Sophomores

by Sean Desmond

  “Once when Telemachos tells him to spare his servant Medon, and the second time when Penelope still doubts it’s him.”

  “What does Homer describe as ‘all-conquering’?”

  Sleep or death, Dan thought, and then guessed: “Sleep.”

  “What must Odysseus do to right things with Poseidon?”

  “Plant an oar in a land where no man knows what it’s for.”

  Oglesby looked up again from the Rouse translation. “Very good, Mr. Malone. One last question, which no one in the history of this class has answered on the first try. You get it right, we talk about heroes, and the class takes the easy test. You get it wrong, and I will have Professor Spiridakos at SMU write the essay questions in ancient Greek. Are you ready?”

  Holy shit, Dan thought.

  “Do it for Johnny!” Jay Blaylock was a movie-line jukebox, and Oglesby’s whipping boy.

  “Mr. Blaylock—you can write a five-hundred-word essay on outbursts for tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, sir.” A snappy Boy Scout salute.

  “Make it a thousand.”

  Oglesby slammed his stick on Blaylock’s desk. It broke some of the tension Dan felt. His hands were trembling as he gripped the edge of his desk.

  “Okay, Mr. Malone. What drunk companion of Odysseus’s fell off Circe’s roof?”

  Dan threw his chin down in concentration. C’mon, you know this. “It’s not Eurylochus.”

  “No.”

  “It’s not Perimedes.”

  Confident, Oglesby closed his book. “No.”

  “Ahhh . . .”

  “Well, Mr. Malone, I must say, that was the closest . . .”

  Then it came to him, like a gift from the gods.

  “Elpenor!” Dan shouted. “It’s Elpenor. Odysseus sees him again in the underworld!”

  Mr. Oglesby bowed. The bell rang, and a great cheer went up among the sophomores.

  * * *

  That Saturday evening Rob McGhee was still crowing about Dan’s epic trivia battle. As the sun set and all the ways of the day went dark, Dan and Rob sat on the concrete retaining wall in front of the Malone house on Crown Shore Drive. The wall was the one signature element to the property—although you could only park half your ass on it, it was reminiscent of the wall in Charlie Brown and was a well-placed caesura in the familiar beat of Fox and Jacobs tract housing. In the fifties, the North Dallas developer had laid out the lots with a simple repeat of ranch houses and given all these side streets their generic marine and littoral appellations—Crown Shore, Boca Bay, Cold Harbor, and so on. The irony that the subdivision sat on a high prairie hundreds of miles from the sea seemed unintended. Nonetheless, the wall was a good spot for cigarettes, conversations, and watching the western skies.

  “C’mon, Malone—what was that?” Rob teased his hand through his moussed hair; he had stolen the Perma Soft from his older sister Lexy. They were waiting for Steve O’Donnell to pick them up—Sticky was the first to get his license—and take them to the dance at Ursuline, the girls’ high school.

  “Just read a lot of mythology, I guess,” Dan said.

  “That was some Real Genius shit.”

  With cupped hands Dan chased a cricket along the retaining wall until it hopped toward the sewer grate. “Nah, I’m a really slow reader.”

  They stood there in the gloaming, the day’s swelter leaching from the asphalt, until the square headlights of the O’Donnell family station wagon flashed around the bend. The tape deck was murmuring “Radio Free Europe” as the Nissan Stanza rolled up.

  Dan peered inside the car. Sticky at the wheel and Rick riding shotgun. Rob grabbed the seat behind Rick, and with the car seat for Stick’s baby sister glued into the other backseat with a resin of Hi-C and Cheerios, Dan tumbled into the way back and sniffed. Christ, the smell is 4-H back here.

  “Hey, asswipes . . .” Rick reached over and sucker-punched Rob in the chest.

  “Son of a . . . ow.”

  “That was for racking me before Latin.”

  Sticky pulled away. It was a breezy Indian-summer night. Windows down, they glided through the halos of light along Forest Lane, Rick mumbling along with the music.

  “So, gentlemen, what’s our plan for the night?” Rick was the crew’s unofficial social chair and the only one with any significant game—i.e., he could flirt with a girl longer than one slow song. Freshman year Rick had the same class schedule as Dan, and osmotically they had become friends. Before Jesuit Prep, Rick was a child actor (he played Spalding Gray’s son in the movie True Stories and was backslapped by Bobby Valentine in a Whataburger commercial), but his personality veered far from the philothespic pretensions of the drama nerds. His looks were a little elfin, like a young Jack Lemmon with ash-brown hair that had a natural part to its curls, followed by baby blues, freckles, dimples, and a jaw-drop smile. The girls fell for this big-time.

  “I’m dancing with Jenny O’Meara, I tell you what.” Rob put it out there.

  “Dude, she’s going with deMarini,” Sticky replied in a here-we-go cadence.

  “So?”

  “So, he can hurt you without even trying. And she is so out of your league.”

  “We’ve got a thing. We went to camp together.”

  “Jesus, McGhee, that was Bible camp five fuckin’ years ago.”

  Rob McGhee was the son of Reverend Robert McGhee, the pastor of Good Shepherd Episcopal. Father McGhee was so high church that you could argue Rob was more Catholic than anyone else in the car. (Especially since Rick was a Methodist.) Rob went to high school at Jesuit over Episcopal for a number of reasons—but most likely because his father was close to leaving his flock (or vice versa). Rob had been raised so Christian it was almost untenable, but he wasn’t naïve or saintly, just anxious, high-strung, a confused vineyard worker. Under a mop of dirty-blond hair cropped new wave, Rob was a manic dreamer, a guitar pick tucked between his teeth, fidgety, his fingers folding, drumming, knuckles cracking, fingernails in constant chaw as the preacher’s son imagined what John Lennon meant by “no religion.” His worrywart tendencies were antagonized to the hilt by the bathtub cynicism of Steve O’Donnell.

  “I’m telling you I can get there.”

  “Yeah, get her to pity you.”

  “Stick, it’s sad that you are so lonely that you have to lash out at others like this.”

  Sticky—a nickname earned for an incident freshman year involving pocket pool, a melted Jolly Rancher, and fingers glued to his algebra test in Chaplinesque fashion—loved to talk shit. He was the best athlete of the bunch but was close to dropping JV football and basketball for music. When not suffering from a case of the fuck-its, he was going to be Jimmy Page, and he and Rob—who, well, he wasn’t Robert Plant, more like Robert Smith—had plans that extended well past their third, breakout album. Sticky had a wide, pied-Irish face, real caterpillar brows, and a great widow’s peak of Kennedy hair lacquered in Outsiders style. He affected lazy punk and too-cool-for-school. He did care; he just didn’t let you know.

  “Lexy said this is the dance where girls pick their guy for the year.” Rob belched out a fat cloud of Dr Pepper. “Winter Snowball, Sadie Hawkins, prom. Tonight’s the night you have to get all that going.”

  “Fuck that noise,” Rick said.

  “I’m not getting married. But I’d settle for some boobs in my face,” Sticky announced to the floor mats of his driver’s seat. The car swerved as he felt around for his Cult tape. He was doing fifty in a thirty, driving over the lane bumpers, but traffic was light and death not imminent.

  Sticky’s family was an interesting case. His brother Dennis “Rabbit” O’Donnell was a senior at Jesuit, third in his class, all-state in cross-country, and for whom early admission to Stanford felt like a done deal. Dennis had hectored Sticky into a myriad (Oglesby word) of second-banana complexes. Sticky was also five
deviations bright, but with family issues like tissues, one after the next, the foremost being his father had left Sticky’s mother, and not for another woman. Sticky, who was the second oldest of six, didn’t talk about this, ever.

  The rest of the crew groaned as he found the tape along the floorboards and the screaming guitar came in off Electric. It was Stick’s car and Stick’s stereo, but the Cult?

  God, this music sucks and blows, Dan thought as he stared up at the dome light like he was making some last petition for an unanswered prayer. As the station wagon turned on Inwood, Rob stretched out in the backseat and kicked his Kaepas next to the headrest for Rick’s seat.

  “I bet five dollars that Malone doesn’t talk to Cady Bloom.”

  “Fuck you,” Dan said.

  “You know, Lexy told me Cady is going out for cheerleading this year.” Rob had all the cheerleader gossip via his sister.

  “So?”

  “So she’ll be over at Jesuit every afternoon for practice. Your competition is about to go school-wide. I’m just saying you got to lock it down early.”

  “She doesn’t even know—”

  “Bullshit.” Rick was trying to buck him up in his smart-ass way. “She knows you from St. Rita’s. Get on it, Malone.”

  Fuckin’-a, Rick’s right.

  “Where are we going after this?” Rob asked.

  “You and Malone here can go on a magical double date with girls you’ll never speak to,” Rick riffed. The rest of the car cackled with gleeful agreement. Cruel, Dan smarted, and probably true. For it was known throughout the Nissan Stanza, if not the entire realm of North Dallas: Dan Malone was rattled by girls.

  Dan tapped his pack of cigarettes, wanting to get a smoke in before the dance. Am I really such a coward? he wondered as he stared out the back window, watching the road disappear into the Dallas night.

  * * *

  Five minutes at the Ursuline dance proved that the boys were as socially inept as expected. Jesuit kids ran in the normal, awkward cliques (jocks, greasers, anti-socs, headbangers, artsy fartsies, band geeks, etc.)—but Dan’s crew flew apart in a multitude of directions. Rick spotted Lili Villeneuve, the French foreign exchange student, and that was the last they saw of Rick that night. Rob shadowed Jenny O’Meara while pretending not to. Stick got into an argument with his cousin Tara, who, with a bevy of froshgirls, wanted full backgrounds on impending lettermen. “When Smokey Sings” leapt out of the speakers, and all the girls started pulling taffy and stutter-stepping aerobics like Molly Ringwald in detention. And just that quickly, Dan was left alone on the sidelines. “I gotta hit the head . . . ,” he said to no one, and slipped away. The boys’ room in an all-girls Catholic high school was three floors down in some subbasement where he was sure he’d be murdered by a member of the janitorial staff. But the long halls on the way attracted a curious if disaffected element. There was Eddie Rivera in front of the mirror, dragging his bangs across his face. Between rounds of grab-ass, Devin Osweiler and a couple of his good ole boys from the wrestling team were dippin’ and had covered one urinal in brown loogies. Lalo da Silva was yelling at his twin brother, Memo, in Spanish about una chica, and uber-nerd Peter Winkleman muttered to himself, lost in some Bakshi version of reality.

  Dan washed his hands and stared into the mirror. No major acne disasters, but don’t pick at that. Mop top kind of hopeless. Why did you wear this Benetton rugby shirt? You look like a flag for an African country. Stop it, man up, go chat up girls, not including Jenny Nowicki, who talks nonstop about swim team. Find Cady Bloom before the next slow song.

  Unable to muster or convince himself, Dan dawdled back to the dance. The Ursuline dining hall was lit low, but he had no problem spotting Cady. She was enveloped by deep blue banners that read, twilight stardust, some sort of confusing, half-baked theme for this mixer. Mary Mother of God, she is cute, Dan thought—big brown eyes, brown hair teased and crimped, and pulling off a checkered-skirt-and-black-tights look that was somewhere between Winona Ryder and Lisa Bonet. The good news: she wasn’t dancing but gazing toward the floor to do so. The bad news: there was that giant dickface Brad McQuivers making his way over.

  The window for approach was closing fast, and Dan was about to veer off when McQuivers was accosted by Samantha Schimmel. Dan almost broke into a skip. The DJ was slip-cueing to the synth whining of Tears for Fears. Dan started across the brazen threshold. Act cool, don’t make a beeline. Three steps away, he caught her dark eyes, and she smiled bright. He moved under the heavenly banners with her now. Two steps away.

  “Cady, oh my Gawd, come, come, come!”

  The piano for “Head over Heels” crashed in, and Julie Houlihan practically tackled Cady from behind, turning her away from Dan, who found himself on a barren tundra as everyone else paired off.

  Goddamn it.

  Dan circled the outskirts of the dance floor, pretending to have purpose but really orbiting like a sad, lost satellite. After a couple of forlorn passes, he headed out to the balcony off the dining hall. The balcony was crowded with upper-class assholes, and Dan wandered down the steps to the back lawn of the school, which rolled to a break of cedars.

  Dan lit his cigarette and watched the smoke silver in the moonlight. He paced around the lawn and then parked himself below the balcony—just in case a chaperone or one of the Ursuline sisters was doing their rounds. The other kids’ shadows bobbed like crows on the lawn. Standing where he was, Dan could eavesdrop on all the adolescent back-and-forth bullshit. Like the swineherd listening in on the suitors in the hall. Then he heard:

  “Oh my Gawd, he was totally coming over.”

  “Totally . . .”

  It was Cady and Julie. They had ducked Dan on purpose. And now he knew. Dan put out his cigarette and hugged the wall. Lord, if they see me now—complete social suicide.

  “He’s been in love with you since like seventh grade.”

  Julie Houlihan had no business but your business, and she had had it in for Dan since he beat her in the St. Rita’s spelling bee.

  “Okay, so now I’m starting to feel bad. I should have danced with him.”

  “You dance with him and then you can rule out Charlie Corlett, who I’m telling you told Janie, who told me, that he thought he might like you . . .”

  “He’s like shy, right? It’s like so late in the dance, what was he waiting for?”

  There was no way he could be seen overhearing all this. Dan looked up at the Big Dipper, trying to muster a plan. Okay, asshole, run away. Dan stayed tight to the wall, crab-walking until he was clear of the balcony. Cady Bloom feels kind of sorry for me. That’s something I can work with, right? He rambled his way through bushes, a drainage ditch, and the side lawns of Ursuline Academy to burst forth into the parking lot. The kids hanging out there just assumed he was smoking pot and asked if he was Holden Caulfield.

  Within the hour Dan had rounded up his shameless crew: Rick, who was in a vague penalty/power-play situation with Lili for eyeing another girl or some other petty merde; Sticky, who was ranting at poor Agatha Torres about the Cowboys’ flex defense; and Rob, who was serving up the nice-boy shoulder to cry on with Jenny O’Meara. (Jason deMarini had apparently told her they needed to “take it easy,” and what did that really mean?) They had all basically struck out but gotten through unscathed by major rejection or drawing unwanted attention to themselves.

  So after a minor success of a night, the boys hit the skids, piling into Sticky’s station wagon to cruise Forest Lane. The dance wound down to “Stairway to Heaven,” and then lights up, hands coming off butts and bras quick. At ten p.m., Mother Pauline came over from the convent to lock up. She led the DJ toward the music room to stow the speakers and the turntables.

  As they placed all the equipment in the A/V closet, Mother Pauline gazed around her music teacher’s classroom with a deep sadness. This was Margaret Raleigh’s class, and it was her usual
job to close down the dances. The reason she wasn’t there was terrible: in April, Peggy had been brutally attacked and strangled in the driveway of her Lake Highlands home. This left the Ursuline music teacher in a coma, lying in a bed of Presbyterian Hospital. Her husband was Reverend Standing Raleigh, the pastor of First United Methodist, whom the Dallas police had arrested and charged with attempted murder. His Park Cities congregation put up his bail as he awaited trial.

  As she flicked out the lights in the music room, Mother Pauline said a prayer for Peggy and whispered to no one: “Heaven help us.”

  [ SEPTEMBER 18 ]

  In the first quarter of 1987, American Airlines saved $40,000 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first class. Pat Malone considered this as he sucked the brine and vodka out of the pit of the olive he had drowned and then salvaged from his martini. The memory of the financials meeting, an exhausting carousel of fiscal slides, shuffled forward in his mind as Pat replayed a god-awful long day. Pat’s boss, Robert Crandall, the lugubrious leader of the largest airline in the free world, was hunting and pecking for cuts all over the place.

  “Do you know how much overhead was saved by not painting the hulls on the new craft silver or white?”

  Crandall was an hour into the managers’ summit in the airline’s old New York HQ, 633 Third Avenue, and started to chain-smoke.

  “The cost of the paint is two-point-three-million dollars, plus the weight of that paint on the aircraft is on average a hundred fifty-four pounds. That’s a weight savings of point oh three percent compared to the painted fleet. Now multiply that over the new MD-80s, Airbus 300s, and 757s, and that’s thirty-four less tons of weight we are carrying per mile, with an average itinerary of four hundred thirty-six miles and total revenue passenger miles of one hundred twenty-three billion, that’s one hundred sixty-three million dollars to this year’s bottom line and close to a one-point-five-billion projection over the life of the new fleet.”

  “Riles, again,” Pat called to the bartender at Sweeney’s. He pulled at his button-down collar and loosened a dark blue company tie. A warm mid-September day in New York, and the far end of the bar was a stifled ozone of flat beer, ash, and stale piss. But that was no bother to Pat, who had time to kill before dinner with his cousin Bill. And with Jimmy Reilly behind the bar, he was killing time in familiar fashion—Sweeney’s, his old local, was a couple of blocks from the American offices.