LOCAL FOOTBALL LEGEND SHOWS VALOR OFF THE FIELD
Mr. Leubbe told the newspaper that he didn’t think of himself as a hero because he was just doing what anyone would have done, which was kind of a dumb thing to say, because there were a bunch of other people standing around when the car went into the river, and they didn’t do anything.
He is pretty nice as a gym teacher. He picks teams for us when we play basketball, and I think he does this because he feels bad for the people who never get picked. He didn’t make me climb the rope because I couldn’t even get myself up past the knot at the bottom, but at the end of class, he took me aside and said, “Listen, Bucknow. I’m not going to make you climb the rope, because at this point, I don’t think you can. You’ve got chicken arms, okay? I’m not saying that to be mean. But there it is. You’ve got to start developing your arm strength, or what’s going to happen is you’re going to become one of those little old ladies who can’t even push their grocery carts in front of them. I’m just telling you, okay?”
The only problem I have with him is the only problem almost everyone has with him, which is that he likes to sneak up on people and scare them. He is very good at it, and you never even know he’s there until his fingers are on the backs of your elbows, his voice loud and startling in your ear, saying “Gotcha” so loud your heart stops right where it is.
I jump when he does it. Everyone does. Even the large, deep-voiced football players, juniors and seniors, who like Mr. Leubbe very much when he is standing in front of them, jump when he comes up from behind. They laugh, but they step away from him quickly, and you can tell they wish he wouldn’t do it anymore.
Knowing that he can be behind you at any time makes gym class somewhat frightening. We run laps looking over our shoulders. Even in the hallways, at lunch, you have to be careful. He snuck up behind Dr. Queen in the cafeteria once and made her drop her tray.
“Whoa, whoa, sorry there, Joan,” he said, helping to pick up her Tater Tots, rolling on the floor. “Maybe a little too much coffee these days?”
Dr. Queen’s hands were shaking, one of them over her heart.
He is also a back slapper. I think he does it to be nice, because usually he does it when he is making a joke or telling you good luck when it’s your turn to run relays. He slaps hard and fast, usually three times, right between the shoulders. You can hear the slap echoing off the walls of the gymnasium, and when he does it to me, I can feel it in my teeth.
He used to slap Mr. Goldman on the back, but he doesn’t do it anymore. Mr. Goldman slapped him back. I saw it happen. They were walking outside together at the end of the day, looking like they were getting along, Mr. Leubbe wearing his red shirt and his whistle around his neck, almost two heads taller than Mr. Goldman. Mr. Leubbe was saying something, and then he started slapping Mr. Goldman on the back. He was smiling, but he slapped him so hard that Mr. Goldman pitched forward for a moment, his tie lifting up off his shirt. Mr. Goldman straightened up and slapped Mr. Leubbe on the back, just once, but hard enough for us to hear it down by the buses, and hard enough to make the gum that had been in Mr. Leubbe’s mouth fly out and land on the sidewalk in front of him. Mr. Leubbe smiled and slapped him again, three times, and Mr. Goldman slapped him back again, smiling too, and for the first time in my life, I saw Mr. Leubbe wince.
So he doesn’t slap Mr. Goldman anymore, but he still does it to Ms. Jenkins, especially after he makes a joke to her about us running laps like orangutans. When she doesn’t smile, he keeps slapping, and says, “I’m just joking with you, Constance. No harm meant to you or your monkey theory.”
And still she doesn’t smile. But she almost does later, when she tells us that contrary to what Mr. Leubbe believes, it isn’t her monkey theory. She’d like to take credit, she says, the half smile rising, but really, she’s not the one who came up with the idea.
The first day went okay. Mr. Leubbe stood next to Ms. Jenkins while she took attendance, his hands on his hips, wearing the same clothes he wore that morning in gym, a red shirt and tan shorts, the whistle on a string around his neck.
“Look, troops,” he said. “I’m just here to make sure everybody gets a fair shake, okay? That means Mr. Charles Darwin and the man upstairs.” His eyes moved across the room, to the endangered species posters, to the bees buzzing in their plastic hive. “I’m not going to pretend to like this monkey business any more than a lot of your parents. Nonetheless, I want everybody to be good sports, to be polite to Ms. Jenkins and to myself and to one another. As far as I’m concerned, we might disagree, but we’re all on the same team, okay?”
Ms. Jenkins must have seen what was coming, his big arm rising up behind her. She tried to step away in time, out of arm’s reach. But he got her, right between the shoulders, one, two, three, and all you had to do was look at her eyes when he got to the third slap to see that as far as she was concerned, they weren’t on the same team at all.
But for the rest of the class, there wasn’t a problem. He just sat in the back row, eating trail mix out of a Ziploc bag, making notes in his notebook. He’s too big for one of our chairs, but he sat in one anyway, his knees sticking up on each side. Ms. Jenkins talked about finches and the Galápagos Islands, and he didn’t seem too worried about anything she had to say about that.
But the next day, she started talking about “our watery origins,” and that’s when the fight started.
“So when did monkeys first start talking?” he called out, not even raising his hand. “That’s what I want to know.” He was smiling at all of us, like we were all with him, all of us in on the same joke. He popped a raisin in his mouth. “And how come some of them stopped?”
Ms. Jenkins had been facing the chalkboard, and she flinched when he said this, the chalk in her hand making a small white mark on the board. It was like he had snuck up behind her, even though, really, she must have remembered he was back there.
“No,” she said, turning around. “Monkeys didn’t talk, Mr. Leubbe. That’s not the argument. The argument is that our lineage can be traced back to a shared ancestry with the simian family.” She gestured at the chart on the wall. “Studies of human DNA and simian DNA have supported this idea.”
He was quiet again until the next day. Ms. Jenkins was talking about how Homo sapiens came before Homo erectus. He didn’t really actually say anything, but we could hear him giggling in the back row. We all turned around again, and finally, he got so loud that Ms. Jenkins had to stop talking.
“Sorry,” he said, his hands raised in front of him. “It’s just that…” He shook his head, his eyes wide, like Rodney Dangerfield telling a joke. “I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t know if I’m comfortable being called homo anything.”
Ms. Jenkins scratched her hair. Even after she was done, a large strand of it remained upright, rising up toward the ceiling like a puff of smoke. Then she put her chalk down and walked out of the room.
Traci Carmichael called her mother from a pay phone at lunch, and by the next day, there was another note for us to take home to our parents, on light green stationery, this time not from Dr. Queen but from the Kerrville County School Board.
On April 4, 1987, we will hold a town meeting in the KHS gymnasium at seven-thirty, The purpose of this meeting is to let the community express its views on how different theories on the origins of life should be presented in KHS classrooms. The school board will be arriving at a decision the following week.
Now the Channel 6 news has come to the school parking lot, and when I go home, Dr. Queen is on television. “It’s out of my hands now,” she says to reporters, holding up her hands like she wants to prove that really, there’s nothing there.
Eileen has already found out about the meeting. She calls to tell me she is driving up from Wichita to meet with some people from the Second Ark. They will pick me up in the church van at seven, just before the meeting. “Don’t you worry about that Jenkins woman,” she says. “We’ll take care of her.”
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p; “I don’t think kids are allowed to go to the meeting,” I say, my hands tight around the receiver. My mother and Samuel are in the front room watching ALF, but my mother hears me say this and looks up at me, one eyebrow raised.
“They can’t keep you out, baby,” Eileen says. “It’s your school, after all. You have the right to be there. And we’re bringing a little surprise for you too.”
I have to act like this is a good thing, because I love Eileen, but I don’t want my surprise, and I don’t want to go to the meeting. I have secretly read the chapter on evolution in my science book, even though we are not supposed to yet, and there are pictures of fossils and skeletons, human bones too old to be Adam and Eve. I have believed everything Ms. Jenkins has told us this year about mitochondria and ATP and chromosomes and the rain forests in Brazil. She’s never lied to us about anything before, and I don’t see why she would start now.
But if she isn’t lying, then Eileen is. And then that means that maybe Genesis is a story that somebody made up. But if you start to believe that, then you also might think there is a chance that no one is upstairs, wearing headphones and looking out for us, choosing good from bad. Maybe we are just on our own. But then if we aren’t, and you listen for a minute to what Ms. Jenkins is saying and start to wonder, and you happen to get run over by a bus just at that moment, well then.
It would be easier, maybe, if you just didn’t think at all.
My mother is doing this stupid thing all of a sudden where she is letting me do whatever I want. I have emphasized repeatedly to her that not just Eileen is coming to pick me up for the school board meeting, but Pastor Dave and Sharon as well, and people coming up from Wichita.
“The people from Eileen’s church,” I say again, slowly, so she can understand. “And Pastor Dave. From the Second Ark.”
“Huh,” she says. But she only looks at Sam. He has been coughing for the last three days, and she is trying to get him to swallow a spoonful of Robitussin. He doesn’t want it, and he keeps turning his head, swinging at her with his good arm.
“They’re coming to pick me up in a van,” I add, thinking this will somehow scare her more.
She turns to me, holding Sam’s arm away from her face. “Evelyn, are you saying you don’t want to go?”
There is something about her face when she says this that infuriates me. Maybe it’s just her nose, but I feel like she’s laughing at me, or like she will, the second I leave the room. One of the cats moves in a slow figure-eight pattern around my feet. “I’m saying I thought you didn’t want me to go anywhere with them. Geez. Make up your mind.”
She cups her finger and thumb around Samuel’s chin, forcing him to open it wide enough for the spoon. “If you don’t want to go with them, you can just tell Eileen. Just call her up and tell her you’re not comfortable.”
“I didn’t say that. I didn’t say that I’m not comfortable.”
Sam screams when he tastes the cough syrup, and tries to spit it back out, but she tilts his chin up and gives him some water from his sippy cup. “Well, good then,” she says. “Have a nice time.”
My surprise is a blue T-shirt that says LIGHT on it in white letters, so big on me it goes down almost to my knees. Eileen slips it over my head before I am in the van.
“Perfect,” she says, leaning down to kiss me on the cheek. “Just perfect.” She is wearing a T-shirt that is exactly the same, only hers says BE.
When she opens the door for me, the interior light comes on, and I see that everyone else in the van has a blue T-shirt also, each with a different word printed on the front. The woman sitting next to the window has a shirt that says THERE, and the man next to her has a shirt that says LET.
“Let…there…be…” I read, trying to sound excited.
“Light, kitten,” Eileen says, buckling her seat belt. “That’s you.”
Sharon is sitting in the passenger seat, and she reaches back to squeeze my hand. “Evelyn, honey, it’s so good to see you! Are you sure your mom doesn’t want to come?”
“I’m sure.”
Pastor Dave is in the driver’s seat, and he says the important thing is that I am here, especially since I am LIGHT. “We’d look pretty silly without you,” he says, winking at me in the rearview mirror. His shirt says GOD, and Sharon’s says SAID. He tells Sharon to show me the back. She leans into the aisle between their seats to show me a picture of a monkey wearing glasses and reading a book. There’s a slash through the whole picture, like in the ad for Ghostbusters. I reach behind my own shirt to feel if this picture is ironed onto the back of mine. It is.
“I like your hair,” Sharon says, turning back around so she can see me. “It’s really cute.”
This is a lie, what Sharon is telling me. My hair does not look cute. Deena convinced me to let her try to do a home perm on my hair, and the rods she used were too small. Now my hair is so thick and curly on the bottom that it sticks out like a Christmas tree, like Gilda Radner’s. It’s okay for her because she’s trying to be funny, but I’m not.
Deena and Travis are not coming to the school board meeting. Deena said no way was she going to school any time she didn’t have to, and Travis, pulling her onto his lap, even though we were sitting in the cafeteria and Dr. Queen had been on the intercom just the week before saying there should be no public displays of affection on school grounds, said he was sure I would be fine on my own.
But I won’t be fine. I can see that now, sitting in the van with all of them, Eileen’s thin arm around my shoulders, her hands tapping along to the radio on the back of the seat. I won’t be fine, and I’m not on my own.
I know that sometimes when you are really worried about something, it ends up not being nearly as bad as you think it will be, and you get to be relieved that you were just being silly, worrying so much over nothing. But sometimes it is just the opposite. It can happen that whatever you are worried about will be even worse than you could have possibly imagined, and you find out that you were right to be worried, and even that, maybe, you weren’t worried enough.
There are more people at the meeting than I expected, people in suits I’ve never seen before, people in suits with notepads in their laps. There are newspaper reporters, and also two television news teams, one from Topeka, another from Wichita. When we come in, a photographer for one of the newspapers sees our shirts and asks if we can line up together for a picture before the meeting starts. I tell Eileen I have to go to the bathroom.
“Sure, honey,” she says, smoothing my hair. “Go.”
I don’t really have to go, and when I get to the bathroom, I lock the door behind me and just stand there for a while, looking at myself in the mirror. The T-shirt is too big for me, and the blue is too bright. I look pale and washed out underneath it, smaller than I really am. The letters on the front are backwards in the mirror, and it looks as if it doesn’t spell anything at all.
Someone knocks lightly on the door. “Evelyn, honey?” Eileen asks. “Are you okay? The meeting’s about to start.”
I open the door, looking up at her face, her crooked mouth, her worried eyes. She is already opening her knitting bag to look for an aspirin or a Tums or whatever I might need. I could ask her for anything. I could say, “Eileen, give me all of the money in your wallet.” And she would. I could take the sweater she has been knitting for the last two months out of her bag and unravel it right in front of her, and she would only look at me and say, Why are you doing this, kitten? She has always loved me this much.
“I’m fine,” I say, trying to smile.
The gym is completely full by the time we get back. Every chair is taken, and now people are lining up along the walls, sitting on the floor. But Pastor Dave was able to secure eight chairs in a row so people would be able to read our shirts in one complete sentence, left to right. Sharon waves to us, pointing at two empty seats, her pink coat spread over them.
I see a lot of parents, but not too many kids. Robby Hernandez is in front of us with his parents and
little brothers and sisters, a priest on one side of them, two nuns on the other. Traci Carmichael sits on the other side of the aisle, between her mother and father. Her mother is frowning at us, wearing a skirt and matching red jacket, her blond hair up in a french twist. Traci’s father wears khaki pants and a black sweater. His face is just like Traci’s, the same thin lips and steady blue-gray eyes. I can feel all three of them watching us, taking in the T-shirts.
You are on the good side, I tell myself. You are on the good side; they are on the bad. There is no reason for you to be embarrassed. Traci Carmichael has always been a bad person.
The five members of the school board sit up front at a long table, facing a podium with a microphone. Dr. Queen is the first person to go up to the microphone, and even though she is usually frightening, people just keep talking and taking pictures, even after she has been standing there for a while, clearing her throat. She finally has to clap her hands together and say, “Hey!” and then the room goes quiet and everyone looks up.
She smiles, lowers her voice again. “I want to thank everyone for coming out tonight. If you signed up to speak, you’ll get five minutes, and I’ll wave this white flag when your time is up.” She waves a little white flag over her head, still smiling, as if she were at a football game or a parade. She is dressed up, I notice, wearing a blue suit, and her hair looks like it’s been recently clipped, the gray stripe exactly in the center. “I hope this meeting can be a productive exchange of ideas, and not a shouting match. I think we can do it if we try. My father used to tell me that it was important to show respect for others, particularly those you disagree with. I hope we can all remember that tonight.”
Everybody nods and seems to agree with this, but Ms. Jenkins is the next person to go up to the microphone, and before she even says anything, people forget all about Dr. Queen’s father and start booing. I hear Sharon humming “Onward Christian Soldiers” under her breath, and after a few notes, Eileen joins in.
The Center of Everything Page 24
