“But, Jody, they can’t prove anything. So what if they have a little bit of red clay? They don’t have an actual footprint. Even if they did, so what?”
“Kathy.”
“What?”
“Ruth’s mother is making a big deal out of this. Somebody apparently tried to harm her daughter and wound up accidentally killing her.”
“Somebody.”
“Yeah. Somebody, Kathy. Now you keep your end of the promise.”
“Okay. Shoot,” said Kathy.
“First you swear.”
“How?”
“Put your hand on my hand. Okay. Now, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help you God, and if you lie, may God strike you paralyzed from the neck down?”
“I swear.”
“Okay,” said Jody, releasing Kathy’s hand from a tight grip. “You remember that night before you were supposed to play Ruth at Newton? Bobby got sick, remember?”
“Yes.”
“And Mom had to go to Norwood for the prescription, and Daddy took Bobby to the clinic, and Oliver had to leave early to help with the club party?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you go?”
“I went to algebra like I always do ... and practice. I went down to the public courts.”
Jody’s eyes burned. She sat upright suddenly and held up her hand as if she were about to hit Kathy in the face. “You dirty rotten liar,” she said. “You deserve to be paralyzed! Don’t you remember? You left without any books. I covered for you. Mrs. Diggins called up and asked where you were, and I said you were off with Daddy. That it was an emergency. I figured you just went straight to the courts to work on your serve. Then I remembered. You didn’t take your racket. Now where were you, Kathy?”
“Jody, I swear up and down I didn’t go near that pool. I didn’t dump any chlorine into anything. I swear!”
“Where were you then?”
“Why do you have to know? Why can’t you just believe that I didn’t have anything to do with it?”
“You know why? Because somebody might start asking questions, that’s why. Because somebody’s kid got killed, Kathy, even if it was by mistake, and it might have been over a tennis game. A tennis game. You had a lot to lose if Ruth beat you.”
“Oh, Jody, I know, I know.”
“Where did you go, Kathy?”
Kathy looked out the window for a moment. The rain had begun again, and it was spitting in over the sill. She got up and closed it. “Fenway,” she said. “I took the express ball park bus. The Yanks were playing the Sox.”
Jody began to laugh a little. “You idiot,” she said kindly. “I believe you.” Her teeth had started to chatter. She hugged Kathy hard and added. “I hope you have a ticket stub or something.”
“I thought you believed me.”
“Oh, Kathy,” Jody said, and shook her head. “Forget it. Never mind.”
7
KENNETH B. HAMMER WAS a very likable man. His feet were large in their splendid brown loafers with the gold buckles. His hands were warm and dry, and his large hamlike thighs strained at the seams of his pants. His hair was a warm brown and brush cut, like a marine’s. “I hear you’re quite a little ballplayer,” he said to Kathy with a toothy grin worthy of a master politician.
“Yes, sir,” Kathy answered. She waited for him to stop shaking her hand. When he did, she sat opposite him in an uncomfortable old student’s desk, the only other place in the principal’s office to sit. She thought Mr. Hammer looked as uncomfortable as she behind the principal’s dignified mahogany desk. Evidently this was so, because he leaned back in the equally dignified mahogany chair and, clasping his big hands behind his head, propped his feet on the radiator.
“I mean, apart from your tennis,” he went on. “You did terrific down in Florida, honey, by the way. We’re all real proud of you. You went into that situation and showed the stuff a champion is made of. But what I mean is I hear you’re some kind of shortstop too.”
Oh, well,” said Kathy, feeling herself redden. “I guess I play a halfway decent shortstop.”
“Used to play a little semipro myself,” said Mr. Hammer, and he picked up a round glass paperweight containing a preserved rose and made as if to pitch it across the room. “Boy, I’d like to be your age again, honey,” he said. “What an unbelievable situation you’re in. Young, pretty, and loaded with talent. You know everybody around here thinks you’re going to go all the way?”
“Thank you,” said Kathy, wondering when he was going to hand over the dreaded algebra exam. “I’ll do my best.”
“Sure you will. You’ve got all the tools, but more important, the right attitude. So you like baseball too?”
The sunlight poured in directly behind Mr. Hammer’s head. Kathy could not see his expression well except for the continuing grin.
“I love baseball. But I’m a girl, and I’m too small and ...
“Too bad about the Sox this year.”
“Yes ...
“You play with this fellow, what’s his name, a lot?”
“You mean Oliver?”
“English. That’s the one. Little fellow. Seems like he thinks you’ve got a great arm. Thinks you can throw like a pro.”
Kathy shifted around in her one-armed seat. “I don’t know really, Mr. Hammer,” she said. “Oliver is always timing people with stopwatches. He makes up little tests for me. Yesterday I won five dollars on a bet from him because I threw to first almost as fast as Rick Burleson two times out of three.”
“It’s great, honey, but don’t do too much of that. You could tear a rotator cuff. Your arm’s your bread and butter.” Mr. Hammer stood and passed Kathy the examination papers.
“Hope it doesn’t upset your boyfriend if you quit baseball,” he said.
“Oliver’s not my boyfriend,” said Kathy. “He’s just my friend.”
“Sure,” said Mr. Hammer. “Nice boy though. Works hard. Know anything about his people?”
Kathy frowned. Something was wrong here. Why was she sweating? “No. I guess his folks are divorced and all, and he lives with an uncle.”
“Poor kid. Had a rough life,” said Mr. Hammer. He rocked back and forth on his heels, his hands in his pockets tightly. Kathy noticed that Mr. Hammer’s loafers creaked. “Seems to have straightened himself out nicely, though.”
“Oliver?” Kathy asked. “Straightened himself out?”
“Got in a peck of trouble when he was about eleven. Put big upholsterers’ tacks under his stepfather’s tires. Guy got a flat, a blowout, and nearly went off a bridge. Tried to have the kid charged on delinquency and all that, but the kid was too young. Never did anything after that.”
A warning light blinked in the back of Kathy’s mind, or so she felt. “I know all about it, Mr. Hammer,” she said as coldly as she dared. “Oliver told me about it the first night I met him. His stepfather was an addicted gambler and gambled away his mother’s hard-earned money and drank himself silly every night, also on his mother’s money, and I told Oliver I thought he was morally right to do it.”
Mr. Hammer smiled and tapped Kathy’s paper with his fingernails. “Do the best you can on this thing, honey,” he said with a comfortable chuckle. “I had old battle-ax Diggins when I was your age. She gave me a D-plus, as I remember, and whacked me once a day! Just leave it on the desk and let yourself out when you’re through. Go out the side entrance. The main entrance is locked.”
Mr. Hammer was gone. The room seemed actually larger without him. The sunlight hit her paper directly. Kathy squinted at it and smelled the mimeograph fluid in the purple print. To Kathy each of the neatly typed and numbered problems might have been a mile of thread, gnarled and knotted for hours by some maniacal baby. Above her a clock ticked in a blond oak frame. Every time its big hand advanced, it jumped slightly. On the top-most shelf of the oak bookcases beside her a bust of Lincoln stared down at her, blindly but judgmentally. Kathy squirmed. On the corner
of the principal’s desk lay the Algebra I textbook. She wondered if Mr. Hammer had left it there to test her honesty or to allow her help during the exam. She gazed at it for one long yearning minute by the clock, then hunched herself up over the first problem. “A freight train,” she read aloud in a blandly reasonable singsong, “leaves station A for station B at two P.M. It is traveling at twenty miles per hour. The distance between stations is ten miles. Another freight train”—Kathy repeated this for emphasis—“another freight train leaves station B for station A, also at two P.M. It is traveling at ten miles per hour.” She wrote down 10 and underlined it. “At what time will the trains pass?” She drew an A and a B and connected them with a line filled in with tiny crosshatches representing ties on a track. After drawing both trains with smoke coming out of their stacks, she said, “Easy! At what time will they pass? Let x equal one train. Let y equal the other. Let z equal two P.M.” It doesn’t mention separate tracks, she thought. They’d crash! She decided to let this first problem sit for the moment.
The next one concerned itself with a transaction between two butchers. The third had to do with bridge spans and the fourth with a tire’s revolutions per minute.
Kathy was bathed in sunlight and in sweat. The open window allowed the sound of a tractor and the smell of newly mown grass to waft through the office. Do they expect me to cheat? Is this a trap? she wondered miserably as her attention switched once more to the book on the edge of the desk. In it lay the answers to all the questions on the test. Somehow Kathy’s memory was good enough to recall the trains and the tires and the two butchers because she always pictured them as in life when given a problem, and she knew practically to the page where she would find her answers. The butchers she’d pored over earlier that summer in Mrs. Diggins’s house, mentally making one Black and one Chinese to keep them separate as x and y. Motes of dust settled softly on the blue and orange cover of the book. I will not cheat! Kathy told herself, gripping her pencil tightly. You already did the first time around, said another voice. I will not cheat. I’m better than they think I am, she said to the book on the desk. Not at algebra, you’re not, said the same logical voice.
The textbook seemed to her a center of evil. Its temptations throbbed at her like an unstoppable Latin rhythm section. Kathy got up from her cramped desk. She took the large flat textbook in her right hand, and eyeing the top of the bookcase, where only a ladder could reach, she threw the book as accurately as she could and shouted, “Get out of my sight!” and called it a vile name.
It was one thing to throw the book fifteen feet in the air but quite another to get it to land flat on a shelf. After trying twice more and having the book land both times at her feet, temptingly open, Kathy succeeded in angling it right. It lay forever out of harm’s way but had ricocheted off the bust of Lincoln, which had split in two as it landed on the principal’s desk.
“You stupid dope! You dummy!” Kathy yelled at herself. “Now look what you’ve done!” Desperately she rummaged through all the drawers in the desk hoping to find some glue, paste, anything that would repair the damage. The drawers were empty save for paper clips and erasers. “Dummy,” she said again. “The bust’s probably an antique worth five hundred bucks.” Sweating and dirty from the dust she had raised, Kathy began to weep softly. She took the two sides of the bust and held them together. The break was clean and the sides held. She put Lincoln, on a low shelf and tiptoed back to her desk.
I’ve done the right thing with the book, she assured herself as she looked at the fourth problem. “If the speed of a wheel must be increased by thirty percent to reach a speed of thirty revolutions per minute,” she read in a shaky monotone, “what is the original speed of the wheel?” Kathy drew thirty circles, each to represent one revolution. “Increased by thirty percent ... she muttered. She drew a hundred more circles as quickly as she could. “Okay, a hundred circles equal a hundred percent. Therefore thirty circles equal thirty percent. Add that to the other thirty circles and you have your answer.” Kathy wrote 60 in the answer box. It can’t be, she thought. Sixty is either a hundred percent more or fifty percent more, I’m not sure, but it sure isn’t thirty percent more. She swore out loud and banged the soft end of her pencil against the desk. On the shelf the bust fell open quietly.
Miserably she looked from the bust of Lincoln to the description of two butchers who were exchanging a hundred pound side of beef worth two hundred dollars for a seventy pound side of pork worth sixty-five dollars and eighty cents. Soap she thought. I’ll stick it together with soap.
In the girls room, which Mr. Hammer had thoughtfully unlocked for her, Kathy found each of the glass soap dispensers empty and cleaned, ready to be filled for the coming year. She nearly cried in happiness when the last of them turned out to contain a white residue in its bottom. Kathy pumped at it, all the while sweating as much as in any match in the broiling sun. She could neither pump the soap out nor unscrew the globe, but it’s better to have a broken soap dish than a broken bust of Lincoln, she reasoned, and she cracked it open with a plastic toilet brush she found in the corner.
Kathy scooped out the dry soap and placed it in a little mound at the side of the sink. She carefully worked it with warm water until it attained a gluey consistency. “Just like real paste!” she told herself in her encouraging algebra-problem voice. Some of it she used to repair the handle of the toilet brush, some to repair the glass globe, and the rest she carried back into the principal’s office in a paper towel and lovingly applied it to the inside surfaces of Lincoln’s head. It held nicely this time, with hardly the appearance of a crack. It should last all year, Kathy told herself, if nobody bumps it or lifts it.
But what if the principal tries to put it back on the top shelf? Kathy asked herself as she sat down again. What if it is an expensive antique? I can’t just say it fell down. Mrs. Diggins’ll be sure to find the book up there, and she’ll know it was me who took the exam in this office, and then I might even get Mr. Hammer into trouble if she finds out he was going to let me cheat! Kathy was certain of one thing. She could do no more algebra with her imagination so rampantly on the loose. I must solve this calmly and sensibly, she decided. All I have to do is get Lincoln back up there and the book back down.
Between the shelves and the window, behind the American flag, was a thin heating pipe. She thought she could shinny up it using one foot for balance on each bookshelf. But not holding a heavy, fragile lump of plaster of paris. But she could wrap the head in something carefully and hold it in her teeth for just those few seconds it took to climb. The only piece of cloth available save her shirt or shorts was the flag. I know Mr. Hammer will come in if I take off my shirt. I know it, she told herself, and so she removed the flag from its pole easily, as it was only stapled on.
It took her less than a minute to wrap the head and a few seconds more to get her balance and replace it perfectly in the dustless square from which it had fallen. On her way down she retrieved the algebra book.
The clock showed more than an hour and a quarter had passed. Wasted! Kathy scolded herself and resignedly looked up the answers to all the problems, allowing herself only a barely passing grade.
She was folding the flag as she had been taught to do in Girl Scouts when Mr. Hammer came back into the office. “I was just folding the flag, Mr. Hammer,” said Kathy.
Mr. Hammer peered at the flagpole.
“It came off,” Kathy added.
Mr. Hammer offered her a ride home as he slammed the office door and locked it behind them. On the shelf the bust came apart. “Place is falling to pieces,” he said sadly, watching it through the glass.
“I have my bicycle, thanks,” said Kathy.
Mr. Hammer tapped the pocket of his jacket where he’d placed Kathy’s exam. He smiled his big smile and winked at her. “Now you go play your heart out, honey. By next week you should be the New England champ.” Afterward Kathy wondered if everything would have turned out differently had Mr. Hammer not winked in the s
ly way he did.
“Mr. Hammer,” Kathy asked in just the voice she’d used to say another freight train, “could you give me back my test, please? I’m ashamed to say I cheated on it. I’d rather take a failing mark than have that on my conscience ... please, Mr. Hammer?”
“Now, honey ... honey!” he warned as he straight-armed Kathy away from his pocket. “We’re just going to talk about it, okay? Just talk about it first, all right? Now calm down. Settle down. We’re going to talk about it. Everything’s going to be okay. You’re under a lot of strain. I’ve seen this happen a hundred times in a pressure situation.”
“I’ve seen this happen a hundred times in a pressure situation,” said Mr. Hammer confidently to Kathy’s father and mother.
“I think the pill is doing her a little good,” said her mother. “Kathy, do you feel any better?”
“I feel ... groggy,” Kathy answered. “But no better, Mom.”
“That’s okay. You get something to eat and you’ll feel a hundred percent,” said Mr. Hammer.
Kathy blinked at him. He was sitting on the sofa in her living room, holding a drink between his large opened knees. He was smiling. “Quite a little fighter!” he said with a grin. “Now once again, Kathy,” he went on in a very warm and easy tone. Kathy watched her mother and father watching Mr. Hammer. What time was it? Evening. “Once again, honey. Two things have to be clear in your mind. One is that you never cheated on a tennis court, did you?”
“No, Mr. Hammer.”
“Of course not,” echoed her mother. “She doesn’t have to.”
When No One Was Looking Page 13
