I put the gun down on the blotter. “I have no intention of shooting you, Ted. But let me remind you that you haven’t really done your duty.”
“That’s right,” Dick said, and after Ted had taken two steps toward the door, Dick came out of his seat, took two running steps of his own, and collared him. Ted’s face dissolved into utter amazement.
“Hey, Dick,” he said.
“Don’t you Dick me, you son of a bitch.”
Ted tried to give him an elbow in the belly, and then his arms were pinned behind him, one by Pat and one by George Yannick.
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Sandra Cross got slowly out of her seat and walked to him, demurely, like a girl on a country road. Ted’s eyes were bulging, half-mad. I could taste what was coming, the way you can taste thunderheads before summer rain . . . and the hail that comes with it sometimes.
She stopped before him, and an expression of sly, mocking devotion crossed her face and was gone. She put a hand out, touched the collar of his shirt. The muscles of his neck bunched as he jerked away from her. Dick and Pat and George held him like springs. She reached slowly inside the open collar of the khaki shirt and began to pull it open, popping the buttons. There was no sound in the room but the tiny, flat tic-tic as the buttons fell to the floor and rolled. He was wearing no undershirt. His flesh was bare and smooth. She moved as if to kiss it, and he spit in her face.
Pig Pen smiled from over Sandra’s shoulder, the grubby court jester with the king’s paramour. “I could put your eyes out,” he said. “Do you know that? Pop them out just like olives. Poink! Poink!”
“Let me go! Charlie, make them let me-”
“He cheats, ” Sarah Pasterne said loudly. “He always looks at my answer sheet in French. Always.”
Sandra stood before him, now looking down, a sweet, murmurous smile barely curving the bow of her lips. The first two fingers of her right hand touched the slick spittle on her cheek lightly.
“Here,” Billy Sawyer whispered. “Here’s something for you, handsome.” He crept up behind Ted on tippy-toe and suddenly pulled his hair.
Ted screamed.
“He cheats on the laps in gym, too,” Don said harshly. “You really quit football because you dint have no sauce, dintchoo?”
“Please,” Ted said. “Please, Charlie.” He had begun to grin oddly, and his eyeballs were shiny with tears. Sylvia had joined the little circle around him. She might have been the one who goosed him, but I couldn’t really see.
They were moving around him in a slow kind of dance that was nearly beautiful.
Fingers pinched and pulled, questions were asked, accusations made. Irma Bates pushed a ruler down the back of his pants. Somehow his shirt was ripped off and flew to the back of the room in two tatters. Ted was breathing in great, high whoops. Anne Lasky began to rub the bridge of his nose with an eraser. Corky scurried back to his desk like a good mouse, found a bottle of Carter’s ink, and dumped it in his hair. Hands flew out like birds and rubbed it in briskly.
Ted began to weep and talk in strange, unconnected phrases.
“Soul brother?” Pat Fitzgerald asked. He was smiling, whacking Ted’s bare shoulders lightly with a notebook in cadence. “Be my soul brother? That right? Little Head Start?
Little free lunch? That right? Hum? Hum? Brothers? Be soul brothers?”
“Got your Silver Star, hero, ” Dick said, and raised his knee, placing it expertly in the big muscle of Ted’s thigh.
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Ted screamed. His eyes bulged and rolled toward me, the eyes of a horse staved on a high fence. “Please . . . pleeeese, Charlie . . . pleeeeeeeeee-” And then Nancy Caskin stuffed a large wad of notebook paper into his mouth. He tried to spit it out, but Sandra rammed it back in.
“That will teach you to spit,” sire said reproachfully.
Harmon knelt and pulled off one of his shoes. He rubbed it in Ted’s inky hair and then slammed the sole against Ted’s chest. It left a huge, grotesque footprint.
“Admit one!” he crowed.
Tentatively, almost demurely, Carol stepped on Ted’s stockinged foot and twisted her heel. Something in his foot snapped. Ted blubbered.
He sounded like he was begging somewhere behind the paper, but you couldn’t really tell. Pig Pen darted in spiderlike and suddenly bit his nose.
There was a sudden black pause. I noticed that I had turned the pistol around so that the muzzle was pointed at my head, but of course that would not be at all cricket. I unloaded it and put it carefully in the top drawer, on top of Mrs. Underwood’s plan book.
I was quite confident that this had not been in today’s lesson plan at all.
They were smiling at Ted, who hardly looked human at all anymore. In that brief flick of time, they looked like gods, young, wise, and golden. Ted did not look like a god.
Ink ran down his cheeks in blue-black teardrops. The bridge of his nose was bleeding, and one eye glared disjointedly toward no place. Paper protruded through his teeth. He breathed in great white snuffles of air.
I had time to think: We have got it on. Now we have got it all the way on.
They fell on him.
Chapter 31
I had Corky pull up the shades before they left. He did it with quick, jerky motions.
There were now what seemed like hundreds of cruisers out there, thousands of people. It was three minutes of one.
The sunlight hurt my eyes.
“Good-bye,” I said.
“God-bye,” Sandra said.
They all said good-bye, I think, before they went out. Their footfalls made a tunny, echoy noise going down the hall. I closed my eyes and imagined a giant centipede wearing Georgia Giants on each of its one hundred feet. When I opened them again, they were walking across the bright green of the lawn. I wished they had used the sidewalk; even after all that had happened, it was still a hell of a lawn.
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The last thing I remember seeing of them was that their hands were streaked with black ink.
People enveloped them.
One of the reporters, throwing caution to the winds, eluded three policemen and raced down to where they were, pell-mell.
The last one to be swallowed up was Carol Granger. I thought she looked back, but I couldn’t tell for sure. Philbrick started to walk stolidly toward the school. Flashbulbs were popping all over the place.
Time was short. I went over to where Ted was leaning against the green cinderblock wall. He was sitting with his legs splayed out below the bulletin board, which was full of notices from the Mathematical Society of America, which nobody ever read, Peanuts comic strips (the acme of humor, in the late Mrs. Underwood’s estimation), and a poster showing Bertrand Russell and a quote: “Gravity alone proves the existence of God. ” But any undergraduate in creation could have told Bertrand that it has been conclusively proved that there is no gravity; the earth just sucks.
I squatted beside Ted. I pulled the crumpled wad of math paper out of his mouth and laid it aside. Ted began to drool.
“Ted. ”
He looked past me, over my shoulder.
“Ted,” I said, and patted his cheek gently.
He shrank away. His eyes rolled wildly.
“You’re going to get better,” I said. “You’re going to forget this day ever happened. ”
Ted made mewling sounds.
“Or maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll go on from here, Ted. Build from this. Is that such an impossible idea?”
It was, for both of us. And being so close to Ted had begun to make me very nervous.
The intercom chinked open. It was Philbrick. He was puffing and blowing again.
“Decker?”
“Right here.”
“Come out with your hands up.”
I sighed. “You come down and get me, Philbrick, old sport. I’m pretty goddamn tired.
This psycho business is a hell of a drain on the glands.”
“All right,” he said, tough. “They’ll be shooting in the gas canisters in just about one minute.”
“Better not, ” I said. I looked at Ted. Ted didn’t look back; he just kept on looking into emptiness. Whatever he saw there must have been mighty tasty, because he was still drooling down his chin. “You forgot to count noses. There’s still one of them down here.
He’s hurt.” That was something of an understatement.
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His voice was instantly wary. “Who?”
“Ted Jones.”
“How is he hurt?”
“Stubbed his toe. ”
“He’s not there. You’re lying.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you, Philbrick, and jeopardize our beautiful relationship. ”
No answer. Puff, snort, blow.
“Come on down,” I invited. “The gun is unloaded. It’s in a desk drawer. We can play a couple of cribbage hands, then you can take me out and tell all the papers how you did it single-handed. You might even make the cover of Time if we work it right. “