maybe you don’t have much use for me neither.”
“What did he do?” Calmer said.
Larsson smiled at that. “That’s the old Calmer,” he said, “here’s the problem, here’s how we fix it.” He checked the room,
making sure nobody else was on the way over. “The worst of it?” he said. “There’s been some…
statistical irregularities
in the testing.”
Calmer stared at him, waiting.
Larsson said, “The rest is probably nothing that can’t be handled in-house,” and seemed to think that over, as if for the
first time. “There’s money missing from the general account, but my thinking is, I don’t see any reason to tarnish anybody’s
name if we don’t have to.”
To Calmer the conversation had begun to feel like somebody stealing your car and then calling you up to see if the transmission
was still under warranty. Calmer sipped at his drink and wiggled his toes and considered the tapered shape of the human foot.
Larsson said, “So why’s the old fucker coming to me, right? Well, you’re the only one I know that might have a handle on this.
The first I heard about it, a friend of mine in Pierre, a man fairly high up in the state government, called up as a personal
favor to warn me that we’ve got a red flag on the statewide achievement tests.”
In the same year they’d squashed him, Calmer had noticed an unlikely improvement in the standardized tests over at Jefferson,
in fact had asked the principal over there for breakdowns of the scores. He tried to remember what year that would have been.
“We got skewered results,” Larsson said. “Whole classes getting ninety-eighth, ninety-ninth percentile in math, all of them
over at Jefferson, the same three or four teachers—and the dumb bastards, one of the classes was even remedial math.”
“
Skewed
,” Calmer said. “
Skewered
means skewered.”
“That too,” Larsson said.
Jefferson was the old high school. The principal, Lobby Johnson, had come up through the ranks of the athletic department,
spent a dozen years as the school’s head football coach, and by now had thirty-odd years with the district, twenty-four of
them in lockstep with Cowhurl. There had been hard feelings when Calmer was chosen assistant superintendent ahead of him,
and Cowhurl had told Calmer on the day he was appointed to leave Lobby Johnson and his high school alone, that he would oversee
what went on over there himself.
Calmer hadn’t cared much for this arrangement but went along with it, leaving Lobby Johnson and his high school to Cowhurl,
and for his part, Lobby Johnson went about running his school like a football team and harboring his grudges against the school
system and against Calmer, and when the time came he was first in line to compose a letter of complaint. This marked the beginning
of the end for Calmer; Cowhurl and the board had decided to get rid of him and were building a case, soliciting complaints—nothing
official, just a phone call at home, an informal talk over lunch—covering themselves in the eventuality of a lawsuit.
But Lobby Johnson at least had never pretended that he and Calmer were friends. There were others who wrote complaints who
had been friends of Calmer, some who owed him their jobs, the most surprising of the bunch being a middle-aged assistant principal
who lived just up the street and had been promoted into his position on Calmer’s recommendation, and for years had dropped
into the house for a Saturday- or Sunday-afternoon beer. He was a disciple of Calmer’s ideas on school discipline, which came
down to one idea really, that if you wanted a kid to behave like a human being the first thing you did was treat him like
a human being.
With Cowhurl and the board suddenly after Calmer’s scalp, though, the assistant principal had a change of heart, and wrote
a letter complaining that Calmer disrupted the smooth operation of his school with his—Calmer’s—unannounced visits to see
for himself how the students were being treated. Calmer, he said, was undermining discipline.
Like the others who turned against him, the assistant principal, for all his kitchen visits, had never said a word to Calmer
about it before.
The waitress brought more drinks.
Calmer said, “What about the money?”
“We can put you on a consultant basis,” Larsson said. “Say, two thousand a week, against a minimum of ten thousand.”
Calmer looked at him blankly, gradually realizing he was being offered a job. He’d thought Larsson wanted a favor.
“Twenty-five hundred,” Larsson said, “but that’s all I can squeeze out of the discretionary fund.”
Twenty-five hundred dollars a week? He tried to remember what he used to make back before he’d been demoted. A hundred a week?
No, that was Milledgeville. Or maybe Prairie Glen. A lot of figures came into his head, but the only one that was anything
like twenty-five hundred a week was the fifty-eight hundred that he’d paid for the house in Vincent Heights. He remembered
the room he’d built off the back steps for Margaret’s bedroom, and the old woman next door always talking about her birds,
but now that he thought about it, it seemed to him that she’d lived with them too. And then there was that kid, running around
breaking in to houses all over the neighborhood. What had become of him?
They had a few more drinks, which seemed to clear things up, in the way more drinks will sometimes do. Calmer saw no reason
in the world not to drink screwdrivers every morning of his life.
“I can’t go outside the district,” Larsson was saying, “bring somebody in that’s got to be brought up to speed. But I found
out what’s going on, which means sooner or later somebody else is going to find out, which then leaves us at the mercy of
any small-time politician in the state who wants to be governor and goes blabbing to the papers. Besides that, I’ve got to
hire a damn superintendent, and the whole mess has to be cleaned up by then, to keep whoever’s next clear of this, completely
out of the picture. You can see that.”
Calmer nodded.
“And I can’t use somebody we already got to look into it; it’s the same fucking problem, who do I trust to keep his mouth
shut? Hire some local lawyer and the next thing you know he’s running for governor too.”
“Tell me about the money,” Calmer said.
“All right, three thousand a week against a guaranteed fifteen, but that’s all I can do.”
“No, the money you said was missing from discretionary spending.”
Larsson scratched his head and smiled. “You would have done this for the good of education, wouldn’t you?” Calmer didn’t answer,
and Larsson continued to smile.
“I don’t know how much,” he said, “don’t even know for a fact who all took it. It’s a side issue here, though. The problem’s
the test scores.”
Calmer shrugged, seeing no reason to remind Larsson that he’d seen it coming. That he’d gone to Cowhurl and warned him.
“At this point I got no idea how long it’s been going on or how high it went. That’s going to be important, I think, how far
back this goes.”
The waitress brought Calmer another screwdriver, and he thanked her and gave her a ten-dollar bill. The biggest tip he’d ever
left in his life. He took half of the drink down at once, noticed that he could no longer taste the vodka.
She came by again a few minutes later, possibly trolling for another ten-dollar bill, but this time Larsson asked for his
tab. He held the pen awkwardly to sign, the way Cousin Arlo and his family held spoons when they ate.
Calmer started for the bathroom but meandered over to the bar instead and stood a little while staring, transfixed as the
bartender doctored up three Bloody Marys, sticking a stalk of brownish celery into each glass before she slid them across
the bar to the waitress. The waitress stood beside him while she waited, smiling.
She said, “You remember me, Mr. Ottosson?”
He smiled at the girl and shook his head.
“Carolyn Dickerson? You were the best teacher I ever had.” Teaching, there would always be that. They’d squashed him—ruined
him, he’d thought for a long time—but here was some kid he didn’t even remember, calling him the best teacher she ever had.
“Thank you,” he said, and the room seemed to pitch, and a moment later he was dripping sweat.
“Mr. Ottosson?” she said. “Are you okay, hon?”
Hon.
He smiled again and excused himself and moved past her, walking through the double glass doors outside onto the practice putting
green in his socks. The cold felt good against his head, which was wet with perspiration, and then, without feeling it coming,
he threw up over the snow. His eyes watered and his sinuses stung, and when his vision cleared, he bent over and picked up
a little clean snow and rubbed it across his face.
The waitress had seen him vomit, and she came out now and took his arm. “Are you okay?” she said again. Beyond her, he saw
Larsson collecting his boots and hat and coat at the table, hurrying, and beyond Larsson, the brunch crowd, hushed and watching.
The best teacher she’d ever had. What did anybody here have that was worth more than that?