There were twenty-seven ‘slow learners’ in Jim’s class, most of them school jocks. The kindest thing you could accuse them of would be disinterest, and some of them had a streak of outright malevolence. He walked in one day to find an obscene and cruelly accurate caricature of himself on the board, with ‘Mr Norman’ unnecessarily chalked under it. He wiped it off without comment and proceeded with the lesson in spite of the snickers.
He worked up interesting lesson plans, included a/v materials, and ordered several high-interest, high-comprehension texts – all to no avail. The classroom mood veered between unruly hilarity and sullen silence. Early in November, a fight broke out between two boys during a discussion of Of Mice and Men. Jim broke it up and sent both boys to the office. When he opened his book to where he had left off, the words ‘Bite It’ glared up at him.
He took the problem to Simmons, who shrugged and lit his pipe. ‘I don’t have any real solution, Jim. Last period is always a bitch. And for some of them, a D grade in your class means no more football or basketball. And they’ve had the other gut English courses, so they’re stuck with it.’
‘And me, too,’ Jim said glumly.
Simmons nodded. ‘Show them you mean business, and they’ll buckle down, if only to keep their sports eligibility.’
But period, seven remained a constant thorn in his side.
One of the biggest problems in Living with Lit was a huge, slow-moving moose named Chip Osway. In early December, during the brief hiatus between football and basketball (Osway played both), Jim caught him with a crib sheet and ran him out of the classroom.
‘If you flunk me, we’ll get you, you son of a bitch!’ Osway yelled down the dim third-floor corridor. ‘You hear me?’
‘Go on,’ Jim said. ‘Don’t waste your breath.’
‘We’ll get you, creepo!’
Jim went back into the classroom. They looked up at him blandly, faces betraying nothing. He felt a surge of unreality, like the feeling that had washed over him before before .
We’ll get you creepo.
He took his grade book out of his desk, opened it to the page titled ‘Living with Literature’, and carefully lettered an F in the exam slot next to Chip Osway’s name.
That night he had the dream again.
The dream was always cruelly slow. There was time to see and feel everything.
And there was the added horror of reliving events that were moving towards a known conclusion, as helpless as a man strapped into a car going over a cliff.
In the dream he was nine and his brother Wayne was twelve. They were going down Broad Street in Stratford, Connecticut, bound for the Stratford Library. Jim’s books were two days overdue, and he had hooked four cents from the cupboard bowl to pay the fine. It was summer vacation. You could smell the freshly cut grass.
You could hear a ballgame floating out of some second-floor apartment window, Yankees leading the Red Sox six to nothing in the top of the eighth, Ted Williams batting, and you could see the shadows from the Burrets Building Company slowly lengthening across the street as the evening turned slowly towards dark.
Beyond Teddy’s Market and Burrets, there was a railroad overpass, and on the other side, a number of the local losers hung around a closed gas station – five or six boys in leather jackets and pegged jeans. Jim hated to go by them. They yelled out hey four-eyes and hey shit-heels and hey you got an extra quarter and once they chased them half a block. But Wayne would not take the long way around. That would be chicken.
In the dream, the overpass loomed closer and closer, and you began to feel dread struggling in your throat like a big black bird. You saw everything: the Burrets neon sign, just starting to stutter on and off; the flakes of rust on the green overpass; the glitter of broken glass in the cinders of the railroad bed; a broken bike rim in the gutter.
You try to tell Wayne you’ve been through this before, a hundred times. The local losers aren’t hanging around the gas station this time; they’re hidden in the shadows under the trestle. But it won’t come out. You’re helpless.