No Dark Valley

by Jamie Langston Turner

  “Hey, Nate, I want you to try something today,” Bruce said to him after school two days later. Bruce was standing outside the music room, where they were still having their A Midsummer Night’s Dream rehearsals. After Christmas they would be moving to the auditorium to practice on stage.

  He had zipped out of his classroom right away today, counting on Nate being the first one to rehearsal, as he usually was. He knew that his speech, if it was going to have any success at all, would have a better chance if delivered to Nate in private rather than during rehearsal with the whole cast present. He moved away from the door to stand over by the band lockers, and so did Nate, the look on his face saying, “Please don’t ask me to do something weird in front of everybody.”

  To a timid soul like Nate, the part of Bottom, the simpleminded weaver who imagines he is a donkey beloved by Titania, was already sorely trying. To make him utter lines such as “I must to the barber’s, monsieur, for methinks I am marvellous hairy about the face” almost seemed cruel, though Bruce kept reminding himself of one important fact: The boy had not only joined the Drama Club voluntarily, as had all the others, but he had also auditioned specifically for the part of Bottom.

  The name Bottom had been met with snorts of laughter and had quickly degenerated, as Bruce had known it would, into various vulgar synonyms, to which he had responded with a sigh and feigned weariness: “Middle school humor is so predictable. At least you could try something a little more sophisticated, like Posterior or Derriere. Or something scientific like Glutei.” Thankfully, they had soon grown tired of the little game, probably because they had gotten no rise out of Nate.

  Others had read Bottom’s lines more expressively during tryouts, but after Bruce, with Elizabeth Landis’s help, had shuffled the parts around so the strongest actors were given the biggest roles, the only reasonable match for Nate was Bottom. A big boy like him certainly wouldn’t work out as Peaseblossom or one of the other woodland fairies.

  And the very mention of fairies had also elicited plenty of wisecracks and giggles at first. Bruce had approached it all very matter-of-factly, however, suggesting that while some middle school students might be too immature to realize these were fairies in the folklore sense—miniature sprites like Tinker Bell and Tom Thumb who worked magic and pulled pranks—he was certain the seventh and eighth graders at Berea Middle School would be able to handle it. Surely they weren’t so narrow-minded as to think that everything had always been the way it was today. So after Bruce had worked some magic of his own to soften them all up to the whole idea of Shakespeare, DeReese Pascoe—who had loudly declared early on, “I ain’t bein’ no fairy”—had soon embraced the coveted role of Puck. And Titus Oldenburg, who followed DeReese’s lead in everything, was Oberon, king of the fairies.

  Five years ago Bruce might have slung an arm around Nate’s shoulder to talk to him, but he had stopped doing that after an ugly lawsuit four years earlier down in Montgomery, where a parent had accused a male teacher of touching her son inappropriately. It had been splashed all over the front page news for days and talked about in every teachers’ lounge in the state of Alabama, not to mention in faculty meetings, where principals had been very pointed in their warnings about physical contact with students. Except for one small slipup, the time he had yanked that Hardy Biddle kid up off the floor over at the high school science fair—and thankfully nothing had come of that—Bruce had kept his hands to himself. He had learned more than one lesson about physical contact in Montgomery.

  As was his custom now in delicate situations with students, Bruce put his hands in his pockets and looked down at the floor as he addressed Nate, facing him squarely but glancing up only for the briefest moments at well-timed pauses to assure the boy that he was indeed speaking directly to him but that he didn’t want to make a big deal out of any of this. Bruce had very carefully planned what he was going to say to Nate, down to exact word choices.

  “You’ve got one of my favorite roles in this whole play, you know,” he started out. His first quick look at Nate’s face told him the boy was listening closely. “Bottom is a magnificent character—not very bright, but so dignified in his own way and unshakable and good-hearted. Such a noble and likable character.” Another glance. Nate was frowning a little, as if he wasn’t sure he liked the idea of being not very bright but noble. Probably he was thinking of the way DeReese got to leap about the stage and say things like “Up and down, up and down, I will lead them up and down” and “What fools these mortals be,” while he, Nate, had to lumber about and be one of the mortal fools, with lines like “O night, O night! alack, alack, alack” and “Thus die I, thus, thus, thus.”

  “Yet so funny in his own way,” Bruce continued. “One of the best comic roles in all of Shakespeare. I can’t imagine this play without the character of Bottom. It would lose so much of its . . . vim and vibrancy.” Though he pretended to be speaking spontaneously, this was all carefully scripted. Bruce liked the sound of vim and vibrancy, and besides that, he was attempting a little flattery by suggesting that he was sure Nate had not only heard of those words but also actually knew what they meant. And he was sure—Nate was a smart boy. His lowest test grade so far in Life Science had been ninety-eight percent.

  No response from Nate now, but none was called for. His lips were firmly pressed together, his black eyes unreadable as he waited to see where this was headed. Bruce even wondered if maybe the boy knew he was playacting, that every word was premeditated. Maybe he was standing there thinking, “Ooh, way to go, Mr. Healey, I’m exceedingly impressed with vim and vibrancy.”

  Bruce forged ahead. “Bottom is a key figure in two of the three plots in the play, but no doubt you already know that.” And it was true. Bruce knew Nate probably had a better overall view of the play than anybody else in the cast. For starters, he had clearly been paying attention the day Bruce had introduced the storyline and characters of the play, the same way he paid attention in class instead of goofing around the way so many boys did, laughing and making bathroom noises, boys for whom school was no more than a slightly advanced form of day care. Anything they happened to learn was purely by accident.

  That very day in Nate’s class alone, for example, Bruce had stopped one boy who was deeply engrossed in drawing the torso of a naked woman on the palm of his hand with a ballpoint pen, and not two minutes later he had confiscated a watch from another boy who was aiming its face in such a way as to make little circles of light dance all over the wall and ceiling. Yet another boy had taken bites from his homework paper and was chewing them into little soggy wads. Bruce had calmly walked back to his desk with the trash can and motioned for a deposit. All of this while Nate sat listening carefully to Bruce talk about the respiratory systems of amphibians and reptiles.

  “So Bottom has to be played by someone really intelligent, see,” he continued now, “which illustrates one of the many ironies of drama. Only a smart actor can convincingly pull off a simpleminded character like Bottom.”

  Nate cocked his head ever so slightly, as if measuring the logic of what Bruce was saying.

  “So much of it is the timing of the lines, of course, and the . . . well, the sincerity of them. I remember when I was in this same play in high school, the guy who did Bottom never did get it quite right. He did try, I’ll give him that, but you could always tell that underneath it all he was worried about looking stupid, especially since Bottom loses both Titania and Thisbe in the end. He was a big handsome guy like you but was all hung up on being cool and suave. I think he was afraid the role would ruin his image with the girls.”

  There was the faintest beginning of a smile in one corner of Nate’s mouth. Very observant of others, Nate Bianchi no doubt knew exactly what kind of boy Bruce was describing, could identify several at Berea Middle School by name, a couple of whom were even in Drama Club.

  “So I just want to suggest something for you to consider,” Bruce said. “Maybe it’ll help, maybe it won’t.” He shrugged as if it di
dn’t much matter to him one way or the other. “You know your lines really well already”—actually, Bruce suspected that Nate knew everyone’s lines by now—“and you’ve got a great sense of timing, but I want you to try . . . well, pretending a little more today that you really are a dimwit. Try having fun being somebody who’s the total opposite of yourself.”

  Bruce took his hands out of his pockets and pointed an index finger at Nate. “You’ve got the biggest challenge that way, you know. I mean, DeReese really is kind of puckish already, right? And Jonathan, ladies’ man that he is, doesn’t have to strain too hard to play the love-struck Lysander. But you have the hardest role. You have to push yourself to the other end of the spectrum from where you naturally are, and then somehow make yourself not care that you’re foolish—or maybe it would be better to say not aware.”

  He paused again and looked straight into Nate’s eyes, holding his gaze for several long seconds. “Does any of this make sense?” he said. “Can you try to forget the rest of us are watching Nate Bianchi and just let yourself become poor old slow dumb Bottom?”

  Nate started to speak, then cleared his throat and started again. “Well, I think so, yes. Yes, sir, I’ll try.”

  Though it was a gradually diminishing courtesy among kids, even here in the South, to say, “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am” to their teachers, and though Bruce knew it had to be further proof that he was getting old, it nevertheless always pleased him to hear it. He nodded and smiled. “Well, give it your best shot today, and let’s see what happens.” He looked down the hall. “Ah, here comes the lovely Titania now with Mustardseed and Hermia. Things are about to get cranked up.” He moved toward the doorway. “Say, Nate, can you give me a hand in here? Let’s move those two stacks of chairs over by the windows.”

  Ten minutes later almost everybody was there, all of them talking at the same time. It always amused Bruce the way middle schoolers could carry on conversations in which everyone was talking and no one was listening. Roomfuls of women had this talent also, but they could do it sitting still. With middle schoolers, the talking was always accompanied by the same teeming movement of certain pond specimens he had observed under the microscope. Bruce often praised his classes for learning so well those two important babyhood skills of walking and talking. Then he would follow up with a line for which he was now famous at Berea Middle School: “Okay now, all you overgrown tots, time to play the quiet game. Dip your hips and zip your lips.”

  Elizabeth Landis came in just as Bruce got everybody settled down to start. With her was a girl Bruce assumed was the new seventh-grader who had moved to Berea from Rhode Island. Elizabeth had told Bruce about the girl. She was interested in being in the Drama Club and wondered if there was anything she could do in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Sure, bring her to rehearsal, we can always use another fairy, he had said. Provided she’s not too big, he had added. Oh no, not at all, perfect size for a fairy, Elizabeth had said, and he saw now that she was right. In fact, this girl would probably be the smallest fairy of them all.

  For such a little girl, she didn’t seem in the least intimidated to be in a new situation. She was wearing a blue chambray shirt and a pair of overalls, with one hand in a back pocket. As she and Elizabeth came up front and sat down in two empty chairs, her eyes were busy trying to take in everything—the other students, the high ceiling, the green linoleum floor, the piano in one corner with the crepe paper cornucopia and turkey sitting on top of it, the pictures of composers on the bulletin board, an old record player on a rolling cart. After she sat down, her feet barely touching the floor, she zeroed in on Bruce, who was in the process of reviewing the new cuts they had made in act 5 and reminding Puck of his new cue to enter for his important closing lines. Hardly anyone was listening, however, because all eyes were on the new arrival.

  So he finally stopped midsentence. “Okay, okay, I give up. We have somebody new,” he said, then looked at Elizabeth. “You want to introduce her?”

  “This is Maggie,” Elizabeth said. “She’s from Rhode Island.”

  Maggie grinned and fluttered her fingers over her head in a little wave that from anyone else might have looked silly and affected. She wore small round glasses, had a sparkle in her eyes and short black hair in a sort of rag-mop style. She looked a lot like Harry Potter, but without the lightning scar on her forehead. It was funny, Bruce thought, how you could tell almost instantly if a kid was going to fit in, and if so, where. Maggie had all the signs of winning a spot for herself right in the middle of things.

  “She was in a community play last summer up in Rhode Island,” Elizabeth added. “Played Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. She really likes drama and thinks it’s cool that we’re doing Shakespeare.”

  Bruce couldn’t help wondering how the folks up in Rhode Island had handled To Kill a Mockingbird, a story set in the Deep South. He wondered if they had attempted southern accents, a doomed endeavor for any northerner. He could see Maggie doing justice to the part of Scout but wondered who had played Atticus Finch and how many light-years away from Gregory Peck’s performance the poor man had fallen. He had a sudden desire to see the movie again. Maybe he’d do that tonight. He had it in his collection.

  Maggie’s bright eyes were still on him, Bruce noticed, full of questions she wanted to ask, her chin lifted, her glasses perched on top of her . . . wasn’t it called a “button nose” in books?

  “Okay, Maggie,” he said, “first of all, I like your name, so you can be relieved about that.” He didn’t tell her it was mainly because it was so close to Maddy or that he also liked everything else about her. “What’s the rest of it?”

  “Trump,” she said. “Maggie Trump.” No one seemed to think it was a funny last name. They were all staring at the back of her dark shiny hair, some of them openmouthed, as if a leprechaun had suddenly leapt into their midst. Several of the girls looked over at Priscilla Bernard, whose opinion carried a lot of weight concerning the social standing at Berea Middle, but right now Priscilla was chewing on the inside of her mouth, staring at Maggie along with everybody else and remaining noncommittal.

  “Okay, good. Maggie Trump,” Bruce said. “Second, since you’re new, I’ll tell you what I tell all my students at the beginning of every year, only you get the short version because we need to get on with our rehearsal.” She was smiling up at him expectantly, swinging her feet now, which were crossed at the ankles.

  Middle-school girls often annoyed Bruce, though in a mild way he could smile about. He thought it was a pity they had to camp out in such an unattractive stage for so long, that they couldn’t shoot directly from the cuteness of elementary school to the beginnings of genuine femininity in high school. Even though some of them were already filling out their bodies to astounding proportions while others were as flat chested as Olympic gymnasts, they all behaved the same—shrieking hysterically at the most trivial things, whispering in conspiratorial clumps in the hallway, watching each other slyly.

  But Maggie Trump seemed different. She had been in the room less than two minutes, but already she came across as refreshingly straightforward. He couldn’t imagine her ever staying after class to ask him unnecessary questions in that awkwardly flirtatious way a lot of middle-school girls had. Or saying spiteful things about other girls behind their backs. But then, maybe she was a slow bloomer. Maybe she simply hadn’t hit true middle-school gawkiness yet.

  As he did in the fall with every new class of students, Bruce now turned his face sideways and pointed to the scars along his neck and jawline. “As you see, I have scars,” he said to Maggie. He held up his left hand. “Here, too.” He pushed up the sleeve of his sweater. “And here, all up and down my arm.” Maggie’s eyes took it all in, and she gave a little half nod, as if to say, “Yes, I was wondering about those.”

  “And here’s why,” he continued, pausing dramatically. “As a child, I rushed heroically into a raging fire . . . but sadly, the victim died.”

  Maggie’s brow furrowe
d, and she pushed her lower lip out a little in a show of sympathy. The other kids, all familiar with the story, were rolling their eyes as they awaited the punch line. “I was only seven,” Bruce continued, “so I got these scars a long, long time before any of you made your debut into this world kicking and screaming like the little brats you were until you got to Berea Middle and we started whipping you into shape. I hardly think about my scars anymore, but I know other people wonder. So because of my keen understanding of human curiosity in general, and especially my deep insight into the notorious nosiness of adolescents, I like to set everyone’s mind at ease. So . . . I was in a fire, okay?”

  This was always his cue to start faking some emotion, which he did now. When he spoke again, his voice was low and quavery. “But it was too late for . . . for her. I couldn’t . . . save her . . . because she was . . . she was already gone by the time they pulled me out.” He wiped at the corner of his eye. Maggie was studying him gravely, but her look of sympathy had changed into something closer to suspicion. It was clear this kid wasn’t easy to hoodwink.

  “I was only seven when I lost her,” he said sadly. “I had to grow up the best I could without her.” He decided to skip the loud nose-blowing part that usually went here, but he did drop his head and rub at his nose briefly before looking up again. “No more of her comforting presence, no more soft murmurs, no more loving caresses of her . . . paw.” There were a few titters of laughter as he closed his eyes, then inhaled deeply and shakily and concluded with, “No, I never found another cat to replace Tabitha.”

  Everybody laughed. Maggie grinned and shook her head. Alex Bower piped up from the back and said, “Was there anything left of her after the fire? Like a skeleton or claws or anything?”