“I’ll drive you.”
And so he did. We went down to the emergency room in Brunswick, and the doctor put six stitches in my cheek, and I told him that I had tripped over a chunk of stove wood in the garage and cut my cheek on a fireplace screen my dad was blacking. We told Mom the same thing. And that was the end of it. We never discussed it again. He never tried to tell me what to do again. We lived in the same house, but we walked in wide circles around each other, like a pair of old toms. If I had to guess, I’d say he’ll get along without me very well . . . like the song says.
During the second week of April they sent me back to school with the warning that my case was still under consideration and I would have to go see Mr. Grace every day.
They acted like they were doing me a favor. Some favor. It was like being popped back into the cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
It didn’t take as long to go bad this time. The way people looked at me in the halls.
The way I knew they were talking about me in the teachers’ rooms. The way nobody would even talk to me anymore except Joe. And I wasn’t very cooperative with Grace.
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Yes, folks, things got bad very fast indeed, and they went from bad to worse. But I’ve always been fairly quick on the uptake, and I don’t forget many lessons that I’ve learned well. I certainly learned the lesson about how you could get anyone’s number with a big enough stick. My father picked up the hardhead take, presumably planning to trepan my skull with it, but when I picked up the hatchet, he put it back.
I never saw that pipe wrench again, but what the fuck. I didn’t need that anymore, because that stick wasn’t big enough. I’d known about the pistol in my father’s desk for ten years. Near the end of April I started to carry it to school.
Chapter 30
I looked up at the wall clock. It was 12:30. I drew in all my mental breath and got ready to sprint down the homestretch.
“So ends the short, brutal saga of Charles Everett Decker,” I said. “Questions?”
Susan Brooks said very quietly in the dim room, “I’m sorry for you, Charlie.” It was like the crack of damnation.
Don Lordi was looking at me in a hungry way that reminded me of Jaws for the second time that day. Sylvia was smoking the last cigarette in her pack. Pat Fitzgerald labored on his plane, crimping the paper wings, the usual funny-sly expression gone from his face, replaced by something that was wooden and carved. Sandra Cross still seemed to be in a pleasant daze. Even Ted Jones seemed to have his mind on other matters, perhaps on a door he had forgotten to latch when he was ten, or a dog he might once have kicked.
“If that’s all, then it brings us to the final order of business in our brief but en-lightening stay together,” I said. “Have you learned anything today? Who knows the final order of business? Let’s see.”
I watched them. There was nothing. I was afraid it wouldn’t come, couldn’t come. So tight, so frozen, all of them. When you’re five and you hurt, you make a big noise unto the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain. It’s the Western Way of Enlightenment. You begin to cram your fists into your mouth to stifle the screams. You bleed on the inside. But they had gone so far . . .
And then Pig Pen looked up from his pencil. He was smiling a small, red-eyed smile, the smile of a ferret. His hand crept up into the air, the fingers still clenched around his cheap writing instrument. Be-bop-a-lula, she’s my baby.
So then it was easier for the rest of them. One electrode begins to arc and sputter, and-yoiks!-look, professor, the monster walks tonight.
Susan Brooks put her hand up next. Then there were several together: Sandra raised hers, Grace Stanner raised hers-delicately-and Irma Bates did likewise. Corky. Don. Pat.
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Sarah Pasterne. Some smiling a little, most of them solemn. Tanis. Nancy Caskin. Dick Keene and Mike Gavin, both renowned in the Placerville Greyhounds’ backfield. George and Harmon, who played chess together in study hall. Melvin Thomas. Anne Lasky. At the end all of them were up-all but one.
I called on Carol Granger, because I thought she deserved her moment. You would have thought that she might have had the most trouble making the switch, crossing the terminator, so to speak, but she had done it almost effortlessly, like a girl shedding her clothes in the bushes after dusk had come to the class picnic.
“Carol?” I said. “What’s the answer?”
She thought about how to word it. She put a finger up to the small dimple beside her mouth as she thought, and there was a furrow in her milk-white brow.
“We have to help,” she said. “We have to help show Ted where he has gone wrong. ”
That was a very tasteful way to put it, I thought.
“Thank you, Carol,” I said.
She blushed.
I looked at Ted, who had come back to the here and now. He was glaring again, but in kind of a confused way.
“I think the best thing,” I said, “would be if I became a sort of combination judge and public attorney. Everyone else can be witnesses; and of course, you’re the defendant, Ted.”
Ted laughed wildly. “You,” he said. “Oh, Jesus, Charlie. Who do you think you are?
You’re crazy as a bat. ”
“Do you have a statement?” I asked him.
“You’re not going to play tricks with me, Charlie. I’m not saying a darn thing. I’ll save my speech for when we get out of here.” His eyes swept his classmates accusingly and distrustfully. “And I’ll have a lot to say.”
“You know what happens to squealers, Rocco,” I said in a tough Jimmy Cagney voice. I brought the pistol up suddenly, pointed it at his head, and screamed “BANG!”
Ted shrieked in surprise.
Anne Lasky laughed merrily.
“Shut up! ” Ted yelled at her.
“Don’t you tell me to shut up,” she said. “What are you so afraid of?”
“What . . . ?” His jaw dropped. The eyes bulged. In that moment I felt a great deal of pity for him. The Bible says the snake tempted Eve with the apple. What would have happened if he had been forced to eat it himself?
Ted half-rose from his seat, trembling. “What am I . . . ? What am I . . . ?” He pointed a shivering finger at Anne, who did not cringe at all. “YOU GODDAMN SILLY BITCH!
HE HAS GOT A GUN! HE IS CRAZY! HE HAS SHOT TWO PEOPLE! DEAD! HE IS
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HOLDING US HERE!”
“Not me, he isn’t,” Irma said. “I could have walked right out.”
“We’ve learned some very good things about ourselves, Ted,” Susan said coldly. “I don’t think you’re being very helpful, closing yourself in and trying to be superior. Don’t you realize that this could be the most meaningful experience of our lives?”
“He’s a killer,” Ted said tightly. “He killed two people. This isn’t TV. Those people aren’t going to get up and go off to their dressing rooms to wait for the next take. They’re really dead. He killed them.’
“Soul killer!” Pig Pen hissed suddenly.
“Where the fuck do you think you get off?” Dick Keene asked. “All this just shakes the shit out of your tight little life, doesn’t it? You didn’t think anybody’d find out about you banging Sandy, did you? Or your mother. Ever think about her? You think you’re some kind of white knight. I’ll tell you what you are. You’re a cocksucker. ”
“Witness! Witness!” Grace cried merrily, waving her hand. “Ted Jones buys girlie magazines. I’ve seen him in Ronnie’s Variety doing it.”
“Beat off much, Ted?” Harmon asked. He was smiling viciously.
“And you were a Star Scout,” Pat said dolorously.
Ted twitched from them like a bear that has been tied to a post for the villagers’
amusement. ” I don’t masturbate! ” he yelled.
“Right,” Corky said disgustedly.
“I bet you really stink in bed,” Sylvia said. She looked at Sandra. “Did he stink in bed?”
“We didn’t do it in bed,” Sandra said. “We were in a car. And it was over so quick . . .
”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured.”
“All right,” Ted said. His face was sweaty. He stood up. “I’m walking out of here.
You’re all crazy. I’ll tell them . . . ” He stopped and added with a strange and touching irrelevancy, “I never meant what I said about my mother. ” He swallowed. “You can shoot me, Charlie, but you can’t stop me. I’m going out.”