I couldn’t believe it. This whole thing was going to be about my moccasins, as if there was something wrong with them.
I said, “They’re appropriate for me.”
“They’re not appropriate for school, Floyd. They may be appropriate for certain social events, or for casual wear around the home, but not for school.”
I was beginning to get a little pissed. I said to him, “My moccasins are authentic, handmade by the Dakota. They cost me fifty bucks. I had to get them mail order from a trading post in Wisconsin. These are not discount store merchandise.”
“The value of your moccasins is not the issue here; you’re missing the point. We do have a school dress code, which is spelled out in the student handbook. Have you read your copy?”
I didn’t say anything. The student handbook, whatever that was, was probably buried back in my room, along with all the other handouts and printed stuff I got on my first day of school.
Saberhagen went on. “Part of my job is to educate students in the social arts. Let me show you a few items here that might help you understand.”
As soon as he said this, he got out several catalogues and put them on the desk. It turned out they were manuals on proper dress, dressing to fit the occasion, finding the right combinations, and so on. He showed me several pages on shoes; he showed me a large picture of these black wing tips, and he asked me, now wouldn’t I really like to have a pair like that?
I couldn’t believe it. Wing-tip shoes weigh about six pounds each, with a leather sole about as thick as a dictionary, and the toe is all covered with these leather whirls that have little holes punched in them. Lawyers wear them when they go to court; somebody else may wear them, too, I’m not sure. But it would be hard to imagine anything more out of touch with the Indian way.
“Well, what do you say?” Saberhagen wanted to know.
“What I say is, my moccasins aren’t hurting anybody.”
“I’ve warned you once about your tone of voice, and I’m not going to do so again. I’m asking you what you intend to do about your footwear.”
I got good and pissed, which is unusual for me. I can usually slough off these more or less insulting situations without any trouble. I probably should have let the whole thing drop, but I said, “I wouldn’t wear wing-tip shoes even if I got them for free. As long as it doesn’t rain, I’m going to keep on wearing my moccasins.”
Mr. Saberhagen slammed his catalogues shut. “That’s it,” he said, and he stood up. “If you think you can speak to me in this manner, in my office, then you’ve got another think coming. Your first detention begins immediately, and you will serve detentions every day until the end of the week.”
Then he wrote out the detentions and handed them to me. He had a look on his face like he expected me to say something.
“Is that all?” I asked.
“Yes. That is all.”
After my last class, I went down to the auditorium, which is also the study hall, to serve the detention. I was a little bummed out to be doing time with all these troublemakers. I freely admit to being a little weird, but I have never in my life been a troublemaker. Troublemakers commit deliberate acts to cause other people grief.
I gave the detention slip to Mr. Porter, one of the coaches, who told me to sit in 16B. Our school is real old, and the study hall desks are these double desks, with only a thin wooden armrest between one person and the next.
It turned out that 16B was right next to a sleazeball named Nicky in 16A. I couldn’t remember seeing him around, but he seemed so enthusiastic about having some company that he told me his name right off.
“What are you in for?” he asked. Saying this, he took out a switchblade with about a five-inch blade, and started using it to clean his fingernails. His nails were long, with a lot of built-up dirt. He wasn’t getting them too clean, but he did dig out these little wads of dirt on the tip of his knife blade and scraped them off on the armrest. Then he started picking his nose with the switchblade. I said to to myself, Is this a troublemaker or what? What am I doing here?
“Hey, man, what are you in for?” he asked again.
I showed him my moccasins. “Saberhagen doesn’t like my moccasins.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“He says they’re not appropriate for school.”
“I’d say it’s none of his business.”
“That’s what I told him,” I said.
“Way to go. It’s good to take no shit offa him.”
“If it’s so good, why am I here?”
I guess that gave him something to think about because he stopped talking. It didn’t help the way he smelled, though. He smelled like he must wash about once a month. We’ve got a lot of guys like him in school; they should round them up every couple of days and take them down to the locker room and scour them down in the shower. I would recommend S.O.S. pads and Comet cleanser. I’m not sure what you could do with their clothes. I guess they’d have to have different ones.
I looked around the study hall; there were maybe thirty people serving detentions, which left about three hundred empty seats. It seemed like a joke that I had to sit this close to a guy who smelled bad and was a pest besides. I thought about asking Mr. Porter to assign me a different seat, but I didn’t know if you had any rights when you were serving detention.
I put it out of my mind. I shifted to the left as far as I could and took out the handout Mrs. Bluefish had given us in English class. It was information about a story-writing contest. I started reading through the guidelines. You could submit a story if you were under seventeen, and the deadline was the end of May. It told how long the story was supposed to be, how you had to type it double-spaced, and so forth. The person who won the contest would have their story published in some magazine I’d never heard of called Script, and would receive a cash prize of a thousand dollars. I consider myself a writer, so I found that I had a pretty bona fide interest in this contest.
“What’s that?” It was him again.
“It’s nothing.”
“But what is it?” Nicky insisted.
So I showed the contest form to him. Not that I thought he’d have any real interest.
He didn’t. “Want to know what I’m in for?” he said.
“Not particularly.”
“You gotta hear this. You know Mushy?”
He was talking about the chemistry teacher. “I know him,” I said.
“Well, I brought this dog whistle to class. The sound is so high, a human ear can’t hear it. But when I blew it in class, it like blew all his circuits. It was choice.” Telling this, Nicky had an ear-to-ear grin plastered on his face.
“That is clever,” I said. Mr. Mushrush wears this old-fashioned type of hearing aid, the kind that has a battery pack that you keep in a shirt pocket. There’re some guys in my chemistry class who make a high-pitched hum, with their mouths closed. Mr. Mushrush thinks it’s some kind of electronic feedback, so he usually starts slapping at the battery pack. I have to admit it was kind of funny, in a juvenile sort of way, the first time I watched it.
Nicky had more to tell me. “Last time I was in for setting off cherry bombs in the girls’ bathroom,” he said. “But this dog whistle was really choice. I wish you could’ve been there.” He still had the grin frozen on his face. He told about these things with the kind of pride you’d expect from somebody who’d just won a college scholarship.
When the bell rang, I asked Mr. Porter if I could have a different seat for my other detentions.
“You’ll keep the seat I gave you,” he said.
Thanks to a phone call from the school, Mrs. Grice knew about the detentions by the time I got back to Gates House. After she chewed my ass for being rebellious and disrespectful, she informed me I was now on probation.
I told her I didn’t do anything wrong, but all she said was, “I don’t want to hear it.”
Then she spelled out the terms of my probation. It was more or less like being ground
ed. I couldn’t go on any special activities, unless they were required by the agency; I wouldn’t have any sign-out privileges to go places on my own. I was required to take a chart to school every day and get it signed by Mr. Saberhagen to show that my behavior was appropriate.
That was about it. The last thing she told me was, “Naturally, I’ll be calling your social worker.” She was popping her loose lip a mile a minute.
“Naturally,” I said.
“I sincerely hope that’s not a tone of voice.”
“I’m just trying to be agreeable here.”
Then she told me I needed to go to my room, which was where I wanted to go anyway.
Barb came over after supper. She asked me what I was working on, so I showed her the form for the story contest. She sort of skimmed it, then said, “Do you like to write?”
“I like to think of myself as a writer,” I said. I pointed to my journal, which was out on the table. “I keep a record of story notes and ideas,” I said.
It seemed to impress her. “I tried to write some poems once, when my son was real small. I guess they were okay, in a greeting card sort of way.”
I didn’t know what I was supposed to say about it, but then it was kind of funny; not humorous, but strange: She was handing me back the contest form and I saw her wiping a tear from her eye. Like something just surged up in her emotions and then disappeared. I didn’t know what to make of it, but it made me a little edgy.
She asked me if I was going to enter the contest.
“I was thinking about it,” I said.
“Go for it. Maybe you’ll write the story that wins first prize.” Then she made a quick shift. “We need to talk. You can’t smoke in here, so how ’bout if we go outside and sit on the stoop?”
It didn’t matter to me. As soon as we got to the stoop, she lit up. “You’ve got yourself in detention and on probation. Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
“We had a shoe controversy,” I said. I gave her a basic summary of my meeting with Saberhagen.
Barb looked at my moccasins and said, “What’s the problem with them?”
“Saberhagen says they’re not appropriate for school.”
“They look presentable to me, and they look like good quality.”
“They are good quality. These are authentic Dakota moccasins, handmade.”
She looked a little impatient. I noticed she was wearing blue jeans and a sweat shirt, not that it mattered to me. Her clothes were her business. She said, “So what’s the problem?”
“I got pissed and gave him some lip. That’s the real reason I got the detentions, if you want the truth. I told him my moccasins weren’t hurting anybody, and I was going to go right on wearing them.”
“All right, it was a mistake to lip off. You can see that as well as I can. But I’ll go in and talk to him; there has to be a way to sort this out.”
She doesn’t have a clue, I thought to myself. She thinks she can walk into Saberhagen’s office and use logic on him. She probably even thinks she could use logic on Mrs. Grice.
There must have been a look on my face, because Barb said, “You don’t want me to talk to him.”
I shrugged. “You can do anything you want, but it’s a waste of time. Saberhagen says my moccasins are against the school dress code.”
She wanted to know where she could read the school dress code, so I told her it was supposedly in the student handbook.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to borrow your copy,” she said.
“I don’t mind. You want it now?”
“Not right now, just get it for me before I leave. While we’re at it here, would you mind telling me what happened Sunday morning?”
“Sunday morning?”
“At church.”
“Oh, that.” I laughed. “That’s a joke, that was nothing.”
“Mrs. Grice didn’t think it was nothing. She was upset about it.”
This was getting on my nerves. “That’s Mrs. Grice’s favorite game. Making something out of nothing.”
“Floyd, please just tell me what happened. I’d like to hear your side of it.” I could see Mrs. Grice looking at us from her window. I had this thought, that besides her usual disapproval of me, she was probably disapproving of Barb’s smoking.
Anyway, I summed up the give-and-take between me and the Reverend Braithwaite. For a conclusion I said, “I really didn’t mean to cause him any grief, but he asked. All I really wanted to do was swap a few stories about miracles. But he came unglued, and once he got his teeth in it, he wouldn’t let go.”
“You really love Indians, don’t you?” Barb said.
I had to think a minute. “I’d have to say I feel connected to the Dakota; I believe my destiny is locked in with them. Whether or not love has anything to do with it, I couldn’t say.”
“When you say destiny, what do you mean?”
She seemed sincerely interested, so I said, “I believe that you come back in another life many times. In some of these lives, you get off the track, which means you are separated from your true destiny. When you’re off the track, if you don’t reflect on the inner person that you are, you will spend your life uptight and out of touch.”
“You mean like reincarnation,” she said. “I’ve got a hamster at home. Do you think he was once Henry the Eighth or Joan of Arc?”
She said it in a certain way that I could tell she wasn’t being smart-ass. “No, you don’t come back as a dog or a cat; all your lives are human lives. I wrote a story about it once.”
“Why don’t you give me a summary of the story?”
It was unusual for somebody to ask me this type of question, but she still seemed sincere about it, so I said, “There was this guy named Galsworthy. His destiny was to be a plumber, and he should have known it, because he liked to fool around with fixtures in his house, especially leaky faucets and running toilets. But he ignored all the signs; all he wanted was to be a rich and powerful executive. He ended up hooked on cocaine and booze, and jumping out of a tall building.”
She had a smile on her face. “Maybe you could use that story for your contest.”
I shrugged. “It’s a possibility. I’ve got lots of outlines. Anyway, you can spend lots of your lives in misery if you never get in touch with your destiny.”
“Does this come from Indian research?”
“Not really. Indian religion is not big into past and future lives. It’s basically my own view.”
She was laughing. “No offense, Floyd, but it does sound a little weird.”
“Let’s put it this way. It’s weird enough that I’m on probation.”
“Come on, lighten up. That’s not what I mean.”
I knew she wasn’t putting me down, but I was trying to make a point. “It’s weird or not weird, depending on how you look at it. One thing I’ve noticed about beliefs is, if a lot of people believe in a thing, it’s not considered weird, but if only a few people believe in it, it’s off-the-wall. You can believe everything written in the Bible, even a part like God coming down out of the sky to have a wrestling match with Abraham, and nobody questions it.”
“I understand what you’re getting at,” she said. “In lots of other cultures, your belief about looking for a destiny in a series of lives would be considered normal.”
“I’m not pissed at you, I’m just trying to make a point.”
She nodded her head. “I also understand that you didn’t mean any harm when you spoke to Reverend Braithwaite. I’ll talk to Mrs. Grice about it.”
She was still into that. “If you want to,” I said.
“You don’t want me to.”
“It’s not that,” I said. In a way though, it was; I’ve learned you can’t depend on other people to fight your battles for you. You have to depend on yourself, because that’s all there is. I didn’t want to go into that, though. I just said to her, “I’ve been through this kind of crap before. My advice to you is, don’t waste your time.”
> “Since it’s my time, how about if I decide how to waste it?”
All I could do was shrug again. “Whatever.”
She was looking at her watch. “It’s almost eight-thirty, I need to be going. Would you please get me that student handbook?”
I got her the handbook.
CHAPTER FIVE
For a week or ten days, things were cool. I was sneaking out the fire escape every once in a while, mostly to chill out in Vale Park, or sometimes to go to the library to look at materials for my English class book report. Mrs. Grice never caught me, though, and nobody turned me in.
But then I came home from school one day and made a discovery that really funked me.
My new roommate, the guy named Nicky, turned out to be the same hairball that sat next to me when I was serving detentions. I couldn’t believe it; I remembered that Kinderhook had told me the name was Nicky, but who would’ve put two and two together?
When I got there, he was in the middle of unpacking his stuff and putting up Iron Maiden and Harley-Davidson posters on his half of the walls. He had this big grin as soon as he saw me. “Yo, bro. We meet again.”
I didn’t say anything. I sat down on my bed and wondered, Why me? I started putting my books away.
While he was unpacking, he was telling me how he’d been hung out for about six weeks, hoping they’d let him stay with his mother, but now it looked like this placement at Gates was more or less permanent. I didn’t say much; not that I get any pleasure from another person being hung out, but I didn’t want to give him too much encouragement.
When I was serving detentions, I made a point of trying to ignore him, but now I was checking him out. Not being too obvious about it, of course. He was about five feet two and weighed maybe one hundred pounds at the most. Like a lot of the punks you run into, he wanted to look like a tough guy. His hair was long and greased back like Fonzie on Happy Days. He had on this black leather motorcycle jacket, even though it was the month of May and real warm, and engineer boots with metal heel taps. He had a big Harley-Davidson belt buckle that said, Ride to Live, Live to Ride.
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