Numbers

by David A. Poulsen

  I thought back on what had been going on since the party. Nothing, that’s what. I’d stop in the hall to talk to Diana and she’d smile at me and keep going. No fake gagging, no giving me the finger — just the smile, then she’d walk on. Except it wasn’t a real nice smile, you know what I mean? It wasn’t a you’re very cool, Alamo smile or even a I’m kind of shy after what we did together smile. I guess it was more of a gotcha smile — like Mr. R in the picture after he had us thinking he’d been hit by the bus.

  Of course I didn’t recognize the smile then. I just thought fine, she doesn’t want to talk but she’s okay with me. Which was pretty well perfect. I mean, I didn’t want to get back together with Diana — mostly I just wanted that whole night to go away and let me carry on with Patti. And I guess I was wishing so hard for that to happen that I thought it was happening. Wrong. Dead wrong.

  Yeah, things on my mind. I really liked Patti — I don’t know about love. I wasn’t sure I’d even know how to tell if that was what it was. But I hated that she wasn’t my girlfriend anymore. I really hated that.

  There was more. I had just found out the Biscayne needed a new radiator and water pump — at the same time. Yeah, that doesn’t suck.

  And that’s also about the time this guy named Garth Redlake came around and started asking questions about Mr. R. The first time was at Joey’s Pizza. Joey had just brought me a six-inch version of “Twist and Shout” — all the pizzas at Joey’s are named after Beatles songs. Since Patti was out of my life forever, I was twisting and shouting by myself. So I didn’t mind when a tall guy who didn’t look much older than my brother — maybe not even as old — slid into the booth across from me and said, “You’re Andy Crockett, right, Alamo Crockett?”

  I swallowed way faster than I wanted to because the bite I was working on was like killer hot, and nodded. The guy stuck out his hand and said, “Garth Redlake, Centennial Times.”

  I wiped off my hand and shook his and looked down at my pizza. Joey came by the table. “You want something?” he asked my uninvited guest.

  “Just a Coke.”

  Joey walked off and Garth looked at me then at my pizza then at me again. “Go ahead and eat, I don’t want to interrupt your dinner — what is that, a ‘Paperback Writer’?”

  “‘Twist and Shout.’ It’s pepperoni, mushrooms, and green peppers … pretty good.”

  Garth nodded. “Looks good. I mean it, go ahead. I was just wondering if I could … I’m writing this story for the paper on some of the teachers who’ve been around for a long time. I was hoping I could ask you about Mr. Retzlaff.”

  “I’ve seen you around here before, haven’t I?”

  “Yeah, the paper’s sent me to cover a couple of stories down here. I cover most of Parkerville’s sports. Including wrestling.”

  I nodded and took a swallow of pop. “I thought you looked familiar. That’s where I must’ve seen you.”

  “And I was here a couple of years back — wrote a story on the school.”

  Maybe I should have thought more about that, maybe asked him about it, but I didn’t.

  “So, it’s okay then?” he asked again. “If I ask you some stuff?”

  He didn’t seem like I thought reporters should be — all aggressive, like cops but with notebooks. Actually Garth Redlake didn’t have a notebook, at least he didn’t have one in front of him.

  “Mr. R? Sure, go ahead.”

  Joey brought Garth’s Coke and he took a long drink before he spoke again. “I’ve heard he’s a pretty amazing teacher. What do you think of him?”

  I nodded. “Pretty amazing’s about how I’d put it. I’ve had some okay teachers before — and some crappy ones — but Mr. R … uh, Mr. Retzlaff, he’s the best, no contest.”

  “What makes him so special, do you think?”

  I took a bite of pizza, worked on it for a while before I answered. “Well, he’s a cool guy. I think every kid at Parkerville thinks that, but that’s not the main thing. It’s what he does to make his classes like mega-interesting. It’s like you can’t wait for the next day so you can get back to Mr. R’s class.”

  “You said he was cool. What’s cool about him?”

  I thought back to the dance but I didn’t figure Garth Redlake would get it. It was one of those you-had-to-be-there moments. I sipped my drink. “He knows every kid in the school. And he cares about every one of them … us.”

  “Would you say he makes you think?”

  “For sure. That’s one of the best things about Mr. R. He makes you think and he gets you looking at stuff in a different way than a lot of teachers or even the textbooks do. Usually, school is all ‘this is the way it is and don’t think about it, just remember it’ … but that’s not how Mr. R does it.”

  That’s when Garth dug out his notebook. It looked like it had been his notebook since before tele-vision was invented. I thought he’d have one of those little tape recorders, but all he had was the beat-up notebook and two pencils, both of them looked like they had recently been sharpened. He’d taken them from the inside pocket of a blazer that was all checks and squares. It looked older than the notebook except it wasn’t tattered; it actually looked kind of okay.

  “Is my name going to be in the paper?”

  Garth looked at me and shook his head. “Only if you want it to be. I’m talking to lots of kids and people in the community as well. Some have said they don’t want their names mentioned. So it’s like, ‘one Parkerville student said, you can’t wait for the next day so you can get back to Mr. R’s class.’”

  I thought about that.

  “Of course, if you’d rather have your name associated with the quote, I can do that.”

  I took a mouthful of pizza and shook my head. When I’d swallowed, I said, “I’m fine with having my name left out of it.”

  “No worries.” Garth scribbled something in his notebook that I couldn’t read — it was upside down and messy.

  “Which social class do you have Mr. Retzlaff for?”

  “Social 10.”

  “That’s Twentieth-Century World History, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh.” I liked the short answer questions because they allowed to me to get through more pizza. At first I’d been kind of uncomfortable eating in front of a stranger, but I was also hungry so now I was eating every chance I got.

  “So that’s the two world wars and Hitler and the Holocaust, right?”

  “Only the Second World War. We took the first last year.”

  “I heard he has some interesting views about the Holocaust and Jews in general.”

  It was a statement, not a question, so I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to say anything. But I also thought he was maybe saying something negative about Mr. R.

  “Mr. R has interesting views about pretty well everything. That’s one of the things that makes him so excellent. Plus, he wants us to think for ourselves — you know, question stuff.”

  “So what happens when you question him?”

  I shrugged. “I think he’s okay with it.”

  Which wasn’t totally true. The only person who’d ever really had an issue with Mr. R was Patti and thinking back on it, I didn’t think Mr. R was okay with it. There was that thing with her presentation and cutting her off. Of course, that might have been because of how Patti went about it … sort of wanting to get in his face. Anyway, I didn’t say anymore to Garth on that topic.

  “So do you think your view of Jews is different now than it was before you started the class?”

  “I didn’t have a view. I doubt if I’d ever thought about Jews or the Holocaust or any of that stuff before. That’s another good thing about Mr. R. I’m thinking about them now. All of us are. Somebody else could be teaching the same course and it would be a total yawner. This isn’t.”

  Garth finished his drink and looked like he was trying to decide whether to leave or not. He hadn’t written anything else in his notebook so I figured I hadn’t been much help with his story.

>   “Would you say Mr. R is your favourite teacher this year?”

  I shook my head. “Mr. R is my favourite teacher of all time.”

  “What would you do if you found out a teacher was telling you things that weren’t totally accurate … maybe teaching stuff he believes rather than the way things actually are?”

  “You talking about Mr. R?”

  “Any teacher … say it was Mr. Retzlaff.”

  “That isn’t the way it is.” I set the slice of pizza I’d been working on down on my plate. “That isn’t how it is at all. Like I said, he wants us to think, not to take something as real or true just because we read it in a textbook or saw it on TV or something.”

  “Would you say Mr. R is anti-semitic?”

  “Which is?”

  “Against Jewish people. Anti-Semites hate Jews.”

  That was a tough one. I thought about it for quite a while. “I’d say no. Not hate. He doesn’t like what the Jews are trying to do — like trying to take over the world and how they exaggerate a lot of the stuff about the Holocaust and all that. I’d say that really pisses off Mr. R, but I never heard him say he hates them or anything.”

  “But he did say the Holocaust didn’t happen?”

  “No, not that it didn’t happen — just that it wasn’t like the stuff we read in the history books and stuff like that.”

  “And that the Jews are to blame for what has happened to them throughout history?”

  That was another one I really had to think about. Answering all these questions was hard … kind of confusing. I tried to remember exactly what Mr. R had said — I remembered the “playing the sympathy card” thing he’d talked about, but I couldn’t recall for sure what he’d said about the Jews throughout history.

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think he said that exactly.”

  “What about the word hoax? Did he say that in referring to the Holocaust?”

  So Garth knew about the hoax discussion. That meant he must have talked to some other kids in the class.

  “Well, we did some cool stuff about hoaxes — and I guess it was all to do with the Holocaust. In a way, I guess.” I said “I guess” twice mostly because I wasn’t happy with my answer. I didn’t want Mr. R to look bad and I wasn’t sure that what I was saying would make him look good.

  “Mr. R is an excellent teacher — the best I’ve ever had.” I knew I’d already told him that but I wanted it out there again.

  Garth nodded and wrote in his notebook.

  “Sure, Andy … Alamo.” He looked up at me. “One last thing. On the Holocaust: Would you say you share the view that it was exaggerated — a hoax — part of the Jewish plan for world domination?”

  I was wishing this would end. “Like I said, I’m going to try harder to not just accept things I read or hear. I’m going to try to decide for myself about things that happened or didn’t happen. And stuff that’s going on in the world now, too. And that’s because of Mr. R.”

  I liked that last answer — felt a lot better about what I’d said that time.

  Garth stood up. “I appreciate your time. And I’ll make sure anything I use from you will be anonymous as you requested. Hope I didn’t cause you to have to eat cold pizza.” He smiled at me.

  “I like cold pizza.” I could have added that it didn’t burn your mouth when you were trying to eat while reporters are interviewing you. But I didn’t. Instead I took a bite as Garth Redlake turned and walked out of Joey’s.

  Five

  I think it was about a week later that I was sitting in the Dairy Queen doing some homework when Lou and Jen came in and sat in the booth across from me. They might have sat with me if I hadn’t had my books and stuff all over the table.

  It didn’t matter because we kind of visited across the aisle. For a couple of minutes, we just talked about the usual stuff — movies, music, school. Jen even asked me if I’d made up with Patti. I just shook my head. Then, just out of the blue, the conversation completely shifted. They were both, like, “Numbers is this creepy old woman and she’s bad for the town” — the same stuff that T-Ho had said. I can’t remember it all but there was quite a bit more. About all I got out of it was that Numbers was somebody that nobody liked and nobody should.

  There was one thing that seemed like a pretty big deal to both of them. The old lady lived really close to the Snow White Dairy.

  “Have you ever walked by her in the street?” Jen waved her hand in front of her face.

  When I shook my head, she added, “The woman stinks.”

  “Like cowshit, man.”

  I was having a little trouble with that. First of all, The Six wasn’t always a shining example of great personal hygiene. And secondly, I doubted that living near something that smelled bad meant that you smelled bad. Although there was one summer we had a family of skunks that lived under our house until Dad could get rid of them. I think we all smelled a little skunky for a while. Didn’t have the neighbours dropping over much that summer. Still, if somebody smells bad it doesn’t really make them — what was it? — nasty.

  T-Ho and Rebel talked to me about Numbers a few more times after that. Mostly they were on about how she gave the town a bad image, how she stunk like cowshit all the time, how she lived in an eyesore of a house that everybody hated, and how she was just all-around bad.

  I didn’t get why there was this sudden big interest in some old lady who (maybe) smelled bad and lived in a crappy house. Ever since we’d seen her downtown that time, it seemed like she was The Six’s favourite topic of conversation. I sort of tried to find out why, but at first T-Ho wouldn’t say anything more than, “You wouldn’t get it. You need to be jen-yoo-wine to understand.”

  That told me exactly nothing. So I didn’t pay a lot of attention. Except I asked a few people why the woman was called Numbers. Nobody seemed to know. I heard a few theories: Jen, who is all about nicknames, said it had to do with how many husbands she’d had. That sounded like a Jen theory, all right; Lou told me he’d heard that the old lady was a former girlfriend of a Mafia boss and she’d been in charge of the numbers racket (I didn’t know what the “numbers racket” was and neither did Lou); and my dad, who had made a point of learning a lot about the town and its people, just shrugged when I asked him.

  “I know the lady you’re talking about, though I don’t know her well,” he told me. “And I’ve heard her called that but I don’t know why — what it means.”

  I didn’t think about Numbers anymore after that. Until December 23. Two days before Christmas, and the last day of school before the break.

  “Alamo.”

  I was trying to find my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird in the piles of stuff that made my locker look like a tsunami site. I turned around and T-Ho was standing there. T-Ho had come looking for me exactly once in my life. That was one night not long after I started at Parkerville. The Crap Wagon was toast and The Six needed a car — my dad’s car — to go into the city for something, I can’t remember what it was.

  So I guessed he probably needed wheels again, except this time it would be the Biscayne. I was wrong.

  “Hey, man, why don’t you stop by the Dairy Queen after school. We need to chat.”

  I didn’t get a chance to answer or even think about it because he walked off down the hall without waiting even half a second. I figured T-Ho wasn’t used to having people say, “I don’t think so” when he suggested something.

  Twenty minutes after school ended I drove the Biscayne into the parking lot of the DQ. The Crap Wagon was already there so I knew it wasn’t my car T-Ho wanted. I grabbed a chocolate-chip-cookie-dough Blizzard and slid into the booth next to Rebel and across from T-Ho. That was different too, the two of them being without the rest of The Six. That had been happening more and more lately: T-Ho and Rebel had become the two guys who kind of hung out even without the others.

  They both nodded and worked their shakes without saying anything right away.

  T-ho belched and looked across
the table at me. “So, the thing of it is, Alamo, as you know, you have had a lot of trouble getting to be jen-yoo-wine, right?”

  What I wanted to say was, what the fuck does that even mean?

  What I said was, “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” T-Ho repeated and nodded. I noticed Rebel was nodding too. I guess they were trying to be dramatic, but actually they reminded me of a couple of bobble-head dolls. And I noticed something else, too. In the time between the end of school and now, both of them had drank enough to smell like booze. I didn’t think they were actually drunk but I could definitely smell alcohol on them.

  “But now that’s all gonna change.” T-Ho was near the bottom of his shake and his straw made that scratchy slurping sound. “We have decided to give the town a Christmas present.”

  “A Christmas present.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Uh-huh.” It was the first sound Rebel had made.

  “And we’re going to let you be a part of it.”

  “Be a part of what?”

  “Here’s the deal, Alamo … we are going to do something about this Numbers bitch. When I say we are going to do something about her, I mean we are going to burn down that piece-of-shit house she lives in.”

  What are you supposed to say when your sort of friend announces he’s going to burn down someone’s house? I guess your first reaction is you don’t believe it.

  I didn’t believe it. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Not kidding. Not kidding at all.”

  “Are you totally crazy? In the first place, people go to jail for burning down other people’s houses. In the second place, why? What’s the big deal with some old lady who lives by a smelly dairy? Who gives a shit?”

  “Well, see, there you go again, Alamo, not getting it. One of the reasons you ain’t jen-yoo-wine is that you just don’t get it. It turns out that a lot of people give a shit. Take me, for instance. I give a shit. And Rebel here, he gives a shit too.”

  Rebel nodded.

  “’Cause you see, Alamo, we are both jen-yoo-wine, which is something you don’t understand and which is why there are only six people in The Six.”