The Best Man

by Richard Peck

  Mrs. Dempsey’s eyes snapped. Her mouth opened and shut again.

  But this was Mrs. Stanley’s classroom and her student teacher. And she wasn’t Lynette’s mother for nothing. She doubled down and took over.

  “I’m sorry the first person you encountered in this school was hysterical and incompetent. And I’m sorry the security guard had fainted. Heaven help us if we ever really do find ourselves under siege.”

  “That’s all right, ma’am,” said Mr. McLeod. “You can always call out the National Guard.”

  Mrs. Dempsey was melting down. I wondered if maybe Mrs. Stanley’s teaching days were numbered. Lynette was wondering something similar.

  Mrs. Stanley turned to us. There was chalk dust all down her front. “Boys and people, this is Mr. McLeod, our student teacher. What do you say to him?”

  Search us. We stared. Esther Wilhelm was saying, just under her breath, “Wow wow wow wow.”

  “You might start with ‘Good afternoon and welcome,’” Mrs. Stanley said, “and end with ‘Mr. McLeod.’”

  “Good afternoon and welcome, Mr. McLeod,” we all said.

  “Good afternoon, troops,” Mr. McLeod said.

  Troops! That’s all we called ourselves from then on. It was way better than boys and people.

  “I am a new teacher,” Mrs. Stanley explained to Mr. McLeod, “and so I am just getting acquainted with these students myself, except, of course, for my daughter.”

  Their heads both blazed in the room. But all of us except Natalie pointed to Lynette in case Mr. McLeod had missed her.

  “And you will find them the usual mixed bag of fifth graders with a lot to learn,” Mrs. Stanley said. “Their last teacher left to go on maternity leave. She seemed to have used her entire pregnancy as a lesson plan, so we may dispense with sex education. They think they know it all.”

  Mrs. Dempsey jumped at the sound of sex education. “Now see here,” she said.

  But it was true. If you wanted to know where babies came from, see us. We had the sonograms.

  The end-of-school bell rang. But the PA was crackling again, with a secretary’s voice. “Alert to Mrs. Dempsey! Alert to Mrs. Dempsey! The front doors are secured, but an anchorwoman from the ABC affiliate has just kicked in the lower glass panel. Alert to Mrs. Dempsey!”

  Mrs. Dempsey pounded for the door, but it was blocked by a blond lady in heavy makeup with a cut on her knee. She had an ear bud in one ear. A mike was clipped to her dress. A cameraman and a lighting guy barged in behind her. The room went blinding bright, and we were all on TV. We were waving already.

  “Now see here,” Mrs. Dempsey said.

  “We’re five seconds from going live,” the anchorwoman said to her. “If you’re the principal, I’ll need a name.”

  But then she saw Mr. McLeod, and the bud fell out of her ear. She fumbled for it and picked up Mr. McLeod’s name from the tape on his camo jacket. “Soldier, what’s your rank?” she said, very breathy.

  “Warrant officer, ma’am,” he said.

  Then we were live. “Tell our viewers, Warrant Officer McLeod, what it’s like to create a panic in a public school merely by wearing the uniform of the country you serve.”

  Mrs. Dempsey cringed, and we went viral.

  “I was just reporting for duty,” Mr. McLeod said. “Student teaching. I’m working on a master’s in Elementary Education.”

  But the anchorwoman was already on to her follow-up question. “And what’s been your combat experience? Afghanistan? The Middle East, Lib—”

  “My unit hasn’t been deployed since I joined,” he said. “This school’s about as close to combat conditions as I’ve come. You might want to see a medic about that knee.”

  The bud fell out of the anchorwoman’s ear again. Mr. McLeod was right about combat conditions. Somebody from Fox News was pounding on the window. Behind him parents were rioting because they couldn’t get in to collect their kids. It was basically chaos.

  • • •

  When school finally wound down, I found Dad out by the curb. It was a chilly Cook County April, so he was in his puffy jacket. I figured he’d be out here. He and Grandpa got the news all day in the garage on a vintage AM radio.

  We crossed the street between a couple of TV vans.

  “Just your ordinary school day?” Dad inquired.

  “Pretty routine,” I said. We stepped over the snaking cables. “We did some grammar.”

  It was a rainy Friday night, so Uncle Paul was there. Usually we watched sports after we ate—looked in on the Surf Dogs of San Diego or something like that. But on lockdown night we had some news shows to replay, in the garage with the space heater fired up.

  I remember Uncle Paul leaning against the fender of an old Pontiac Firebird Dad was detailing. Uncle Paul with his arms folded, watching Mr. McLeod and the ABC anchorwoman with the bud falling out of her ear and all of us waving in the background.

  “I think Mr. McLeod works out,” I said.

  “Tell me about it,” Uncle Paul said.

  • • •

  You know the rest. The headline in the Saturday Trib read:

  CLIMATE OF FEAR PERVADES SUBURBAN SCHOOLS

  The Sunday News ran a half-page picture of Mr. McLeod—Warrant Officer Ed McLeod, aged 26—under the headline:

  GI Joe Reports for Duty With Fifth Graders

  How’d You Like Him for Your Student Teacher?

  So before the weekend was over, fan pages and blogs about Mr. McLeod were all over the Internet. A ton of blogs. And he had a local fan club of au pairs. I didn’t know what au pairs were. Turns out they’re foreign babysitters.

  Anyway, by Monday morning we were going to have the most famous student teacher in the Twitter-verse and the photosphere. And the whole rest of our fifth-grade year was nowhere near normal.

  9

  By the end of that next school day, the online edition of the Trib posted a follow-up:

  RESERVIST STUDENT TEACHER SMUGGLED INTO SUBURBAN SCHOOL

  Warrant Officer Ed McLeod, who caused a lockdown on Friday by turning up in uniform at a suburban school, had to be smuggled into Westside Elementary to begin his student teaching today. After a weekend firestorm of media coverage, response to his movie-star looks and starched camouflage fatigues crashed numerous social media sites. Marriage proposals were posted from as far away as North Korea.

  A pop-up fan club of local au pairs blocked the school entrance with toddlers in strollers. Mothers driving children as old as sixth grade to school created gridlock across the normally quiet suburb.

  Mr. McLeod arrived on the floor of a classic Pontiac Firebird, driven by an unidentified student’s father who delivered the blue-eyed National Guardsman to a disused furnace room. He was briefly sighted in civilian clothes with a large dog on a short leash, between car and furnace room door.

  ABSOLUTELY NO MEDIA signs were posted throughout the school grounds. The principal, Mrs. Velma Dempsey, 52, was unavailable for comment.

  Local police plan to patrol the school grounds for the foreseeable future.

  Kinko’s printed up those ABSOLUTELY NO MEDIA signs for Mrs. Dempsey. But how was she to get Mr. McLeod into school without being mobbed, interviewed, or proposed to? She dumped the problem on Mrs. Stanley, who called Mom Sunday night. Dad thought of the Firebird. It was a car too noticeable to be noticed, and Mr. McLeod would fit on the floor up front. Grandma Magill remembered that Grandpa had kept the keys to every building he’d ever built.

  So we were all in on it. I was the unidentified student in the back of the car, next to the dog.

  We’d picked up Mr. McLeod in the lot outside his gym, where he’d parked his old beat-up Kia, not the Hummer I’d hoped for. Then Dad tooled us across town. Mr. McLeod was under the dashboard. From down there he introduced me to the dog, who wanted to shake my hand. He was a B
elgian Malinois named Argus.

  He crowded me on the backseat and looked like he could eat your head if it was dinner time. Cops waved Dad into the parking lot at school. Then Mr. McLeod and Argus and I made a run for the furnace room door. I had the key and led them to the classroom. Lynette had come early with her mom.

  “Look, no socks,” she said, pointing out Mr. McLeod’s ankles. He was in a dark blue blazer this morning, button-down blue shirt, maroon tie, wingtip shoes. It would be a long time before any of us saw him in uniform again. But that gets ahead of the story.

  “That’s a new pantsuit on Mrs. Stanley,” Lynette remarked. “And she bought all the blusher at Walgreen’s. She cleared their shelves. She thought she looked too washed out on TV.”

  Mrs. Stanley was showing Mr. McLeod the roll book or something. Argus was stretched out in the paperwork on the floor, monitoring the room. It was the calm before the storm.

  Lynette leaned over. “What’s the dog about?”

  “Search me,” I said. “It’s just his dog, I guess. It got in the car with him.”

  Lynette’s eyes rolled. “It’s not just his dog. Look at the collar on it. It’s some kind of official dog, a professional. Maybe it can sniff out narcotics or dead bodies. Maybe it’s trained to attack immature students who never notice anything.”

  “Who?” I said. “Russell Beale?”

  Lynette sighed, and the room exploded with everybody else: seeing Mr. McLeod, spotting the dog, milling around. They’d fought their way through the au pairs, and they were all keyed up and unready to learn.

  All the guys wanted to fist-bump Mr. McLeod. Josh Hunnicutt’s fist was above his head. A couple of girls cried at the sight of him—not the usual criers. Needless to say, nobody was absent. We were hoping there’d be more helicopters. Raymond Petrovich wrote himself a pass to walk the attendance form down to the office. We never did get computerized attendance records at that school.

  Raymond dodged past Mrs. Dempsey, who loomed into the room with her phone out. An unauthorized dog had been reported. Also, unauthorized people were outside our windows.

  One was a big blond woman with a baby, holding up a sign that read:

  HI, ED!

  AU WHAT A PAIR WE’D MAKE!

  “A dog, Mr. McLeod?” Mrs. Dempsey said in her voice of doom.

  “Yes, ma’am, his name’s Argus.”

  Argus arose. He was one beautiful dog, with that long muzzle and pointed ears and a brown coat with a star of white fur on his chest.

  Everybody said, “Awww.”

  Coming to attention, Argus put up a big paw and expected Mrs. Dempsey to shake it.

  “Cool,” we all breathed. Mrs. Dempsey froze. But she had to shake the paw. Argus was waiting. Just as she did, a camera flashed from somewhere.

  Mrs. Stanley smiled slightly from her desk.

  “Argus is a military working dog. He’s the breed guarding the White House,” Mr. McLeod told us, teaching already. “And the same breed the Navy SEALs used to get Osama bin Laden.”

  “Whoa,” we said. Josh Hunnicutt was standing on his desk so he could see. Russell Beale was wide-awake.

  “Argus was a scout up on the front lines,” Mr. McLeod said. “He wore a tactical vest with cameras and durable microphones to relay information back to the base.”

  “Whoa,” we said again, and “wow.”

  “There was a time when army dogs were put to sleep after they’d served their hitches,” Mr. McLeod told us.

  “NOOO!” we roared.

  “But now through a Department of Defense adoption program, they’re re-assigned to civilian law enforcement. Argus was a soldier. Now he’s going to be a cop somewhere. My Guard unit is handling him while he’s in transit.”

  Argus knew Mr. McLeod was telling us his story. He showed us his profile. He was like a recruiting poster for dogs.

  Cameras flashed again, from somewhere. We were used to them by now. It’s the price of fame.

  Mrs. Dempsey’s mouth worked without words. What could she say about a dog who’d been safeguarding our freedoms? Besides, Argus was practically a four-footed lesson plan. We were learning stuff this morning, and that didn’t happen every day.

  “Tactically brilliant,” Lynette murmured. “They’ve got Dempsey on the run.”

  Mrs. Dempsey wobbled, and a camera clicked, somewhere. The phone in her hand rang. Her personal ring tone was “School days, school days, good old golden rule days.” She took the call.

  “NO,” she barked, “absolutely no one is allowed in except the people replacing the glass in the front door. And where are the police who are supposed to be patrolling our perimeters? We have people with cameras in the trees. Never mind. I’m coming at once!” One more bleak look at Mrs. Stanley and Mrs. Dempsey was out the door.

  “She called herself,” Lynette remarked.

  • • •

  Mrs. Dempsey’s picture made Tuesday’s paper. She was shaking Argus’s paw. Here’s what the headline said:

  GI JOE’S K9 ATTACK DOG WELCOMES PRINCIPAL VELMA DEMPSEY, 52, TO HER OWN SCHOOL

  That picture practically went to the moon and back. It ended up on the website of the American Kennel Club and the Belgian Malinois Breeders’ Quarterly and the online magazine of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. According to Lynette, it was Mrs. Stanley’s screen saver.

  10

  Student teachers usually sit at the back, observing the real teacher for a couple of weeks. But that didn’t happen.

  Early in the first week Mrs. Stanley kind of bogged down on improper fractions. We knew fractions but not improper fractions. Mrs. Stanley got her numerator all balled up with her denominator.

  Mr. McLeod came to the front of the room and showed us how to convert between improper fractions and mixed numbers. He drew some pie charts. So after that, he was back and forth as needed. When he turned around from the blackboard that first day, Natalie’s hand was up.

  “What is it, Natalie?” sighed Mrs. Stanley.

  “This question is for Mr. McLeod,” Natalie said.

  “Is it about improper fractions?”

  “Certainly not. There is nothing to them,” Natalie said. “What I want to know, and I speak for the rest of the . . . troops, is do you actually intend to become a teacher, or are you going to be an actor in big-budget films? You’re trending on Twitter, and the word on the Entertainment Weekly website is that you’re scouting for an agent.”

  Mrs. Stanley rubbed her forehead. We were all ears. Natalie’s phone was in her hand.

  Mr. McLeod stroked his smooth chin.

  “Being an actor would mean going out to Hollywood, right?”

  We guessed so.

  “Does anybody know where Hollywood is?”

  Not specifically. Raymond Petrovich may have had a sketchy idea. His hand was halfway up. Some of us had been to Disneyland. Or was it Disney World?

  Mr. McLeod was reaching around for something in his back pocket. “California is a couple of thousand miles from Chicago.” He pulled out a Cubs cap and put it on. “And from the Cubs, so I don’t think so.”

  Time skipped a beat. Then we were cheering. Up on our desks, doing the wave. Our eyes stung. We yelled the place down.

  You could have heard us all over school. The sixth grade next door had to hear. That may have been when the trouble started. Sixth graders don’t like anybody having a better time than they’re having. And we had the first guy teacher in the history of the school. How annoying was that?

  • • •

  Mr. McLeod couldn’t leave Argus at home every morning. If you didn’t give the dog a job, he’d mope and get off his feed. So he was up and down the aisles like Mr. McLeod.

  He herded us every day and figured out we were to be in our seats when the bell rang. He was the shepherd. We were the sheep. He was more than a dog.
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  Feeding him was pretty easy. After his paw-shaking picture went viral, we got over three hundred pounds of complimentary dog food. Argus had his own FedEx deliveries straight into the classroom. We were up to here with Alpo. We drew up a schedule of who’d walk him at lunch since Mr. McLeod couldn’t leave the building without being mobbed, interviewed, or proposed to.

  It was a really good week, except Friday was Argus’s last day. He’d been re-assigned to the police force of Madison, Wisconsin.

  We gave him a going-away party, of course. We broke out the dog food, and there were refreshments for the troops too. Every day that Mr. McLeod was with us, people’s mothers sent pans of brownies. A ton of brownies. And the au pairs brought unusual Swedish pastries. We lived in a fog of powdered sugar.

  It was a great party, as you can see on YouTube.

  And the sixth graders next door no doubt heard every bark and giggle through the wall, and didn’t like it. I mean—we had our own dog and baked goods, and what did they have? Long division?

  Unknown hands pushed a manila envelope under the classroom door one morning the next week. It was full of dog poop. Not Argus’s. So the sixth graders were really steamed.

  Argus knew he was in transit and about to ship out. After his party was over and he’d licked his bowl clean, he herded us back into our seats. Then he made one last round of the rows, giving each one of us a nose bump. Russell Beale was asleep with his head on his desk, so Argus stuck his tongue into Russell’s ear and moved on.

  We were crying by then, and Mrs. Stanley was blowing her nose. Then Argus went for his leash and carried it in his mouth over to Mr. McLeod. Now we were sobbing.

  Then just before the last bell rang, the classroom door opened, and Uncle Paul walked in. Uncle Paul out of the blue. Six foot four, in the door: hand-tailored double-breasted blazer. Brass buttons. Wingtips. No tie. Designer stubble. Unauthorized, but already in the classroom. Somewhere on him was the furnace room key that Dad had given him.

  “Why, Paul,” said Mrs. Stanley, who hadn’t seen him since Christmas. “What on earth are you doing here?”