A Phantom Herd

by Lorraine Ray

Dust smears my town. One beaming yellow sun drowns in the smear. Two flags beneath the sun begin the trouble.

  There's my school. There are the flags. There's my mother turning back, back toward our small brick home, back toward a sink full of bubbles and breakfast dishes and the George and Square radio show, leaving me-a pale child with large brown eyes, short blonde hair, and a gap between my new front teeth-by myself, scuffing to first grade on a hardened mud rut. There's the creosote bush near the rutted path and the snake hole lurking at its base; my older brother once crammed his bad penmanship there. I see the hole and the bush and the sun and the flags, the American and the arc of happy ray-beams that Arizona salutes, flapping halfway down their pole.

  Flags belong at the top of poles; Meredith draws them that way, and when they fly high they make me feel proud like something good about Arizona on national TV or the singing of hymns in church or the reports of the defeat of the communists in Viet Nam. But I don't ask the crossing guard at Fifth Street about the flags; with his badge and his steel bar he looks far too fierce. Instead I take the sidewalk entrance past the flagpole peering up at the low flopping cloth. Has the janitor forgotten to raise them? Why hasn't anyone at school pointed out his mistake? If the janitor has forgotten, surely Mr. Rykken, our principal, will punish him; he's strict; in his desk he keeps a two-inch thick paddle. But has he arrived yet? Behind a prim round privet his office does look dark. Is he inside watching, angry that I linger on the steps, that I stare up at the flags? The thought terrifies me. I scurry past his wicked window down the long open corridor to the playground.

  At the water fountain on the playground I fall in line behind that nice big girl named Eloise Moreno. When Eloise spins around and swipes a dribble off her chin, our eyes meet, and I feel brave, so I ask about the flag. Eloise leans against the brick wall and says, confidentially, "They do that if somebody's dead."

  A moment later the morning bell delivers its angry, clanging summons. Trudging to class in a very straight line, I think about what Eloise said. If someone from the school's dead, I hope it's Mr. Rykken. Although that's a bad thing to think, it's also too good to ever happen.

  My teacher, Miss Flynn, leads the class into the room. At the back of the line I think my everyday morning prayer: may I never see an s ahead in a word, for I have a lisp and it makes people snicker.

  They're inside, squealing at the teddy bear on his high shelf in the corner. Dressed like a pirate for Halloween with a black eye patch and a cardboard cutlass, his hat has a Jolly Roger on it, and he sits atop a box that is a boat. "The janitor and Miss Flynn dressed him that way," says Robert Ruiz, my friend across the aisle. "I saw them when I came back after school." Miss Flynn swishes by, sailing a paper with numbers to circle onto our desks. I think about asking Robert about the flags-why they hang low-when a thin freckled hand taps me on the shoulder. "Don't forget your speech therapy," says Miss Flynn.

  On my way to my speech class a crooked dust devil swirls down from the empty desert lot, from the land everyone says Howard Hughes owns. He's a freak, that Howard Hughes; his nails curl ten inches long. Thinking of him, with the whirlwind around me, I dash for the door, and although the knob turns, the door stays down. When I try it again, a foot in the gap helps me snake my way through, but the door slams with a loud bang behind.

  The little room is dark. There's light from a high, west-facing window, but the bare bulbs surrounding the set of dusty mirrors are switched off. That's a second surprise. I expect to see Mr. Harris in front of the lighted mirrors in a child's chair with his knees nearly at his ears. His dark eyebrows and his dark eyes and the way his hands caress the pages of books pleases me. But no one is there. The room is empty.

  I sit and smooth the pleats of my skirt, trying to remember the beginning of Mr. Harris' lessons about the sounds of words and how to make them. He gives me rhyming hints to conquer my fear of the words that have letters I can hear in my head but not say out loud. "A final s," he likes to say, "should never be a nettle, remember that the sound is like a teeny hissing kettle." His eyes are so gentle and nice whenever he says that rhyme for the fearful lisping plurals: moths, slides, and rustlers. During my last session the past Friday, he recited his rhyme about the r being a kitten that purred deep in my throat and I thought that I would like to hold his hand and show him how I pretend to be the burro, Brighty of the Grand Canyon, on the rocks beside my home. But he said such a strange thing then. "Do you know about the everlasting arms of God?" he asked, staring at the floor. "They can comfort you if ever you feel small." I began to ask, "Do you feel small?" but stopped myself because small began with an s and I hadn't wanted to lisp. Now I want to say the word small and his name as well, with a little kettle hiss on the end, for I plan to be better at every sound that day.

  Mr. Harris keeps a tin filled with pumpkin candy. I can take some anytime. I search for it and find it with its black panther crouching on the lid. My fingers grasp one crescent-shaped orange slab. "Around the ragged rock the rugged rustlers ran." I repeat that phrase into the mirror and lick the cloying candy once. "Cake, cookies, candies." I practice that too. Then holding the candy between my thumb and forefinger, I daub it on my lips as though I am a starlet in front of my dressing mirror, all unready in my underwear.

  For the first time, and with alarm, I notice a row of rag mops and empty buckets. The room is a broom closet. The mops, like evil men, stand at attention, awaiting orders. I shove my chair backward and flee.

  Outside everything's better. The morning sun shines, yellow and round. A tranquil choir of wind carols in the pines. Quiet soothing pines, content with the plain brown birds pecking underneath their boughs. I walk on the sunny strip of the open school corridor, taking an interest in a steady stream of ants that disappear into a concrete crevice; small bits of candy dropped on their trail enrage and excite them. Sitting near the ants on a low brick wall, I chew my candy until my milkman, Mike, roars by in a big green truck. I jump up then to see him, and the shamrock, and the leprechaun on the side of his truck.

  "Hi, Mike!" I leap up on the wall and wave.

  "Oh, Mike!"

  "Come back!"

  Mike's gone, but a penny of my milk money from my pocket strikes bright ringing sounds on the poles under the overhang. Ta-ting-ding. Ta-ding-ting. I do that for a while. Then I swing some figure eights. Leaning out far, like a lady I've seen at the circus, I notice someone at the far end of the school. It's a janitor rubbing one hand with a red rag.

  My collar tightens against my throat. I pull myself behind the pole, then peek out. The janitor tucks the rag in his back pocket and strides straight for the school office.

  Back. Back to the speech therapy room. But where to hide? A large paper chart of an open mouth with a graveyard of teeth and a raw red tongue hangs at a tilt on yellowed tape at the side of a filing cabinet. I batter my way behind. And there, between the chart and the filing cabinet, I cower, listening for the coming footsteps.

  A dusty smell of old paper tickles my nose. The big clock on the wall, which has always moved before, doesn't. A sparrow crashes the window and rockets away. The pink plastic dials on the front of Mr. Harris' record player make a funny clown face and a crazy man's face and the face of the man called Dr. Scar on the Chiller TV show. I shudder at the row of threatening mops.

  In a flood of light, the door opens. Someone is searching the room. "Come out of there," says an angry woman.

  I keep still.

  "I can see your shoes. Come out."

  I wriggle free. A sour woman blocks the doorway, tucks her blouse into her skirt. "Are you waiting for Mr. Harris?"

  I nod. I hate the word yes (with its sinister last s) and never say it.

  "Come along," the lady orders.

  On the way to the office the lady tugs at the standing collar of her dress and picks at her cuffs. "All this trouble," the lady says with a sniff. "I've got to leave early for lunch. I've got company coming. From Chicago. Do you know where Chicago is?"

/>   I shake my head.

  "I didn't think you would. Out here there's no regard for the really important places. New York. Boston. Those are cities. Sometimes I think the entire East Coast of America could fall into the ocean and no one out here would bother to read about it."

  "Here she is," the lady announces to a bosomy woman when they enter the office.

  "Well," says the bosomy woman, picking up the phone, "our Miss Flynn-" she rolls her eyes upward, "-never collects her mail in the morning."

  "Isn't she the oddest bodkin?" says the lady.

  The bosomy woman winks. "Sit here," she says. There's a chair beside her desk.

  The other lady raps on a door and disappears. That's Mr. Rykken's office. I know it. The lady going in, knocking first, means he isn't dead.

  What's the penalty for swinging on the poles? The two-inch thick paddle? I wonder how hard it will hit, and I know I'll find out soon.

  "The principal will see you," says the lady, reemerging.

  Mr. Rykken at his clean steel desk wakes from a therapeutic trance. His pale gray eyes water; his brown skin stretches into a smile under a mad halo of frowsy, white hair. A cheap print of a young woman picnicking beside a grassy green waterfall is propped on the desk before him, while the room in every corner holds a sense of emptiness, grass-stained golf shoes and a set of encyclopedias, bookmarked with sheets of colored facial tissue. As I sit down in a chair beside his desk, Mr. Rykken scribbles on a pad of paper. When he finishes, he tears off the note and folds it in half. "Did you especially like Mr. Hawwis?"

  I nod, frowning; Mr. Rykken makes w's of r's.

  "I thought so. I liked him myself. I know you will wemember the many things he taught you."

  He glides open his bottom desk drawer. Now it's coming. Now I'll feel the paddle.

  Into the drawer he reaches, bringing something out. A box of pencils slides across the desk with the folded note on top.

  "Take these to Miss Flynn," he says, tapping them, "I suppose she's short of supplies."

  I stare numbly.

  "Go on," says Mr. Rykken.

  I blunder back two steps.

  "Go back to your class."

  It's a long way back, a long lonely hall. A boy comes out of the bathroom and pretends to vomit. A ball hits some metal doors hard.

  "Has Mr. Harris gone somewhere?" I ask Miss Flynn when I return to my room.

  "My God," says Miss Flynn, scanning the note. "Dear, dear Jesus and God." Miss Flynn sits for a moment with her palm pressed to her forehead. "Put the note in your desk. Take it home to your mother. Hurry now. Don't miss your recess."

  I leave the room, watching Miss Flynn, whose eyes glisten, whose mouth trembles.