Rook: Snowman

by Graham Masterton

  Rook: Snowman

  Graham Masterton

  © Graham Masterton 1999 *

  *Indicates the year of first publication.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  About the Author

  One

  With a chorus of high-pitched screams from his balding tires, Jim Rook drove into the parking lot at West Grove Community College in his old bronze Cadillac convertible and bounced to a stop in the Dean’s personal parking space. He climbed out of the car without opening the door, caught his shoe on the handle, and dropped his file of homework, scattering papers all over the tarmac and into the bushes.

  He was fifteen minutes late for his first class already, and he hopped around the parking lot stamping on sheets of paper to stop them from blowing away. It was a glaring hot day in early June, but there was a nagging southerly breeze, and it took an inspired jump over a jacaranda bush to stop Linda Starewsky’s essay on Hamlet from being blown away across the college grounds and into the trees. Not that it would have been any great loss to critical literature.

  “Hey, Mr Rook! Didn’t know you white folks were so good at dancing!” called out Clarence, the janitor, as he passed by with his little sweeping-pan and the scraper he used for removing warm Bubblicious from the sidewalks.

  Jim was in too much of a hurry to think of a smart reply. He shouldered his way through the side doors of the college, cramming his papers in a big untidy bunch under his arm. He jogged as far as the main corridor, his untied laces whipping the floor. Then he slowed down to a hurried hobble. He was too breathless and dehydrated to force himself any further. He had woken up nearly an hour late with a hangover the size of Mount Rushmore, and he had left his apartment without even a swig of flat Gatorade. He had been trapped on the freeway in a sea of glittering metal for over a half-hour, breathing in eight lanes of yellow traffic fumes, with the morning sun beating on his forehead.

  He reached a water-fountain and bent over it. He was still wearing his sunglasses and he hit his head against the wall. He opened his mouth; but instead of water he found himself sucking something slippery and hard and intensely cold. He said, “What the – phhwah!” and jerked his head up, spitting in disgust. He took off his Ray-Bans. The water was curving out of the spout in a crystal-clear arc. Still curving, even though he wasn’t pressing the lever any more. He looked closer and realized that it wasn’t moving. He tentatively reached out with his finger and prodded it, and it was ice.

  He looked around, bewildered. The corridor was deserted. The college was air-conditioned, and comparatively cool, but how could the water in the fountain have frozen solid? He snapped it off and turned it this way and that, between his fingers.

  He was still examining it when the swing doors at the far end of the corridor banged open and the new head of English came lolloping toward him. Dr Bruce Friendly was a big-boned, surly, loosely built man, with a high shock of wiry white hair. He walked everywhere like a giant-sized marionette, throwing one foot in front of the other as if he were trying to shake it off.

  He had intense, near-together eyes and intense, near-together ideas. One of those ideas was that teaching high-flown English literature to a bunch of dyslexics and Hispanics and characters out of a Spike Lee movie was a waste of Los Angeles public taxes that bordered on the criminal. If Jim’s English and Special Needs Class hadn’t impressed the Japanese education minister so much on his recent trip to California, Dr Friendly would have axed it as his second most urgent priority after ordering himself a high-backed tilt-swivel chair with a view of the girls’ tennis courts.

  ‘He’s Japanese! What does he know about English? The guy speaks in squiggles.’

  Jim was still staring into the open palm of his hand when Dean Friendly came up and stood right beside him him and stared into his hand, too.

  “What do you make of that?” asked Jim.

  “I don’t follow you, James. What do I make of the fact that the palm of your hand is wet? I’d guess you were sweating because you’re running way behind time and your class sounds like the second battle of Antietam.”

  “Well, it’s wet now, but it a few seconds ago it was ice.”

  Dr Friendly stared at him without any pretense of interest or sympathy. “I’ve told you what I think about what you do. If the education board didn’t think that you were such a glittering public-relations asset, I’d have your contract terminated tomorrow and your class out doing what they were born to do, which is fix automobiles, serve in hamburger restaurants and sweep up trash. Sometimes you ought to stop and think what a great service you’re giving to the community, James! Teaching Shakespeare to a motley collection of kids who can’t even spell their own names!”

  “What’s wrong with that? Shakespeare couldn’t spell his own name, either.”

  “The day that one of your students writes anything half as good as Troilus and Cressida, I’ll let him spell his goddamned name any way he likes.”

  Jim continued to hold open the palm of his hand. “I don’t actually want to get into a discussion about Special Class II. This was ice. The water-fountain was frozen.”

  “Well, maybe we’re having a little trouble with the water-refrigeration unit. Why don’t you mention it to maintenance?”

  “Even if the water-refrigeration unit was on the fritz, how could the water freeze in mid-air? It was there, in a curve, just frozen.”

  “Did you go to a party last night?” asked Dr Friendly, peering at him closely. “You look as if you went to a party last night. How can I guess that? The bags under the eyes? The stubble, perhaps? The hog’s breath?”

  “I went to a party last night, yes sir. In fact I held a party last night. It was my housewarming. I just moved into a new apartment. One block from the boardwalk, with a glorious view of the ocean, so long as you stand on the bathroom window-ledge with a mirror attached to a walking-stick, and bend your head backward, like this.”

  Dr Friendly watched him bend his head backward like this, and remained totally unimpressed. “How much did you drink during this housewarming?”

  “Not much. Why? I might have toyed with one or two tequila slammers.”

  “Yes?”

  “I might even have drunk two or three beers, or was it four? And somebody brought a case of sparkling wine. It was a celebration, what do you expect? New apartment, new me. I’m thinking of buying a dog, too. A schnauzer. I might call it Dr Friendly, after you.”

  Dr Friendly took hold of Jim’s hand and held it up. “Did you really see ice, James? Or are you still under the influence? I’d be only too pleased to report you for showing up at college unfit for teaching duties.”

  “Excuse me, sir. I’m as fit for my teaching duties as you are.” He looked down at Dr Friendly’s protruding stomach. “And trimmer, I hope.”

  “Then tuck in your shirt-tail and get along to that collection of dummies you call a class.”

  Jim looked away for a moment, with his hand pressed to his mouth. Then he turned back and said, “Listen, sir. You’ve made it one hundred per cent clear that you don’t like me and you don’t see the point of my class. You’re the head of the English department and you’re entitled to your own personal opinions, even if they are bigoted and intolerant and narrow-minded and educationally unsound. But my class is made up of young people who have had enough of a struggle in t
heir lives already, without being dragged down and demeaned by the very people who are supposed to be helping them. They have speech impediments to overcome; they have cognitive difficulties; and almost all of them come from crummy rundown homes where they’re the only ones who know how to read and write, and if they so much as pick up a book even their own parents make them feel like they’re freaks. So if you want to insult me personally, go ahead. Call me anything you want. But never, ever call my students ‘dummies’, never again.”

  Dr Friendly took a deep, slow breath and his mouth puckered up. “I think you’d better get yourself off to that oh-so-needy class of yours, don’t you, before you say something you wish you hadn’t? And by the way, your new student has started today. Hubbard, from Alaska. Half Inuit, half idiot, from what I can make out. I wish you joy of him.”

  Jim didn’t trust himself to say anything else. He knew that his remedial English class wasn’t universally popular. Several members of the faculty believed that he was giving his pupils a hope of social betterment which they would never be able to achieve, and which would lead them to become even more disenchanted with the world than they were already. There were times when he had toe-to-toe arguments with other members of the faculty and enjoyed it: they fired up his adrenalin. But Dr Friendly was so unremittingly hostile that he could have happily taken hold of his stringy bolo necktie and twisted it around until his big horse-like face turned purple.

  He turned the next corner and even though his classroom door was closed he could hear that Dr Friendly was right about the noise. Some of the class were whooping and laughing while others were attempting their own nasal versions of this week’s chart hits and three black girls were singing ‘I Will Always Love You’ in a harmonized scream. Jim came in through the door and walked over to his desk, dropping his homework on it in a heap. As he did so, the class instantly fell quiet.

  He stood and looked at them for a while, saying nothing, as if he had just arrived by time machine and was wondering which century this was and who all these weirdly dressed young people were, with their extraordinary hair and rings in their noses.

  They looked back at him with equal uncertainty: a disheveled thirty-six-year-old in dark aviator sunglasses and a crumpled brown shirt with turquoise surfers on it. His steel-banded wristwatch was too big for his skinny wrist. His khaki docker pants looked as if he had used them as a pillow. Despite an attempt to paste it down with water, his hair stuck up at the back like a cockatoo. He hadn’t shaved.

  Slowly, he took off his sunglasses.

  “Boy,” said Washington Freeman III, a hugely tall black boy who always sat in the front row. “You look like you met Godzilla on your way to class.”

  “That’s not a very respectful way to talk about Dr Friendly,” said Jim, without even the flicker of a smile.

  “Heck, I didn’t mean that,” grinned Washington. “I meant you look like shit.”

  “What does that mean, I look like shit?” Jim demanded. He stepped up to Washington and craned his neck back so that he could look him directly in the eye. “You mean I’m chocolatey-brown and steaming, what?”

  “Well, no, sir, all I meant was—”

  “Shit is a lazy and woolly way of expressing yourself, apart from being offensive. What are you going to write in your next essay? ‘Hamlet’s father came to the feast and he looked like shit’? How many marks do you think they’d award you for that?”

  “But it don’t mean shit like shit shit. It mean just, you know, like shit, and shit.”

  “You’re not thinking of compiling a dictionary when you leave college, are you? Listen, Washington, anybody who has a half-reasonable grasp of the English language never has to use words like shit. You could say I was pallid, haggard, worn, ravaged or unlovely. You could say that I was white as a ghost, wrinkled as prune or crumpled as a sheet of wrapping paper. You could describe my face as looking like an unmade bed or two pounds of condemned veal or a wedding-cake that has been left out in the rain. All of which are well-known literary descriptions.”

  He walked slowly between the lines of desks, looking one by one at his eighteen students. White, black, Hispanic, Chinese: all of them disadvantaged not only by poverty and social class, but by basic reading problems and stutters and word-blindness and a lack of concentration that would have embarrassed a gnat.

  “Better still,” he said, “you could invent your own description of the way I look. You could coin a new phrase, so that you conjure up in other people’s minds a vivid picture that describes me even more clearly than a photograph. In fact, since I not only look like shit but I feel like shit, that’s going to be your first project for this morning. Describe my hungover appearance in not more than twelve well-chosen words.”

  There was a general groan of complaint and somebody threw a paper pellet at Washington and hit him on top of the head. “Keep your mo’ close nex’ time, short-ass.”

  Jim returned to his desk, tucking in his shirt. Suzie Wintz winked at him and said, “Hi, Mr Rook. Looks like you partied pretty hard last night.” Suzie always looked fashion-magazine perfect. She had heaps of curly blonde hair and huge mint-green eyes and a permanent pout. She always described herself as ‘trainee mode’. But for all of her confidence and all of her sensuality, she could barely write more than three consecutive sentences, one of the most memorable of which had been ‘Shakespeare was balled and rote plas like Titanic’.

  “There are three occasions in his life when a man is duty-bound to party,” Jim told her, sorting through his homework. “The first is when his voice breaks. The second is when he’s just about to get married. The third is when he realizes that life is one-third getting yourself together and two-thirds slowly falling apart again.”

  “You just made that up.”

  “Yes. Clever of me, wasn’t it? Now you make up a good descriptive phrase for the way I look, just like I asked you to.”

  He turned his attention at last to the boy slouching in his chair two desks behind Linda Starewsky. At first sight, he looked unusually mature and handsome compared with most of Jim’s students. At this age, most of them still had small heads and big noses and protruding ears and constellations of bright red spots. Jim called them ‘Quarks’ after the alien character in Star Trek. But this boy had a chiseled, adult-looking face, with high cheekbones and a straight nose and a very firm jawline. His black hair was cut en brosse and he had startlingly blue eyes. He wore a very white T-shirt with Anchorage, Alaska emblazoned on the front, washed-out blue jeans and very expensive Timberland boots. He had an olive-skinned sulkiness about him which put Jim in mind of a young Elvis Presley.

  “So, you’re Jack Hubbard,” said Jim, approaching him and holding out his hand. “Welcome to the wonderful world of English and Special Needs.”

  Jack eyed him up and down, and then reluctantly took his hand and shook it. “Okay,” he said.

  Tarquin Tree put up his hand and said, “Okay if I write this like a rap?”

  Jim turned to Tarquin, a skinny boy in a T-shirt with yellow and black hoops, like a bee. “You can write it any way you like, Tarquin, so long as it’s original, descriptive, and doesn’t rhyme ‘rap’ with ‘crap’.”

  “I do a thing like that, Mr Rook? You won’t never see me do a thing like that! If you ever see me rhyme rap with crap, you got my permission to give me a slap. You can slap me so hard, you can give me a hit, I won’t never use no words like—”

  “Tarquin,” said Jim, pointing his finger at him. Tarquin was instantly silent, although his hand kept flapping on the table in rap-time. Jim had told this year’s class that his finger was a phaser, set to kill. He didn’t point it very often, but when he did, they knew that he was serious. It meant that’s it, you’ve gone over the line.

  “Get here okay?” Jim asked Jack. “You’re living over on La Grange, aren’t you?”

  “Pico. My dad’s rented this house. I don’t know how long for.”

  “He’s working here, isn’t he?”
/>   “Finishing off a TV special, all about Alaska.”

  “And what happens when he’s finished doing that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we’ll stay, maybe we won’t.”

  “You always follow your dad around?”

  “Don’t got a choice. My mom died six years ago. And traveling around, that’s his work.”

  “You must be finding the weather a little different.”

  “It’s okay in Anchorage, this time of year. But up in Yukon-Charley it gets pretty cold.”

  “Well, I hope you’ll have the opportunity to tell us all about it. How much of a chance did you get to study, up in Yukon-Charley?”

  Jack shrugged. “We had books to read. Like encyclopedias and stuff.”

  “What was the last book you read?”

  “McGeary’s Snowmobile Maintenance.”

  “Say what?” said Washington, with a hoot, but Jim gave him a look which meant, remember your first day, when you had to tell me what you’d been reading?

  “How about novels, or poetry, or plays?”

  Jack shook his head. “Only this one novel, The Process, about a guy who crosses the Sahara Desert and goes out of his brain.”

  “That sounds cool. Do you still have a copy?”

  “It’s probably packed up someplace, but yes, I guess.”

  “That’s a pretty empty spot, the Sahara. Just like Yukon-Charley, I guess. Did you associate with any of the feelings in the book? I mean, the isolation, that kind of thing?”

  Jack lowered his eyes and thought for a moment. Then he raised them, and said, “You’re never alone, wherever you are.”

  Jim made a little circling gesture with his hand, to indicate that he wanted to explain himself more fully.

  “You can be right out in the snow, hundreds of miles from the nearest trading-post. Nothing but white wherever you look. White, white, white, until you’ve got stuff dancing in front of your eyes, and you’re sick of it. But you aint never alone. Never.”

  There was something in Jack’s voice that led Jim to think that learning to deal with his isolation up in Alaska must have been one of the most critical experiences in his life so far. White, white, white, until you’re sick of it. He hadn’t heard one of his students speak so vehemently about anything for a very long time. Not since Waylon Price had gone looking for his missing sister one night, and found her in a rundown house off Melrose, dead of an overdose.